Joseph Stigler retweeted
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The beauty of capitalism is that you don't have to care about helping people to improve their lives. The profits incentivize even the most selfish entrepreneur to figure out what other people want. Markets turn self-interest into mutual benefit. That's the entire point.
Capitalists wouldn't be capitalists if they actually wanted to help people.
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Joseph Stigler retweeted
Ok boomer
Replying to @Timcast
Rage-bait by the king of rage-bait. His next rage post will be how much seniors want younger people to pay for their Medicare and Social Security
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Guess why someone never shows you this?
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Joseph Stigler retweeted
Holy crap The “conspiracy theorists” were right
Massive concession: Los Angeles election officials just told a federal court they have no independent way to verify citizenship beyond what voters attest. (They simply take their word for it.) Under federal law, only citizens may vote in federal elections. Yet California has not acted on the list of 20,000 suspected noncitizens or agreed to set aside their ballots. American citizens’ votes are being diluted in California.
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Joseph Stigler retweeted
I am in tears. President Trump and Vice President JD Vance announced Nick Shirley will get PAID for the fraud he has EXPOSED THIS IS A MASSIVE WIN 🔥
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Joseph Stigler retweeted
There is also great paper on Swedish lottery winners (perfect natural experiment), which found out that randomly increasing a person’s income does not reduce their crime rate - i.e. people don't steal BECAUSE they are poor. There is negative correlation between income and crime, but it's not causal - it's just that third factors (like lower IQ, executive function/self-control, high impulsivity, aggressiveness, etc.) cause both criminal behaviour and lower income.
"You reduce crime by eliminating poverty." This is one of the greatest intellectual confusions of our century. It sounds compassionate. It feels obvious. And the moment you actually test it, it falls apart. Let's look at the data. First, the correlation is real. Nobody serious denies that poorer areas have more crime. In Sweden, kids from the poorest 20% of families are about 7 times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime than kids from the richest 20%. But correlation is not causation. So Swedish researchers did something brilliant: they compared siblings. Same parents, same home, same upbringing, but different family income at different points in their childhood, because parents' income moves over time. Result, on more than 500,000 children (Sariaslan et al., British Journal of Psychiatry, 2014): once you account for what's shared inside the family, the effect of income on violent crime goes from 7x to nothing. The hazard ratio drops to 0.95. No effect. Finland ran the same test on 650,000 people. Same result: the income-crime link disappears when you compare siblings. What predicts crime isn't the bank balance. It's what travels inside families. Second test: what happens when poverty spikes for everyone at once? 2008. US unemployment doubled from 5% to nearly 10%. 15% of Americans officially poor. If poverty creates crime, crime should have exploded. Instead it fell. Year after year. Robbery, the most "economic" crime of all, dropped 10% in 2010 alone. Criminologists literally said they were stumped. Same story in the Great Depression: 25% unemployment, and crime went down in many cities. Third test: take families out of poverty and see. The US government ran a randomized lottery called Moving to Opportunity. Thousands of families in public housing got vouchers to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. For boys, violent arrests dropped at first, property crime arrests went up, and over time the effects faded. New zip code. Same behavior. Fourth: the claim that police don't matter. This one is just false. Chalfin et al. (American Economic Review: Insights, 2022): each additional police officer prevents about 0.1 homicides. And per capita, the lives saved are twice as many among Black victims as among white victims. The people who suffer most from "police don't matter" are the poorest neighborhoods. So what does predict crime? The Dunedin study followed 1,000 children from birth to age 32. Self-control measured between ages 3 and 11 predicted adult criminal convictions, even after controlling for social class and IQ (Moffitt et al., PNAS, 2011). Cognitive ability matters too: across 700,000 Swedish men, lower cognitive scores at 18 track with violent convictions, and the link barely moves when you control for childhood socioeconomic status (Frisell et al., 2012). And here's the part nobody quotes: in Dunedin, kids whose self-control improved over time did better than predicted. Behavior can change. Which means responsibility is real. Why does this matter? Because "poverty creates crime" isn't just wrong. It's toxic. It turns criminals into victims. The man who robbed you becomes a symptom of "the system," and you, the real victim, become a footnote in someone else's narrative. It merges two completely different things. "You're poor, we'll help you" is one policy. "You're poor and you committed a crime, so we'll excuse you" is another. Fusing them insults the millions of poor people who work, raise their kids, and never hurt anyone. The vast majority of poor people are not criminals. That alone kills the theory. It removes responsibility. Build a political system on "your circumstances made you do it" and you destroy the one thing that actually changes behavior: the certainty that you own your choices. Every excuse the state manufactures is an incentive. And it feeds the state forever. If every crime is a social failure, every crime justifies a new program, a new budget, a new agency. Crime becomes the business model of bureaucracy. The alternative is simple and old. A lighter state that protects instead of explains. The same rules for everyone, from the projects or from a gated community. Certain, swift punishment for anyone who commits a crime. And never, ever telling someone their crime was written in their social condition. Treating someone as responsible is respecting them. Excusing someone because they're poor is the most condescending thing you can do to them.
