(((RichardGCombs))) @rgcombs

Socialism has never been a system where workers own the means of production. In practice, it's been a system where the state controls the means of production, with workers ultimately taking orders from political authorities. It has repeatedly served as a transitional stage toward more centralized state ownership. Capitalism doesn't force you to sell your labor. It simply means that if you want goods or services, you must offer others something they value in exchange. That can be labor, starting a business, freelancing, investing, or forming a worker-owned cooperative. Capitalism doesn't prohibit worker ownership—it allows it voluntarily. Socialism seeks to make one ownership model compulsory.

Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist

5 days ago

You have it backwards. Socialism is the system where workers own the means of production. Capitalism is the system where workers are forced to sell our labor in order to survive and do not own any part of the value that our labor creates. The capitalist ruling class owns it all.

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Tuck Fucker. Huh. That didn't clean it up the way it usually does. Whatever. Point stands. Fuck Tucker.

Eitan Fischberger @EFischberger

a week ago

WHOA: Tucker just called for President Trump and the congressmen pushing for American-Israeli military cooperation in the NDAA to face Nuremberg-style treason charges

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Exactly

🥷🦅Austin Wade Petersen 🇺🇲🥋 @AP4Liberty

4 days ago

A supermarket keeps 1 to 4 cents of every dollar you spend. Zohran Mamdani's government run stores promise groceries 30 percent cheaper!! There is no 26-cent pile of "greed" hiding in the egg aisle. Every point of that discount has to come from somewhere and somewhere is from

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A psychologist spent 10 years studying 400 people who called themselves lucky or unlucky. Then he handed each one a newspaper and asked them to count the photographs inside. Unlucky people took about two minutes. Lucky people took seconds. Page 2 held a half-page ad in giant type reading "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." A few pages later, another one offered a cash prize to anyone who told the experimenter they'd seen it. The lucky group spotted both messages. The unlucky group counted straight past them, so locked onto the task that half a page of bold print became invisible. When Richard Wiseman asked afterward if they'd noticed anything unusual, they said no. His personality data explains why. Unlucky participants scored roughly twice as high on anxiety, and tension narrows attention until the unexpected gets filtered out entirely. Lucky participants also varied their routes to work, talked to more strangers, and broke their routines on purpose, which multiplies how much unexpected material crosses their path to begin with. Wiseman ran one more test that proves the mechanism. He surveyed 700 lottery players. Self-described lucky people were twice as confident they'd win. Their winnings matched everyone else's exactly. Feeling lucky does nothing in a game of pure chance, because there's nothing to notice. So he built a "Luck School" that trained unlucky people to behave like lucky ones. Participants reported lasting gains in fortune, confidence, and even health. The luck was sitting in plain sight on page 2, in type half a page tall. The only variable was who looked up.

duke @millersgft

6 days ago

A moving man will meet his luck 😶‍🌫️

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👇👇👇

Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand

5 days ago

The buyer is just as "greedy" for wanting lower prices as the seller is for wanting higher ones. The employee is just as "greedy" for wanting higher wages as the employer is for wanting lower labor costs. The free market channels these competing interests into voluntary

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What the funk

Katie Miller @KatieMiller

5 days ago

According to Google it is OK to only want a Black doctor, but not a White doctor. @Google produces clearly different answers based on race. This is peak woke.

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If you give problems the wrong names, you can't understand them. If you can't understand problems, you can't fix them. There are almost no homeless people in America. There are only feral humans. A homeless person is someone whose distinguishing feature is not having a home. I was homeless once, for a day, when the lease on one apartment expired before the next one was cleaned, repaired, and ready. I parked a moving van full of my worldly possessions at my university, and slept on a couch in the student commons. That's "homeless". "Feral" is when a human cannot live within society, or comply with the basic expectations required for membership. Yes, they do not have homes. But this is not their distinguishing feature. Because they also don't have jobs, sanity, sobriety, manners, morals, or hygiene. Which is why they do not have homes. If you give them a house, because you think they are "homeless" rather than "feral", then they will simply repeat, within that structure, the same feral behavior. And soon that structure will be uninhabitable. Which, for certain people, is the whole point. A man whose job is to sell 3d printed houses isn't trying to fix the feral-human problem. He's trying to sell 3d printed houses. And it's one hell of a lot easier to sell them to bureaucrats who aren't spending their own personal money. It doesn't matter if 3d printed houses suck to live in. It doesn't matter if the feral humans trash them. Nobody in this equation cares about the feral humans, even the feral humans themselves. And nobody in this equation cares about the taxpayers. If the feral humans are still feral, then the 3d house grifters can sell more gimmick houses, and the bureaucrats can spend more of someone else's money. If a violent political upheaval becomes necessary, this will be very unpleasant for everyone involved, but at least afterwards, we will all be able to use the feral humans, bureaucrats, and grifters to fertilize the garden of new homes. Which will be made out of bricks.

