Water keeps you alive. You'll die without it in 3 days.

But you can buy a bottle for less than a dollar.

Diamonds? Pretty rocks you can't eat or drink.

Cost thousands.

This paradox broke economists' brains for centuries. Until 1871 changed everything. 🧵 That year, a 31-year-old journalist in Vienna named Carl Menger published something that would destroy Karl Marx's entire worldview.

He didn't just solve the water diamond paradox.

He discovered why socialism always fails.

In 1965, a German philosopher wrote an essay that would reshape American universities.

His name was Herbert Marcuse. His essay was called "Repressive Tolerance."

And yesterday, his ideas pulled the trigger. 🧵 Marcuse had a simple argument: Traditional tolerance is actually oppression in disguise.

When you let "oppressors" speak freely, you're just helping them maintain power.

Real tolerance, he claimed, means being intolerant of the right and tolerant of the left.

In 1991, Milton Friedman made predictions about the War on Drugs that sounded completely insane at the time.

33 years later, every single one came true with terrifying precision.

Here's how a Nobel laureate saw what nobody else could: 🧵 Politicians called him a radical. The DEA dismissed his warnings. Mainstream economists said he was out of touch with reality.

But Friedman understood something they didn't: economics doesn't care about good intentions.

Karl Marx spent his life attacking capitalism and the "exploitation" of workers.

Your leftist colleague loves this story. Socialists worship him. But there's one problem: Marx never worked a day in his life and lived off capitalist profits for decades. 🧵 Marx rails against the bourgeoisie while his best friend Friedrich Engels literally owns factories employing 800 workers in Manchester.

Marx didn't just tolerate this. He lived off those "exploitative" profits for most of his adult life.

Your leftist campus colleague with a "Tax the Rich" sticker on his MacBook says he's a socialist because he cares about minorities and fighting inequality.

But here's what they won't tell you: the ideology of "caring about people" has the worst human rights record in history. 🧵 Picture this: You care about equality, minority rights, individual freedom, and human dignity.

You should be the first person to reject socialism completely.

Because no political system in history has been worse for the exact things you claim to care about.

This book written by Ludwig von Mises in 1944 may be the most important thing to understand the threat we are facing in 2025.

"Omnipotent Government" predicted our current crisis 🧵 In the 1800s, the world experienced unprecedented peace and prosperity under classical liberalism.

Free trade connected nations. People moved freely across borders.

Then something shifted in the realm of ideas, and within decades, two world wars consumed civilization.

Trump imposed sweeping tariffs to "protect" American industry.

Meanwhile, 40 years ago, a small island nation did the exact opposite and became an economic powerhouse.

This is the story of New Zealand's farming revolution, and why protection breeds weakness. 🧵 In 1984, New Zealand faced a crisis.

The government was broke, spending more than it could afford, and agriculture—their economic backbone—was heavily subsidized.

Farmers received roughly one-third of their income from taxpayers. Sound familiar?

Stop taking Karl Marx seriously.

He was completely refuted over a century ago by Austrian economists who dismantled every pillar of his theory.

Yet somehow, his ideas still haunt lecture halls and political debates like intellectual zombies.

Here's how four economists buried Marxism forever. 🧵 The destruction began in 1871 with Carl Menger and a simple question: where does value really come from?

Marx said labor creates value. Eight hours of work equals eight hours of worth.

Menger said: wrong. Value lives in human minds, not in objects or hours worked.

In 1990, a Black Democratic legislator who ran Jesse Jackson's campaigns twice implemented Milton Friedman's free-market education ideas.

This is how liberty can win through unlikely alliances. 🧵 Meet Polly Williams and Milton Friedman. On paper, they had nothing in common.

Friedman: Nobel Prize-winning economist, architect of free-market theory.

Williams: Former welfare recipient, inner-city Milwaukee representative, civil rights activist.

Yet together, they revolutionized American education.

Imagine being so beloved that working-class families hung your portrait in their homes. Not because you were a celebrity, but because you actually cut their taxes and fought for their freedom.

Meet William Ewart Gladstone: history's most popular classical liberal 🧵 This wasn't some academic theorist or ivory tower philosopher.

Gladstone was a four-time Prime Minister who dominated British politics for over half a century.

And here's what made him different: he made liberty cool, moral, and undeniably popular.

Brilliant economists are saying Hayek was right about the past, but AI changes the game.

"The calculation problem? Solved. Modern supercomputers can handle what Soviet planners couldn't."

Here's why even smart people are missing something fundamental. 🧵 This isn't new thinking. It's the return of an ancient conceit.

Soviet planners once believed they could organize society "scientifically." No more waste, no unemployment, just rational experts allocating resources perfectly.

They called it scientific socialism. We know how that ended.

A 16th-century Spanish priest wrote the first systematic defense of sound money, identified inflation as theft, and justified killing tyrants who imposed taxes without consent.

