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Replying to @davidfrum
David, you are reducing a multi-factor problem to two variables in order to torture the data to your narrative.
I’ve found it very enlightening how this Frenchman has captured billions of views over the past few weeks starting with his warning to America to avoid what’s happening in France and Europe.
And that his critics on the left and in academia are behaving exactly like he said they would. I was told I was ignorant, retarded, and innumerate over the past 24 hours by the academics (@brivael 32:1 jury) for considering that Hitler’s economic governing policy had many features of the left (collectivism, central plan, class division).
Grok and I distilled his warnings from his account here. Will summarize with more explanation later.
🚨🚨🚨 A warning to Americans, from a Frenchman. 🚨🚨🚨
You are starting to elect people who promise you more state, more redistribution, more "free" things. New York already has a democratic socialist mayor, perhaps the furthest-left since Fiorello La Guardia. I'm not here to tell you how to vote. I'm here to tell you how this story ends, because we lived it. France ran this experiment for 40 years, and we are now living its final chapter.
It starts in May 1981. François Mitterrand wins the presidency with the Communists in government. The program is pure romance. They nationalize the big banks and industrial groups. They lower the retirement age to 60, cut the work week, add a fifth week of paid vacation, create a wealth tax, and hire massively in the public sector. "Changer la vie", change life itself. That was the slogan.
Reality took less than two years to answer. Capital fled. The franc was devalued three times. Inflation stayed in double digits while our neighbors were bringing theirs down. In March 1983, Mitterrand made a U-turn and imposed austerity, "le tournant de la rigueur".
Remember this, because it is the pattern. Socialism doesn't fail once and disappear. It fails, reinvents itself, and changes its electorate.
After 1983 the Socialists had a problem. They had abandoned the economic revolution, so what was left to sell? The answer was identity politics before the term existed. In 1984 SOS Racisme was born, closely tied to the Socialist Party. The moral battle replaced the economic one. Anyone who raised the question of immigration or integration was no longer an opponent. He was a racist.
Then came the first real test. In 1989, three girls showed up to a public school in Creil wearing the Islamic veil. The Socialist government refused to decide, sent the question to the courts, and let it rot for fifteen years. The ban only came in 2004. That was the moment the Republic blinked. The message received was simple: if you push, the state will back down.
Over the following decades, the left slowly replaced the working class it had lost with a new coalition. In 2011 the Socialist think tank Terra Nova wrote it down in black and white, saying they should stop chasing blue-collar workers and build a coalition of graduates, youth, and minorities. Electoral clientelism became strategy. In certain cities, local politicians traded subsidies, jobs, and silence for votes delivered by community networks, including Islamist ones.
The result today is that in the 2022 presidential election, Muslim voters gave 69% of their first-round votes to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the hard-left candidate. A party that once claimed to be secular is now courting religious identity. Let's be precise: this is not about our Muslim fellow citizens, millions of whom are fully French. It is about a political machine that decided a community vote was worth more than the principles of the Republic.
Now the economy, because the two collapses are the same collapse.
In 2000, the Socialist government of Lionel Jospin, with Martine Aubry as labor minister, imposed the 35-hour work week. The theory was that sharing work creates jobs. What it actually did was make French labor more expensive, destroy the culture of effort, disorganize hospitals that still haven't recovered, and teach an entire generation that work is a burden the state should shrink for you.
That is the deep logic of socialism. It doesn't make people richer. It makes them dependent. Every new subsidy creates a voter who fears losing it. Every new public job creates a voter who defends the system. After a while, you no longer have citizens. You have clients.
Look where it ends. France hasn't voted a balanced budget since 1974. Public debt was around 20% of GDP when Mitterrand arrived. It is now around 3,550 billion euros, about 118% of GDP. France is once again Europe's biggest spender, with public spending at 57.3% of GDP. And a report commissioned by the government in July 2026 projects that without budget efforts, debt would reach 130% of GDP by 2030.
And to be completely honest, the right didn't fix any of this. Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande, Macron: they all managed the decline instead of reversing it. The left set the direction, and the right lacked the courage to change it. That's how you get 40 years of slow rot, economic and social at the same time. A country that works less, pays more, gets less security, and no longer dares to say what it is.
So today France has two choices, and so will you if you go down this road.
The first choice is to stop lying to ourselves. Multiculturalism, meaning many cultures living side by side with no common rules, does not work. It never has, anywhere. When there is no shared culture on top, one culture eventually takes over the others. That's not hate, it's sociology. What worked in France for 150 years was assimilation. You come, you become French, you take on the language, the laws, the history, the way of life. In exchange, the nation takes you in fully, with no asterisk. Assimilation plus controlled immigration. And the deal is already signed with millions of people. Children of Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Algerian, Moroccan, and Vietnamese immigrants who are as French as I am. They are not the problem. They are the proof that the model works when we have the courage to apply it.
