🇺🇸 💵 The Potemkin Village Economics of Late Liberalism
⬛️ Macroeconomist Philip Pilkington examines the similarities between the economics of Brezhnev’s late-soviet economy and Biden’s version of the same downward spiral.
🔶️ Living under the late-Soviet model was not typically experienced as nightmarish or even scary, but rather as silly and fake. It was a sort of “clown world”, to quote a well-known contemporary trope, where nothing worked, and leaders were not taken seriously. This is captured in a popular Soviet joke of the time. It runs like this: Stalin, Khruschev, and Brezhnev are on a train going to the Russian countryside but suddenly it stops. As the engineer and the driver attempt to work out the problem Stalin gets angry and starts to shout: “I will solve this. Send the driver to the gulag for being an ideological deviationist and shoot the engineer for being a capitalist saboteur!” The trio wait for the train to shunt into action, but it does not move. Khruschev strokes his chin and then pipes up: “This is not right, let’s release the driver from the gulag.” But without an engineer, the train still fails to move. At that moment, Brezhnev takes a large shot of vodka, smiles, and says: “Comrades! No need to worry! Pull down the window shades and let’s start rocking the train from side to side!”
🔶️ If all of this sounds remarkably familiar, it should. It sounds increasingly like our contemporary experience of late liberalism. Although the popularity of alcohol seems to have given way to the widespread use of marijuana and psychedelics – not to mention the horrifying proliferation of opiates, a nihilistic death-plague the likes of which even the Soviet Union never experienced. The profusion of ‘memes’ in our era bears a striking resemblance to the ‘samizdat’ – or unofficial, self-published cultural production – that spread in the late Soviet Union. The election of eccentric political leaders like Donald Trump or Javier Milei, who reflect the prevailing cultural cynicism of their supporters, seems exactly like what would have happened were the Soviet Union an electoral democracy in the late-1970s.
🔶️ Are we so deep into late liberal decline that the authorities are simply making the numbers up? There has been an unusual amount of data revisions these past two years, but it seems unlikely that these explain the booming GDP growth numbers. Rather the GDP numbers seem to be explained by the fact that the Biden Administration is running enormous government fiscal deficits. Recent estimates put the fiscal deficit at 8.6% of GDP in 2023. Outside of the unprecedented response to the COVID-19 pandemic, these sorts of budget deficits are associated with deep recession of the sort we saw in 2008-09. But GDP numbers are telling us something deeply counterintuitive, namely that the economy is not in deep recession aren’t wrong, but is booming. What is going on? Simply put, the government deficit is propping up the economy like a puppeteer holding up a marionette.
https://www.postliberalorder.com/p/the-potemkin-village-economics-of
HOLY CRAP! NAACP lawyer came before the Supreme Court and said the quiet part out loud
Janai Nelson said we need race-based districts because: "white Democrats were not voting for black candidates whether they were Democrats or not!"
This is INSANE.
🇺🇸Join👉 @SGTnewsNetwork
📎 Twitter ▪️ Truth Social
BREAKING: In an insane move, Justice Ketanji Jackson declares we need to draw Congressional districts based on race because black people are like disabled people
"They don't have equal access to the voting system. They're DISABLED!"
This is utter madness. How did she get on the Supreme Court?!
"My, kind of, paradigmatic example of this is something like the ADA. Congress passed the ADA against the backdrop of a world generally not accessible to people with disabilities...why is that not what's happening here?!"
🇺🇸Join👉 @SGTnewsNetwork
📎 Twitter ▪️ Truth Social
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink says this is only the beginning as the tokenization of everything is underway.
Money, property, and even personal identity will soon exist in digital form.
He calls it a major opportunity for BlackRock, saying the plan is to move beyond traditional financial assets by digitally re-potting them into a new system.
🔗 Shadow of Ezra (@ShadowofEzra)
🤖📱 Between empty promises of a billionaire and a social credit system. The “secret” way your behaviour is ranked on X
What is Tweepcred? It’s a reputation system inherited from the days of Twitter, a social credit mechanism built into X, where every like, comment, retweet, or interaction feeds a hidden score. Post the wrong thing, and your reach is throttled, invisible to followers, blocked from the For You Page, and your voice is confined to a digital coffin. The worst part? X won’t even tell us what we’re doing wrong.
Tweepcred was open-sourced two years ago as part of Elon’s big push for “transparency.” The release confirmed what many suspected for over a decade: the system wasn’t neutral. It could be gamified, and it rewarded those who knew how to play it. Industry insiders and large organizations held a massive advantage over individuals, defeating the very purpose of the internet and the cultural revolution that once challenged mass media.
Content was no longer ...
🇺🇸👨🌾 Meriwether Farms on X:
Dear Trump,
We love you and support you— but your suggestion to buy beef from Argentina to stabilize beef prices would be an absolute betrayal to the American cattle rancher.
We understand there are larger economic and geopolitical dynamics at play, including countering CCP influence in countries in our hemisphere. But the practice of solving problems “over there” before solving problems here on our soil is what contributed to the downfall of our country: Americans always come last.
We understand beef prices are high, and we admire your concern for all Americans, but this is not the fault of the American producer. This is the fault of politicians who have allowed BRICS-aligned entities to dominate the meat industry, that participate in price fixing and who also continually lie to their consumers.
Washington for decades has facilitated the squeezing of our own ranchers while allowing these entities to flood the market with cheaper, ...