The real enemy? Progressive taxation. One intervention creates problems that demand five more interventions, each generating revenue for the system. Start with a 15% top rate "just on the wealthy." Within decades, you get bracket creep pushing middle-class earners into those top rates. Politicians respond by creating new deductions and credits to "help families." Tax code balloons from 400 pages to 75,000 pages. Compliance costs hit $400 billion annually in the US alone. Small businesses hire accountants instead of workers. Entrepreneurs relocate to Singapore or Dubai. Each complication spawns three new bureaucracies. The Alternative Minimum Tax arrives to catch "tax avoiders" (translation: people following the law). Then comes the Earned Income Tax Credit to help low earners crushed by payroll taxes. Estate tax planning creates entire industries. Corporate inversions trigger anti-inversion rules that trigger new loopholes that trigger more rules. Sweden tried this experiment in the 1970s and 80s. Top rates hit 87%. Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Longstocking author) paid 102% marginal rates. IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad fled to Switzerland. Tennis star Björn Borg moved to Monaco. Tax revenues as percentage of GDP actually fell. Sweden eventually slashed rates and simplified the system. The original promise was to soak the rich. The result: middle class paying 40%+ effective rates while billionaires hire armies of lawyers to pay 15%. Each new "fix" creates ten new distortions, ten new lobbying opportunities, ten new ways for connected insiders to game the system. Modern taxation, working as designed. #economy #libertarian

The worst enemy of collectivists is not capitalism, but reality. #economy #libertarian

Your town starts with a simple 2% property tax to fund basic services. Year 3: Revenue shortfall hits. Infrastructure "desperately needs" upgrades. Property tax jumps to 3.5%. City council promises this covers everything. Year 5: School district claims crisis funding needs. Separate education tax appears; just 1.5% for the children, they say. Your total tax load now sits at 5%. Year 8: Environmental impact assessments become mandatory for all development. New environmental compliance tax of 0.8% gets tacked on. Plus a transportation improvement fee of 1.2% because the roads can't handle the delayed projects. Year 12: Housing affordability crisis emerges (funny how that works). City creates affordable housing trust fund requiring another 1% tax. Storm water management fees add 0.5%. Total burden now exceeds 8.5%. Year 15: Local businesses start fleeing to neighboring counties. Commercial tax base shrinks. Residential property owners must make up the difference. Rates jump across all categories. Your effective rate hits 11%. The city's books show every tax paying for its designated purpose. The infrastructure still crumbles. Schools still claim poverty. Housing costs skyrocketed beyond what any middle-class family can afford. You started with one modest tax for basic municipal services. A complex web of overlapping levies now funds an army of bureaucrats managing the crisis created by the previous army of bureaucrats. Each department gets its budget. Each program gets its funding. Each tax collector gets their cut. The services you actually wanted remain broken, just more expensive. #economy #libertarian

The #government forces you to hand over 30% of your income before you even see it, then taxes you again when you buy groceries, fill up your car, and pay your property taxes. They call this "your fair share" while spending $6.75 trillion of your money in 2024 on wars you didn't vote for, subsidies for corporations that already turn massive profits, and bureaucrats whose jobs exist solely to create more rules for you to follow. You work January through April just to pay the federal government. Add state and local taxes, and you're working until mid-May before you earn a single dollar for yourself. Medieval serfs worked one day in three for their lords. You work more than that for yours. The tax code spans 75,000 pages. Complexity serves power. Simple rules would mean simple compliance and simple resistance. Complex rules require expensive accountants, create arbitrary enforcement, and ensure that only the connected can navigate the system efficiently. Small businesses drown in compliance costs while Amazon pays effective tax rates in the single digits. They tell you taxes fund essential services, but the largest expenditures go to interest payments on debt they created and military interventions that make you less safe. Your local roads get funded, but so do gender studies programs in Pakistan and million-dollar grants to study the mating habits of quail on cocaine. Every tax they collect represents hours of your life you'll never get back, traded not for services you chose, but for priorities politicians selected while spending other people's money. #economy #libertarian

