Thinking I'll become a banker. Not actually do anything productive for humanity, just make money by looking after other productive people's money.
New Zealand
Joined June 2011
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Graham Beswick retweeted
Jaguar killed itself. No villain required, no recession to blame, no supply chain disruption to hide behind. Tata Motors bought a fading but salvageable brand in 2008 for $2.3 billion and spent the next fifteen years turning it into a case study in how to destroy capital.
The rebranding campaign of late 2024 was the public execution. Jaguar dropped its leaping cat logo, fired its entire existing customer demographic via press release, and replaced a century of racing heritage with a pastel-colored advertisement featuring zero cars. The marketing team apparently decided the path to profitability ran directly through alienating the people who actually bought Jaguars. Brilliant.
The rebrand was just the visible wound. The rot started earlier. Jaguar spent years producing vehicles with reliability ratings that made Land Rover look like a Swiss watch, while charging Mercedes money for the privilege. The F-Pace, the E-Pace, the I-Pace: each one a beautiful object that dealers apologized for in advance. You bought the badge and got a subscription to your mechanic's vacation fund.
The pivot to an all-electric lineup, announced with great fanfare in 2021, then delayed, then sort-of-delayed-again, captured everything wrong with a company led by government subsidy chasers rather than engineers. Jaguar chased EV tax credits and green virtue points instead of fixing the fundamental problem. Nobody trusted the cars.
Markets are merciless precisely because they are honest. Customers stopped buying, and no amount of rebranding or regulatory coddling reversed that verdict. Capital allocated to a brand that cannot hold a customer is capital destroyed. Tata learned this lesson expensively. You, having never bought the car, learned it for free.
The ad campaign is just a sign on the door that reads, "This company is woke trash." The real rot lies beneath the surface. Firing the marketing agency won't change that.
Graham Beswick retweeted
Possibly the best Bitcoin advertisement ever made.
It's your money, until you ask for it back.
Graham Beswick retweeted
Europe's central banks were not built to protect you, they were built to finance wars.
The Bank of England launched in 1694 with a single purpose: lend William III 1.2 million pounds to fight Louis XIV, and collect interest in perpetuity. Parliament handed a private cartel a monopoly on note issuance. In exchange, the Crown got its war. Depositors got paper promises. The model spread like an infection.
France watched and replicated. John Law established the Banque Générale in 1716, eventually converting it into the Banque Royale, which he used to flood France with paper livres backed by nothing but colonial fantasies about Louisiana. By 1720 the whole scheme collapsed, wiping out French savers across two generations and poisoning French confidence in paper money for over a century.
The lesson Europe drew was not "stop doing this." The lesson was "do it more carefully."
Germany formed the Reichsbank in 1876, Sweden had its Riksbank from 1668 (the world's oldest, and a blueprint every subsequent government copied). Each institution followed the same logic: centralize control, monopolize issuance, and give the state a captive lender when revenue from taxation proves politically inconvenient.
Ludwig von Mises explained that inflation functions as a tax. Every unit of currency created without corresponding production transfers purchasing power from your savings to whoever spends the new money first, which is always the government. That process accelerated dramatically after World War One, when the gold standard's constraints became inconvenient for states that had already promised their citizens more than they could honestly deliver.
The Weimar hyperinflation from 1921 to 1923 is the obvious horror story, but the quieter theft across the rest of Europe through the 1920s and 1930s cost savers just as much over time, simply spread across more years. Gradual expropriation carries less drama and less political resistance.
Every European central bank operating today, including the European Central Bank created in 1998, runs on this same foundational logic: the sovereign needs money, the bank provides it, and you absorb the cost through prices that never quite return to where they were.
Graham Beswick retweeted
Power selects for a specific personality type, and it is not yours.
F.A. Hayek spelled this out in 1944. In a centrally planned system, the people who rise are not the most competent or the most honest. They are the most willing to exercise force against strangers, the most comfortable with contradiction, and the most skilled at coalition-building through favors rather than merit. Government filters for the bad ones from the start.
The mechanism is straightforward. Political power means controlling resources you did not earn. Capturing that control requires outcompeting rivals who have no ethical constraints. A principled candidate refuses to promise contradictory things to different voter blocs. An unprincipled one does it without blinking. The unprincipled one wins. Repeat this selection pressure across hundreds of electoral cycles and you get the U.S. Congress in 2026: a body where the average member has held office for over a decade, raised millions from interested parties, and delivered almost nothing measurable to the people who voted for them.