Jason Ballard @JasonDBallard

6 days ago

3D Printed Housing for the homeless in Austin TX. Construction cost: $99k

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Thank you @nytimes for your honest and accurate reporting. We must fight against the extremist religion of the car in question that caused it to plow into the LBTQ parade. Cars are born peaceful. They are self-radicalized online but vehicle extremists.

The New York Times @nytimes

a week ago

Breaking News: A car plowed through a park during Berlin’s biggest LGBTQ Pride event, killing at least one person and injuring more than a dozen others, city police officials said on Saturday. nyti.ms/3Rx0XDS

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🚨 BREAKING: B1 BOMBERS JUST DROPPED 2,000 LB PAYLOADS INTO IRAN... WOAH! 🚨 Iran just THREATENED to HIT British bases—Good luck! Our F16s are LOCKED AND LOADED🔥 EU Diplomats ORDERED TO EVACUATE IRAN… they know SOMETHING 👀 Iran BEGS at the table, but TRUMP says NO DEAL. "They haven't felt enough PAIN yet!" 🔥

In 1920, Ludwig von Mises delivered one of the most powerful intellectual blows against socialism in history. In his essay Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, Mises demonstrated how rational economic calculation is impossible under socialism. The argument is devastatingly simple. In a free market, prices emerge from the voluntary interactions of millions of individuals. These prices reflect real scarcities, subjective valuations, and trade-offs. They serve as indispensable signals that tell producers what to make, in what quantities, and how to allocate resources efficiently. Under socialism, where the state owns the means of production, there are no genuine market prices - only arbitrary administrative decisions. Central planners, no matter how intelligent or well-intentioned, lack the information they need to allocate resources rationally. They cannot know the relative value of different goods, the opportunity costs involved, or whether they are using capital efficiently. Mises was not claiming that socialist planners are necessarily stupid. He was saying the problem is structural and insurmountable. Even the most powerful supercomputers could not solve it, because the necessary knowledge is dispersed, local and constantly changing - generated only through real market exchange. This insight proved prophetic. Every serious attempt at central planning - the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Venezuela - eventually collapsed into chronic shortages, waste and economic failure. Mises showed that socialism doesn’t just fail in practice. It fails in theory. The Economic Calculation Problem remains one of the strongest arguments ever made for capitalism and private property. Without them, rational economic action cannot exist. Mises gave the world a clear, logical reason why collectivism is doomed. Few ideas in economics have aged as well.

Regardless of what you think of the sentiment (I think it's bullshit, but whatever), the wealthy will always find ways around rules like this.

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor

2 weeks ago

If you have a second home in New York City worth more than $5M, check your mailbox when you’re back in the five boroughs — because you've got mail. Today, we sent notification letters to property owners, letting them know that our new pied-à-terre tax is coming soon. The best

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Smithsonian's "white supremacy" list: ✅ individualism, self-reliance ✅ nuclear family structures ✅ rational, linear thinking ✅ work before you play ✅ plan for the future ✅ protect property ✅ avoid conflicts ✅ manage time ✅ be polite

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Everything the government touches gets more expensive. Everything it leaves alone gets cheaper. Since January 2000, overall prices are up 93%. Wages are up 131%. Now look at what happened sector by sector. Prices that exploded: - Hospital services: +240% - College tuition: +180% - College textbooks: +150% - Medical care: +140% - Childcare: +122% - Housing: +111% Prices that collapsed: - Cellphone service: -45% - Computer software: -70% - Toys: -73% - Televisions: -97% That is not a coincidence. It is a mechanism. Every sector in the first list runs on subsidized demand and somebody else's money. Student loans pay the tuition bill. Insurance and Medicare pay the hospital bill. Subsidy programs pay the childcare bill. When the buyer never sees the real price, the price stops behaving. Every sector in the second list makes you pay directly, against global competition. There is no federal television loan program. So TVs got 97% cheaper over the same 25 years tuition nearly tripled. None of this is new. In 1987, Reagan's education secretary Bill Bennett predicted that every increase in federal student aid would simply be swallowed by tuition hikes. Economists call it the Bennett hypothesis. Four decades of data have called it correct. And yes, new cars sit on the market side at +25%. Someone will bring up the bailout, which is fair. Washington spent about 80 billion dollars on the auto rescue and taxpayers ate roughly 10 billion of it. But a one-time rescue of two companies is not a standing subsidy to every buyer. You still pay for your own car, and Toyota still exists. Even with bailouts, mandates, and tariffs, cars rose 25% while inflation ran 93%. So the next time someone tells you healthcare and college are expensive because of market failure, show them the chart. The market is the part that worked. Data: Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI, Jan 2000 to Dec 2025, via Mark J. Perry, AEI.

