This comes to show that even in South Africa, the man on the street still sometimes has influence. Well done to everyone who made themselves heard about this insane and draconian proposal. Hat tip to @PRDG_ZA for doing excellent work on this topic. We live to fight them another day.

The US presidency is the most dangerous office in the world. Here are the top 3 best and worst presidents ever: Let's start with the best: 1. Grover Cleveland vetoed 414 bills in his first term alone, including congressional handouts to drought-stricken Texas farmers in 1887, on the grounds that the Constitution authorized no such charity. He was right. 2. Warren Harding inherited the sharp 1920-21 depression and did almost nothing, cutting federal spending from $6.4 billion to $3.3 billion and slashing tax rates. The economy recovered within eighteen months, precisely because Washington stepped aside. 3. John Tyler, largely forgotten today, vetoed a national bank bill twice, endured expulsion from the Whig Party, and refused to let Henry Clay transform the Treasury into a political instrument. These three men share a rare quality: they treated the federal government as a cage, not a tool. Now the worst. 3. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, imprisoned 14,000 political opponents without trial, shut down opposition newspapers, and conscripted men at gunpoint. The war's financing required the Legal Tender Acts of 1862, which forced irredeemable paper greenbacks on US citizens regardless of what contracts previously specified. Centralization of federal power over the states never fully reversed after 1865. The constitutional republic that emerged was a different animal from the one that entered. 2. Woodrow Wilson delivered the Federal Reserve in 1913, the income tax through the Sixteenth Amendment, the military draft, and the Espionage Act, which could imprison anyone for criticizing the war. He segregated the federal civil service. He took the country into a European slaughter with a propaganda apparatus, the Committee on Public Information, designed to manufacture consent. Every major expansion of state power in the twentieth century traces a direct line back to Wilson's two terms. 1. Franklin Roosevelt gets the top prize for catastrophe. He criminalized gold ownership via Executive Order 6102 in 1933, forcing Americans to surrender their gold at $20.67 per ounce, then immediately revalued it to $35, confiscating roughly 41 percent of savings held in the hardest monetary form available. He extended a cyclical recession into a decade-long depression through the National Industrial Recovery Act, agricultural price controls, and relentless uncertainty about property rights. Businesses do not invest when the rules change by executive whim every quarter. Real unemployment never fell below 14 percent throughout the 1930s. He packed the Supreme Court when it resisted. The regulatory state you live inside today, with its 188,000 pages of federal rules, grew from seeds Roosevelt planted between 1933 and 1945. Power corrupts budgets, currencies, and constitutions with equal efficiency. The best presidents understood their job was to leave you alone.

In September 2008, the Federal Reserve and Treasury ran a rescue operation. AIG, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Société Générale were the beneficiaries. You were the source of funds. Here is how the mechanism worked. AIG had written credit default swaps guaranteeing hundreds of billions in mortgage-backed securities. When those securities collapsed, AIG owed its counterparties full par value. The government injected $182 billion across multiple tranches, and AIG's counterparties collected 100 cents on the dollar. Goldman alone received $12.9 billion. No haircuts. No negotiations. Full payment, funded by you. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, a former Goldman CEO, made this call. The conflict of interest practically announces itself. Free market economists recognize that bankruptcy exists precisely for this moment. AIG's assets, subsidiaries, and insurance policies would have survived Chapter 11 reorganization. Policyholders carry legal protections under state insurance law regardless of the parent company's solvency. The "systemic collapse" narrative was a performance, staged to justify socializing losses that sophisticated institutional investors should have absorbed themselves. When counterparties realize the government will guarantee their riskiest bets at full value, they price that guarantee into every future transaction. Risk calculation collapses. Banks take larger positions than the underlying economics justify because the downside belongs to you. You did not write those credit default swap contracts, you did not collect the premiums, you did not sit on AIG's board approving the exposure. You simply received the invoice, laundered through Treasury debt and Federal Reserve money creation, inflating away purchasing power you will never recover.

Central planning doesn't fail because planners are stupid, but because planners are blind. Soviet factory managers faced a simple incentive structure: hit your quota, keep your job, possibly keep your life. The State Planning Committee (Gosplan) measured shoe production in units. One shoe equals one unit. So managers at factories across the USSR produced left shoes, warehoused them, reported their numbers, and collected their bonuses. Right shoes were, technically, someone else's problem. This actually happened. Soviet citizens lined up for goods that existed in abundance on paper and in warehouses, completely unwearable without their missing counterpart. The absurdity is funny until you realize millions of people walked around in poorly fitted footwear because no price signal existed to tell any producer what consumers actually needed. The Soviet shoe problem repeats itself wherever governments replace price signals with targets: hospital bed counts, agricultural tonnage, student graduation rates, housing units permitted. The metric gets optimized, but the underlying human need gets ignored. Bureaucrats optimize for what gets measured. Markets optimize for what gets bought. Only one of those methods requires the person selling to actually satisfy you.