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Joseph Stigler retweeted
So if all the reports are true, Ilhan Omar lied about her age to make it seem like she naturalized through her father, who apparently she lied about being a citizen in the first place, then used her illegitimate citizenship to marry her brother so that he could inherit her fake naturalization before remarrying and starting a fraudulent winery that sold empty bottles of wine?
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Joseph Stigler retweeted
That’s a bargain. Illegals cost Arizona $3.2 billion a year and the country $200 billion. Each illegal costs American taxpayers an estimated $166,716 over their lifetime. And that’s before accounting for the displacement of American workers, downward pressure on wages, crime, filth, disease, cultural erosion, and reduced quality of life. The real cost is incalculable. Deport them all.
Wow. Mass deportation costs the average Arizona taxpayer about $2,045. What else could that money go toward? 🚒4,000+ firefighters ✏️4,500 teachers 🍎23,000 kids in Head Start What are we doing? azmirror.com/2026/10/13/the-…
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Joseph Stigler retweeted
🚨BREAKING! Kash Patel is targeting Ketanji Brown Jackson’s husband for selling Supreme Court access! “For $500,000, you can plead your case privately to one of nine justices,” Patel revealed. “Brown Jackson compromised at least seven cases.” The FBI Director says the ethics committee can handle her, he’s got his sights set on the husband. Corruption in robes won’t stand.
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Joseph Stigler retweeted
They have blood on their hands.
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We can't deport him! He'll be killed in his home country. The home country: We have a warrant out for him for 39 forcible rapes of young boys. You hear that? They're going to kill him for being LGBTQ.
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Joseph Stigler retweeted
Pro-tax people are idiots. All of them. And I will die on this hill. They are slaves to the state who moan, “Govern me harder, daddy.” I’m fine with a one-time sales tax at the point of purchase. That’s it. That’s all we need to fund the most basic functions of the government. Every other tax we pay is unnecessary and if it means that revenue falls short of meeting the budget, the budget is bloated and should be cut. Just like at the federal level, there is plenty to eliminate, consolidate, or trim within state and local governments.
