https://x.com/brivael/status/2052311280564748501?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw
" If you're a good-faith leftist and you're reading this thread, read what's next carefully. You might become a liberal in five minutes. The sentence is beautiful because it perfectly sums up the fundamental economic error of the left: "a system that wants to concentrate all the wealth in the hands of a few." This sentence assumes that wealth is a fixed pie. A finite quantity. If someone takes more, others necessarily have less. If Bezos is rich, it's necessarily because he stole from the poor. That's false. It's the most false thing you can believe in economics. And that's where all the error comes from. Wealth isn't a pie to be shared. It is created. A baker who produces bread doesn't take anything from anyone. He adds bread to the world. Before him: no bread. After him: bread. The world is richer, he is richer, his customers are more satisfied. No one lost. Everyone gained. That's the difference between a market exchange (positive-sum game: both parties win, or they wouldn't exchange) and theft (zero-sum game: what one gains, the other loses). Capitalism is based on exchange. Communism, on forced redistribution, therefore on theft. Now the numbers. Because this isn't an opinion, it's historical arithmetic. In 1820, 94% of humanity lived in poverty, 84% in extreme poverty (less than a dollar a day). Today, global extreme poverty has fallen to about 9%. This is the most extraordinary data point in human history. In 200 years, we've gone from 9 out of 10 people in absolute misery to fewer than 1 out of 10. In just the last 35 years, 117,000 people escape extreme poverty every day. Every day. Since 1990. That's more than 1.5 billion people in total. That's the equivalent of 25 times the French population lifted out of absolute misery in one generation. What caused that? Not humanitarian aid. Not NGOs. Not the state. Economic growth. Therefore capitalism. Therefore market exchange that creates wealth where there was none. The two countries that contributed the most to this miracle are China and India. Both were communist or socialist. Both were among the poorest countries in the world. Both decided in the 1970s-80s to shift toward a market economy. Result: 800 million Chinese and several hundred million Indians lifted out of poverty in 40 years. Communism kept those countries in misery. Capitalism got them out. That's a fact. Not an opinion. So reality exactly reverses your sentence. Capitalism doesn't concentrate wealth in the hands of a few. It creates so much of it, everywhere, that even the poorest become less poor. Bezos is rich, AND the average Bangladeshi eats better today than an 18th-century king. Both are true at the same time. That's what you need to understand. Communism, on the other hand, doesn't create wealth. It redistributes what already exists, until there's none left at all. That's why it always ends up producing generalized poverty. Not by accident. Mechanically. When you break the system that creates wealth, all that's left is to share the misery. Yesterday's prosperous Venezuela is today a country where people eat dogs. Cuba after 65 years of socialism has a per capita GDP lower than that of neighboring Dominican Republic. North Korea at night is a black hole on satellite images next to a lit-up South Korea. That's not a detail. It's empirical proof repeated a hundred times. So if you really want to help the poor, you need to want more capitalism, not less. More free exchange. More entrepreneurship. More private property. More market. Not out of love for the rich, but out of compassion for the poor. It's the only system that sustainably lifts them out of misery. You can verify all the data above. World Bank, Our World in Data, Maddison Project. None of it is disputed. It's just that they've been hidden from you, because they destroy the narrative you were sold in school, at university, in the media. Now you know. The question is no longer "what do you believe." It's "what are you going to do with what you now know." Welcome."
1 comment:
Too many want to believe helping the poor is all about donations. And sure, there are those for whom an immediate donation might very well be the difference between life and starvation. So donations have their place. But to put donation as a prime directive rather than putting in place all which will enable people to thrive on their own is pretty much ensuring donations will not only always be necessary, but necessary more often for a growing number of people. And given how many abuse charitable giving, strict criteria for qualifying for charitable aid must be in place.
And it occurs to me, those like Liz Warren want to tax the accumulated wealth of people. Where are they are denying SNAP bennies for those who own expensive cars and other property?
I once worked with a woman who often complained how she and her husband were getting "f'd" again, referencing some debt for which they should have been prepared but didn't. Many people take such chances with their finances. He husband was a union worker making a high dollar/hr wage. But they had a way to get the new debt paid off: they had a boat. Another co-worker would just repeat "sell the boat" every time she'd choose to blame "the system". "Sell the boat." "We can't do that! That's what we like to do!" But the debt was someone else's problem.
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