Envy needs an ideology, and socialism has always been happy to provide one. Mises wrote a whole book about this in 1956, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, and the diagnosis holds up: people who resent the outcomes of voluntary exchange will always search for a doctrine that transforms their resentment into virtue. The woke left found theirs. Notice what wokeism and socialism share at the root. Both start from the premise that unequal outcomes prove injustice. You earned more than your neighbor? Exploitation. One group outperforms another in median income? Systemic oppression. Neither doctrine ever asks whether people made different choices, took different risks, or produced different value for others. Asking that question would ruin everything, because the entire project depends on assigning blame rather than understanding prices, profit, and loss. Once you accept that unequal outcomes equal injustice, you need a corrector. Someone powerful. Someone with the authority to override contracts, seize property, and redistribute according to a moral hierarchy the planners themselves define. That job description has exactly one applicant: the state. This is why the woke activist and the socialist always arrive at the same policy desk, demanding rent control in New York, wealth taxes in Sacramento, hiring quotas in every HR department from Seattle to Brussels. Marcuse and the Frankfurt School figured out decades ago that the Western worker refused to play his assigned role as revolutionary. He got rich instead. Capitalism handed him a car, a house, and air conditioning, and he stopped listening to men promising utopia through expropriation. The revolutionaries needed a new client base. Class became identity, but the machinery stayed identical: oppressor and oppressed, guilt and grievance, revolution and rule. The love affair with socialism, then, follows logically. Wokeism supplies the moral demand for coercion; socialism supplies the economic apparatus of coercion. Neither can survive in a world of private property and voluntary exchange, because in that world you rise by serving customers, not by capturing committees. Venezuela ran this experiment from 1999 onward. The grocery shelves reported the results.

In the 1920s an imprisoned Italian journalist, disillusioned by the realisation that Karl Marx’s prediction of spontaneous worldwide socialist revolution was failing to come true, began working on a new revolutionary strategy that would profoundly shape the modern left. In his Prison Diaries, Antonio Gramsci argued that capitalist societies were held together not primarily by economic power or state coercion, but by cultural hegemony - the dominance of bourgeois values, culture and institutions (education, media, family, religion and civil society). As long as the working class accepted these values as “common sense”, revolution was impossible. His solution was revolutionary: the left must wage a “war of position” - a long, patient struggle to capture the institutions that shape culture and ideas. Only after achieving cultural dominance could they seize political and economic power. This was a major departure from classical Marxism. Instead of focusing on factories and economic base, Gramsci shifted the battlefield to culture and consciousness. He understood that whoever controls the “superstructure” (culture) can eventually control the base (economy and politics). Gramsci’s ideas became foundational to what later became known as Cultural Marxism. The Frankfurt School and the New Left built upon them, moving the struggle from class warfare to cultural warfare - attacking Western traditions, morality, family structures, and national identity. Today’s identity politics, “the long march through the institutions”, critical studies in universities and the weaponisation of culture all trace their intellectual lineage back to Gramsci’s insight. He understood that real power lies in defining what society considers normal, moral and true. It has been a guiding principle for the left ever since.

BREAKING: @SenRandPaul, the Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, has just released internal federal documents which he says show that the FBI intervened and stopped CBP from searching and questioning Peter Daszak upon his return to the US from China at JFK airport in 2021 during the WHO's investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. The documents show that CBP's National Targeting Center had flagged Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance, as an "extremely high person of interest" ahead of his arrival in the US, citing his more than 15 years of collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and his role as principal investigator on NIH grants funding bat coronavirus research in China, and that "much of the funding DASZAK receives is put towards gain of function research." The documents reveal that CBP had a series of questions they planned to ask Daszak when he landed and were going to search his media, until they were told to stand down by the FBI. In an email dated 2/4/2021, a CBP official notifies others within CBP: "Please be advised that FBI New York has requested we do not stop the subject below." Chairman Paul says as a result, the stop, search, and questioning of Daszak never happened.

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Any questions? I don’t have any.

IMHO, this is one of the best speeches in years. Countering the Resurgence of Political Terrorism open.substack.com/pub/statedept/…

Tennessee❤️ When people told us at the beginning of our road trip that people in the South are different, we didn’t really know what they meant. But after spending several weeks here, we finally understand. The hospitality here is just something else. Everyone knows everyone, and it feels like people are living one big shared life. Someone is always stopping by, doors are always open, and everyone is welcome. One guy told us he hasn’t locked his house in 23 years. When we were out on the lake, we met some people who immediately invited us to their lake house to hang out. They offered us drinks, chicken wings, and made us feel completely at home. It’s a kind of hospitality I’ve never experienced before. When we got back to the dock late that night, one of the guys on the boat said something that really stuck with me: “You don’t have to live in some big, exciting city. What matters is the people who live there. That’s what makes you happy. I’ve lived in many places around the world, but nothing comes close to Ocoee, Tennessee. And you know the best part about living here? We’re going to do the exact same thing again tomorrow.” We will be back.

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Reminder: the year Fidel Castro took power, Cuba had the same GDP as Greece. The year he died, Cuba had the same GDP as Sudan. In other words: Socialism. Fails. Every. Time.

Jacobin @jacobin

4 weeks ago

"Socialists not only understand economics just as well as capitalists... but can solve their years of mismanagement through an embrace of our principles." — @ZohranKMamdani

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