Thread by @Chxta

One of the most important men in history is Adam Smith. His magnum opus, "The Wealth of Nations", is the basis of the greatest accumulation of wealth in human history.

It was after Smith put his ideas into writing that the structured capitalist economy began to build, and led to a situation where countries have been able to bring people out of poverty in huge numbers.

Need evidence? Look.

Note that #England's GDP grew linearly right until the century following the publication of that seminal book.

As the man's ideas began to take root, it was boom, exponential growth, and they've hardly looked back ever since.

Adam Smith's ideas are the basis of modern-day capitalism. Want another, more recent, example?

Here it is, #China.

And China brings us nicely to the opposite of Adam Smith.

Adam Smith died in 1790, and 28 years after his death, another very important historical figure was born.

His name was Karl Marx, and he wrote two very influential books, The Communist Manifesto in 1848, and Das Kapital starting in 1867.

The Communist Manifesto was all about class struggle, while Das Kapital, which was published in three volumes, was a critique of the methods of capitalism.

Karl Marx was right.

In his day, which was a period of phenomenal growth powered by the industrial revolution and capitalism, we saw the misery inflicted on people of the lower classes by unbridled capitalism, which is not much different from feudalism.

All you have to do is to read Charles Dickens's "Oliver Twist", to have a window into the misery that poor people lived during this high growth phase.

You could also watch "12 years a slave" to see the other aspect of unfettered capitalism, free (slave) labour.

Yes, Marx was right, and 34 years after he died, one country adopted his theories, #Russia.

The Russian leader, Vladimir Lenin, was a devotee of the theories of Marx and his friend, Friedrich Engels, and tried to impose those theories on his people.

Lenin quickly found that people tended to resist these theories because of one small fact - wealth distribution does not really reward innovation or hard work.

The only real way to impose Marx's theories on a whole country is by force, and so d #SovietUnion was born, in 1922.

Lenin's successor, Iosef Stalin, was even, err, better than Lenin in imposing his ideas on the people.

Stalin died in 1953 but had created a powerhouse, with the small matter of a few million people dead (read up about Holodomor).

Quite a few others adopted the methods, because to their minds, the end justifies the means.

Four years before Stalin died, Mao Zedong came to power in #China and took Stalin's methods even further.

The results were a disaster.

Mao died in 1976, and his successor, Deng Xiaoping took a look at the disaster before him and decided to ditch Marx and go with Smith.

The charts below, with my scrawny writing, tells the story:
#England began to accelerate after adopting Smith.

#China also began to accelerate after adopting Smith.

In both cases, millions of people were lifted out of poverty after economic acceleration began.

What was the byproduct of this spectacular growth?

A new species called billionaire.

The Soviet Union, the first country to adopt Marx's ideas, collapsed under the weight of its contradictions in 1991 and broke up.

Some of them were quick to adopt variations of Adam Smith's ideas. #Estonia, #Latvia & #Lithuania.

The next chart speaks to the journey thus far…

This brings us to the new-found hatred for billionaires.

There is a need to weed out these harmful economic ideas on time in our generation before they enter leadership, and in #America, @AOC is one such extremist.

Like Karl Marx (whom she's obviously a disciple of), she is right that extreme capitalism is a problem. But the extreme of anything is a problem, and even a broken clock is correct at least two times each day.

It is true that there is a need for the government to help the downtrodden in the society, and for that, the well-to-do should, as a moral duty, bear some of that burden.

But to eliminate the well-to-do?

This "eat-the-rich" philosophy has been shown empirically to lead to mass murder and middling economic growth.
Look at this chart of 80 year GDP per capita for various countries. Note the red of the #SovietUnion.

At the start of Stalin's era, everyone was paid the same.

Naturally, the laggards got the better of it, and those who would naturally be better workers were not motivated to work.

Eventually, the government grew some sense and introduced incentives.

Productivity increased.

But as the chart shows, even in the people's paradise, growth never reached the heights of all the other countries that adopted Adam Smith.

Following AOC's ideas can sound cool, but historically, there is only one outcome from those ideas. Heck, even #China fled from them.