The socialist fantasy operates on a fundamental delusion: every advocate imagines themselves as the commissar, never the slave. They picture themselves redistributing wealth, not having their own wealth redistributed. This economic illiteracy runs deeper than simple ignorance. Venezuela's middle class cheered Chávez's early expropriations of "the rich" before watching their own savings evaporate through hyperinflation. Cuba's revolutionary intellectuals celebrated the seizure of private property until they found themselves queuing for bread rations. The pattern repeats because socialists fundamentally misunderstand how wealth creation works. Free market economists have explained this for decades: wealth isn't a fixed pie to be redistributed. You create wealth through voluntary exchange, capital accumulation, and entrepreneurial innovation. When you destroy the price system and eliminate private property rights, you obliterate the very mechanism that generates prosperity. The Soviet Union's 70-year experiment in central planning produced exactly what economic theory predicted: chronic shortages, technological stagnation, and mass poverty. The cruel irony is that socialism's most vocal cheerleaders today come from the laptop class. They sip $7 lattes while typing manifestos about worker solidarity, completely insulated from the consequences of their ideology. They've never run a business, never met a payroll, never experienced the discipline that market forces impose on resource allocation. History offers no examples of successful socialist transformation, only cautionary tales of economic collapse and human suffering. Yet the fantasy persists because it appeals to humanity's worst instincts: envy, laziness, and the desire to live off others' productive efforts without contributing value yourself. #bitcoin #monero #economy #libertarian

The progressive and romantic, the brilliant Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), pompously proclaimed: "Is it possible that our parents, while transmitting to us the capabilities of their physical constitution, did not also transmit to us understanding, spiritual energy, and morality?" Condorcet, of course, is absolutely right. Of course, they did transmit. But one small clarification is required: our "parents" were not only humans. Moreover, they were predominantly non-humans. Our "parents," beginning with the theropoda of the Paleozoic, were an impressive evolutionary chain of creatures whose brains "adaptively" developed in conditions where the strength and fullness of aggression were almost everything, and "other" qualities were completely superfluous. This conclusion allows us to put an end to the question of the "depravity" of man and his "guilt," as demonstrated by his "fixed history." It is clear that homo could not be any different; he did not have the slightest neurophysiological capacity for this. #atheism #biology

The Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860 destroyed the protectionist stranglehold that French and British special interests had maintained for decades. Richard Cobden negotiated this bilateral free trade agreement between Britain and France, slashing tariffs across hundreds of goods and opening markets that bureaucrats and cronies had kept artificially closed. Wine, silk, manufactured goods—suddenly French and British consumers could access these products without paying tribute to domestic cartels. The results were immediate and undeniable. British exports to France jumped 45% in the first year alone. French wine imports to Britain increased tenfold as punitive tariffs evaporated. Both economies expanded as resources flowed to their most productive uses instead of being trapped behind tariff walls. Workers in competitive industries saw wages rise while consumers enjoyed lower prices and better quality goods. What made this treaty brilliant was its unconditional most-favored-nation clause. Any trade concession either country granted to third parties automatically extended to the other. This created a domino effect—within a decade, similar treaties spread across Europe as governments faced pressure to match these liberal terms. The treaty essentially weaponized free trade, making protectionism harder to maintain as trading partners demanded equal access. Modern trade negotiators could learn from Cobden's approach. He bypassed the protectionist lobbies in both parliaments by negotiating directly with Napoleon III, then presenting legislators with a fait accompli. No endless committee hearings, no special interest amendments, no carve-outs for politically connected industries. Today's 2,000-page trade deals stuffed with regulatory harmonization and corporate welfare make the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty's elegant simplicity look revolutionary by comparison. #bitcoin #monero #economy #libertarian

