🐍 🇺🇸 🛠 Libertarians have disappeared from American politics. Their think tanks and magazines are richly endowed but irrelevant, their ideas exhausted. What happened to champions of free markets and free people?

Socialism is more fashionable today than at any time since the Soviet Union collapsed. It’s back, and its major rival isn’t an ideology of unfettered free markets but right-wing populism. Theodore Roosevelt is a greater inspiration than Ronald Reagan to today’s young Republicans. The man most likely to be the next GOP presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, is more enthusiastic about Huey Long than Milton Friedman. Even the alternative “NeverVance” candidate insiders in Washington prefer – Secretary of State Marco Rubio – has made a point of saying capitalism must be “common-good capitalism.”

Libertarians have disappeared, just as the national debt has blown past $40 trillion. Arguably the most libertarian member of the US House of Representatives, Thomas Massie, lost his primary in May after investing all his political capital in anti-Zionism and the Epstein files. The most libertarian senator, Rand Paul, has not succumbed to the same obsessions but finds himself marginalized in Donald Trump’s second term. He and Rubio were first elected to the Senate the same year; their divergent fortunes tell a tale.

Bold thinking rather than ballot-box popularity had always been libertarianism’s strength – but today the ideas seem exhausted, and there’s no libertarian who provokes or inspires to anything like the degree Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek or Murray Rothbard once did. Libertarian think tanks and magazines are running on fumes; they’re richly endowed but irrelevant.

One need not agree or even sympathize with libertarian philosophy to find all this surprising. Free markets had triumphed by the end of the 20th century, with even Democrats such as Bill Clinton and British Labour party leaders such as Tony Blair adopting pro-market attitudes, if not policies that satisfied libertarians. What had long been radical libertarian views on gay rights, recreational drug use, pornography and vices such as gambling have now become law throughout the western world. Free trade was a bipartisan orthodoxy for decades, and for more than 30 years Americans and Europeans got to reap the benefits – as libertarians believe them to be – of mass migration.

Strangest of all, even as the public’s faith in the institutions of government has plummeted this century, the popularity of anti-government ideology hasn’t risen. Instead, populists and socialists have reaped the harvest of discontent.

⬇️ Continued:

https://spectator.com/article/the-strange-death-of-libertarianism/

https://archive.ph/ahWH5

🇪🇹🇪🇹⚡️ — A moderate internet disruption in Ethiopia has occured. This comes amidst reports that Ethiopia's state-owned internet company Ethio-Telecom has disrupted phone and internet connectivity throughout Tigray, northern Ethiopia.

🇺🇸⚡️ — CNN and MS NOW journalists have been denied access to covering Chinese President Xi Jinping's arrival to the White House for a State Dinner.

📖 🇩🇪 🐣 In 1980, the DDR achieved a miracle. After a decade of labor, E Germany's birthrate had reached 2.0 from a low of 1.2 - effectively hitting replacement birthrate - higher than the US at the time. But, how did they manage to do this? One woman stands out. Inge Lange.

Between 1965 through 1975, the DDR birthrate had gone from 2.5 to 1.5. It was crashing fast. As the head of the Women's Department of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party, Inge Lange could comb the data and see doom coming for the DDR.

Lange was in many ways the primary cause of the DDR's collapsing birthrate. She has been the primary advocate for abortion acces and birth control throughout the 60s and this had been done during a shortage of manpower - Germany had yet to recover from WW2 losses.

However, her friendship with Margot Honecker - wife of the Chairman - meant she had the best means to influence fixes to this disaster she had caused. She had introduced a bug into the DDR's socialist code, and she was going to patch that bug.

Her political formulation became colloquially known as Mutterpolitik, or "Mommy Politics". It was a Dual-earner Model in which the DDR would encourage women to participate both in work and motherhood as socialist ideals.

At it's core was the belief that children should be burden-free and the state should expend capital to make sure it's burden-free. The DDR created a massive spiderweb of childcare and kindergarten, generous maternity time, and State guaranteed job security.

Of course, it must be mentioned here there was a double reason for this childcare support: The DDR was competing with the Church. If they could gain the loyalty of children first, the church wouldn't be able to grab them later.

One example of this can be found when a western Journalist, Colin McGlashan, visited the DDR and found that, past the socialist propaganda, the girls in school were being trained to mothers, not atomized labour. This was an important shift in the socialist culture of the DDR.

Job security was such that even if a Mother decided to leave a job for taking care of the kids, she was guaranteed a role of equal position when she returned to the work force. This may have been a primary motivator for why women started to have kids again.

The DDR evan began copying some of the natalist policies from before the war that promoted families. Cash bonuses were given for each child born, and public housing requests rosters put families at the top rather than single people or foreign labor.

Due to their closeness, West and East Germany could not properly censor each other's radio and television. As such, the DDR could actively play off western culture. The West's obsession with working mothers without any children became one such trope to play off.

For example, at the time West Germany had a meme called the Rabenmutter - Raven Mother. This was a woman who neglected her children for work. The DDR subverted this meme. East Germany had no Rabenmutters!

Some have even stated that because abortion was freely available, but the incentives to have children was all the more higher, this actually created a culture of deciding to have children - to this day, women in Saxony enjoy some of the highest fertility rates.

These efforts brought Lange considerable political clout and was a close friend of the Politburo. However, this closeness resulted in her expulsion from politics after reunification, being somewhat a symbol of DDR oppression despite her efforts.

The DDR Demographic miracle of 1980 was not just a statistical anomaly but the result of comprehensive pro-natalist policies hitherto unreplicated in the West. In fact, to this day, the DDR remains the ONLY European country since 1970 to achieve a growth in fertility rates of .8

Sadly the Birthrate did indeed sink again after 1980 as the DDR went broke, but it is perhaps worth noting that even the post 1980 slump is less than the total collapse following reunification. Once Western cultural values spread East, the DDR was cooked.

One wonders why the example of the DDR is not studied more comprehensively by demographic experts today. By replicating the policies of the DDR, we could quite quickly change the demographic trends in the west. What reason is there not to?

📎 Ælþemplær

📝 European fertility rates only returned to replacement levels under the third Reich during the 1930s and in the DDR during the 1970s. This is rather disturbing as it suggests only authoritarian regimes are capable of sustaining themselves.

Whether they are far right or far left doesn't matter.

📎 Aelthemplaer

🇺🇸🇨🇳⚡️ — President Trump gifts Chinese President Xi Jinping a model of an eagle.

It's my honor to present President Xi with a gift made by an extraordinary American artist, one of the greatest in the world, and designed in personal collaboration with Melania and myself.

The bald eagle is a national symbol of the United States and an embodiment of the free and soaring spirit of America, and we hope it will find a nice place, a wonderful place in Beijing.