The Snowball: Picture wealth as a snowball rolling down a hill, growing as it goes. That is what a free economy looks like when you leave it alone. Every voluntary trade packs a little more snow onto the ball. A farmer sells grain, a carpenter builds a table, a programmer writes code, and each exchange adds mass. Nobody has to push the snowball. Gravity does the work. Human beings acting freely, producing and trading with each other, is the gravity. It requires no plan and no permission. It only requires that nobody stops it. Now picture the state standing on the hillside with a spade. Every tax is a scrape off the side of the ball. Every new regulation slows the roll and shaves off mass before it can gather more. Every dollar the central bank prints doesn’t add snow at all. It paints the surface white while the real ball underneath stays the same size or shrinks. British pedophile John Maynard Keynes gave the state a respectable theory for running the printing press, and every government since has run with it. Government can scrape at a rate that matches the snowball’s natural growth, and the economy will look flat. Stagnant. You will be told this is just how mature economies behave. It is not. It is the sound of a spade keeping pace with gravity, one taking exactly what the other creates. Scrape harder than the ball grows and you don’t get stagnation. You get a shrinking economy while the people holding the spade insist they are helping it grow. Argentina has run this experiment for decades. Zimbabwe ran the printing-press version to its logical end. The snowball wants to grow. It has wanted to since the first human traded a fish for a spear. All it has ever needed from any government is to be left alone on the hill. Every scrape, every scoop, every pass of the spade is an extraction made by someone who did not build the snowball and does not own it, but is taking his cut anyway.

What I've read recently: Snowball - Warren Buffett Biography (9.7/10) Lessons about scaling up of Berkshire Hathaway and deep dive into Warren's childhood and what made him a good investor. Undisputedly the pound for pound GOAT of playing capital markets at the highest level. Beneath the Cards - Garrett Adelstein (7.9/10) Autobiography and story telling of the journey through high stakes poker from one of the most winning cash game players. Was insightful and related to a lot of the childhood stories and motivations behind becoming successful but too much time spent addressing the J4o hand with Robbi and too little poker stories. Would have been great to have detailed history of earnings, insight into frameworks applied to other ventures, etc. @junkbondinvest's newsletter, insightful breakdown of fixed income markets specifically the MSTR STRC offering and current game theory surrounding credit markets in AI.

Cancellations of US EV projects and related battery facilities have snowballed since Trump returned to office, killing or jeopardizing tens of thousands of jobs, according to a Reuters analysis of Atlas Public Policy data. Most of those investments had been planned for states Trump won in 2024