Champion of Reason, Individual Rights and Capitalism.
United States
Joined January 2025
- Tweets4.1K
- Following923
- Followers11.4K
- Likes3.1K
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
DIPLOMATIC FLATTERY DEBATED: "Witkoff is a famously very genial guy and nice guy. What Trump has said about him everybody likes him. Maybe now Vladimir Putin likes him too for saying something pretty extravagant there that he is a humanitarian. The guy is a war criminal for God’s sake and rains down bombs on civilians without regard to human life. To call him a humanitarian is absurd... When you are trying to get a guy who has been locked up for four years illegally, you don’t insult the guy. Maybe you flatter him. Maybe this time he flattered him a little too much." @brithume
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
Trump’s executive order waving sanctions on Russia is a present to Vladimir Putin.
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
LASIK eye surgery costs roughly $2,100 per eye today. In 1998, it cost $2,200 per eye. Adjusted for inflation, you are paying about 60% less for a procedure that has simultaneously become faster, safer, and more precise. That is what markets do when left alone.
Now compare that to a hearing aid. The FDA classified hearing aids as prescription medical devices for decades, locking you into audiologist appointments before you could buy a $3,000 device that a manufacturer could produce for $300. Or, look at insulin. Heavily regulated, patent-extended, and politically manipulated, a vial of Humalog ran over $330 in 2024 versus roughly $21 in Canada for a biosimilar. Same molecule. Different regulatory environment.
LASIK sits in a peculiar gap. Insurers rarely cover it, which means third-party payment schemes never severed the price signal between provider and patient. You shop, clinics compete, manufacturers race to improve technology. The feedback loop that markets depend on functions exactly as it should.
Regulated medical markets break that loop deliberately. The FDA's approval process costs pharmaceutical companies over $2.6 billion per new drug on average, erecting barriers that protect incumbents and punish smaller competitors who cannot absorb a decade of compliance costs. Patients then pay the premium on the back end.
LASIK is the control in the experiment. The market won.
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
Students supported Mao
Students supported Castro
Students supported Khomeini
Students supported Hitler
Students supported Mussolini
If find yourself blindly supporting every student lead movement, you’ll be wrong very often, in many eras, on many issues.
A good rule of history: if you find yourself opposing a student movement while siding with the ruling class, you're wrong. Every time, in every era, whatever the issue.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Student movements have not always been on the right side of history. Mao's student Red Guards persecuted hundreds of thousands. Students helped Castro and Khomeini rise to power, and Nazi student groups opposed the Weimar Republic.
britannica.com/topic/Red-Guar…
encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/art…
aei.org/education/actu…
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
“No one's paying attention” might be one of the most absurd claims ever made about poverty.
Politicians have campaigned on it for generations. Governments have spent trillions fighting it. Entire bureaucracies, welfare programs, academic departments, charities, and political movements exist because of it.
Poverty has received extraordinary amounts of attention, money, and political power.
Perhaps it's time to question whether the policies we've spent decades pursuing are actually solving the problem, rather than pretending nobody has bothered to notice it.
Michael Douglas: “The disparity of wealth is very very depressing”
Joe Rogan: “It’s certainly frustrating that more people don’t have an opportunity to do better in this life and that no one’s paying attention to that. If you look at the country as a community, you would say okay if this is all our friends, why are so many of them living in abject poverty for decades upon decades? Why is there crime-ridden neighborhoods that never get better? They’ve been ignored. We could throw resources at fixing these spots and we don’t”
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
Quote: "Russian forces indiscriminately bomb Ukraine’s cities, not because of Moscow’s lack of precision munitions but as a tactic. Its soldiers have massacred Ukrainian civilians. They deploy rape as a weapon of war."
The Trump Administration’s Outlook Toward Ukraine Is a Moral and Strategic Atrocity nationalreview.com/corner/th…
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
Trump got sent to the principal's office many times in grade school and vowed he'd never have one again. :-/
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
Ayn Rand finished We the Living in 1936, the novel is the cleanest fictional autopsy of what collectivism does to actual human beings. She lived it. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg in 1905, she watched Red Guards seize her father's pharmacy on Nevsky Prospect, leaving the family to scrape through the famine years. The book is her least ideological and most personal: no John Galt speeches, just Kira Argounova trying to study engineering while the Soviet state strangles every path she takes.
The economics sits underneath every scene. When the Bolsheviks abolished private trade, they did not abolish scarcity. Rather, they abolished the price signals that let anyone allocate scarce goods. Kira stands in bread lines because central planners cannot calculate what a market computes automatically through profit and loss. The result is rationed potatoes, confiscated apartments, and jobs handed out by Party loyalty rather than competence. Rand dramatized the calculation problem that Ludwig von Mises had already proven unsolvable, and she did it with a food shortage instead of an equation.