Sparta deliberately created the most inconvenient #money imaginable: heavy iron bars that rusted, took up enormous space, and became worthless if you accumulated too much. The Spartan state wanted to prevent wealth accumulation entirely, so they made money itself a burden rather than a store of value. This represents the ultimate statist fantasy: money that punishes savers and makes #capital formation impossible. While Athens developed sophisticated banking and trade networks using silver #coins, Spartans struggled to conduct basic commerce with their cumbersome iron currency. You couldn't hide wealth, transport it easily, or even store it without dedicating entire rooms to your "fortune." The economic consequences were predictable and devastating. Sparta never developed the merchant class that fueled Athenian prosperity. No foreign traders wanted to deal with iron money that lost value through oxidation. Spartans couldn't engage in long-distance trade or accumulate the capital necessary for economic growth. The state got exactly what it wanted: economic stagnation disguised as virtue. Modern economists celebrate this monetary system as an early example of "preventing inequality." Sparta's iron money didn't eliminate wealth differences—it simply ensured that everyone remained poor together. The helots who comprised 80% of the population stayed enslaved while the Spartan citizens stayed economically primitive. Today's central bankers pursue the same goal through different means: negative interest rates, inflation targeting, and wealth taxes all serve to punish saving and capital accumulation. The only difference is that our financial overlords use sophisticated mathematics instead of heavy iron bars. #bitcoin #monero #economy #libertarian

Picture this: October 2010, a black Toyota Prius pulls up to some venture capitalists in San Francisco. Two guys named Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp just pitched an app that lets you summon rides with your phone. The VCs probably thought "cute tech toy for rich millennials." Meanwhile, across the country in New York City, taxi medallions were trading for $1.3 million each. These little metal plates had appreciated faster than Manhattan real estate for decades (because the city artificially capped them at 13,237 medallions since the 1930s). Immigrant drivers mortgaged their entire lives to buy these things, treating them like retirement accounts. Fleet owners sat on medallion portfolios worth hundreds of millions. The medallion system started during the Great Depression when Mayor Fiorello La Guardia decided too many taxis were "flooding" the streets. Classic government solution: create artificial scarcity, call it public safety. For eighty years, this cartel enriched medallion owners while screwing over riders who couldn't hail cabs in outer boroughs and drivers who paid usurious lease fees. Then Uber scaled. By 2014, medallion values crashed to $870,000. By 2018? Try $200,000. Hundreds of drivers declared bankruptcy. The Taxi Workers Alliance started organizing suicide prevention workshops because medallion debt was literally killing people. Meanwhile, you could finally get a ride in Brooklyn at 2 AM without bribing a dispatcher. #bitcoin #monero #economy #libertarian

The Constitutio Antoniniana of 212 AD stands as history's most brazen tax grab disguised as benevolence. Emperor Caracalla granted Roman citizenship to virtually every free inhabitant of the empire because citizens paid inheritance taxes that non-citizens avoided. The Roman historian Cassius Dio called it exactly what it was: a scheme to increase revenues. Rome's finances were hemorrhaging. Caracalla had raised military pay by 50% and spent lavishly on public works to buy popularity. The empire's silver denarius had been debased from 98% silver under Augustus to 83% under his reign. Standard government playbook: create the crisis through spending and currency debasement, then expand the tax base to fund the mess. The citizenship grant brought an estimated 30 million new taxpayers into the system overnight. These fresh citizens now owed Rome's 5% inheritance tax (vicesima hereditatium) and various other levies previously reserved for the citizen class. Caracalla essentially performed the ancient equivalent of closing tax loopholes — except he created the "loopholes" by expanding who owed taxes rather than changing the rates. Free market thinkers today watch governments employ identical tactics: California chases fleeing residents with exit taxes, while the federal government floats wealth taxes on unrealized gains. The method changes but the principle remains constant — when governments overspend, they don't cut expenses, they hunt for new sources of revenue. Caracalla's "generous" citizenship expansion bought Rome a temporary fiscal reprieve while accelerating the empire's long-term decline through increased bureaucratic overhead and economic interference. Every government believes it can tax its way out of spending problems. Every government learns the same lesson Rome did: you can't. #bitcoin #monero #economy #libertarian