Kings banned his books. Executioners burned them. The Inquisition tried to erase them from history.

But this Jesuit monk had developed the core insights of Austrian economics 250 years before Austria even existed. 🧵 This is the story of Juan de Mariana, the original "politically incorrect" libertarian who out-Rothbarded Rothbard, out-Misesed Mises, and challenged the entire power structure of his time.

While most people think free-market economics started with Adam Smith, the real intellectual revolution began in the lecture halls of 16th-century Salamanca.

Milton Friedman was visiting China when officials showed him workers building a canal with shovels to create as many jobs as possible.

Friedman replied: "Then why not give them spoons?"

Sounds logical, right? More workers = better economy? Here's the logic politicians miss. 🧵 The Chinese officials missed the point entirely. They weren't hired to create jobs; they were hired to build a canal.

Creating jobs is easy. Creating value is hard.

We could destroy every farm tractor in America tomorrow. That would create millions of new farm jobs overnight. But would anyone call that progress?

In August 1939, Britain and France were desperately trying to stop Hitler.

They had one last hope: convince Stalin to join them against Nazi Germany. Instead, Stalin chose to ally with the nazis.

This wasn't an accident. It was ideological sympathy. 🧵 The scene in Moscow was surreal.

British and French envoys were begging Stalin for an alliance, but talks stalled over Poland accepting Soviet troops and the Baltic states falling into Stalin's sphere.

Stalin was stupefied by British refusal. How could British imperialists, who had seized one quarter of the earth, deny him the right to annex former Russian possessions?

The Soviet Union promised equality, prosperity, and democracy for all.

— 7 million died in the Holodomor famine.
— 6 million people forcibly deported.
— 800,000 died during deportation.
— 40% lived in poverty.

Don't be fooled—life for regular people in the USSR was awful. 🧵 We're told constantly that socialism "just hasn't been tried correctly yet."

But the USSR wasn't an accident. It was socialism's most ambitious experiment.

And the results? A masterclass in how utopian promises become dystopian realities.

You're a Soviet railroad commissar. No markets. No prices. Just you and a mountain range between two cities. How do you decide where to build?

This simple question reveals why socialism always fails. 🧵 Through the mountains, you'd use less steel but massive engineering resources. Around the mountains, you'd use more steel but save engineering for other projects. Both steel and engineering are desperately needed elsewhere for irrigation, trucks, harbors, thousands of other uses.

Was Jesus actually a socialist?

From progressive pulpits to college campuses to political debates, it’s a claim you hear everywhere today.

But what happens when we actually examine what Jesus taught versus what socialism requires? Let's investigate. 🧵 To answer this fairly, we need to define socialism clearly. Many people define it as "government giving free stuff" or "people doing good things for others."

Well, if that's socialism, then F.A. Hayek was a socialist—he supported some social programs and certainly believed in helping people.

Ludwig von Mises warned us 80 years ago: when governments start making individual "deals" with private companies, we're witnessing the transformation from capitalism to something far more dangerous.

The news about Nvidia and AMD giving the U.S. government 15% of chip sales to China? Mises saw this exact pattern coming. 🧵 In "Omnipotent Government," Mises identified a dangerous transformation he called "etatism."

Think of it this way: You still "own" your business on paper, but the government tells you what to make, who to hire, what prices to charge, and who you can sell to. You're a manager, not an owner.

Everyone says their own country should be more like Sweden.

Bernie Sanders built his campaign around it. AOC points to it constantly.

But if you really want to "be like Sweden," you'd have to abolish property, inheritance, and wealth taxes, cut corporate rates, and privatize Social Security with individual accounts. 🧵 Here's what they don't tell you: Modern Sweden isn't socialist at all.

Sweden's "socialist" reputation comes from one brief, disastrous period in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Before that, Sweden became the world's fourth-richest country through laissez-faire capitalism.

In 1925, a top Soviet economist wrote something that would eventually cost him his life.

Nikolai Bukharin, Lenin's "Golden Boy" and editor of Pravda, admitted that Ludwig von Mises was right about socialism. At least for the historical epoch in which he wrote.

This is the story of intellectual honesty in the face of tyranny. 🧵 Bukharin wasn't just any communist. He was perhaps the only trained economist among the Bolshevik founders. He studied economics during his exile in Germany and attended lectures of the great Austrians, including Böhm-Bawerk.

Lenin called him "not only a most valuable and major theorist of the Party; . . . [but] he is also rightly considered the favourite of the whole party."

At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a 40-year-old math mystery that stumped professors worldwide.

Universities celebrated her breakthrough paper. Then they rejected her graduate school applications.

Why? She was a genius with a published paper, but skipped high school. 🧵 This is the credentialism trap in action.

Hannah taught herself advanced calculus by age 11 using Khan Academy.

While her peers were memorizing multiplication tables, she was exploring graduate-level mathematics at her own pace.

Homeschooling gave her freedom to learn without limits.