The regime demands not just Kira's labor, but her soul. She must inform, conform, and recite the collective catechism to survive, and the state treats her refusal as sabotage. When the government owns all property, it owns you, because you cannot eat without its permission. Economic control and political control are the same control.
American publishers rejected the manuscript for years (too anti-Soviet for the fashionable 1930s intelligentsia, who still admired Stalin), and it sold modestly until Rand's later fame pulled it back into print. Its diagnosis holds everywhere a planner promises abundance through compulsion: Venezuela's empty shelves after 2014, Cuba's ration books, Zimbabwe, which was turned from a paradise into a giant shithole. Every regime that mistook confiscation for production.
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
It’s time to stop arguing against socialism on the basis that “it doesn’t work” because that only encourages socialist to add “so far” and try again.
We are against socialism because it is a moral evil, based on theft, lies and violence against the innocent.
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
@brithume It's not bizarre once you follow the pattern. Socialism has a fixed meaning: government ownership of the means of production. It is not "prioritizing workers or any of the other nonsense," as Vance claimed, and he avoids the real definition for two reasons.
First, he is a pragmatist. For a pragmatist, definitions shift to fit the cause of the day, so socialism becomes open borders and boys in girls' sports. Those are campaign issues, not a definition.
Second, the real definition would indict his own administration. The federal government now holds equity stakes in at least ten private companies, including roughly 10% of Intel and a golden share in U.S. Steel. That is government ownership of the means of production, in part. Add government direction of the companies it does not own, and you have a state directed economy. They are not outright socialists, but they have accepted the principle and handed the actual socialists more than they could ever wish for.
Vance, evading the actual definition only helps the real socialists. Both sides now accept government ownership of the means of production, and when two sides share a principle, the more consistent one always wins. The socialists are the consistent ones.
What do they think the next socialist administration will do with the machinery built by their supposed adversaries?
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
Proper optimism about AI safety is optimism about humans’ ability to build controllability into AI capabilities, and their many incentives to do so in a free society with proper liability enforcement.
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
Are there any AI doomers who are experts in the workings of a free society that protects individual rights?
A lot of the “rationalists” are collectivist-statists who in some ways value reason but don’t actually understand how reason functions and evolves when individual rights are protected.
So much of doomerism is based on this ignorance. Doomers project that human beings won’t evolve in response to increasingly negative feedback from some phenomenon—whether it’s mineral reserves depleting or air pollution increasing.
They assume that people will 1) just keep doing self-destructive things over and over, and 2) fail to develop new methods of mastering challenges. So they expect us to just run out of oil or keep making our cities more and more polluted.
With AI, the doomer sees that increasingly powerful open-ended computers can, when configured in certain ways, inadvertently create new kinds of cyberattacks. And they imagine that if the open-ended computers were way more capable—which they will be—then the attacks will get worse and worse and worse.
Whereas when rights are protected and reason is unleashed, humans evolve: the people responsible for the dangerously-configured computers are held liable (legally and reputationally), and they quickly invest more in controlling open-ended computation to lessen inadvertent harm, while the potential victims get more interested in improving cybersecurity using open-ended computation.
The other variable driving AI doomers is the belief that “AI” is a conscious, interested, competitive being that is somehow beyond human control. If you believe this, and you never really understood the mechanics of free-market capitalism, I totally get how you’d be super-afraid of “AI.”
But good news: LLM-based computers are not conscious or interested—they have no desire to take our job or take us over—they are just incredibly powerful tools of people who are conscious and interested. And we need to get better and better at controlling these tools. Which we will if we’re left free to use our minds to do so.
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
California: let’s eat the ~250 people—generally the most productive and innovative—who already pay for ~50% of the state budget.
This is morally wrong and won’t end well. I’m glad I left this state a decade ago.
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
He’s in luck: The ratio of total millionaires to billionaires in America is roughly 23,600 to 1.
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
Because nothing says “dignity” quite like having the government seize someone else’s earnings so you can evade the responsibility of earning your own, then calling the burden you imposed on them a human right.
Zohran Mamdani explains his definition of socialism to Theo Von: “Socialism to me means you’ll have whatever you need to live a dignified life and that it is the government’s job to deliver on that. When people say dignity we’re talking about the things that allow you to take a breath. Housing, childcare, public transit. No one should be priced out of these things. These are non-negotiables, you need these to live”
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
But notice that he's not actually advocating privacy of the individual from the state, but further state control over the "AI oligarchs" who might be interfering with the state's total control of everying. He's actually consistent to the end in his quest for absolute centralized enslavement of everyone.
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
AI critics mistakenly assume that data centers ALWAYS raise electricity prices.
It’s not true.
“We can definitely do AI in a way that keeps electricity prices the same or even lowers them,” explains @AlexEpstein.
Here’s how: