▪️The pear meme is supposed to be a dunk on capitalism, but actually reveals its strength. The fact that pears can be grown in Argentina, harvested, kept fresh for a long journey to Thailand, packed, then shipped to America, and it costs just 63 cents for one of these is pretty efficient!
▪️The beauty of capitalism is that this arrangement of resources, out of infinite other possibilities, was discovered to be an efficient way to bring pear cups to the market. And it was all coordinated voluntarily in win-win trades. It’s pretty miraculous when you think about it.
▪️It’s the people who scoff at this being inefficient who should be ridiculed. They are the ones who are clearly ignorant of markets. Or if it really is so inefficient and wasteful, start a pear company to outcompete it, should be easy right?
It’s bizarre to see them seesaw back and forth that Trump is totally clueless and aloof, just golfing all day, then all of a sudden he’s a dangerous king/dictator who’s diligently plotting to seize absolute power.
▪️This one is frustrating because, while it’s nice to see the vigor and speed that DOGE is acting with, they’re also sloppy with some of their findings. This is not some bombshell, millions of dead people’s SS numbers aren’t being paid out to fraudsters.
▪️This problem has been known for some time, you can read an inspector general’s report from 2015 about millions of names on the SS “numident” not being correctly annotated for deaths, even though they were older than 112 (the oldest known American at the time).
https://oig-files.ssa.gov/audits/full/A-06-14-34030_0.pdf
▪️There are innocent explanations for some of these. Expatriates that died outside the country, for example. Or immigrants given temporary work permit who returned to their country, people issued new numbers for various reasons, etc. However, most are simply due to the govt not diligently keeping track of deaths.
▪️It’s embarrassing that the govt has millions of numbers on the numident that are ...