Few know that the 'Encryption war' never ended: it began centuries ago and never stopped. The 90s “Encryption Wars” was just the feds tripping over their surveillance fetish in broad daylight. Early cryptographers died unrecognized because their contributions couldn’t be acknowledged. Bletchley Park’s cryptanalysts remained classified long after 1945, so thousands of codebreakers returned to civilian life, sworn to silence, and while conventional soldiers could boast of heroics, those who fought actually pivotal intellectual battles had to dodge questions about their wartime service. Turing’s family had no idea what he did. Neither did Marian Rejewski’s. The Navajo code talkers got medals for fighting but with gag orders, etc., etc. I can continue forever... The cipher war never stopped, it just went silent: if people don’t realize they’re at war, they don’t fight back. TL;DR: The state’s #crypto war never ended; they just got better at 'hiding the bodies': the state conducts cryptographic research today that won’t be declassified for decades... if ever. You don’t hate the state enough. While some might argue that it's justified against external enemies, the next stage of the encryption war could target us. 'If a noticeable exodus to this parallel economy emerges, the state's greatest "national security" threat won't be foreign foes: it will be us - people who just want to be left alone.' #bitcoin #monero #libertarian

Cash for Clunkers destroyed 690,000 functional vehicles in 2009, creating an artificial scarcity that rippled through used car markets for over a decade. The Obama administration sold this $3 billion program as environmental salvation and economic stimulus, but any free market economist could predict the real outcome: massive wealth destruction disguised as progress. The program forced dealers to pour sodium silicate into engines, permanently destroying cars that poor families could have afforded. Politicians eliminated the bottom tier of the used car market overnight. Suddenly, a reliable $3,000 Honda Civic became a $7,000 Honda Civic (if you could find one). The supposed beneficiaries — working-class Americans who needed affordable transportation — got priced out entirely. #Government intervention always creates unseen victims, and Cash for Clunkers delivered them by the millions. Single mothers, college students, and minimum-wage workers watched their mobility options vanish as used car prices soared 30% between 2009 and 2014. The environmental gains proved negligible too: most clunkers averaged 15-17 MPG while replacements hit 24-25 MPG. Destroying half a million cars to improve average fuel economy by 8 MPG represents the kind of central planning that would give Soviet bureaucrats a hard-on. The wealth destruction extended beyond sticker prices. Higher transportation costs forced people into longer payment terms, creating a debt cycle that persists today. Cash for Clunkers normalized 84-month auto loans, turning cars from depreciating assets into multi-year financial anchors. Bureaucrats congratulated themselves for moving inventory off dealer lots while condemning an entire generation to transportation poverty. #bitcoin #economy #libertarian

“A tale of two continents” Two continents. Two worldviews. Two outcomes. On the one hand, a system based on ownership, voluntary exchange, and experimentation. On the other hand, a system based on planning, redistribution, and control. Look at the US. Google is building an infrastructure for knowledge. Tesla is turning the car into a learning software platform, with autonomous driving at its core. SpaceX is breaking state dominance in space and launching thousands of satellites to build its own communication layer. Anthropic is developing systems that scale knowledge exponentially. These are not companies operating within frameworks. They are rewriting the frameworks. Because they are allowed to. And then the numbers, because that is where the difference becomes stark: The US stock market currently represents approximately $65 trillion in value. Europe remains stuck at around $25 trillion. That difference is no coincidence. It is the result of a philosophy. In the US, capital is freely allocated to ideas with potential. Failure is accepted. Scale is rewarded. The market selects what works retrospectively. Put the European Union alongside that. Here, everything starts with rules. First the risk classification, only then the experiment. First the subsidy, only then the innovation. Autonomous driving becomes a legal dossier. Energy a patchwork of policy. Space travel a political compromise. Consequence: Europe is not building its own SpaceX with thousands of satellites. No Tesla collecting data on a large scale and rolling out self-driving vehicles. No AI player growing without restraint like Anthropic. Europe produces poverty not out of intent, but out of structure. By suppressing risk, you suppress breakthroughs. By distrusting success beforehand, you prevent it from arising. The irony is that this is sold as protection. But protection against what? A libertarian perspective is clear here. Prosperity arises through creation, not through redistribution. Through decentralized knowledge, not through central planning. Through voluntary interaction, not through imposed systems. Two continents. One builds and scales, with $65 trillion in capital as fuel. The other manages and distributes, with $25 trillion as the ceiling. And in the long run, the one who dares to invest and build wins. #bitcoin #economy #libertarian

