On January 1, 1990, Poland flipped the switch. No phased rollout, no five-year transition committee, no gentle weaning of the patient off central planning. Leszek Balcerowicz lifted price controls, slashed subsidies, made the złoty convertible, and opened the borders to trade, all at once. The planners in the West clutched their pearls. Surely you cannot just do this overnight. Surely the people will starve.
They did not starve. Within weeks the empty shelves that defined every communist economy filled up. Street vendors appeared in Warsaw selling everything from sausages to imported electronics. The shortages that the central planners spent forty years failing to fix vanished once prices were free to do their job: tell producers what people actually wanted. A price is information. Strangle it and you blind the entire economy, which is exactly why the comrades kept guessing wrong about how many shoes to make.
Now look at the gradualists. The economists who insisted on "sequencing" and "managed transitions" pointed at the contraction in 1990 and 1991 as proof Balcerowicz went too far. Yes, output dropped and unemployment rose. That was the rot of central planning becoming visible, the liquidation of factories that produced goods nobody wanted at costs nobody could justify. You cannot keep a steel mill open just because it employed ten thousand people making steel that sold below the cost of the coal that fed it. Pretending otherwise is how Ukraine and Belarus stayed poor for another decade.
The numbers settled the argument. Poland returned to growth by 1992 and never stopped. By 2019 its real GDP was roughly two and a half times its 1990 level, the strongest performance in the entire former Eastern Bloc. Russia, which dithered, half-reformed, and handed state assets to insiders through rigged auctions, produced oligarchs instead of a market. Ukraine kept its old factories breathing on subsidies and stayed broke.
The lesson sits there for anyone willing to read it. The transition hurts least when you stop managing it and let people trade.
To those on the right giving us the “It’s not a big deal, they just upheld the way birthright citizenship been interpreted for 100 years”…
It is a big deal because the Democrats have been actively letting millions of people into the country illegally and this was our best chance to have this properly interpreted.
Honestly what is it going to take for you guys to wake the hell up and realize we are not in the same fight we were 20-30 years ago?
The court has not made birth tourism legitimate. It has made itself illegitimate. Thomas and Alito are right. Congress must start acting now to remove all foreign women from the country immediately. And begin attaching pregnancy test to visa requirements.
Force the Supreme Court to confront the will of the people again and again and again.
Upset with the SCOTUS decision today?
Call your senator at (202) 224-3121 and tell them to support my Constitutional Amendment to end Birthright Citizenship. We must protect the integrity of American citizenship.
It’s a perversion of self-government.
Judicially mandating that foreigners are entitled to birth US citizens against the wishes of the people as reflected in law means we cease to be our own rulers.
As a mom of two girls, fuck this shit. I'm terrified and furious for their future.
Bring in the fucking military right now, this is a national security invasion.
They're flooding our country, trying to replace us and steal it from our children.
Millions poured in, straining everything, changing our neighborhoods and future forever.
I won't let them turn this into a place where my girls aren't safe.
No fucking way.
I'm fully radicalized and done holding back.
GET THE FUCK OUT NOW.
PROPOSED: Effective as of this morning in the aftermath of the Trump v. Barbara birthright citizenship SCOTUS decision, it is contrary to the national security interests of the United States to allow even ONE foreign national female to enter or remain within our nation or territories.
Discuss.
As a Native American I’m a little offended that the 14th Amendment didn’t grant us citizenship until Congress passed an exception for us. Meanwhile, a CCP spy can fly to Guam, drop a baby and fly home with the baby who qualifies to run for president 35 years later.
So maybe we should revoke visas when a non-citizen gets pregnant.
That’s a cruel alternative.
But less cruel than what SCOTUS did to the USA’s citizens today.
Well the Supreme Court has made their decision…and apparently 5 of the justices think the authors of the 14th amendment clearly meant anyone could randomly show up illegally, have a baby, and that suddenly meant citizenship.
We should now move to significantly cut all immigration, and significantly reduce visas.
Look, I wanted to be reasonable. But reason doesn’t seem to work for some people, so now we have to take more drastic measures.
It’s a shame really, but that’s where we are.