Ben Franklin on investing and compounding

Money makes money.  And the money that money makes, makes money. 

~ Benjamin Franklin

 

Lew Rockwell on how libertarians were right about 9/11

A libertarian must never tire of saying “I told you so.” Nor is there a dearth of opportunities to do so. Before 9-11, for example, it was the libertarians who said that 1990s sanctions against Iraq and broader intervention in the Middle East would inspire terrorism. The libertarians also warned that FAA regulations weren’t really making the airlines secure. The libertarians further saw that hundreds of billions spent on “defense” and “intelligence” weren’t really providing either. 

Thus was 9-11, two years ago, a big “I-told-you-so” moment for libertarians. The hijackers, seething in anger at US policy in the Gulf region and the Middle East, exploited a FAA-regulated system with plenty of loopholes for bad guys, to crash into a major financial center, and the US government, despite all its spending and promises, was powerless to stop it. 

And yet, in this upside-down world, the big message after 9-11 was not that the government and its ways had failed us. Quite the opposite. We were told that the government would save us. It was libertarianism that failed. 

Remember? Hillary Clinton, always exploiting the political moment, said of the efforts to cope on that awful day, “we saw government in action.… It was the elected officials who were leading and comforting.” That’s an odd way to describe running for their lives, prior to seizing power from their bureaucratic bunkers.

Vice President Dick Cheney said, “one of the things that’s changed so much since September 11th is the extent to which people do trust the government, big shift, and value it, and have higher expectations for what we can do.” The triumph of hope over experience! 

George Will wrote that “Sept. 11 forcefully reminded Americans that their nation-state…is the source of their security.… Events since Sept. 11 have underscored the limits of libertarianism.” He is speaking here of the same nation-state that stood by and did nothing as 19 guys with box cutters took down the twin towers.

Francis Fukuyama joined in to proclaim the “fall of the libertarians”: 

[9-11] was a reminder to Americans of why government exists, and why it has to tax citizens and spend money to promote collective interests. It was only the government, and not the market or individuals, that could be depended on to send firemen into buildings, or to fight terrorists, or to screen passengers at airports. 

Albert Hunt of the Wall Street Journal typified this genre of commentary. “It’s time to declare a moratorium on government-bashing,” he wrote. 

For a quarter-century, the dominant public culture has suggested government is more a problem than a solution.… But, as during previous catastrophes, America turns to government in crisis.… For the foreseeable future, the federal government is going to invest or spend more, regulate more and exercise more control over our lives… We will hear much less about the glories of privatization in areas like airport security.… Top Bush administration officials will have to dramatically alter their views on regulation.… Moreover, more muscular authority must be given to the new Office of Homeland Security…Tougher security measures at home are unavoidable.… But there is no real debate over expansion in general. Sept. 11 has underscored the centrality of government in our lives. 

So it went, across the political spectrum. The idea was that the events of that day had somehow refuted all our slogans about cutting government, privatization, personal liberty, markets, and peace. Clearly, they said, it was excessive liberty that had led to this disaster. It was cuts in government, and too little foreign belligerence, that brought it on, while the public sector, from the New York firemen to the military bosses who exacted vengeance abroad, saved us.

~ Lew Rockwell, "Times Change, Principles Don't," Mises Wire, September 11, 2003

 

James Bovard on warnings prior to 9/11

I think if the American people had known how [many] warnings, how many signals the U.S. had ahead of time of this potential hijack conspiracy, there would’ve been far less of a reaction to rally around the flag and more criticism of the president.  Commentators thought it was great in the weeks after 9/11 that trust in government skyrocketed…  People need to keep their minds open.  People need to keep skeptical and critical.

~ James Bovard, C-SPAN Booknotes, September 25, 2003 (aired November 2, 2003)

2003

 

Nassim Taleb on the need for individual business failure

For the economy to be antifragile and undergo what is called evolution, every single individual business must necessarily be fragile, exposed to breaking - evolution needs organisms (or their genes) to die when supplanted by others, in order to achieve improvement, or to avoid reproduction when they are not as fit as someone else.  Accordingly, the antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility - and sacrifice - of the lower one.

[...]

Now, by disrupting the model, as we will see, with bailouts, governments typically favor a certain class of firms that are large enough to require being saved in order to avoid contagion to other business.  This is the opposite of healthy risk-taking; it is transferring fragility from the unfit to the collective.

