Buffett's father, Howard Buffett, was perhaps the most libertarian congressman in U.S. history.
He was also a vehement opponent of foreign military intervention, including military aid:
"Even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns. Persuasion and example are the methods taught by the Carpenter of Nazareth, and if we believe in Christianity we should try to advance our ideals by his methods. We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home. We cannot talk world cooperation and practice power politics."
Cryptocurrency is just a technology to give people the means to generate assets, and transfer them, themselves. Advocating that the state's monopoly on violence be employed to prohibit people from using this technology is incredibly illiberal.
They're in control and responsible for their responses. Blaming someone else for one's anger or overreaction is indicative of abuse. "You made me lash out," is simply not a mature way to live one's life.
UV is not so dangerous that you can't step in the room for a few seconds. Moreover, there's a significant number of precautionary measures you can take, like wearing UV-resistant sunglasses when you enter the room. There are also UV lamps that have timers on them, so you can have it automatically turn on and off when you're not there.
Like the Soviet Union, the European Union operates at a scale where it can feasibly create a nearly full suite of goods/services in parallel to the market alternative.
There are many other countries in the world. The world will go on, even with reduced trade with the US. We will just increase trade with Canada, Australia, Japan, etc. and even China.
Many of these tools could be seen as better than the American alternatives in certain respects (e.g., being more privacy-focused). If any country could be boldly compared to the Soviet Union in terms of protectionism, it’s more likely the United States these days.
It's interesting that you imply the European Union is communist or state capitalist in a similar way to the Soviet Union or that European Alternatives are not part of the market, analogous to state-produced consumer goods in the Soviet Union. It's especially interesting (which is a nice way of saying preposterous) considering the primary function of the European Union has always been a European single market (the EEA includes the EU and EFTA) to ease trade between countries in Europe, with most other concerns logically following downstream from that (e.g. moving towards a United States of Europe is a logical consequence of the need for a state to back the Euro which was a logical consequence of the desire to avoid currency exchange when trading goods within the EEA).
Considering the only thing the Soviet Union and the EU have in common is part of their names in English and there's literally no similarity between Soviet consumer products and European Alternatives other than that they're foreign to the US, I struggle to understand what the point of your comment is supposed to be as good faith demands I assume the nonsensical implication is unintentional.
The EU is of course much more market-based than the Soviet Union, but the analogy is not totally without merit.
Legislation like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the Digital Services Act (DSA), and the Forestry Regulation, as well as heavy tax burdens and expansive restrictions on contracting freedom in the labor sector, have resulted in a situation where no EU company founded from scratch in the last 50 years has a market capitalization exceeding €100 billion, while the US has six such companies valued over €1 trillion. Also, the EU has only 14 publicly traded companies, founded from scratch within the last 50 years, worth at least $10 billion, with a combined market cap of $430 billion. In contrast, the US has 241 such companies (data here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1e3MnYQ044U1gzi_8bDMo...), and they're collectively worth nearly $30 trillion — almost 70 times the EU total.
I don't agree with the notion that the existence of a few mega-corps is a useful metric. Of course the US is the more free market, and allows those oligopolies to exist. The EU would have split up those companies years ago.
PPP statistics don't account for the lower value of ersatz products/services. They artificially equate the value of product/service suites across countries, instead of relying on market price signals to gauge value.
That is definitely one measure, but it is also an economy where someone working at the restaurant in a hotel in Miami earns about one bottle of water per hour. If the bottled water is expensive or if the salary is low is a matter of perspective.
And most "productivity" stats use GDP as a proxy for the productiveness of output, which is of course biased with the aforementioned overvaluation - the fact that in the US a burger costs $25 with tax and tips included, but 15 euros in France doesn't mean that a US server and cook are more productive.
And in any case, that is relevant in an EU to Soviet Union comparison how exactly?
The Soviet Union analogy is not a direct comparison. My point was narrower: excessive centralized control, even in a market system, can stifle economic dynamism, much like the Soviet model did in an extreme way. The EU’s heavy regulations (GDPR, DMA, labor laws) aren’t command economics, but they lean toward a similar logic of prioritizing control over freedom, with measurable results.
US stocks may be inflated but the gap — 241 US companies worth $30 trillion vs. 14 EU ones at $430 billion — reflects more than hype. It shows the US consistently produces globally dominant firms, a sign of higher productivity and innovation. The EU’s regulatory burden likely plays a role in why its startups rarely scale that big.
For productivity, I cited the US economy being 50% larger (nominal GDP: ~$28T vs. ~$18T for the EU). Your ECB source doesn't contradict my point. It used a baseline of 2019 for both regions, to measure productivity growth, but the regions started at different baselines in 2019.
Anyway, getting back to my point: the US does a better job of creating new industries in large part because it avoids the EU’s regulatory morass and therefore has a more market-based economy.
There was this little thing called World Wars that decimated a lot of capital of all kinds (demographic, financial, materiel, infrastructure) which USA exited in completely different position - one of oversupply of all the above to the point that Marshall Plan helped USA as much as it helped Europe by providing an extension of demand for USA industry.
The entire Silicon Valley exists because that windfall was allowed for the most ridiculous defense spending in the world which went on to create the baseline that private investment could continue (though there was considerable dip when the defense spending got cut in 1990s, private demand by then could continue).
In comparison, wider common market in EU is mostly, well, a thing from 1993 - the EEC had partial one, but it's only since 1993 that you could reasonably treat EU market similarly as USA one, which heavily impacted just how big you could grow as company (you need people to buy your products/services after all). And you still have to deal with things like multiple languages whereas for USA it's viable to have just limited english support.
Combine this with huge impact of retirement funds looking for investment opportunities and zero interest rates for long time, you have conditions where in USA you could get multi million investment for a juice company with overengineered juicer. It's essentially law of large numbers there, lots of churn will get you more even if actual successful companies are lower percentage - the scale does it.
And let's be honest, a lot of US investment capital (including Y-Combinator!) did a lot to ensure that prospective founders from Europe founded the company at least partially in USA (in case of YC, even focusing on SFBA).
Also, you mention GDPR, when it's one of the easiest regulations to deal with in my experience (it actually cleared up stuff that existed before). The DSA and DMA only become really strict once you have MAU bigger than adult population of many of EU countries (more than 10% of total EU population).
Honestly, for startup, a lot of it is easy checklist of "don't do that" - the most you might have to do is to look at what goes through the brains of your marketing dept once you have one and prevent them from going crazy with tag manager... something that your users would be happy about too.
If anything is missing, it's the large VC industry that was incubated through decades of defense and government spending in USA (guaranteeing demand and customers).
Got it, so you're using arbitrary metrics of economic success and a number of protectionist policies and other regulations to justify your comparison of the European Union to a state capitalist, planned economy with secret police, authoritarian and dictatorial rule, extremely rigid top-down hierarchical governance and tight travel restrictions that is widely known for its massive domestic surveillance apparatus, extreme use of forced labor camps, forced resettlements, violent military suppression of leftist opposition, waves of purges of political sects, and the literal genocide in Ukraine?
That seems like a completely reasonable analogy one would use with no ulterior motives. Assuming, of course, one were completely ignorant of most world history events of the 20th century.
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But you're literally begging the question so let's look at your list. Here's the top 10 biggest companies in the US:
1. Apple
2. Nvidia
3. Microsoft
4. Amazon
5. Google
6. Meta
7. Tesla
8. UnitedHealth
9. Oracle
10. Costco
Right off the bat the odd one out is UnitedHealth. They're a megacorp resulting from the fusion of multiple private health insurance companies - with some of the mergers clearly being considered so concerning for market competition that there were attempts to prevent them, which - as is common in the US - of course failed. This is a company leeching billions of American citizens to act as a middleman for healthcare while Americans still have to pay most of their medical expenses out of pocket. Not to mention the blatant corruption between health insurance companies and medical service providers resulting in completely arbitrary costs with fictional discounts. An inefficiency that has made American healthcare orders of magnitude more expensive than in other developed nations while still providing worse health outcomes for the average citizen and fueling the uniquely American opioid epidemic thanks to decades of prioritizing prescription medications over actually useful diagnostic procedures and treatments.
Let's single out NVidia because its stock price ballooned over the past three years and as the dip following the Deepseek announcement demonstrated has more to do with the general AGI hype train than actual value produced - unless you believe the announcement literally destroyed "$600bn in value" rather than just correcting the clearly absurd valuation of the company.
Amazon has almost single-handedly wiped out most of the retail industry in the US and elsewhere. They have massive control over the cloud infrastructure market. Their in-house brands have a documented history of cloning successful products sold on Amazon and then outcompeting them the same way Amazon initially outcompeted retail with unsustainable price dumping, only to hike up prices once the competition is out of business. This has allowed Jeff Bezos to become one of the richest people on Earth and Amazon to use its market dominance as leverage against individual US states to get sweetheart deals waiving regulations and labor protection laws and securing tax exemptions.
