Frédéric Bastiat had 6 years to change economics forever.

Most economists spend decades writing papers five people read. Bastiat was an unknown farmer with tuberculosis.

By the time he died, he'd built a movement that's still winning arguments 175 years later.

You have four years of college. 🧵 Here's what most students tell themselves:

"I need more credentials first."
"I need the right connections."
"I need the perfect moment to start."

Bastiat had none of these when he began in 1844.

He had a failing farm, terminal illness, and six years left to live.

He didn't wait for permission.

Everyone Wants Democratic Transition for Venezuela

But how do you restore democracy in a kleptocratic state captured by criminal elites?

To understand the problem, you need to understand how Venezuela got here. This story is a stark reminder that freedom isn't lost overnight, but slowly dismantled, one piece at a time. 🧵 The Liberation Myth: Venezuela Started With a Promise

In 1811, Simon Bolivar liberated Venezuela from Spanish rule. He dreamed of a unified, free South America built on republican ideals.

But Bolivar's revolution created a nation, not stability. What followed was a century of chaos.

“I'm against Maduro, but I think what Trump did was wrong.”

This sentence sounds reasonable, balanced, and mature. The kind of thing a serious person would say to avoid seeming radical.

The problem is that this sentence is, morally, one of the worst possible positions on Venezuela. 🧵 Not because it's moderate. But because it's a conscious escape. That "but" isn't prudence. It's a silent plea for moral exoneration.

The attempt to appear sophisticated while avoiding the thing that morality often demands: to hierarchize evil. To say what is worse. To choose.

They predicted the Great Depression. Then the 2008 crash. Then 2020's inflation surge.

A group of economists spent 150 years warning about the same pattern.

Nobody in power listened.

And every time, they were proven right.

This is the story of the Austrian School. 🧵 Modern economics had a fatal flaw.

For decades, mainstream economists treated the economy like a machine. Pull this lever, push that button, adjust interest rates here; boom, everything works perfectly.

But economies aren't machines. They're millions of people making billions of decisions every single day.

You can't predict human action with mathematical precision. The Austrian School understood this from day one.

In 1968, historian Robert Conquest published research showing Stalin killed millions.

Western intellectuals called him a propagandist. A Cold War hack. A CIA plant.

Then the USSR collapsed. The archives opened.

And every number he predicted was proven correct; or too conservative. 🧵 The 1960s had a serious Soviet problem.

While Conquest documented mass murder in Ukraine and the Gulag, Harvard professors praised Stalin's industrialization. British intellectuals visited Moscow and declared the future had arrived.

Anyone questioning this got dismissed as a reactionary.

China tried capitalism as an experiment in four cities.

It worked so well they're still pretending to be communist.

But this "accident" keeps happening everywhere. And almost nobody talks about why. 🧵 You've been told capitalism needs heavy regulation to work. That developing countries need government intervention to industrialize.

But across the world, governments created small zones with one key feature: dramatically fewer regulations, lower taxes, and actual property rights.

Three ideas everyone told you would help you are actually destroying your generation.

A social psychologist at NYU spent years studying why Gen Z has record anxiety and depression.

What he found will make you question everything about how you were raised. 🧵 Jonathan Haidt analyzed campus culture, mental health data, and generational shifts.

His conclusion? Three "great untruths" are being taught to young Americans as wisdom.

But they're the opposite of wisdom. They're psychological poison.

Javier Milei calls himself a "Borgesian Liberal."

The man who inspired Argentina's new president? Jorge Luis Borges, the greatest writer in Spanish since Cervantes.

And the Nobel committee blacklisted him for 20+ years because he believed individuals matter more than collectives. 🧵 While Pablo Neruda (communist) won the Nobel in 1971 and Gabriel García Márquez (Fidel Castro's personal friend) won in 1982, Borges was denied for two decades.

His crime? Defending individual liberty with philosophical depth that rivals Friedrich Hayek.

Argentina's 1853 Constitution declared property "inviolable." It guaranteed rivers open to all ships, banned protectionism, copied America's federal system, and even improved on it.

For 80 years, this worked perfectly.

Then one Supreme Court decision destroyed everything. 🧵 Here's the part nobody teaches: Argentina didn't stumble into prosperity.

After decades of civil war, the founders in 1853 made a deliberate choice. They looked at the United States and asked: Why reinvent the wheel?

They copied the Constitution almost word for word, but improved it by learning from America's mistakes.

Jean-Paul Sartre invented a verbal trick that killed millions.

He took the word "violence" and redefined it.

The existing social order? That was violence. Institutions? Violence. Property? Violence.

Once everything is violence, killing to overthrow it becomes self-defense. Here's how one philosopher's language game produced genocide. 🧵 Sartre was the most celebrated intellectual of the 20th century.

Existentialism. Freedom. Authenticity.

Every philosophy department teaches his work as liberation thought.

But they skip over what happened when his ideas left the seminar room and entered the killing fields.

Karl Marx wrote poetry as a teenager. Not love poems. Apocalypse poems.

"I shall howl gigantic curses at mankind," he wrote, imagining himself as God watching the world burn. "Everything that exists deserves to perish."

That wasn't youthful angst. It was the blueprint for everything that followed. 🧵 Your sociology professor calls Marx a scientist. A rigorous thinker who analyzed capitalism and discovered its fatal contradictions.

But Paul Johnson's examination of Marx's life reveals something far stranger: the man who claimed to have found the "scientific laws" of history never outgrew his teenage fantasies of universal catastrophe.

One evening in the early 1960s, a graduate student from Princeton named Robert Nozick walked into an apartment on West 88th Street in Manhattan.

He was there to meet Murray Rothbard, the radical economist who believed all government was illegitimate theft.

That night changed the history of political philosophy. 🧵 Robert Nozick was a conventional social democrat. Smart, ambitious, headed for a prestigious academic career. He believed in welfare programs, redistribution, the New Deal consensus.

Everything a respectable New York Jewish intellectual was supposed to believe.

Then he met Bruce Goldberg at Princeton.

They called him a fanatic. An extremist. A man stuck in the 19th century.

For forty years, Ludwig von Mises was academia's outcast. No university would pay him. No government would listen to him.

He kept teaching anyway. He kept writing anyway.

And when the Soviet Union fell, they finally admitted he was right all along. 🧵 The year was 1920. Mises published a paper that would make him an intellectual pariah across Europe.

He argued that socialism must fail because central planners could never gather enough information to coordinate an economy. Without market prices, there could be no rational economic calculation.

Every socialist intellectual in Europe dismissed him as a reactionary. Every political faction that controlled university appointments remembered his name.

Thomas Sowell figured out why the same people line up on opposite sides of EVERY political debate.

Gun control. Healthcare. Education. Crime. Foreign policy.

It's not about policy preferences or values. It's about two fundamentally incompatible visions of human nature. Once you see this pattern, you can't unsee it.

How does your view on minimum wage predict your view on foreign policy? 🧵 In 1987, Sowell published A Conflict of Visions, and it explained something everyone experiences but nobody can articulate: why political arguments feel like talking to aliens.

The book isn't about left versus right. It's about something deeper. Two different ways of seeing what humans are capable of, what knowledge actually is, and how society should be organized.

Ayn Rand escaped Soviet Russia and watched a society destroy itself from the inside.

She identified 5 patterns that signal a civilization is circling the drain.

You're watching all 5 happen in real time. 🧵 Rand didn't write philosophy in a vacuum. She watched her family's pharmacy get seized. She saw productive people get punished for succeeding. She witnessed merit become meaningless.

Then she came to America and wrote a warning: here's exactly how it happens.

We shouldn't need to say this.

But after recent conversations in conservative circles, apparently we do.

Here's a thread on why anyone who claims to defend liberty, Western civilization, or American principles cannot be a collectivist. 🧵 Collectivism isn't just a left-wing problem.

It's any ideology that treats groups as more real than individuals. That judges you by what tribe you were born into rather than what you choose and achieve.

On the left, it appears as class warfare and identity politics.

On the right, it appears as nationalism that judges by ethnicity. In tribalism that divides by blood.

A month ago, Javier Milei looked politically dead.

Congress overturned his vetoes. Markets were in freefall. The peso was collapsing. Polls showed voters turning against him.

On Sunday, he won a landslide that shocked everyone.

This is how he pulled it off. 🧵 Let's rewind to early October.

Milei's Argentina had spent months trapped in a vicious cycle.

He'd slash spending. Congress would override him. Investors would panic. The peso would drop. His approval would sink.

Then Congress would get more aggressive.

Liberty isn't a cult.

These days, there's a race to be the most "libertarian" or "classical liberal," but it's grounded in dogmatism. Acting like there's only one way to justify liberty, support it, or advance it.

That thinking could be the death of liberty. 🧵 Here's the irony:

The people most dogmatic about liberty are acting more like Marxists than liberty lovers.

They treat their preferred thinkers like sacred texts. They excommunicate anyone who disagrees. They run purity tests instead of building movements.

This is how ideologies die.

Marx lost the economics debate by 1900.

But he planted an intellectual time bomb that wouldn't detonate for a century.

It's why you can't have debates anymore. It's why arguments are replaced by identity credentials.

Mises warned us in 1949. We didn't listen. 🧵 1896: Economist Böhm-Bawerk publishes a systematic dismantling of Marx's value theory.

150 pages. Every contradiction documented.

Marx's defenders had a choice:

Refute the arguments

Or change the rules of debate

They chose option 2.

And it changed everything.

Recent polls show growing support for socialism among young people worldwide.

Here's the irony: This support is strongest among those who hate authority, reject compliance, and refuse to obey.

The only two things you can do under socialism are comply and obey. 🧵 Let me show you what youth life actually looked like under socialism.

In the Soviet Union, youth indoctrination began early. Parents enrolled children in the "Little Octobrists" organization to help them secure future positions.

By age 14, they joined the Komsomol. Its core mission? Prepare future members of the Communist Party.

Do socialists have a better moral sense of fairness than capitalists?

After all, they're the ones concerned about everyone's well-being, right?

Well, no. Research shows the main drive behind support for redistribution isn't fairness. It's a desire to see the better-off suffer. 🧵 In 2017, researchers from various Psychology and Anthropology departments analyzed data from 6,024 participants across the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Israel.

What they found destroys the entire moral foundation of socialism.