~ Nassim Taleb, Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder, pp. 74-75

 

Steve Eisman on the AI ecosystem

I think about it like a chain.  So you've got Nvidia selling the chips.  Nothing wrong with selling chips.  You've got the hyperscalers buying the chips.  Nothing wrong if somebody buys the chips.  Where it starts to get squishy is something like 70% of AI revenue of the hyperscalers is just from OpenAI and Anthropic, and that's about 25% to 35% of their entire cloud revenue.  So basically, if you follow the entire chain down, the entire ecosystem is dependent on two companies - to say that they lose billions is a euphemism - and one of them I think is in trouble, which is OpenAI.

~ Steve Eisman, "Stock Picking in Difficult Times with George Noble," The Real Eisman Playbook, 16:40 mark, September 21, 2026 

 

Jacob Hornberger on how FDR provoked the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor

By now, the evidence overwhelmingly establishes that President Franklin Roosevelt wanted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to take place.  He desperately wanted to intervene in the war against Nazi Germany, but he faced a virtually insurmountable obstacle — the American people, most of whom firmly opposed U.S. entry into a second world war. 

Of course, this was during a time when presidents were still abiding by the U.S. Constitution’s requirement of a congressional declaration of war before a president could wage war against another nation-state.  FDR knew that he had virtually no chance whatsoever of securing such a declaration from Congress.

FDR knew that his only chance for getting the U.S. embroiled in World War II was to provoke Germany or Japan into attacking the United States.  In that case, he would be able to exclaim, “We’ve been attacked!  We’re innocent!  We were just minding our own business!  We have no choice but to defend ourselves!  Now, give me my declaration of war.” 

That’s what FDR’s oil embargo on Japan was intended to do — to provoke Japan into attacking the United States.  By preventing Japan from securing enough oil to fuel its war machine in China, FDR aimed to have Japan attack the U.S. Pacific Fleet so that Japan would have a free hand in securing oil in the Dutch East Indies without U.S. interference. 

When Japan attacked military ships at Pearl Harbor, FDR got what he wanted … and more.  Not only did he get his declaration of war against both Japan and Germany, he also got an aroused populace that immediately dropped its opposition to entry into World War II, rallied ’round the flag, and became enthusiastic supporters of the war. 

~ Jacob Hornberger, "Was 9/11 a New Pearl Harbor?," Power & Market, September 15, 2026

 

Dan Wang on the U.S. vs. China

I start my book, my very first paragraph, to say that Chinese and Americans are more alike than any other people...  They're the two great founts of entrepreneurial dynamism in the world.  It is Shenzhen and Silicon Valley that are inventing the future and not so much Europe and Japan any longer.  There's kind of a hustle energy, there's a hastiness... [25:30]

That's another similarity between the U.S. and China: They're often very future-oriented.  They have a sense of optimism, much more so than the Europeans who have a sense of optimism only about the past. [27:45]

[...]

Maybe we can say that China right now has some of the control paranoia of the Soviet Union, some of the manufacturing excellence of Japan and some of the American entrepreneurial hustle.  You combine all of that and that is part of the reason that I think that China is going to be a pretty formidable power going forward.  [1:05:50]

[...] 

I think that China will not become anything like a cultural superpower in part because the engineers are so censorious.  They're so thin-skinned, they censor everything they can't understand, which is a lot.  If you take a look at a lot of aspects of cultural prediction, whether that is books, novels, films, China really has become much more constricted over the past 12 years of Xi's rule.  I think that China will not become anything like a big financial superpower in part because the control tendencies of the engineers is to impose a lot of capital controls and that makes it much more difficult for foreigners to want to hold RMB.  [1:10:20]

[...]

I want the U.S. to be 20% more engineering and I want China to be 50% more lawerly.  I think that it would be amazing if the Chinese state actually respected the creative impulses of its own people... if individual rights would actually be respected.  [1:30:00]

[...]

We can and should recognize both of these things, that repression can grow worse while technological dynamism grows richer.  I always feel myself that I have to fight this two-front war against people who think that China will collapse because of all the repression or that, because China's economic growth has been so impressive at lifting so many millions of people out of poverty, that gives the Communist Party a free pass on all of the sorts of violations that it has inflicted upon the people.  I think we can acknowledge both things are true, that the Communist Party has grown oppressive in more novel ways over the past 10 to 30 years; at the same time, it has grown richer and more technologically capable.  [1:37:20]

~ Dan Wang, "Dan Wang - The US vs China in the 21st Century," Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, October 16, 2025