Key point: "the thing that pulled humanity out of misery was never a plan. It was millions of free people trying things."
If you're a young American, or a Democrat who's a little confused about where all this is going, read this. It's long. It's worth it.
Start with misery.
For almost all of human history, misery wasn't a crisis. It was the default. Your ancestors were born poor, lived poor, buried half their children, and died poor. Around 1800, roughly 9 out of 10 humans lived in what we'd now call extreme poverty. Even kings lived worse than you: no antibiotics, no anesthesia, no light after sunset.
Today it's around 1 in 10.
That didn't happen because someone finally designed the perfect system. It happened because, in a few corners of the world, people were left free enough to trade, try, fail, and try again. Property rights. Prices. Contracts. Rule of law. Boring words. They built everything you have.
Now meet Friedrich Hayek.
An Austrian economist who watched his continent fall to two ideologies that both promised to organize society from the top. In 1944 he wrote The Road to Serfdom. A year later he wrote a short essay that should be required reading in every high school: The Use of Knowledge in Society.
His insight is simple and devastating. The knowledge needed to run an economy doesn't exist in one place. It's scattered across millions of heads: the baker who knows flour just got expensive, the nurse who knows which shift is understaffed, the farmer who knows his soil. No committee, no ministry, no genius can gather it all. Prices are the miracle that lets all that knowledge talk to itself without anyone being in charge.
When you replace prices with plans, you don't get a smarter economy. You get a blind one.
His friend Karl Popper made the same point about history itself in The Poverty of Historicism, a book dedicated to the countless people who died because someone believed history had a destination and that he alone knew the way.
Then the 20th century ran the experiment. Not once. Everywhere.
The Soviet Union was planned from Moscow. It collapsed in 1991, after famines, gulags, and bread lines in a country with some of the best farmland on earth.
Mao's China gave us the Great Leap Forward and tens of millions dead of hunger. Then Deng opened markets in 1978, and roughly 800 million people escaped extreme poverty. Same people. Same culture. Different rules.
Korea: same peninsula, same language, same ancestors. Look at a satellite photo at night. One half is lit. The other is dark.
Germany: one nation split in two. The side that called itself the workers' paradise had to build a wall to stop its workers from leaving.
Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves on the planet. Nearly 8 million people have fled it.
Cambodia lost about a quarter of its population in the name of starting over from year zero.
Every time. Different continents, different cultures, different leaders, same ending. At some point it's not bad luck. It's the design.
"But I mean Denmark." Fair. But Denmark isn't socialist. Its own prime minister told a Harvard audience in 2015 that Denmark is a market economy. The Nordics are free-market countries that chose to fund a big welfare state with the wealth markets created. That's a debate worth having. It's not the same debate.
Now let me tell you about my country.
France is the closest thing the developed world has to a live test of "the state will take care of it." Public spending is around 57% of GDP, among the highest on earth. Public debt is above 110% of GDP. The national education system employs over a million people, one of the biggest employers in the world.
And right now, French high school students are blockading hundreds of schools. Their complaints: not enough teachers, crumbling buildings, overloaded schedules. On October 1st, the entrance hall of a high school in Nantes was destroyed by a deliberate fire during a blockade.
Read that again. In the country that spends more than almost anyone and centralizes more than almost anyone, kids are in the street because the system can't give them a teacher and a building that works.
And the demand you hear most? More funding. More state. More of what built the problem.
I'm French. I get the anger. The anger is legitimate. The diagnosis is backwards.
One ministry in Paris trying to run thousands of schools is Hayek's problem in miniature. The principal knows which teacher is missing. The parents know which roof leaks. The ministry knows a spreadsheet.
So here's what I want to say to every young person, in France or in America, who's tempted by the idea that the system just needs more power to finally get it right:
You're allowed to want it. That's your right. But you don't have to guess. You have something no generation before you had: the full archive. Every experiment has been run, documented, photographed, counted. The famines have numbers. The walls have dates. The boat people have names. The night photo of Korea is one click away.
Your ancestors paid for that knowledge. Some with their savings, some with their freedom, many with their lives. They left you the results.
Respect your ancestors. Read what they left you.
Read Hayek. Read Popper. Read Solzhenitsyn. Read Orwell, who was a socialist and still told the truth about totalitarianism.
And then build. Because the thing that pulled humanity out of misery was never a plan. It was millions of free people trying things.
That's you. That's the job.
https://x.com/brivael/status/2111105992091967561?s=20
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