Socialism is most popular in rich, capitalist countries, where the wealth allows people the luxury of indulging it.

People who have actually experienced socialism hate it.

Typically insightful analysis by @IJSanders. See also his eloncdn.blob.core.windows.net/eu3/sites/996/….

A review of my book …

amazon.com/dp/1641775327/…

nationalreview.com/2026/11/the-le…

Oh no! Passing BAAJA would lead to less emissions *and* more money in our pockets. The horror!

The irony of politicians who run up trillion dollar deficits spending your money crying to "get money out of politics."

“Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or ‘given’ base; and if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being.”
— Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery

"Bold ideas, unjustified anticipations, and speculative thought, are our only means for interpreting nature: our only organon, our only instrument, for grasping her."

— Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery

I hope policymakers and postulators will keep in mind that cutting, capping, and limiting governments' taxing power, from the state to the local level, got more votes than ANY winning candidate on the ballot this year.

#ncpol

“Somme,” wrote a Prussian veteran. “The whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word.”

Four hundred thousand British and Allied troops, and a similar number of Germans, lost their lives, without any noticeable gain or loss of territory. It was that territory, pock-marked by artillery, filled with toxic gas, devoid of any living thing except enemy patrols, that later inspired Tolkien’s description of the approach to Mordor:

“Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails on the lands about.”

It wasn’t only the lansdscape that he recalled. “My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier,” he later wrote, “of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.”

Sam is, indeed, the archetypal British NCO: Uncurious, loyal, imperturbable and almost impossibly brave. He turns out to be the true hero of the story, yet he has come from the unlikeliest of backgrounds.

This point is made especially powerfully in the film version. In a scene that doesn’t appear in the book, noble-hearted Faramir asks Sam if he is Frodo’s bodyguard.

“I’m his gardener!” replies the little hobbit, in a way that is supposed to be dignified, but comes across as comical. When they eventually part ways, Faramir, now overcome with respect, tells Sam: “Truly the Shire must be a great realm, Master Samwise, where gardeners are held in high honor.”

The director, Peter Jackson, was making explicit something that Tolkien had left as subtext. Before coming to the scarred and poisonous mud of Mordor, Sam had been surrounded by fecundity. After a lifetime of tending to living things, he was suddenly encircled by death.

My great uncle, Cpl. Bill Hannan, fought at the Somme at the same time as Tolkien. Like Sam, he was a gardener, dragged from his flowerbeds to the filthy sumps and shell-craters of the battlefield.

Unlike Sam, he never made it home. His name is carved into the great memorial at Thiepval, along with those of 72,000 other British and South African soldiers whose bodies were never recovered from no-man’s land.

Almost every British family was touched, as mine was, by the tragedy. My old school lost 749 students, a number which I still struggle to take in. Like so many schools, many of its present buildings were erected as monuments to the slain: We were educated, I now realise, in a semi-mausoleum.

At the time, of course, it barely registered. Few adolescent boys have much sense of mortality. Now, the remembrance services that slid past me as a schoolboy move me to tears.

Year after year, we meet, go through the same rituals, recite the same consoling phrase: “We will remember them.” Though the last of the veterans died some years ago, and though it won’t be long before the last person who knew the fallen is also gone, we will remember them.

Though the slain survive only as names on family trees, faces in yellowing photographs, letters notched in marble, we will remember them. Those tram-drivers and locksmiths and miners, those common men who did uncommon deeds, those gardeners whom we hold in high honor. We will remember them.

“This view, according to which methodology is an empirical science in its turn—a study of the actual behaviour of scientists, or of the actual procedure of ‘science’—may be described as ‘naturalistic’. A naturalistic methodology (sometimes called an ‘inductive theory of science’) has its value, no doubt. A student of the logic of science may well take an interest in it, and learn from it. But what I call ‘methodology’ should not be taken for an empirical science.
…
Thus I reject the naturalistic view. It is uncritical. Its upholders fail to notice that whenever they believe themselves to have discovered a fact, they have only proposed a convention.6 Hence the convention is liable to turn into a dogma. This criticism of the naturalistic view applies not only to its criterion of meaning, but also to its idea of science, and consequently to its idea of empirical method.”

Karl Popper “The Logic of Scientific Discovery” [1934]

Good news!

" Jackson hopes that with a divided state legislature and the lessons of the 2010 and 2026 elections, lawmakers might consider real redistricting reform."

Some ideas for redistricting reform are in the link below. #ncpol

RT @CreativeDeduct: Between 1918-1922, following the Marxist playbook of violent conflict between social classes, communist revolutionaries…

Capitalism involves far more cooperation than competition—think of the number of mutually beneficial transactions you’ve had today compared to the number of competitions you’ve been in today.

If the lesson you try to learn from these midterms is "Foreign policy opinions dominate U.S. elections" then I'm sorry but you are doomed to a forever spiral of political defeat.

Republicans were elected to FIX THE BORDER and FIX INFLATION.

They did fix the border but then destroyed that political capital by having masked guys without badges kidnap your roofer before the roof was fully reshingled.

On inflation, Republicans raised tariffs (higher prices), sided with data centers (higher prices), started the Iran war (higher prices), and deported the cheap workers (higher prices).

You can argue those were good policies, but they were not the policies Americans wanted Republicans to pursue! And, crucially, they were policies that credibly linked the GOP to higher prices.

And if you peruse the last 2 years of my tweets you will find dozens of cases of me tweeting some variety of "If I had just been elected on a wave of anti-inflation sentiment, I would simply not increase prices."

Republicans were warned this would happen. I and many others repeatedly told them that a high-price policy agenda would lead to ruin. But Oren Cass said it would make factories go brrrrrr.

Nothing says "St Louis" quite like Budweiser, the Gateway Arch, the Old Courthouse and Busch Stadium II.

@budweiserusa | @GatewayArchSTL | @Cardinals

both sides actually say the real thing hasn’t been tried, but “not real capitalism” led to incredible wealth generation everywhere and “not real communism” lead to murder and oppression

Pierre has a unique gift for making economics easy to understand.
Niche, I know, but one of the things I most resent about Trump is the way that his disgusting aggression toward Canada hurt the historically pro-American Tories and kept Pierre from office.

Me too.
johnlocke.org/are-americans-…