I'll Take a Gordon Gekko Over a Central Banker Any Day

Yes, tweets from multi-billionaire investors can temporarily move single stocks by a dozen percentage points, but actions of central bankers can turn entire markets into multi-year bubbles and generate catastrophic business cycles. So much for the dangers of "concentrated economic power" as compared to those of concentrated political power.

And yet, the typical attitude of a layperson - or, worse still, a pseudo-professional - is to cry for ever more "regulation" of those who wield the former by those who wield the latter, as opposed to the other way around. So much for the persuasiveness of economically-informed comparative institutional analysis vis-a-vis the power of a large-scale Milgram effect combined with a large-scale Stockholm Syndrome.

This, my friends, sums up the extent of the intellectual, psychological, and cultural challenge we face. Best of luck to us all.

A Libertarian Allegory of the Cave

A statist reacts to liberty the same way a prisoner who spent his entire life locked in a pitch-black dungeon would react to light - he recoils from blinding discomfort. Which hardly proves that it's better to sit in the dark. More often than not, to see is to overcome artificially induced blindness.

A Slow But Steady Movement Toward a Voluntary Society

Bitcoin, 3D printing, independent online learning, charter cities, increasing cultural interconnection, optimistic prospects for seasteading, growing black market entrepreneurship, boom in homeschooling, growing distrust of state-sanctioned media, unsustainable state debt. A confluence of positive factors is setting the stage for the development of a voluntary society and for the gradual withering away of the burdensome, dangerous, and embarrassing anachronism of statism. There are reasons to look into the future with cautious optimism.

Why Do Libertarians Oppose the Welfare State?

A libertarian does not oppose the welfare state because he does not care about the poor, but because he cares about them too much to believe they deserve being caught in the web of lies, empty promises, perpetual dependence, hate-mongering, and cultural degradation created by self-serving, power-hungry crooks.

Regime Uncertainty and Legal Entrepreneurship

Politicians and bureaucrats undermine entrepreneurship and private investment when they create uncertainty about the security of property rights, contract law, and other “rules of the game.” The risk of regime uncertainty would be significantly smaller under a contractual, polycentric legal order shaped by market entrepreneurs.

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Now That's a Crazy Story if I Ever Heard One

Someone seriously suggested to me the other day that the following accurately describes our condition: once upon a time marauding warlords took over the world, divided it into separate dominions, imposed exploitative levies on every productive inhabitant of the land they controlled, built a vast infrastructure of roads to acquire easy access to their serfs, created an immense apparatus of propaganda, designed to brainwash the serfs into believing that only under the rule of the warlords can they be free men and women, destroyed their dignity, self-reliance, and natural communal bonds by a system of periodic handouts, and finally blurred the distinction between themselves and the serfs by inviting the latter to join the ranks of the former, thus initiating a great, neverending spectacle of everyone trying to live at the expense of everyone else in a vicious cycle of mutual theft and collective hatred. What a crazy thought! Thank God that the compulsory civic education I received for free from the public school system administered by my democratic government inoculated me against such kooky conspiracy theories.

Four Types of Leaders, Ranked from Best to Worst

1. Humanitarian entrepreneur (public-spiritedness + voluntariness)

"The paramount virtue of capitalism is that it fosters progress through diversity and freedom without sacrificing efficiency, justice, and charity. One can be even stronger: it is also more efficient, more just, more charitable, and more egalitarian than any other viable system. Provided only that there is effective dispersal of power, the capitalistic order is driven by competition in manifold ways, in the field of ideas as well as commodities." - G. Warren Nutting

"Business is fundamentally ethical, because no one has to trade. Business is fundamentally noble, because it elevates humanity. Business is fundamentally heroic, because it ends poverty." - John Mackey

2. Prudence-only profit-seeker (self-centeredness + voluntariness)

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own neccessities but of their advantages." - Adam Smith

"Innumerable speculative thinkers, inventors, and organizers, have contributed to the comfort, health, and happiness of their fellow men — because that was not their objective." - Isabel Paterson

3. Pragmatic tyrant (self-centeredness + coercion)

"The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a 'protector,' and that he takes men's money against their will, merely to enable him to 'protect' those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these." - Lysander Spooner

"If one had no choice but to be a slave, private slavery as in antebellum America would be preferable to the kind of collective slave ownership that Eastern Europe recently experienced." - Hans-Hermann Hoppe

4. Would-be philosopher king (public-spiritedness + coercion)

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C.S. Lewis

"Absolute monarchies disposed with less fickleness of the fortunes of one individual than popular absolutisms dispose of the destiny of entire social classes." - Nicolas Gomez Davila