In light of the new #Epstein scandal, Islamic preachers have become increasingly active on social media, exploiting the topic of child molestation and attempting to portray the #Muslim ummah as a paragon of morality. In this regard, I would like to cite some Islamic sources to clarify this. In an authentic tradition from Imam al-Bukhari in his Sahih (Hadith 5133), Aisha reports that the Prophet married her when she was six years old and began living with her when she was nine (Photo 1). In a true Islamic society, based on the Quran and Sunnah, such sexual behavior is not reprehensible—it is the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah. The Hanafi work "al-Fatawa al-Hindiyya" speaks quite eloquently about this: "Most sheikhs are of the opinion that age is irrelevant, but physical ability is. If a girl is large and healthy, capable of supporting a man, and is not susceptible to illness, then the husband is permitted to penetrate her, even if she has not yet reached the age of nine." (Photo 2)

Great interview, @Paula.

In just a few years, bad actors shielded by a strangely docile #Bitcoin Core have transformed its immaculate ledger into the most expensive open sewer in history. The playbook was diabolically simple: Exploit known protocol loopholes that Core refuses to close, and spawn a parasitic zoo of degenerate shitcoins (Ordinals, BRC-20, Runes, NFTs whatever this week’s scam token is called). Then flood the chain with fiat-funded garbage inscriptions until the cancer is too big to remove without “breaking compatibility.” When the maximalists who spent a decade laughing at Ethereum’s clown casino finally screamed foul, Core’s response was the now-infamous: “What is even spam?” And, with the solemnity of a priest blessing sewage, Core shipped v30, handed every grifter on earth an industrial excavator, and rebranded the resulting stench as “freedom,” “innovation,” and “adapting to the new culture.” Look at the numbers. They don’t lie: almost 40% of the entire UTXO set, created in barely two years, is now cartoon apes, pixelated cocks, and immortal trash. This isn’t the beginning of a beautiful new ecosystem. It’s the opening act of a hostage situation. Those “88 million inscriptions” that supposedly paid 7,000+ BTC in fees? Not organic demand. Obvious bribes, fiat conjured out of thin air by entities who face no budget constraints, funneled straight to miners to launder vandalism into legitimacy. Anyone who thinks infinite-money printers will ever be stopped by “market forces” has traded adversarial thinking for bedtime stories. There is no real community here, no lasting economic activity, no future, just a giant pump-and-dump dressed up as culture. The handful of true believers clutching their sacred JPEGs don’t need protocol changes. They need therapy. When pushback finally arrived, Bitcoin #Knots, sensible BIPs, #CAT, actual attempts to defend the original protocol, the mask slipped completely. Overnight, the people defending sound money became, in the ultimate rhetorical nuke, “Nazis.” And so, in this newly confused ecosystem poisoned by the woke mind virus, the official position of the now-known-as “Coretards” became: “Because someone might misuse a scalpel tomorrow, we must let the gangrene consume the leg today.” Saying “this is spam and it should be addressed” is apparently the real attack on freedom. Bitcoin Core didn’t just make a technical mistake. It caught the civilizational mind virus that teaches societies to celebrate their own decomposition and to crucify anyone still sane enough to point at the rot. That’s not hyperbole. That’s the autopsy. We all have to take a step back and acknowledge the level of delusion on display: The suicidal overconfidence of Core loyalists convinced they represent some silent majority. Core should have shut this NFT circus down from day one. Now their credibility is gone. Coretard is their legacy. --dewmap