Exactly. It's completely shit to live under as well. Those shoes you like? They won't exist. Shoes are shoes, and you will get what your bureaucrat decides you get, all size 8. That little coffee place you are a regular at? Gone. Replaced by standing in line at your local grocer for 12 hours to see if the truck brought coffee this month. You want to buy a car? Put your name on a list and wait 10 years.

Murray Rothbard took Mises's price theory and drove it to a destination Mises never reached. Mises built the case that central planning fails because socialist planners cannot perform rational economic calculation without real market prices. Prices carry information that no committee can replicate. Rothbard accepted every word of this and asked the obvious follow-up: if state intervention distorts prices and destroys coordination, why stop your critique at the water's edge? Why exempt the state itself from the logic? The answer required property rights. Rothbard grounded everything in self-ownership. You own your body. By extension, you own what you mix your labor with, provided you homestead it from a prior unowned state. Every other right flows from this. Taxation is the seizure of your property under threat of imprisonment. From that foundation, Rothbard constructed anarcho-capitalism systematically, not as a utopian dream but as the logical terminus of taking rights seriously. Defense, arbitration, contract enforcement: private firms supply all of it in a competitive market. His 1973 book "For a New Liberty" laid this out with unflinching precision. His 1982 "The Ethics of Liberty" supplied the philosophical scaffolding. What Rothbard accomplished was a fusion, not a compromise. Mises gave him the economic engine. Locke and Lysander Spooner supplied the moral chassis. The result was a system where aggression has no legitimate institutional home, including Congress, including the Federal Reserve, including every bureaucrat drawing a salary your paycheck funded involuntarily.

The establishment gave @JMilei months. In 2023, 170 Argentine economists signed a letter calling his dollarization plan an illusion, and Ian Bremmer wrote that he expected the economy to collapse in short order—typical Keynesian bullshit, always exactly wrong. Then monthly inflation fell from 25% in December to nearly 10% by March, and after fifteen straight years of deficits, Argentina ran a primary surplus of 1.4% of GDP in 2025. His party more than doubled its congressional seats in the midterms. The scoreboard has red ink too. Poverty fell to an eight-year low of 28% in late 2025, then jumped to 32.3% in the first half of 2026. Inflation ran at 33.4% a year, the second-highest in Latin America behind Venezuela, and the IMF cut its 2026 growth forecast from 3.5% to 2.1%. @saifedean Ammous says the central bank explains the red ink. Milei campaigned on closing it and treated that as an absolute condition, then kept it. Ammous argues that a central bank monopoly on currency and banking licenses guarantees continued peso inflation, and that Ecuador, without its own national currency, cannot inflate even if it wants to. He says Hoppe was right: Milei should have shut the bank and defaulted. Milei replies that the bank's debts and liabilities need to be cleaned up before it closes, and his proposed charter reform bans the bank from financing the Treasury. The scorecard splits along the line Ammous draws. Milei cut the deficit and the apocalypse never came. He left the state's money monopoly standing, so the state still decides how many pesos exist. But hey, Libertarians can cheer the first half and demand the second. All eyes are on Javi to see how this plays out.

The Inflation King: Everything you need to know about modern investing can be summed up in the story of one man: Hugo Stinnes, a German industrialist who built the largest private empire in Weimar-era Germany by doing something most people thought was reckless. He borrowed. Constantly. Aggressively. In marks. Stinnes came from a coal family in the Ruhr Valley and already ran a solid industrial operation before World War One. When the war ended and Germany began printing marks to pay its reparations debts under the Treaty of Versailles, most citizens watched their savings dissolve in real time. Stinnes drew the opposite conclusion than his neighbors. While German citizens hoarded paper marks in mattresses and savings accounts, Stinnes borrowed enormous quantities of those same marks from German banks, then immediately converted them into real assets: coal mines, steel plants, newspapers, shipping lines, hotels, forests, paper mills. By 1923 his conglomerate, the Stinnes-Konzern, controlled over 1,500 enterprises across Germany, Austria, and beyond. He employed roughly 600,000 people. The inflation that ruined an entire generation of German savers made Hugo Stinnes almost incomprehensibly wealthy. How did he do it? When a government or central bank expands the money supply, the purchasing power of each existing unit of currency falls. Prices across the economy do not adjust simultaneously. The new money flows into specific assets first, before it filters through to wages and consumer goods, which means whoever holds those assets during the transition captures a windfall. Stinnes borrowed in a currency he correctly identified as dying, bought hard assets whose value was tied to physical reality rather than government decree, and then repaid his loans in marks worth a fraction of what he had borrowed. After the Weimar hyperinflation, the real value of what he owed was virtually nothing. He got the hard assets he bought with loaned marks for free. Your house today runs the same play, just in slow motion. You take out a mortgage denominated in dollars, a currency the Federal Reserve has expanded by over 40 percent since early 2020. You hold a fixed-rate liability in a debasing currency while the asset itself reprices upward. The bank receives dollars of diminished purchasing power over thirty years. You hold the land and the structure. The reason property specifically has captured so much of the post-2020 inflation is that new money always travels along the path of least resistance toward collateral-eligible, financeable assets. Residential real estate sits at the center of the credit system. Banks lend against it readily. Institutional buyers treat it as a store of value. When the Fed slashed rates to near zero, and Congress distributed trillions in fiscal transfers, that purchasing power flowed directly into housing markets with predictable results: U.S. median home prices rose from $329,000 in early 2020 to over $420,000 by 2026. Stinnes died in 1924, before his empire unraveled under poor succession and deflation, but the strategy outlived him. Borrow in the currency they are destroying; hold the asset they cannot print.