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Joseph Stigler retweeted
"You reduce crime by eliminating poverty." This is one of the greatest intellectual confusions of our century. It sounds compassionate. It feels obvious. And the moment you actually test it, it falls apart. Let's look at the data. First, the correlation is real. Nobody serious denies that poorer areas have more crime. In Sweden, kids from the poorest 20% of families are about 7 times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime than kids from the richest 20%. But correlation is not causation. So Swedish researchers did something brilliant: they compared siblings. Same parents, same home, same upbringing, but different family income at different points in their childhood, because parents' income moves over time. Result, on more than 500,000 children (Sariaslan et al., British Journal of Psychiatry, 2014): once you account for what's shared inside the family, the effect of income on violent crime goes from 7x to nothing. The hazard ratio drops to 0.95. No effect. Finland ran the same test on 650,000 people. Same result: the income-crime link disappears when you compare siblings. What predicts crime isn't the bank balance. It's what travels inside families. Second test: what happens when poverty spikes for everyone at once? 2008. US unemployment doubled from 5% to nearly 10%. 15% of Americans officially poor. If poverty creates crime, crime should have exploded. Instead it fell. Year after year. Robbery, the most "economic" crime of all, dropped 10% in 2010 alone. Criminologists literally said they were stumped. Same story in the Great Depression: 25% unemployment, and crime went down in many cities. Third test: take families out of poverty and see. The US government ran a randomized lottery called Moving to Opportunity. Thousands of families in public housing got vouchers to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. For boys, violent arrests dropped at first, property crime arrests went up, and over time the effects faded. New zip code. Same behavior. Fourth: the claim that police don't matter. This one is just false. Chalfin et al. (American Economic Review: Insights, 2022): each additional police officer prevents about 0.1 homicides. And per capita, the lives saved are twice as many among Black victims as among white victims. The people who suffer most from "police don't matter" are the poorest neighborhoods. So what does predict crime? The Dunedin study followed 1,000 children from birth to age 32. Self-control measured between ages 3 and 11 predicted adult criminal convictions, even after controlling for social class and IQ (Moffitt et al., PNAS, 2011). Cognitive ability matters too: across 700,000 Swedish men, lower cognitive scores at 18 track with violent convictions, and the link barely moves when you control for childhood socioeconomic status (Frisell et al., 2012). And here's the part nobody quotes: in Dunedin, kids whose self-control improved over time did better than predicted. Behavior can change. Which means responsibility is real. Why does this matter? Because "poverty creates crime" isn't just wrong. It's toxic. It turns criminals into victims. The man who robbed you becomes a symptom of "the system," and you, the real victim, become a footnote in someone else's narrative. It merges two completely different things. "You're poor, we'll help you" is one policy. "You're poor and you committed a crime, so we'll excuse you" is another. Fusing them insults the millions of poor people who work, raise their kids, and never hurt anyone. The vast majority of poor people are not criminals. That alone kills the theory. It removes responsibility. Build a political system on "your circumstances made you do it" and you destroy the one thing that actually changes behavior: the certainty that you own your choices. Every excuse the state manufactures is an incentive. And it feeds the state forever. If every crime is a social failure, every crime justifies a new program, a new budget, a new agency. Crime becomes the business model of bureaucracy. The alternative is simple and old. A lighter state that protects instead of explains. The same rules for everyone, from the projects or from a gated community. Certain, swift punishment for anyone who commits a crime. And never, ever telling someone their crime was written in their social condition. Treating someone as responsible is respecting them. Excusing someone because they're poor is the most condescending thing you can do to them.
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Joseph Stigler retweeted
Not to blackpill but I need to say something. My parents are boomer libs and I asked them if they heard about what's happening in France and they said: "Oh yeah, we heard there are big student protests over the education and class sizes."
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i regret to inform you that personal growth rarely comes from acquiring new knowledge and almost always from: -getting humiliated -showing up terrified and doing it anyway -admitting you might be the problem
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Sorry but the USSR-level social spending has to end at some point
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Joseph Stigler retweeted
JUST IN: Paris boutique owner pledges continued support for the "student movement" after her shop's windows were smashed & items were looted.
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Joseph Stigler retweeted
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Joseph Stigler retweeted
We should purge the CIA and all sectors of government by requiring physical fitness exams. Government employees should be forced to run competitive 5 miles, and do a certain benchpress, pullup, and number of push-ups. This will naturally filter out dysgenic Bolsheviks.
Replying to @ThomBrady5
Like how the vaccine mandate was a trojan horse to purge the government of conservatives, what sort of purity/loyalty test could we use which would disproportionately drive out libs while leaving us plausible deniability?
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