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Michael Matulef
MichaelMatulef@nostrplebs.com
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Know Thyself | Everything Voluntary✌️ | Follow the Tao
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Michael Matulef 4 months ago
Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions. — Friedrich Hayek
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Michael Matulef 4 months ago
The whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson: we cannot escape scarcity.
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Michael Matulef 4 months ago
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” — Friedrich Hayek
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Michael Matulef 4 months ago
And this is the perennial genius of the State: it not only seizes power through deception, but maintains it through the willing self-deception of its subjects. The bamboozle becomes not merely a passing fraud, but the very foundation of political legitimacy. Once the public has been conditioned to equate the State’s coercion with social order, they will defend their own shackles and denounce anyone who points to the lock. The State is not an unfortunate accident that can be corrected by ‘better men’ in office; it is a permanent machinery of plunder and control, inherently hostile to truth and liberty. To grant it power, no matter how small, is to grant it the means to grow, to entrench the bamboozle ever deeper—until, at last, the parasite destroys the host. image
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Michael Matulef 4 months ago
The economic freedom which is the prerequisite of any other freedom cannot be the freedom from economic care which the socialists promise us. — Friedrich Hayek
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Michael Matulef 4 months ago
They still believe the economy is a machine with knobs and levers — not a living network mutating beyond their comprehension.
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Michael Matulef 5 months ago
Economics is not a science of material objects or their physical characteristics. It is the logical analysis of human action — of purposeful behavior under conditions of scarcity. Concepts such as “goods,” “commodities,” or “wealth” do not exist independently in nature; they arise from the subjective meanings actors assign to things in the context of their ends and means. All economic categories — value, cost, exchange, profit, loss — are rooted in the structure of action itself, not in empirical observation of physical phenomena. To reduce economics to the study of “goods and services” is to commit a category error. It is not the properties of things that matter, but that these things are chosen, valued, and acted upon by individuals. Economics, properly understood, is praxeology — the systematic study of action based on self-evident axioms, not empirical materialism.
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Michael Matulef 5 months ago
The collectivist seeks to replace the acting man with the abstraction of a collective will. But such a will does not exist; it cannot choose; it cannot value. It is always a mask—worn by the tyrant, the planner, the bureaucrat—who supplants the individual and extinguishes the only genuine source of progress: the spontaneous actions of free men. All collectivist doctrines—whether socialist, fascist, nationalist, or theocratic—demand the subjugation of the individual to a fictitious whole. They are not only morally repugnant; they are irrational. For they seek to annihilate the very mechanism of life: human action itself. So when we say that anything other than liberty—anarchy in a proper sense—is anti-human, we are not making an ideological claim, nor engaging in partisan rhetoric. We are stating a logical truth—one rooted in the nature of man as an acting being. Liberty is not a “value” in the relativist sense. It is a necessary condition for human action. Only a free individual can choose, prefer, and act. Without liberty, there is no actor—only obedience and decay. A system that denies liberty—by decree, coercion, and collectivist abstraction—seeks to extinguish the only agency through which human life is sustained: the individual choosing mind. To abolish liberty is to abolish action. To abolish action is to abolish life. https://mises.org/mises-wire/axiom-action-and-inescapability-liberty
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Michael Matulef 5 months ago
The free market isn’t some naïve ideal. It is the only moral and practical framework for human cooperation. The real myth, the real danger, is your faith in Leviathan.