France keeps electing governments that promise order while building the exact machinery that produces chaos. The pattern is old. The 1968 uprising paralyzed Paris because de Gaulle had spent a decade expanding state payrolls, suppressing price signals, and convincing the French that prosperity required a bureaucrat's signature. By 2005, the banlieues around Paris burned for three weeks. Clichy-sous-Bois, Aulnay-sous-Bois, hundreds of torched cars every night. The state had warehoused North African immigrants in subsidized housing blocks, disconnected from labor markets by minimum wage laws priced above their marginal productivity, and handed them welfare checks just generous enough to eliminate the urgency of assimilation. That combination guarantees a poverty trap. Today, with immigration remaining a central tension and pension expenditures consuming 14% of GDP, France runs the same experiment expecting different results. You pay into a system your entire working life and receive benefits calibrated to political survival rather than actuarial reality. Meanwhile, each new transfer payment handed to recent arrivals without reciprocal labor market access breeds exactly the resentment politicians then exploit. Open borders and a welfare state cannot coexist. Either migrants enter a free labor market and compete on merit, building genuine stakes in French civil society, or the state subsidizes parallel communities that have no economic reason to integrate. France consistently chooses the latter, then acts surprised at the friction. Bastiat diagnosed this in 1850. The French state still hasn't read him.

Gresham's Law states that bad money drives out good, and every government that has ever debased its currency has proven this true the hard way. The mechanism is straightforward. When a sovereign declares that two coins carry equal legal value despite one containing more silver, citizens spend the inferior coin and hoard the superior one. The overvalued bad money circulates. The undervalued good money disappears into mattresses and private vaults. The state creates this distortion through legal tender laws, forcing you to accept both coins at the same face value regardless of actual metal content. Without that legal compulsion, Gresham's Law doesn't operate. Markets simply price the better money higher. Rome did this with systematic ferocity. The silver denarius, roughly 90% pure under Augustus, fell to under 5% silver by the reign of Gallienus in the 260s AD. Citizens watched the debasement happen and responded rationally: they spent the garbage and saved whatever genuine silver remained. Gresham's Law is a symptom, not a disease. State monopoly over money is the disease. Remove the legal tender mandate, allow competing currencies, and good money wins on merit. Thomas Gresham identified the phenomenon in 1558 through observation. The cure has been available just as long.

LASIK eye surgery costs roughly $2,100 per eye today. In 1998, it cost $2,200 per eye. Adjusted for inflation, you are paying about 60% less for a procedure that has simultaneously become faster, safer, and more precise. That is what markets do when left alone. Now compare that to a hearing aid. The FDA classified hearing aids as prescription medical devices for decades, locking you into audiologist appointments before you could buy a $3,000 device that a manufacturer could produce for $300. Or, look at insulin. Heavily regulated, patent-extended, and politically manipulated, a vial of Humalog ran over $330 in 2024 versus roughly $21 in Canada for a biosimilar. Same molecule. Different regulatory environment. LASIK sits in a peculiar gap. Insurers rarely cover it, which means third-party payment schemes never severed the price signal between provider and patient. You shop, clinics compete, manufacturers race to improve technology. The feedback loop that markets depend on functions exactly as it should. Regulated medical markets break that loop deliberately. The FDA's approval process costs pharmaceutical companies over $2.6 billion per new drug on average, erecting barriers that protect incumbents and punish smaller competitors who cannot absorb a decade of compliance costs. Patients then pay the premium on the back end. LASIK is the control in the experiment. The market won.

