jack

🦬🇺🇸

[jack @jacks_wander]

@ParlandzS You can research yourself (link) or use google, whichever you prefer. Unsustainable numbers have led to a very large immigration restriction recently.
https://t.co/cy2yBiq6m2

[jack @jacks_wander]

@Noahpinion Canadians 📉 Foreigners 📈

[jack @jacks_wander]

@Kalshi_Finance On a tear

[jack @jacks_wander]

@MorningBrew YoY change is insanity

[jack @jacks_wander]

NVIDIA annual revenue (w/ FY2027 projection).
Unreal.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The conventional explanation for Rome’s demographic collapse is wealth. People got comfortable. They stopped having children. It happens to every prosperous civilization. Nothing to be done.

This is wrong. Or rather, it is incomplete in the way that matters most.

Rome didn’t stop having children because it got wealthy. It stopped having children because it built a welfare state – and the welfare state did what welfare states always do: it replaced the incentives that make people build families with incentives that make people consume instead.

The grain dole began modestly. Around 40,000 recipients in 73 BC. By Caesar’s time: 320,000. That eightfold expansion in under three decades was not a plan – it was a political mechanism. Each magistrate who wanted votes expanded eligibility. Each expansion normalized the next. The citizen who once considered the dole shameful eventually expected it, then demanded it, then organized politically to protect it.

The dole didn’t just feed people. It changed what people were for. A Roman citizen with guaranteed grain, free entertainment at the arena, and no frontier left to conquer has no pressing need to build anything – including a family. Children are a project. Projects require purpose. The welfare state had quietly removed the purpose while appearing to provide security.

Augustus saw the birth rate collapsing and did what statists always do: he legislated. The Lex Julia, the Lex Papia Poppaea – penalties for the unmarried, rewards for the fertile, the full power of the empire deployed to engineer a baby boom by decree. It didn’t work. It never works. You cannot legislate desire. You cannot fine people into wanting a future.

What Augustus didn’t have was Mises and Hayek. He didn’t understand that the system he was trying to fix with more intervention was being destroyed by the intervention he had already deployed. He saw the symptom — falling birth rates — and reached for the tool he knew: state power. He didn’t see the cause, because no one in his world had yet articulated it: when you replace personal purpose with state provision, you replace the human drive to build with the human tendency to consume. The dole didn’t just feed the hungry. It fed the purposeless.

We have Mises. We have Hayek. We have the complete theoretical account of what the welfare state does to human motivation, to family formation, to the incentive structures that make people want to build something that outlasts them. We know what Augustus didn’t know. We know why the laws failed. We know what produces the behavior he was trying to legislate into existence.

The answer is not more legislation. It is less welfare state. Not because cruelty is a virtue – but because purpose is. The person who must build to survive builds. The person who must form a family to transmit what they have built forms one. The person who receives guaranteed grain, guaranteed entertainment, and guaranteed security from the state has been given everything except the reason to do any of those things.

Scrap the socialism. Restore the purpose. The birth rate will follow – not because anyone ordered it, but because people who have something to build and something to transmit tend, given the choice, to build and transmit.

Rome didn’t know it had a choice. We do.

[jack @jacks_wander]

@makehistorycool God bless, looking forward to reading more!

[jack @jacks_wander]

@Geiger_Capital @djcows Ban almonds too

[jack @jacks_wander]

@djcows @b1uemarinee Almonds are thirsty 🤌

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

Fight night energy is taking over DC.

UFC Freedom 250 is almost here. 🇺🇸

[NFL Fashion Advice @fashion_nfl]

All-time graphic.

[Bleacher Report @BleacherReport]

What a photo.

Jack Hughes gave it his all 👏❤️

(📸: Elsa/ Getty Images)

[jack @jacks_wander]

The State of the NBA: 2025-26 Season So Far