Bureaucracy compounds the problem. Once entrenched, state agencies attract people who want authority without accountability. You cannot fire most of them. The FDA, the TSA, the Federal Reserve all function this way, staffed by individuals whose career advancement depends on expanding the agency's reach, never on serving you efficiently.
Graham Beswick retweeted
13 years of school.
Not one hour on:
What money is. Who creates it. Why it shrinks. Who profits when it does.
You learned the mitochondria. You learned trigonometry.
You never learned the one system that would rule every day of your adult life.
Ask yourself if that's an accident.
Graham Beswick retweeted
In November 1910, six men boarded a private railroad car in Hoboken, New Jersey, using only first names to conceal their identities, and traveled to Jekyll Island, Georgia, to write what became the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Nelson Aldrich, the Senate Republican leader whose daughter married John D. Rockefeller Jr., led the delegation. Frank Vanderlip of National City Bank, Henry Davison of J.P. Morgan, and Paul Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. did most of the drafting. The meeting stayed secret for over twenty years.
Warburg was the architect. Trained in European central banking, he had spent a decade lobbying for an American equivalent. He got one. The structure the Jekyll Island group produced gave private banks control over credit creation while socializing the losses through a government backstop. Rothbard documented this meticulously in "The Case Against the Fed," published in 1994, drawing on Vanderlip's own 1935 confession in the Saturday Evening Post.
The public justification was monetary stability. The 1907 panic, itself partly engineered by J.P. Morgan's strategic withdrawal of credit, served as the fear-lever that made the Fed politically sellable. Congress handed the new institution the monopoly on currency issuance in 1913, and the dollar has lost roughly 97 percent of its purchasing power since.
You are downstream of that 1910 railroad car every time you spend a dollar. Every round of quantitative easing, every bailout of too-big-to-fail institutions, traces back to the institutional design those six men built in secret. Competitive banking with hard commodity backing produces stability without requiring a cartel. The Fed produces stability for bankers, and Inflation that lands on your savings.
Graham Beswick retweeted
Carl Menger published On the Origins of Money in 1892, and it remains arguably the most devastating refutation of the statist theory of money ever written.
Menger worked in Vienna during the late 19th century, when the German Historical School dominated European economics. That school rejected universal economic laws and insisted governments shape institutions deliberately. Menger spent his career dismantling that claim. His 1871 "Principles of Economics" launched the marginalist revolution, and his 1892 essay finished the job on monetary theory specifically.
The core argument is simple and brutal: nobody invented money. No king decreed it, no parliament voted it into existence. Individual traders, acting on self-interest, gradually converged on the most saleable commodity available to them. Gold and silver won because they are durable, divisible, portable, and scarce. This process happened spontaneously, across cultures, without central coordination. Menger called the most saleable good the most "liquid" commodity, and traced how liquidity differences between goods naturally selected winners over centuries of voluntary exchange.
Menger exposes the state's foundational lie: that money derives its validity from government authority. Every central bank, every fiat currency regime, every IMF directive operates on that lie. The Federal Reserve, which prints dollars with no commodity anchor and has destroyed roughly 97% of the dollar's 1913 purchasing power, exists entirely because the state captured and corrupted a spontaneous market institution.
Menger's legacy is the intellectual ammunition to say clearly that central banks are parasites on a system they did not build and cannot improve. The market created money, then Governments hijacked it.
Graham Beswick retweeted
- You: "Who does the government borrow from?"
- Government: "The central bank."
- You: "Where does the central bank get money?"
- Government: "It creates it."
- You: "And the government pays interest on that?"
- Government: "Of course. Debt is debt."
- You: "Interest... on money created from nothing... paid by my taxes?"
- Government: "You're not an economist."
Graham Beswick retweeted
With regard to the current Globalist Bankster's order to go to war with Russia for their profit and pleasure.
THIS IS A MUST-WATCH:
Graham Beswick retweeted
Price controls destroy supply. The EU proved it again in 2022 when Brussels capped wholesale electricity and gas prices after the Nord Stream sabotage sent spot prices past 700 euros per megawatt-hour in August.
Generators across Germany, France, and Spain did exactly what any rational producer does when a price ceiling sits below their marginal cost: they cut output or pulled supply off the market entirely. French nuclear operators throttled dispatch. Spanish gas-fired plants ran below capacity. The supply Brussels wanted to guarantee, was chased away.
