as they say, everyone has to start somewhere....

CBO just released its latest "Distribution of Household Income" report (for year 2023), and the findings are - as usual - a narrative violation. Real incomes up across the board. Income inequality basically flat for decades. Taxes falling for everyone except the rich.

Revealed: Secret robot offensive that ‘killed 3,000 Russians’ telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2…

If you’ve wondered how a “democratic socialist convention” looks, feels, and sounds, here’s your chance.

I met good friends from Germany for a glass of wine in the late summer sun today. At some point we somehow started talking about last Sunday’s Berlin election, won by the far-left party, the renamed East German communist party. You will simply not believe what they told me the lefts have done to Berlin’s real estate market: 1. They introduced a rent cap. As I said in the post below, apartments available for rent immediately dropped 60%. The left was seriously surprised. 2. A rental apartments building in Berlin cannot easily be converted into owner-occupied apartments, it is nearly impossible and takes at least a decade. As a result rental real estate prices dropped 30% versus owner-occupied property, and nobody builds rental buildings anymore. The left was seriously surprised again. 3. The lefts now have two more brilliant ideas to fix the severe Berlin housing shortage their absurd policies caused: nationalize residential real estate and legalize illegal occupation of privately owned properties. With that, nobody with even three brain cells left would build new housing in Berlin, regardless if for rental or owner-occupied. The left will be most probably surprised again. Isn’t this simply mind-blowing? Each of the left’s policies makes the Berlin housing situation worse, and they really keep inventing even worse ones. Don’t they have even basic economics understanding or at least some common sense?

1.8 million Syrian refugees have returned home since Dec 2024. But do you notice which countries and regions they’re returning from, and which they aren’t? Temporary asylum in the West is never temporary.

🔥🔥

Mamdani’s followers are seizing Berlin. The new government there is likely to be far more radical than even he is - expropriating apartments and cozy with criminal gangs. spectator.com/article/zohran…

Every year spending in almost all of these districts goes up in real terms - with these results. School choice now.

Swedish election update. There's now the possibility of a NEW ELECTION in the affected area after authorities are investigating possible ELECTION FRAUD. A man from Somalia who got Swedish citizenship 7 months ago was elected to parliament for the Left. It's reported that people were given money and pre filled ballots and were driven to voting location. The constituency of Dalarna could see a rerun of the election take place with around 223,000 eligible voters.

Toys ‘R’ Us is opening 120 new stores as grownup collectors fuel toy sales. Nostalgia more than kids may save toy stores. nbcnews.com/business/consume… via @nbcnews

Ouch, painful chart. What a picture.

The most striking chart I’ve seen in a while

Senator @BasedMikeLee, given how relatively small Canada’s population is, why aren’t these in per capita rates? -- Canada MAID assisted suicide rate: 40.0 deaths/ 100,000 people -- U.S. firearm homicide rate: 4.5 deaths/ 100,000 people Canada’s rate is 8.9 times higher!

Germany destroyed its own price controls in 1948 and watched an economy resurrect itself inside eighteen months. Ludwig Erhard did it unilaterally. On June 20, 1948, he abolished the Nazi-era price and wage controls that the Allied occupation forces had maintained, then went on radio to tell Germans what he had done before anyone could stop him. The American occupation authorities were furious. General Lucius Clay demanded an explanation. Erhard told him he had not reformed the controls, he had abolished them. The results were immediate. Goods reappeared on shop shelves within days. Germans who had been hoarding anything of tangible value started trading again because currency reform and price liberalization made holding marks rational for the first time in years. Industrial output rose 50 percent in the six months following the reform. The villain in this story is price controls, and the economists and bureaucrats who insist they tame chaos rather than create it. Price controls tell producers to stop producing and tell consumers to hoard. Every time. The postwar German black market proved it: the official economy was starving while the illegal economy fed people. Erhard simply liberated the black market by freeing prices. You benefit from this history whether you know it or not, because it settled an empirical argument that interventionists have been trying to reopen ever since. Free prices coordinate production without a central planner. Suppress them and you get empty shelves and queues. Germany in 1946 had both. Germany in late 1948 had neither. The so-called Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle, was not miraculous; Erhard applied basic economic logic that Friedrich Hayek had already formalized in 1945 in "The Use of Knowledge in Society." No central authority possesses the dispersed, local, constantly changing information that prices aggregate and transmit. Bureaucrats trying to set correct prices are not just inefficient; they are epistemically incapable of the task. Hayek made the theoretical case, thrn Erhard ran the experiment on a starving nation, and proved it. West Germany grew at roughly 8 percent annually through the 1950s. East Germany, running Soviet central planning across the same ethnic population with similar prewar industrial infrastructure, stagnated and eventually built a wall to prevent its citizens from leaving. That comparison is about as clean a controlled experiment as political economy ever produces. Same people, same history, radically different institutions. The lesson: prosperity flows from secure property rights, sound money, and voluntary exchange. Erhard gave West Germans all three in one afternoon.

Pennsylvania was a free state before the Constitution was ever ratified (1780). That was just shy of 250 years ago or about 12 generations.

30 years later, Labour's victory was the shape of disasters to come. Tony Blair held his finger in the dyke for a while, but then the Tories accepted his worst ideas and cemented them in place.

Crickets. Muslim countries can't be criticized (except very quietly) for their intolerance in this area.

As Bill Maher would say "New Rules"

As outrageous as Trump's kicking out reporters from White House, let's remember what other presidents have gotten away with. Much less outrage expressed then.