@EvenskyDavidi
iAccount based inUnited States
About this account
- Account based in
- United States
- Connected via
- Web
Account-level information from X, not a live location or the device used for a specific post.
Coral Gables
Joined November 2013
- Tweets337
- Following2.6K
- Followers473
- Likes208K
Stalin and Mao did not wander in from outside and randomly decide to start murdering millions. Feed a large population through a coercive central apparatus and you do not get monsters by chance. You get them by design, every time, because two separate mechanisms guarantee it.
The first is selection. Any system where a small group makes decisions for millions requires someone to sit at the top of that hierarchy and issue the orders. That is not an accident of history. It is a structural fact of coercive control. And the climb to that seat rewards a specific type. Compromise, hesitation, and conscience all become liabilities on the way up, because the man willing to purge a rival, lie to a committee, or order a famine to hit a grain quota outcompetes the man who will not.
Hayek called this "why the worst get on top." It is not a moral accident. It is the selection pressure baked into any hierarchy where obedience and force decide who advances. Put enough people through that filter for enough decades and the ruthless win by default.
The second mechanism runs independent of who wins.
Mises and Hayek proved the calculation problem: no ruler, no politburo, no ministry, however brilliant or well-staffed, can process the information needed to allocate resources for millions of people. Prices carry that information in a market, generated by everyone's trades simultaneously. Strip out prices and private property and you strip out the only mechanism that ever solved this problem. It does not matter if you replace Stalin with a saint. The knowledge required to plan a national economy from a single desk does not exist anywhere for anyone to use.
Here is the double bind.
You get a ruthless, overconfident person selected to hold total power, and you hand that person a task that is mathematically impossible to perform well even in good faith. Ruthlessness plus impossibility produces famine, purges, and collapse as the predictable and only possible output of the machine.
This is why every large-scale coercive system trends toward the same result regardless of the country, the decade, or the ideology painted on the front of it. The names change: Stalin, Mao, Mengistu, but the mechanism generating them never does.
david evensky retweeted
Friedrich Hayek – The Man Who Gave the Counter-March Its Strategy.
Gramsci invented the long march through the institutions. Dutschke gave it its name. They built the infrastructure of the left’s cultural dominance – and it worked. But there was a man on the other side who understood the mechanism just as clearly and built a counter-strategy that produced Thatcher, Reagan, and Milei. His name was Friedrich Hayek. And his strategy is still underused – including in Poland.
1. The key text is not The Road to Serfdom. It is a 1949 essay almost nobody has read: The Intellectuals and Socialism. Why do socialist ideas keep winning politically, even when the evidence against them accumulates? Because you are watching the final stage of a process that began decades earlier. Before any idea reaches parliament, it circulates among academics. From them it passes to the secondhand dealers – the writers, teachers, journalists who translate abstract ideas into the common assumptions of an entire society. By the time the politician acts, the intellectual work is already done. The politician is not the beginning of change. He is its final expression.
2. He called them secondhand dealers in ideas – the most important role in the intellectual supply chain. The academic produces the idea. The secondhand dealer makes it thinkable for millions who will never read the academic paper. If he wrote the essay today he would add influencers, podcasters, and profiles like this one to the list. The mechanism is the same. The distribution is faster. Which is why the counter-march can now move at a speed Hayek could not have imagined.
3. He did not stop at the essay. He built institutions. The Mont Pelerin Society – 1947. The Atlas Network – founded after Hayek explained the way to change society was not to enter politics but to change the intellectual climate first. These institutions spent decades producing ideas considered radical and politically impossible – and then Thatcher happened. Then Reagan. Then Milei. Thatcher said of them: "There were not many of them, not everyone wanted to listen – but they were right, and they saved Great Britain."