The second choice is to keep pretending. Let the state get bigger, let debt explode, keep buying social peace with money we don't have, and keep handing territory to those who reject the West. In that scenario, it is not impossible that France first elects a hard-left government, a Mélenchon government. Then, when the system can't pay its promises anymore, something else fills the vacuum. Michel Houellebecq wrote that story as fiction in 2015, in a novel called Submission. A lot of French people stopped laughing at it a long time ago.
France is a Western country with Western values. Equality between men and women. Freedom of expression, including the freedom to criticize religion. The law above faith. Work as dignity, not punishment. Some things are simply not acceptable here, and we need to have the courage to say it again.
America, you still have what we're losing: a culture of work, a culture of assimilation, the idea that the state is your servant and not your parent. The people selling you "more state" are making the same promise Mitterrand made in 1981. It sounds generous. It ends in debt, dependence, and fragmentation.
Don't trade the American Dream for the French Disease. We already paid the price. Learn from it for free.
Lee Prevost retweeted
Replying to @theallinpod
When @Jason says “literally the #1 podcast in the world,” does that mean we shouldn’t take him literally on all his other openings making that same statement?
Lee Prevost retweeted
David Friedberg: France’s Crisis Is a Warning for America
“France is a bellwether for the West.
So take a look at this chart. This chart is a measure of public spending as a percent of GDP.
And you can see the comparison of France's public spending as a % of GDP to the peak public spending as a % of GDP of major communist nations.”
@Chamath:
“So do you think France is a communist state? They spend like it.”
@Jason:
“Well, it's certainly been a socialist state, right?”
Chamath:
“Is it working?”
@Friedberg:
“That's my point. And I think this is such a prescient lesson for the West to look at.
We all think that there's some political problem with Macron or whoever it was.
The more the government spends, the worse the conditions get for its people, not the opposite, and then the people riot and revolt.
Take a guess where the US is today. US public spending is roughly 36% of GDP. France today is operating its national government spending deficit is 5.4% of GDP. The US is actually 6.2% of GDP.
France is, I think, probably the first to go because they're only growing their economy at half a percent while the US is growing at 2.3%.
So we're still kind of hanging on because we have some degree of economic growth that's allowing us to kind of hold things together.
But I would argue that we are facing the same sort of fiscal cliff which leads to this extraordinary social unrest as France.
All the economic measures are aligned, we're at the same rate, we're at the same set of problems, and we're starting to see the cracks in the system.
There's probably a multi-year solution.”
Happy Halloween!
Millions Of 12-Foot-Tall Lawn Skeletons Discovered On Dem Voter Rolls buff.ly/dCnEWgq
I’m choking on my Blue Cross Blue Shield of NC renewal now as we speak.
Thanks @BarackObama
The 33:1 jury responds to @brivael viral essay on Hitler’s core economic ideology almost in unison. I noticed:
- most never watched the essay. People avoided engaging on his actual points and referred to esteemed historians (33:1 jury).
- most argued the uneconomic points. Brivael’s was mostly an economic one
- much ad hominem on his credentials and suit to be an arbiter of the truth (or mine for even entertaining it)
- most disqualified his arguments because Hitler persecuted some Communists.
My summary:
xitter.cf/leeprevost/status/2114…
I’m afraid the esteemed professor of history just stepped into @brivael trap using esteemed historians as his source arguing with Elon without watching his video essay.
Replying to @LeePrevost @brivael
I cited several acclaimed historians: Paxton, Evans etc. Musk et al cited nobody.
The brilliance of @brivael ‘s video essay, in addition to his novel and fresh arguments, is that he anticipated what his ideological opponents would say without even reading or responding to them.
Queue the lefty historians next.
They unwittingly stepped into the pre-sprung trap he set for them 3 moves ago on the public square chessboard.
This probably hits hard if you failed history in high school.
Hitler was a far-Right fascist whose party was named the National Socialist German Workers' Party to attract working-class voters.
Then he banned the Social Democratic and Communist parties, and sent socialists and communists to concentration camps.
Lee Prevost retweeted
Replying to @LeePrevost
Auten-Splinter are far more even-handed.
When faced with a decision on how to handle uncertainties in the data, it's not an exaggeration to state that Piketty-Saez-Zucman always choose the approach that makes inequality increase.
Auten-Splinter tend to pick approaches that are defensible outside of that margin.