Microsoft and Oracle are deeply entrenched in the enterprise market, especially public service and bureaucracy. Microsoft literally has a public history of an anti-competitive strategy called "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" that was used to harm industry standards and interoperability in order to tighten vendor lock-in. Oracle's problems are less blatant but it also pretty much grew to its size through deliberate vendor lock-in, shady licensing, and malicious and at times illegitimate lawsuits, often using lawfare against open source projects especially. Bill Gates is now using his wealth to open new markets to US pharmaceutical companies under the guise of humanitarianism. Larry Ellison seems to keep more out of the public light while using his billions to influence political campaigns.
Google/Alphabet and Facebook/Meta literally made their billions through the exploitation of the personal information of their users while deliberately misleading them about what data was collected and how it is used. They then used their de-facto monopoly positions in search and social media respectively to sell ads and analytics - and are well-documented to have actively misled customers by fudging their metrics (e.g. Facebook pushed video content in an effort to move news sites to publishing on their platform directly although the success metrics of the videos were deliberately engineered to grossly exaggerate their reach and engagement, harming those sites to the point some went out of business). Meta's prioritization of "engagement" at any cost and insufficient content moderation have directly contributed to multiple genocides and the platform has been used to organize child sexual abuse and live stream spree killings. Google meanwhile dominates the search and browser markets (even most alternative browsers are built on Chromium).
Apple is probably the least actively damaging company of the bunch but its success also is based entirely on the infamous "walled garden" approach of vendor lock-in ranging from software to hardware, in the past literally preventing its software from being used on third party hardware and closely controlling the ability of other manufacturers to interface with its hardware. It has since begun opening up to third parties and using interoperable industry standards - thanks to legal pressure from the EU for selling its products within the EU. It's also pretty much the perfect example for "vertical integration" taken to the extreme.
Tesla's initial value was mostly driven by being in the right spot at the right time (especially thanks to Elon Musk's antics resulting in popular media comparing him to Tony Stark because the Iron Man movies were normalizing comic book characters in wider pop culture and techno-optimism and space-futurism were at their zenith), as well as using the first-mover advantage to build out proprietary charging infrastructure. But its biggest competitive advantage were government subisides in the form of carbon emission credits, which it sold for profit to other manufacturers, raking in literally billions of dollars ($9 billion between 2009 and 2024 alone) at zero cost to Tesla itself. Tesla's present valuation however is largely the consequence of its stock price massively ballooning in 2020 - the most likely reasons for which are 1) its ability to remain profitable with literally zero production due to the sale of said credits and 2) its "vertical integration" (read: use of proprietary parts rather than relying on suppliers), i.e. again vendor lock-in.
The reason Tesla's stock price remains mostly stable (the recent drop thanks to its association with Elon Musk's current antics notwithstanding) - despite the company's constant failings with the Cybertruck, quality issues and the yearly promises of FSD being imminent - seems to be mostly tied to its inclusion in various funds and derivatives because of its meteoric rise. Either way this success has allowed Elon Musk to literally buy his way into one of the arguably most influential positions of power via the Trump government, directly controlling a legion of unelected interns dismantling US government services from within.
SpaceX (not publicly traded, so not in your list) meanwhile has a number of lucrative government contracts (mostly with US agencies but also internationally), especially because of its increasingly dominant position in satellite broadband which as demonstrated in Ukraine does not only provide them (and Elon Musk) with an economic advantage but also the ability to exert direct political influence over geopolitical events.
The massively influential prison industrial complex (maintaining the US's leader in number of incarcerated citizens both relative to its population and in absolute numbers) and military industrial complex (which are uniquely influential in the US federal government, rivaled only by Elon Musk himself now) of course also aren't something I'd expect anyone to brag about.
I can't really say anything bad about Costco though. Their failings mostly seem to be the result of the poor state of consumer protection, health and safety, and animal cruelty laws in the US and they genuinely seem to seek to improve those issues when they become public. Sinegal, Brotman and James all seem to be genuinely decent people and the company policy has fairly explicitly been shaped by the idea of putting customers and employees over shareholders - quite unlike the general consensus in the US following Milton Friedman.
In the EU, most of these companies couldn't have existed because they'd have run afoul of antitrust legislation, consumer protection laws, labor laws, health and safety laws, etc - either at the EU level or at a member state level (which would likely have fueled EU legislation to standardize the laws across member states). The DMA and DSA were literally created because of the anti-competitive behavior of some of these companies and their outsized influence across multiple markets. The GDPR was literally created because of the massive violations of privacy and the demonstrable harm caused by them.