Exposing Simon Dixon's Double Standards: Beneath the Mask of a Sovereign Individual npub1546jstdajzf6gw4plvr6z4kpcaxtvl3h0zjdv5gw8tx8uup5d6rq8ef9mt presents himself as a champion against elites, a Bitcoin defender through self-custody, and an anti-imperialist urging everyone to "follow the money." But when you dig deeper into his views, what emerges is a web of contradictions: principles of freedom applied selectively, with criticism driven by personal and religious biases. 1. Selective History in Geopolitics: He passionately condemns Zionism as colonialism marked by displacement, genocide, and apartheid, framing Israel as a proxy for American military-industrial imperialism. At the same time, he completely overlooks similar historical actions by Arabs and Muslims—from the 7th-century conquests (seizing the Levant and Palestine "by right of the conqueror") to Ottoman expansion, which involved cultural shifts and subjugation. He rails against Western or Zionist empires but stays silent on Muslim ones. This isn't genuine anti-imperialism; it's biased selectivity with an anti-Western and pro-Islamic tilt. A real libertarian would reject all conquests equally as violations of individual rights. 2. One-Sided View of Islam: Dixon portrays Islam as a personal path of peace, tolerance, and resisting oppression (quoting verses like "no compulsion in religion" and limiting jihad to self-defense). Yet he never mentions the dhimmi system—the institutionalized subjugation of non-Muslims in Islamic societies: jizya tax for "protection," restrictions on bearing arms, building new places of worship, equal court testimony, or criticizing Islam. This creates a clear hierarchy where non-Muslims are second-class citizens, involving economic and social coercion that's incompatible with true equality and non-aggression. By glossing over this, Dixon romanticizes Muslim history as "harmonious," implicitly justifying domination. As a Muslim, his drive comes from a religious sense of duty to "serve humanity," but it makes his anti-oppression stance selective—freedom only on his terms. 2. Fixation on Saylor and Dictating the "Right" Way to Bitcoin: Day after day in posts, podcasts, and videos, he accuses npub15dqlghlewk84wz3pkqqvzl2w2w36f97g89ljds8x6c094nlu02vqjllm5m of serving elites, centralizing Bitcoin via debt, and sabotaging the revolution (custody vs. self-custody). He claims $MSTR is a tool for price manipulation through FUD and potential forced sales. But on a free market, a sovereign individual should be free to handle their capital any way they choose—whether through leveraged treasuries, ETFs, or derivatives. The risks are theirs alone. Dixon doesn't just highlight dangers (which could be helpful); he passes moral judgment and prescribes the "one true path" (self-custody only). His manipulation theory falls apart under scrutiny: $MSTR shares drop in response to BTC stagnation, not the reverse—the market naturally punishes leverage. This obsession comes across as fixation, perhaps psychological or tied to promoting his own agenda/business. Conclusions: Behind the "follow the money" mantra lies not objective insight but a subjective ideology—anti-Western, pro-Islamic, laced with collectivist tendencies. Dixon excuses historical hierarchies (like dhimmi), condemns others' choices, and pushes a "revolution" where freedom is reserved for those who align with his vision. He's valuable for pointing out risks in centralization and leverage, but his stance isn't libertarianism—it's propaganda riddled with double standards. True freedom means no one dictates your choices: how to hold BTC, whom to criticize, or which history to focus on. No one owes the "revolution" anything against their will. Always test these gurus for consistency—otherwise, their "truth" is just a disguise for control. #Bitcoin #Libertarianism