4. The difference between the Gramscian left and the Hayekian right is not the strategy. The strategy is the same: change the intellectual climate, move the Overton Window, wait for the political moment when what was previously unthinkable becomes inevitable. The difference is that the left funded it systematically for fifty years. The right understood it in theory and underfunded it in practice – treating independent think tanks as expensive hobbies rather than load-bearing infrastructure for ideas you want to become policy.
5. Both sides understood the mechanism. One funded it properly. The other kept looking for the politician — the next Reagan, the next Milei — without understanding that before each of them there were decades of institutional work that nobody filmed. You cannot skip the intellectual work and go straight to the politician. Someone must produce the ideas. Someone must translate them for millions. Someone must fund the institutions that do both for twenty years, including when the ideas are unfashionable.
6. The series you are reading is the Hayekian strategy running at 2026 speed. The secondhand dealing – civilizational argument translated into the format that reaches millions who will never read Gramsci or Hayek but who recognize the mechanism when they see it named. Musk and Milei repost it because they recognize the intellectual supply chain working in real time. The Overton Window is moving. The counter-march has a distribution platform the left cannot control.
7. Hayek died in 1992, vindicated on everything, implemented insufficiently. And then the tide came back – because the intellectual infrastructure was never built at the scale the long march had built theirs. We are building it now. This series is part of it. The work is not finished. It has barely begun.
Antonio Gramsci – The Most Dangerous Intellectual of the Twentieth Century.
Not the most famous. Not the most read. The most dangerous and the most consequential – because he was the one who figured out why the revolution kept failing, and what to do instead. The man who invented the long march through the institutions.
Everything that followed — the Frankfurt School, the Fabian Society’s operational model, the WEF formation pipeline, the captured university, the HR department enforcing approved speech — is downstream of what he wrote in a prison cell in Mussolini’s Italy, in code, between 1929 and 1935.
1. His central question: why hasn’t it happened? The working class was supposed to rise. The contradictions of capitalism were supposed to produce the revolution. They hadn’t – not in the West. Gramsci’s answer was precise and devastating: because the ruling class does not maintain power through force alone. It maintains power through cultural hegemony – the control of the ideas, values, and frameworks through which people understand the world. The worker who accepts that the existing order is simply how things are will not revolt, regardless of his material conditions. The revolution requires cultural change first.
2. The instrument was the long march through the institutions. Not the barricade. The school, the university, the media, the judiciary, the civil service, the cultural establishment – every institution through which a civilization transmits its values to the next generation. Capture these, fill them with people who share the counter-hegemonic project, and the cultural assumptions that maintain the existing order gradually dissolve. No barricades. No visible moment of rupture. Just the slow replacement of one cultural hegemony with another.
3. The educational capture was the masterpiece. Control the curriculum and you control the categories of thought available to the next generation. Not by telling them what to conclude – by shaping what questions they think to ask, what they consider obvious and what they consider unthinkable. The generation educated after the long march does not need to be told what to think. It thinks what it was formed to think – and experiences that thinking as its own.
4. He also theorized the organic intellectual – the person who translates the theoretical framework into stories and assumptions that circulate through the culture without appearing ideological. The film that makes the existing order seem absurd. The journalist who frames every story within the approved assumptions. Gramsci understood that culture is politics by other means – and that the side that controls the culture wins, regardless of who wins the elections.
5. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a published, documented, widely taught strategy that the left implemented consciously across the entire Western world. The 1968 generation put it into practice in the universities. They became the professors, the journalists, the civil servants, the judges, the HR directors of the decades that followed. The march took fifty years. It worked.
6. Mussolini’s prosecutor said at his trial: "We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years." The brain did not stop. It produced thirty-three notebooks – smuggled out, published, and became the most widely read Marxist text in the Western academy after Marx himself. Gramsci died in 1937, six days after his release, at forty-six. He did not see the march he theorized. He did not need to.
7. Every captured institution, every transformed curriculum, every HR department enforcing approved speech, every content moderation policy suppressing the unauthorized voice – all running the program Antonio Gramsci designed in a prison cell, by a brain that was supposed to have been stopped. It wasn’t. And neither was the march.