The EU is not without its flaws. As I said, it's literally a Free Trade Agreement at its heart and the poor cooperation during COVID hopefully dispelled its loftier claims. But if you think the existence of practical monopolies in the US is a demonstration of the US's superior "free market", your "freedom" looks a lot more like feudalism with extra steps.
the difference being that the EU is in the market. The US is easing its debt by boosting profits, but this will only work temporarily. Otherwise, the US will gradually slip out of the market. Of course no one has a crystal ball, or if someone has one it doesn't really predict the future... we'll see!
> The US is easing its debt by boosting profits, but this will only work temporarily.
I mean, it's hard to see how it would work at all! Their tariff take is simply not going to be sufficient to move the needle very much, and it's not implausible that the revenue loss on income and corporate tax due to lost economic growth will be larger.
Mercantilism doesn't work, there's plenty of evidence that the current policies are really bad for the US and the global economy, there's no silver lining to them, not even the temporary "boosting profits", which won't happen.
If the future can't be predicted that's because one can't predict when Trump and his imbeciles will be stripped of power.
It's pretty well established that the vast majority of hunter-gatherer societies saw a much larger proportion of the population die from violence than typically seen in more advanced types of societies.
The author wants you to believe the Irish Famine was caused by free-market extremism. This couldn't be further from the truth. Ireland wasn’t starving because of free markets — it was starving because Britain’s mercantilist policies blocked it from importing food from outside the empire.
The British forced Ireland to rely on their overpriced grain, banned direct imports from the U.S. and Europe, and kept tariffs high with the Corn Laws — all while millions starved. That’s not laissez-faire. That’s imperial economic control designed to keep Ireland dependent on politically connected domestic producers.
O’Toole’s omission of this amounts to deception. He’s twisting history to fit a narrative, blaming capitalism while letting British trade restrictions, protectionism, and outright exploitation off the hook.
The Irish Famine was a disaster of Britain's mercantilist policies. Whitewashing that to score political points for his illiberal domestic agenda is an insult to history.
The mercantilist economic policy of the UK was an abject failure that made its people poorer and prevented the import of cheap food.
But the UK’s unwillingness to provide sufficient aid once the famine had already started was motivated by laissez-faire politics and a Malthusian belief that the famine was the Irish’s own fault for overbreeding.
Remember that the government with the support of the Whigs and Radicals actually repealed the Corn Laws, it was just too little too late. Ironically the Whig’s free market beliefs if enacted in policy much earlier might have prevented the famine from happening in the first place, while simultaneously meaning they weren’t interested in properly mitigating it once it did happen.
The blame has to ultimately be placed at the feet of the mercantilist policies. Once they restricted trade, they were responsible for the welfare of the Irish. So, these arguments that they made, that the Irish were responsible for overbreeding, were not a product of laissez-faire ideology, just their bastardized understanding of it.
This shift is long overdue. The EU has an economy 10 times larger than Russia's, and yet somehow is dependent on the U.S. to fund its military and its efforts to counter Russia in Ukraine.
No. Sites shouldn't have to ID everyone that uses them. The internet shouldn't be turned into a nursery for children just because parents don't want to do their job and supervise their children while they're on the internet. If you want a curated internet that is child-appropriate, then you create your own private internet. You don't force the rest of the world to censor itself.
Decoding any part of his memories would be the greatest archeological coup in history, by a massive margin.
By some estimates, the cerebral cortex can store hundreds of terabytes of information. Recovering even 0.1% of that would amount to possibly hundreds of GB of information about life in a major Roman urban center.
I thought a lot of this stuff was basically below conscious thought. You can interrupt it but otherwise the urge to breathe and the corresponding breathing proceeds apace. I've been told that in ventilator-dependent patients if the ventilator has too low a breath rate they still have the urge to breathe and feel it quite painfully until the ventilator takes a breath for them.
If you pass out under water because you run out of oxygen you will immediately resume breathing and drown.
Well, comparing the pictures of solarpunk with my perceived reality I sadly have to disagree.
(solarpunk is about a bit more than having 30% of energy with solar and wind)
He was also a vehement opponent of foreign military intervention, including military aid:
"Even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns. Persuasion and example are the methods taught by the Carpenter of Nazareth, and if we believe in Christianity we should try to advance our ideals by his methods. We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home. We cannot talk world cooperation and practice power politics."
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