The Free Market

 https://x.com/rockchartrand/status/2082295526846779573?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

 "The buyer is just as "greedy" for wanting lower prices as the seller is for wanting higher ones. The employee is just as "greedy" for wanting higher wages as the employer is for wanting lower labor costs. The free market channels these competing interests into voluntary exchange instead of coercion, and the resulting price is whatever both parties find acceptable. Neither side gets everything it wants, but both walk away believing they're better off than before, or no change takes place."

 https://x.com/theobjectivist/status/2082539759516201436?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

 "Check your premises. Every one of them is smuggling in a contradiction. Capitalism does not force labor. Reality forces labor. A man alone on an island must fish or starve, and no capitalist put him there. Nature attached survival to effort long before any employer existed. The man who offers you a wage did not create your need to eat. He offers you a way to meet it, a trade you are free to accept, refuse, or better. To call that "force" is to erase the difference between a gun and an offer. And notice what you're actually pointing at. Your list is a catalog of governments using force, coups, bombings, regime change. That's not capitalism. That's statism, the very thing capitalism opposes. Capitalism is the system that bars force from human dealings. What exists today is nowhere close to capitalism. It's a mixed economy: partly free, partly controlled, riddled with subsidies, cartels, and government favors, exactly the machinery that produces the interventions on your poster. Whenever you see men profiting "just by having money," look closer and you'll find the state, granting the privilege, printing the currency, rigging the game. That is not the market. It is the corruption of it. Every comfort you enjoy, the food, the medicine, the device you typed that on, is the remnant of what capitalism achieved in its brief, partial existence. Freedom built the wealth. Statism is spending it down. You've mistaken the poison for the cure, and the cure for the disease."

 https://x.com/rockchartrand/status/2082507884017918102?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

 

 

"This has it exactly backwards. Capitalism doesn't depend on poverty. It depends on production, trade, and creating value. Socialism's appeal is strongest when people are dissatisfied and focused on unequal outcomes, because redistribution requires something to redistribute and a constituency convinced it's owed someone else's wealth. If everyone were prosperous and satisfied, its central promise of redistribution would have far less appeal."

https://x.com/magattew/status/2082512001423618149?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

 "If you really care about the poor, you should take economic freedom seriously. Poverty has a much harder time surviving in countries where a person with an idea can turn it into income without being trapped by officials, bribes, and rules written by people who never had to build anything. Decades of data, from every corner of the world, keep saying this. And yet the politics around poverty never starts there. Men lie, women lie, numbers don’t."

 

 

 

 https://x.com/rothmus/status/2082485044988322135?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

" “Muh profit is theft!!!!1111” Whereas in the real world, Marx’s own labor theory of value was dead by volume 3 of Capital after treating it as iron law in volume 1. Böhm-Bawerk asked a simple question: why does capital earn a return at all? And the fact is that production takes time. Take for example a fisherman who spends days building a net and goes without fish so he can later catch far more than the man grabbing with his bare hands. Capitalists do that at scale. They advance wages and materials today for goods that will not sell for months or years. There is literally no theft, only different time preferences. Labor gets paid now, capital earns its return much later. And that willingness to wait of course has a price, which we call “interest”. “Profit” is that little extra residual that sits on top of it, as a result of uncertainty, superior foresight, and correctly allocating resources in a world that is never in perfect equilibrium. Most importantly, when Marx (or whoever tried to finish his work) tried to move from pure labor values to real market prices in vol 3, the math stopped mathing. Because industries with different capital intensities cannot produce equal rates of profit while also producing equal rates of surplus value. The numbers contradicted each other inside the same system Marx described. And that was the end of it. So technically, historically, and economically, his theory has been dead from self-contradiction since 1894 and yet, half of Reddit still treats volume 1 like scripture because it’s politically satisfying rather than factually correct."