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.

In 1848, France was collapsing.

The king had been deposed, a new republic was forming, and socialist ideas were gaining traction.

Politicians promised the State would guarantee employment, wages, education, and welfare for all, by force if necessary.

Into this chaos stepped Frédéric Bastiat, newly elected to the National Assembly. 🧵 Bastiat was already known for his economic writings, but now he was at the heart of political power.

While his colleagues gave passionate speeches about "social rights guaranteed by the State," Bastiat became one of the few voices challenging what he called "the legalization of plunder."

The idea that the State could take from some to give to others, as long as it was done through law.

Ludwig von Mises was 57 years old when the Nazis seized his life's work.

They confiscated his library, his manuscripts, his home, everything.

He fled to America with nothing but the clothes on his back and couldn't speak English.

Most people would have given up. Mises started over. 🧵 When Mises arrived in America, he couldn't order coffee without struggling with the language.

He was already a renowned economist in Europe, but in New York, he was just another refugee starting from zero.

Instead of dwelling on what he'd lost, he threw himself into learning English from scratch with the same intensity he'd once applied to economic theory.

In 1952, an economist made a discovery that would embarrass psychology for 30 years.

While behaviorists insisted the mind was just stimulus and response, F.A. Hayek claimed your brain actively constructs reality through self-organizing networks.

They called him unscientific. He was decades ahead. 🧵 Here's what Hayek saw that the experts missed: your brain doesn't passively receive the world; it builds it.

Every single perception is actually an interpretation. You literally cannot see something truly new because your mind needs existing categories to make sense of anything.

Your brain is a "classificatory device," constantly turning chaos into order without any central command.

Freedom has a marketing problem.

We have the greatest product in human history. Individual liberty has created more prosperity, ended more suffering, and unleashed more potential than any idea ever conceived.

Yet we're getting destroyed by people promising free stuff while delivering famines. 🧵 Think about this historical irony: In the 1800s, we were the revolutionaries. We tore down kings, ended slavery, gave power to the people.

Now we sound like we're defending a broken system instead of offering something better.

What happened?

Nuclear reactors are spending millions to protect you from radiation levels lower than eating a banana.

This isn't safety theater—it's the 70-year regulatory nightmare that killed American nuclear power.

But recent executive orders could change everything. 🧵 The absurdity is staggering.

America has been treating nuclear power like it's made of pure plutonium when most of it is safer than your morning coffee.

The culprit? The "Linear No Threshold" (LNT) - the assumption that ANY radiation exposure, no matter how tiny, is dangerous.

The FDA is literally preventing Americans from protecting themselves from cancer.

While people in the US burn with decades-old sunscreen formulas, Europeans and Australians enjoy superior protection that the American government won't let its citizens buy.

The bureaucracy is so broken that one company has spent 20 years and $18 million trying to get FDA approval for a single sunscreen ingredient. 🧵 The FDA hasn't approved a new sunscreen ingredient since 1999.

Let that sink in. Your smartphone has been updated thousands of times since then, but your cancer protection is stuck in the Clinton administration.

Meanwhile, dermatologists routinely recommend sunscreens from Australia, Europe, and Asia that Americans can't legally access.

Most Americans have forgotten that the Declaration of Independence is one of the most subversive documents written in human history.

And understanding why matters more today than ever. 🧵 For thousands of years, every government got power the same way:

— "God chose me to rule you."
— "My bloodline makes me special."
— "I conquered you, so I own you."

The libertarian kid in your economics class just interrupted the professor for the third time this week, lecturing about Austrian economics while everyone stares at their phones.

After class: "Libertarians are such... you know."

How does someone fighting for freedom become the person everyone actively avoids? 🧵 Leonard Read saw this coming decades ago.

He warned that liberty would suffer if its advocates tried to 'reform' others like central planners: through lectures, pressure campaigns, and force.

The problem isn't the ideas. It's the method.