Until now – because the distribution monopoly that made its outcomes enforceable is cracking. The counter-march has begun. It just doesn’t have a name yet.
Keynes built his entire macroeconomic system on a single false premise: that saving and investment are separate, potentially divergent forces requiring government to reconcile them.
Saving and investment are not separate forces. Every dollar you save gets lent, invested, or held as cash balances that lower prices and raise real purchasing power for others. Ludwig von Mises laid this out in 1912. Saving IS investment. The act of withholding consumption releases real resources, steel, labor, time, for capital formation. No reconciliation needed.
Keynes invented the "paradox of thrift" to justify intervention. If everyone saves simultaneously, he argued, aggregate demand collapses and the economy contracts. The error here is treating the economy as a bathtub with a fixed water level rather than a dynamic network of production stages. Lower consumption spending frees resources that entrepreneurs redirect toward longer, more productive capital structures.
What Keynes gave governments was intellectual permission to punish savers through inflation and deficit spending. You pay that price every month at the grocery store.
Sixty-two years and $22 trillion later, the U.S. poverty rate sits at roughly 11 percent, almost identical to where Lyndon Johnson found it in 1964. The government ran the most expensive social experiment in human history and produced nothing measurable. Bureaucracies perpetuate themselves, and this policy worked exactly as designed.
When Washington transfers purchasing power to the poor through SNAP, Medicaid, housing vouchers, and 126 other overlapping programs, it doesn't eliminate scarcity; it relocates decision-making from individuals to administrators. Those administrators develop career interests in perpetuating dependency, because a solved problem eliminates their department.
Free market thinkers identified this perverse incentive structure before Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act. Every dollar taxed from productive activity carries a deadweight cost before it reaches anyone's dinner table.
Capital formation lifts people out of poverty. You build wealth through savings, property rights, and voluntary exchange, none of which $22 trillion in redistributed spending actually produced.
He was right
Antonio Gramsci – The Most Dangerous Intellectual of the Twentieth Century.
Not the most famous. Not the most read. The most dangerous and the most consequential – because he was the one who figured out why the revolution kept failing, and what to do instead. The man who invented the long march through the institutions.
Everything that followed — the Frankfurt School, the Fabian Society’s operational model, the WEF formation pipeline, the captured university, the HR department enforcing approved speech — is downstream of what he wrote in a prison cell in Mussolini’s Italy, in code, between 1929 and 1935.
1. His central question: why hasn’t it happened? The working class was supposed to rise. The contradictions of capitalism were supposed to produce the revolution. They hadn’t – not in the West. Gramsci’s answer was precise and devastating: because the ruling class does not maintain power through force alone. It maintains power through cultural hegemony – the control of the ideas, values, and frameworks through which people understand the world. The worker who accepts that the existing order is simply how things are will not revolt, regardless of his material conditions. The revolution requires cultural change first.
2. The instrument was the long march through the institutions. Not the barricade. The school, the university, the media, the judiciary, the civil service, the cultural establishment – every institution through which a civilization transmits its values to the next generation. Capture these, fill them with people who share the counter-hegemonic project, and the cultural assumptions that maintain the existing order gradually dissolve. No barricades. No visible moment of rupture. Just the slow replacement of one cultural hegemony with another.
3. The educational capture was the masterpiece. Control the curriculum and you control the categories of thought available to the next generation. Not by telling them what to conclude – by shaping what questions they think to ask, what they consider obvious and what they consider unthinkable. The generation educated after the long march does not need to be told what to think. It thinks what it was formed to think – and experiences that thinking as its own.
4. He also theorized the organic intellectual – the person who translates the theoretical framework into stories and assumptions that circulate through the culture without appearing ideological. The film that makes the existing order seem absurd. The journalist who frames every story within the approved assumptions. Gramsci understood that culture is politics by other means – and that the side that controls the culture wins, regardless of who wins the elections.
5. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a published, documented, widely taught strategy that the left implemented consciously across the entire Western world. The 1968 generation put it into practice in the universities. They became the professors, the journalists, the civil servants, the judges, the HR directors of the decades that followed. The march took fifty years. It worked.
6. Mussolini’s prosecutor said at his trial: "We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years." The brain did not stop. It produced thirty-three notebooks – smuggled out, published, and became the most widely read Marxist text in the Western academy after Marx himself. Gramsci died in 1937, six days after his release, at forty-six. He did not see the march he theorized. He did not need to.
7. Every captured institution, every transformed curriculum, every HR department enforcing approved speech, every content moderation policy suppressing the unauthorized voice – all running the program Antonio Gramsci designed in a prison cell, by a brain that was supposed to have been stopped. It wasn’t. And neither was the march.
Until now – because the distribution monopoly that made its outcomes enforceable is cracking. The counter-march has begun. It just doesn’t have a name yet.
Carl Menger did what no economist before him had managed: he located value inside the human mind rather than inside the object being traded. Vienna, 1871. His Principles of Economics landed quietly, then detonated slowly across the discipline.
Before Menger, economists tortured themselves trying to explain why diamonds cost more than water when water keeps you alive. Menger dissolved the paradox in a sentence. Value is marginal and subjective. The tenth glass of water you drink today carries almost no value to you; the first glass you drink after three days without it carries everything. The object does not contain the value. You assign it, based on your circumstances, your preferences, your next most pressing want.
This wrecked the labor theory of value completely, clearing the ground for honest price analysis.
Prices, Menger showed, are not arbitrary signals or social constructs. They are compressed information about millions of individual valuations, each person acting on knowledge no central planner could ever collect. Bureaucrats in Brussels and Washington still haven't absorbed this. They control prices and watch shortages materialize on schedule, baffled every time.
Menger built the foundation. Everything built on it since has held.
david evensky retweeted
“Socialism fails in theory, fails in practice, fails historically, and fails the moment you spend five minutes thinking about incentives. It punishes production, rewards political allocation, and then acts surprised when there is less to allocate. The only place it remains viable is in the mind of someone determined to ignore all of that and desperately search for a scapegoat to blame for the predictable consequences.”
—@RockChartrand)
david evensky retweeted
When a system increasingly requires coercive methods to function, it attracts and favors the most ruthless, power-hungry people.
Hayek examines this phenomenon in Chapter 10 of The Road to Serfdom, “Why the Worst Get on Top.”
david evensky retweeted
"I never understood why it is 'greed' to want to keep the money you earned but not greed when you want to take somebody else's money."
- Thomas Sowell
Keeping up with the Kardashevs
Elon Musk reveals why, measured against the sun's energy, human civilization barely registers as existing at all:
"Right now we're very low on the Kardashev one scale. If you say what proportion of our planet's power are we harnessing, it's a very, very tiny number. And we're harnessing almost nothing of our star's power. The sun is truly an immense thing. It's difficult with words to characterize just how immense the sun is"
"The sun is about 99.86% of all mass in the solar system. Most of the remaining 0.14% is Jupiter. The entire mass of Earth is in the tiny miscellaneous category. Earth is a tiny dust mote compared to the sun"
"We currently use much less than a trillionth of the power output of the sun, and a trillion is a million times a million. So basically we're practically nowhere on the Kardashev two scale. On the Kardashev scale, we're still non-existent. We're not registering"
They faced the same issues in Ancient Rome
Rome handed out free grain to 40,000 citizens in 73 BC. By 46 BC, Julius Caesar found 320,000 people lining up for their monthly ration. That eight-fold expansion happened in under three decades, and it shows you how welfare states actually grow.
No Roman senator stood up and announced a plan to addict a third of the city to government bread. It happened incrementally, through political competition. Each magistrate who wanted votes expanded eligibility. Each expansion normalized the next one. The citizen who once considered the dole shameful eventually expected it, then demanded it, then organized politically to protect it.
This is the core mechanism free market thinkers have identified across every era: once you create a transfer program, you create a constituency for that program. Recipients vote. Administrators build careers. Grain merchants who supply the state develop a stake in keeping the contracts flowing. The political economy locks in.
Caesar, to his credit, actually cut the rolls back to 150,000 through verification audits. It was one of his more economically coherent moves, though the Senate still murdered him. His successors quietly let the numbers climb again.
What did the dole require? Massive grain imports from Sicily, Sardinia, and Egypt, organized through state logistics at state expense, funded by taxation and conquest. When the conquest revenue dried up, the obligation remained. Rome had written a check against future military success, and future military success eventually failed to arrive.
The lesson is not complicated. Distribute a benefit and you distribute dependency. Distribute dependency and you distribute political power to whoever controls the distribution. The grain dole didn't weaken Rome overnight, but it made every subsequent reform politically impossible.
david evensky retweeted
Die Grundlagen für den Totalitarismus werden jetzt gelegt. Mit jedem Gesetz, das Eigentum, Redefreiheit und den freien Markt systematisch dem „Klassenkampf“ opfert. Mit jedem Eingriff, der den Preis manipuliert, die Produktion dirigiert und die Verantwortung vom Einzelnen auf den Staat verlagert. Es beginnt harmlos: mit Steuern, die „gerecht“ klingen, mit Regulierungen, die „Schutz“ versprechen, mit Rhetorik, die den Reichen den Krieg erklärt.
Doch jeder Schritt raubt dem Bürger ein Stück Selbstbestimmung. Jeder Schritt stärkt die Hand, die den Hebel hält. Und am Ende steht nicht die befreite Gesellschaft, sondern der allmächtige Leviathan – mit der Politkaste an der Spitze und den Bewaffneten als Vollstreckern.
Freiheit ist kein Geschenk des Leviathans, sondern das Recht, über sich selbst und die Früchte seiner Arbeit zu verfügen.
Privateigentum ist keine Gier, sondern die Voraussetzung für Kooperation ohne Gewalt.
Preise sind keine Willkür, sondern Signale der Knappheit und des Wertes.
Sobald man diese Fundamente zerschlägt, bleibt nur der Zwang – und der Weg in die sozialistische Diktatur ist geebnet.
#FreiheitstattKnechtschaft #SteuernsindRaub #ParasitenundKollektivistenwegmitEuremZwang #Eigentum #Freiheit
david evensky retweeted
“In order to achieve their end, collectivists must create power—power over men wielded by other men—of a magnitude never before known, and their success will depend on the extent to which they achieve such power.”
— Friedrich Hayek
david evensky retweeted
“The Constitution of the United States, with its elaborate checks and balances, clearly reflected the view that no one was ever to be completely trusted with power.”
— Thomas Sowell
david evensky retweeted
Economic freedom is simply individual rights applied to production and trade.
david evensky retweeted
“Totalitarianism is the new word we have adopted to describe the unexpected but nevertheless inseparable manifestations of what in theory we call socialism.”
— Friedrich Hayek
david evensky retweeted
Turkey OCCUPIED #Gaza for 400 yrs. Never offered independence.
Turkey MASSACRED 1.5 million Armenian #Christians. To this day, never acknowledged the genocide.
Turkey was NEUTRAL & PROFITED from war against greatest evil in history—German Nazism.
Turkey has OCCUPIED 37% of EU member #Cyprus since 1974.
Turkey has SUPPRESSED aspirations of tens of millions of #Kurds.
Turkey JAILS political dissidents & journalists.
Turkey HOSTS #Hamas & other terrorists.
Turkey CONSPIRES w/ radical, anti-Western Muslim Brotherhood.
And we’re supposed to take morality lessons from @RTErdogan & company?
Give me a break!