You paid for this twice. Your electricity bill carried emergency government subsidies funded by debt, and your employer absorbed industrial rationing that cut production schedules through winter 2022-23. BASF curtailed ammonia output at Ludwigshafen. German steel producers ran blast furnaces at reduced rates. That destroyed real economic output, not just spreadsheet entries.
The mechanism is always the same. Prices coordinate information that no committee possesses. When a price spike signals genuine scarcity, producers invest, consumers conserve, and the shortage resolves. Cap the price and you blind every actor in the market simultaneously, guaranteeing the shortage deepens exactly when it hurts most.
Brussels decided that politicians allocating energy through administrative rationing beats producers and consumers responding to real signals. Germany's industrial output contracted 0.4 percent in Q4 2022. The price cap paralyzed the market. Ironically, government intervention to "solve" the crises did more damage than the crises itself, as always.
Graham Beswick retweeted
- You: "My stocks went up 10%."
- Government: "Congratulations! That's taxable."
- You: "But inflation was 8%. I only really gained 2%."
- Government: "We tax the full 10%."
- You: "You tax the inflation you created?"
- Government: "Capital gains are capital gains."
- You: "So you profit from debasing my money twice?"
- Government: "You're not an economist."
Graham Beswick retweeted
NAYIB BUKELE: "They used to own everything, and in a way they still do; the media, the banks, the NGOs, the international organizations, and almost all the governments and corporations in the world."
"They also own the armies, the loans, the money supply, the credit ratings, the narrative, the propaganda, the factories, the food supply; they control international trade and international law. But their most powerful weapon is the control of the “truth”."
"They are willing to fight, lie, smear, destroy, censor, confiscate, print, and do whatever it takes to maintain and increase their control over the “truth”, and everything, and everyone."
Graham Beswick retweeted
The one sector governments left mostly alone delivered forty years of continuous price collapse and it destroyed the central planners' core argument in the process.
A transistor that cost $7.50 in 1961 costs less than a millionth of a cent today. Your 2026 smartphone carries more computing power than a 1990 Cray supercomputer that cost $30 million. Storage, bandwidth, processing speed: every metric deflated while quality exploded. This is what markets do when the state steps back.
Compare that to healthcare, education, and housing, three sectors drowning in subsidies, licensing regimes, and regulatory capture. Prices in all three outpaced inflation every decade since 1980. Government intervention reprices risk, blocks competition, and rewards incumbents for lobbying instead of innovating.
The Federal Reserve spent those same forty years printing money and insisting deflation was catastrophic. Falling prices drive demand, not panic. Intel, Apple, and AMD competed ferociously, drove costs down, and generated trillions in real wealth. Nobody waited to buy a computer because prices might fall next year.
Mises identified capital allocation as the economy's core problem: who decides where resources go? Entrepreneurs decided in tech, taking losses when wrong and profits when right. Bureaucrats decided in healthcare and education, socializing losses and mandating consumption.
You live with the consequences of that distinction every single day, every time you renew your health insurance and watch the premium climb while your phone bill drops.
Graham Beswick retweeted
St. Augustine – The Difference Between Power and Civilization.
St. Augustine understood something about political power that modern civilization routinely forgets: a state is not made legitimate by its size, its laws, its institutions, or its ability to enforce them. What separates government from organized predation is justice.
Remove justice, and power remains – but legitimacy disappears. His argument is ultimately not about kings or pirates. It is about the principle that makes authority worthy of obedience, and the thin line between a political order and organized coercion.
1. Power and legitimacy are not the same thing. Power is the ability to make people obey. Legitimacy is the right to command. A tyrant can possess enormous power and no legitimate authority. A government can control every institution in the country and still be fundamentally unjust. The existence of political authority does not prove its legitimacy. Government does not create justice. Justice sets the moral limits of government.
2. Justice is what transforms power into authority. Every functioning society needs coercion: laws must be enforced, criminals restrained, contracts protected. The question is not whether force exists, but what that force serves and what limits it. A just state uses coercion to defend an order in which people can live together. An unjust state increasingly uses the same machinery to protect the interests of those controlling it.
3. Legality cannot be the ultimate measure of justice. A government can make almost anything legal if it controls the lawmaking process. If something is legitimate simply because it is legal, then the state becomes the sole judge of its own legitimacy. That is circular. Law is supposed to constrain power, not merely formalize whatever power decides to do. A perfectly legal injustice remains an injustice.