Central planning produces exactly what Ludwig von Mises titled his 1947 pamphlet: planned chaos. The mechanism is straightforward. Prices carry the information producers and consumers need to coordinate their decisions across millions of transactions simultaneously. When a government fixes bread prices below market, bakers stop baking or exit the industry. Shortages appear. Planners then fix flour prices to compensate. Now millers face losses. The intervention metastasizes upward through the supply chain until the state controls the entire food system, badly. Venezuela walked this path in textbook fashion. Hugo Chavez nationalized agriculture, fixed food prices beginning in 2003, and by 2016 Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds of body weight from hunger. Central planners cannot rationally allocate resources because no single authority possesses the dispersed, localized, constantly changing knowledge that prices transmit automatically. Mises called this the calculation problem. Without genuine market prices, socialist planners cannot rationally allocate resources because they have no real signal telling them where resources are most urgently needed. They guess. They mandate. You pay. This is why every centrally planned economy in history eventually rations goods, generates black markets, and criminalizes voluntary exchange. The black market is simply the real economy refusing to disappear on bureaucratic command. Prices are not a human invention that governments can redesign. They are the emergent language of scarcity itself, and suppressing them does not change the underlying reality, it just makes that reality invisible until the shelves go empty.

Capital gains tax is theft, committed twice against the same dollar. You earn income. The government takes its cut immediately, in the US its between 22% and 37% depending on your bracket. What remains is yours, after-tax money, already processed through Washington's collection machine. You choose not to spend it. You save it, invest it, buy assets with it. The discipline required to delay consumption is precisely the behavior that funds capital formation across the economy. Then the asset grows. You sell it. The government appears again, demanding 20% (plus the 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax for higher earners) on the nominal gain, which often includes pure inflation adjustments that represent no real increase in purchasing power whatsoever. The IRS treats your patience as a second taxable event. The original dollar was already taxed. The "gain" frequently reflects nothing more than the dollar losing value while you held the asset. Murray Rothbard identified this pattern: the state punishes capital accumulation. Consider a simple case. You invest $50,000 of after-tax earnings in 2016 into an S&P 500 index fund. By 2026, it's worth $115,000. Inflation consumed a meaningful slice of that $65,000 gain. You pay capital gains tax on the full nominal figure regardless. Capital gains taxation suppresses investment, shrinks the capital pool available for productive enterprise, and forces entrepreneurs to seek financing from a shallower pond. Fewer productive investments get made. Workers carry that cost through lower wages and fewer opportunities. The state expands, while you suffer.

Recessions are supposed to hurt. That pain is the cure, not the disease. When credit expands beyond real savings, the central bank manufactures a boom that cannot last. Businesses build factories for demand that borrowed money fabricated. Workers take jobs that only exist because interest rates sat artificially low. When the correction arrives, those malinvestments need to liquidate. Wages fall in some sectors, capital shifts, weaker firms close. Painful, yes. Fatal, no. The depression arrives when government refuses to let the correction finish its work. Herbert Hoover did this with textbook precision between 1929 and 1932. He signed Smoot-Hawley, raised the top income tax rate from 25% to 63%, pushed wages above market-clearing levels through industry agreements, and expanded federal spending by 50%. Every intervention delayed liquidation. Franklin Roosevelt then deepened and extended those same policies for a decade, keeping unemployment above 14% through 1940 when the private economy, left alone, would have recovered years earlier. Governments prop up insolvent banks, subsidize failing industries, and inflate prices to prevent the nominal wage adjustments that would restore employment. Each intervention signals investors to wait. Capital sits idle because the rules keep changing. The recovery never gets traction because the government keeps moving the floor.

Criminals in Costa Rica, when they hear the name "Bukele":

This describes South Africa accurately; only we are already 30 years into this. Europe and the US are quickly catching up, though.

When immigrants refuse to integrate into the host society's legal, linguistic, and commercial fabric, they create jurisdictional ambiguity. Ambiguity is where transaction costs breed. But that is only part 1 of the problem cascade. Consider the banlieues ringing Paris, where Sharia-adjacent informal courts settle disputes that French civil law theoretically governs. Two competing legal systems occupying the same geography produce institutional decay. Contracts become unenforceable across community lines. Capital avoids the uncertainty. Citizens pay that cost in stagnant property values and higher insurance premiums. But wait there is more. Language is infrastructure. A Turkish enclave in Berlin where 40% of residents speak no functional German represents a communication barrier that price signals cannot cross efficiently. Entrepreneurs cannot hire freely across that barrier without absorbing translation overhead. Labor markets fragment. Wages inside the enclave compress because the worker pool cannot compete in the broader market. Then, the welfare state makes it dramatically worse. State subsidies remove the market pressure that historically forced assimilation. Ellis Island immigrants learned English because the market paid them to. Today the German government pays families in Neukölln to remain monolingual, then wonders why parallel societies calcify across two and three generations. Non-assimilation creates a property rights problem across cultural barriers. Voluntary immigration into a free society demands adoption of its legal foundations. Anything less transfers real costs onto existing citizens without their consent, and that is simply redistribution without even a passport. Fast forward 20 years and you end up with this:

History does not merely rhyme; it repeats.