Professor, Colonel (US Army, retired)
California, USA
Joined October 2019
- Tweets33.1K
- Following136
- Followers914
- Likes16.6K
Carl Castro retweeted
Tuesday was the most hopeful I’ve felt about politics since 2008
Some thoughts on how Democrats can avoid fucking this up (like not settling scores with each other on Twitter, for example)
Carl Castro retweeted
Golden Age Swindle
Say it ain't so, Bessent! Would you be surprised if DHS paid 600% more for a prison for absolutely no reason whatsoever?
Would you be surprised if the company who owns and will get paid to operate it donated to Donnie's campaign?
Would you be surprised if the institutional investors who will collect all the winnings are the same cast of characters we used to refer to as the swamp?
Would you be surprised if Scott Bessent got asked about this clear financial waste and said he didn't know about it and it was a waste of his time?
So much winning!
McMahon Spends $43,000 for New Furniture as She Looks to Close Her Department.
Why does someone need new furniture when they want to close shop?
Carl Castro retweeted
HUGH GRANT with a very funny speech when presenting Richard Curtis with an Honorary Oscar in 2024.
Carl Castro retweeted
The factoid that '50% of marriages end in divorce' was kinda true decades ago.
But the divorce rate peaked in 1980.
Now, less than 40% of all marriages since 2000 end in divorce.
For college graduates, it's under 30%.
For college graduates who get married after age 25, and who don't have any kids before marriage, it's under 20%.
Anybody promoting the outdated, deceptive 50% rate has some kind of anti-marriage or anti-natalist agenda.
It scares young people away from getting married and having kids. That is their goal.
Carl Castro retweeted
.@jonstewart unpacks AI’s dubious promise of a better future, from the fate of our jobs to an "age of abundance"
Carl Castro retweeted
The robot that displaced a factory worker in 2019 made you richer. Not the factory owner. You.
This confuses people who treat jobs as the end goal of economic life rather than the means. Henry Hazlitt demolished this error in 1946 in "Economics in One Lesson." When a machine replaces ten workers on an assembly line, those ten workers represent released labor, which redirects toward production the economy couldn't afford before. The machine, meanwhile, drops the price of the manufactured good. You buy the same shirt for less. That gap between what you pay now and what you paid before is real purchasing power, a raise you received without your employer signing anything.
Let's look at televisions. A 60-inch 4K television cost around $1,500 in 2015. Today you buy comparable picture quality for under $350. Automated manufacturing drove that collapse. The factories didn't become charitable organizations; they competed for your dollars by deploying capital more efficiently, and the savings landed in your pocket.
This process terrifies politicians because the benefits disperse invisibly across millions of consumers while the displaced workers are visible, concentrated, and angry. So politicians respond by subsidizing inefficiency, taxing automation (as the EU seriously proposed in 2017), or erecting tariffs that punish you for wanting cheaper goods. Every such intervention forces you to pay more than the market price, transferring your purchasing power to a protected producer and their employees.
Free market thinkers have stressed one fact since Mises and Böhm-Bawerk formalized capital theory: rising capital intensity, meaning more and better machines per worker, is the entire mechanism behind rising real wages historically. Britain improved living standards between 1760 and 1850 by replacing hand-operated looms with machines, freeing labor to produce medicine, railways, and eventually the electricity grid.
Automation is capital accumulation made visible. You benefit from every iteration of it, provided the state leaves the price system alone to do its work.