4. Institutions can make power harder to see. The ancient tyrant arrives with soldiers. The modern state often arrives with forms, procedures, regulations and administrative language. Nobody appears to be exercising arbitrary power because everyone is simply "following the rules." But procedure does not make an outcome just. And when responsibility is distributed across thousands of people, everyone can participate in injustice while nobody feels responsible for it. Power is most dangerous when it no longer looks like power.
5. This is why civilization needs principles above the state. If nothing stands above political power — no civilizational law, no fundamental rights, no moral order — then there is ultimately no principled limit to what government may do. Politics becomes a struggle for control of the machinery. Whoever captures the state gets to redefine the rules, the rights and eventually the meaning of justice itself. When power becomes the source of morality, politics becomes war by other means.
6. Civilization is therefore not the absence of force. It is the subordination of force to justice. It is not simply having government, but having government constrained by principles that government itself cannot casually rewrite. It is not stability at any price. A perfectly stable tyranny is still a tyranny. The real achievement is creating an order in which those who wield power are themselves subject to something higher than their own power.
7. And that is Augustine’s civilizational lesson. Every political order eventually faces the same choice: will power serve a moral order, or will the moral order be rewritten to serve power? The names change – kingdom, republic, empire, democracy. The institutions change. The technology changes. The principle does not.
Remove justice, and the state becomes merely a larger version of the gang.
Civilization begins where power accepts that there are things it may not do – even when it can.
St. Augustine: “Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? A gang is a group of men under command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention… For it was a witty and a truthful rejoinder which was given by a captured pirate to Alexander the Great. The king asked the fellow, ‘What is your idea, in infesting the sea?’ And the pirate answered, with uninhibited insolence, ‘The same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a tiny craft, I'm called a pirate: because you have a mighty navy, you're called an emperor.’” (City of God, Book IV, Chapter 4)
Graham Beswick retweeted
Dear socialist friend,
Nothing is stopping you.
If collective ownership works so much better, you can prove it by next Tuesday. Pool your savings with your comrades. Elect a planning committee. Run a bakery, a farm, a repair shop – shared ownership, equal pay, decisions by vote. All of it is fully legal, today, everywhere in the West. No revolution needed.
And yet.
You want the workers to seize the factories – but you won’t open a food truck with three people from your group chat. You demand collective housing – but you won’t sign a joint lease with people who agree with you about everything.
People have tried voluntary socialism for two hundred years. The communes keep dissolving – the members simply walk out. The only socialist countries that lasted were the ones that locked the borders.
That’s the whole story. Where leaving is allowed, everyone leaves. Socialism only survives where leaving is banned. The people voted – on foot.
Just do it. Or admit that "collective" was always just a word for other people’s property.
Graham Beswick retweeted
Rome handed out free grain to 40,000 citizens in 73 BC. By 46 BC, Julius Caesar found 320,000 people lining up for their monthly ration. That eight-fold expansion happened in under three decades, and it shows you how welfare states actually grow.
No Roman senator stood up and announced a plan to addict a third of the city to government bread. It happened incrementally, through political competition. Each magistrate who wanted votes expanded eligibility. Each expansion normalized the next one. The citizen who once considered the dole shameful eventually expected it, then demanded it, then organized politically to protect it.
This is the core mechanism free market thinkers have identified across every era: once you create a transfer program, you create a constituency for that program. Recipients vote. Administrators build careers. Grain merchants who supply the state develop a stake in keeping the contracts flowing. The political economy locks in.
Caesar, to his credit, actually cut the rolls back to 150,000 through verification audits. It was one of his more economically coherent moves, though the Senate still murdered him. His successors quietly let the numbers climb again.
What did the dole require? Massive grain imports from Sicily, Sardinia, and Egypt, organized through state logistics at state expense, funded by taxation and conquest. When the conquest revenue dried up, the obligation remained. Rome had written a check against future military success, and future military success eventually failed to arrive.
The lesson is not complicated. Distribute a benefit and you distribute dependency. Distribute dependency and you distribute political power to whoever controls the distribution. The grain dole didn't weaken Rome overnight, but it made every subsequent reform politically impossible.
Graham Beswick retweeted
Every monopoly you have ever feared was built by politicians, not by entrepreneurs.