Lee Prevost retweeted
You misspelled “pocketed.”
For context, Colorado built the Greenland Wildlife Overpass, which is 1 foot shorter but 26 feet wider, for 87% less money than @GavinNewsom spent.
It's all fraud and incompetence.
Lee Prevost retweeted
Eleven of the 12 states leading job growth since the pandemic are Republican.
Eight of the 10 slowest are blue.
At some point, Democrats should stop calling it a coincidence and start asking what they’re doing wrong.
Is it the FIGs now?
Everyone is talking about Le Spread, the French-German ten-year bond yield differential, now at first euro crisis levels.
In reality, it’s much worse. During the first euro crisis, Germany still had a functioning economy and was seen as rock-solid. Today, many understand the German business model is broken, and Germany is just buying time by issuing more debt to mask its industry’s implosion through inflated, inefficient government spending and headcount. Germany is on the path to become another failed big-government state like France, with only a few years left to pretend with more debt that its economy is stable.
Le Spread doesn’t tell the whole story. With France already in crisis and Germany slowly becoming another France, Europe and the euro are cooked. If you own euro assets, hedge them before it’s too late.
Add to this and almost record bond yields spreads between German and French bonds - slightly shy of where it spiked during eurozone debt crisis.
Broke, entitled, overtaxed, and in debt.
France ranks #1 in taxes and social spending among developed nations, and protesters are demanding MORE of both?
What’s French for idiocy?
Lee Prevost retweeted
Replying to @LeePrevost @RoKhanna
I predict this California wealth tax will ultimately create higher tax revenues for Florida than it will for California.
I’ll take the over. Anyone in on the under?
Lee Prevost retweeted
I don't think the macroeconomics of paying for new programs by taxing unrealized capital gains works.
slowboring.com/p/obamas-forg…
The US presidency is the most dangerous office in the world.
Here are the top 3 best and worst presidents ever:
Let's start with the best:
1. Grover Cleveland vetoed 414 bills in his first term alone, including congressional handouts to drought-stricken Texas farmers in 1887, on the grounds that the Constitution authorized no such charity. He was right.
2. Warren Harding inherited the sharp 1920-21 depression and did almost nothing, cutting federal spending from $6.4 billion to $3.3 billion and slashing tax rates. The economy recovered within eighteen months, precisely because Washington stepped aside.
3. John Tyler, largely forgotten today, vetoed a national bank bill twice, endured expulsion from the Whig Party, and refused to let Henry Clay transform the Treasury into a political instrument.
These three men share a rare quality: they treated the federal government as a cage, not a tool.
Now the worst.
3. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, imprisoned 14,000 political opponents without trial, shut down opposition newspapers, and conscripted men at gunpoint. The war's financing required the Legal Tender Acts of 1862, which forced irredeemable paper greenbacks on US citizens regardless of what contracts previously specified. Centralization of federal power over the states never fully reversed after 1865. The constitutional republic that emerged was a different animal from the one that entered.
2. Woodrow Wilson delivered the Federal Reserve in 1913, the income tax through the Sixteenth Amendment, the military draft, and the Espionage Act, which could imprison anyone for criticizing the war. He segregated the federal civil service. He took the country into a European slaughter with a propaganda apparatus, the Committee on Public Information, designed to manufacture consent. Every major expansion of state power in the twentieth century traces a direct line back to Wilson's two terms.
1. Franklin Roosevelt gets the top prize for catastrophe. He criminalized gold ownership via Executive Order 6102 in 1933, forcing Americans to surrender their gold at $20.67 per ounce, then immediately revalued it to $35, confiscating roughly 41 percent of savings held in the hardest monetary form available. He extended a cyclical recession into a decade-long depression through the National Industrial Recovery Act, agricultural price controls, and relentless uncertainty about property rights. Businesses do not invest when the rules change by executive whim every quarter. Real unemployment never fell below 14 percent throughout the 1930s. He packed the Supreme Court when it resisted. The regulatory state you live inside today, with its 188,000 pages of federal rules, grew from seeds Roosevelt planted between 1933 and 1945.
Power corrupts budgets, currencies, and constitutions with equal efficiency. The best presidents understood their job was to leave you alone.
I reread Mark Andreesen’s techno-optimist manifesto from October 2023.
What a fantastic piece that is even more relevant today. Very timely counter to the doomer narrative.
a16z.com/the-techno-optimist…
Lee Prevost retweeted
Polls Show Democrats Have Slight Lead In Early Vote-Rigging buff.ly/qacgIQV





