The free market actually punishes monopolistic behavior. When one firm charges above-market prices, it hands competitors an engraved invitation to undercut it. High profit margins attract entry. Consumers shift. Prices fall. The system self-corrects constantly, without a single bureaucrat lifting a finger.
Then the state arrives.
Washington granted AT&T its telephone monopoly through FCC licensing in 1934, keeping it legally insulated from competition for decades. The United States Postal Service holds a statutory monopoly on first-class mail delivery today, backed by criminal penalties if you try to compete. The American Medical Association lobbied Congress throughout the twentieth century to restrict medical school admissions and license requirements, artificially compressing the supply of doctors and pushing your medical bills upward. Politicians manufactured these outcomes, usually with the enthusiastic cooperation of the very industry being "regulated."
This pattern has a name. Free market thinkers call it regulatory capture: the regulated industry eventually controls its regulator, using the government's coercive power to strangle rivals in the crib. The FDA, the FCC, state occupational licensing boards, patent law, zoning codes. Every one of these mechanisms transfers competitive pressure away from established players and onto consumers.
You pay the price. Literally.
The intellectual move most people miss is conflating size with monopoly. A firm can dominate ninety percent of a market through superior service and still face the constant discipline of potential competition. Monopolies become dangerous when legal barriers prevent entry, and only the state can erect one with lasting force. Remove the government privilege, and the monopoly dissolves faster than most people expect.
Graham Beswick retweeted
Scott has an income of $55,000 per year.
Scott spends $75,000 per year ($10,000 on guns).
Scott grows his debt by $20,000 per year.
Scott has total debt right now of $400,000.
Scott has fixed unfunded liabilities of $1,750,000 and is less than 10 years from retirement.
Scott's own employees say that his 130% debt will be 690% by the year 2096.
Scott needs to refinance roughly $100,000 in the next 12 months to stay solvent.
What is happening now?
Scott has a Japanese friend who is his biggest lender (despite being in even more debt) that just told Scott he might need to unwind $110,000 of Scott's debt to the open market. Therefore Scot sent his Japanese friend "$50-$100" this summer to keep him calm and ask him to not dump the debt.
The credit card companies Scott borrows from are refusing to give him cheap debt anymore, and are giving him 19 year highs on interest rates.
Scott said on August 19th that because nobody is buying his credit card debt that he will "at least double" the rate he is buying back his own credit card debt with new debt he takes out. The credit card companies didn't like that and offered him even higher rates 24 hours later.
If Scott goes bankrupt we have WW3, because Scott has been buying lots of guns. Scott would rather dilute Dollars he is borrowing in and watch himself starve than go bankrupt.
You can buy 100% of the insurance in the world against Scott's insolvency for $15,700.
Scott himself has said publicly that he wants to buy insurance against himself and that people should consider buying it.
Scott's friends say they want to back his debt with the insurance against his debt - because the insurance is that cheap and the debt is that bad.
This insurance plan's cost to buy went up 30% over the last 3 days.
Why? Because people are starting to doubt Scott.
Scott is America.
The insurance plan is Bitcoin.
Graham Beswick retweeted
In 1913, Congress handed a cartel of private banks the legal monopoly to manufacture money. The Fed creates dollars through a ledger entry, buys Treasury bonds with those dollars, and the Treasury spends the proceeds into the economy. New money, conjured from nothing, chasing the same goods you were already buying. Prices rise. You get poorer. Nobody voted for this.
Nixon finished the job on August 15, 1971, severing the last link between the dollar and gold. At that moment, the U.S. government unilaterally defaulted on its Bretton Woods obligations, simply announcing to the world that the rules had changed. Nixon called it a "temporary" measure. Fifty-five years later, temporary is still in effect.
When the Fed expands the money supply, the new money flows first to banks, financial institutions, and government contractors. Those early recipients spend it before prices adjust. By the time the money reaches you, wages and savings have already lost ground. This is the Cantillon effect, named after Richard Cantillon, who described it in 1730. Wealth transfers silently from savers to asset-holders. From you to them.
Sound money advocates have documented this exhaustively. The data is not ambiguous. The dollar has lost over 97% of its purchasing power since 1913. Savings punish you. Debt rewards you. The entire incentive structure tilts toward spending today, borrowing recklessly, and holding real assets. This system is designed to fund unlimited government spending through monetary expansion rather than honest taxation.
