Category Archives: ideas

Any society needs some defense against crime. Statists claim that this is the state’s job and there’s no other way to do it. Anarchists (anarcho-capitalists, at least) claim that the market can provide this service as efficiently as any other. It has always been clear to me that a free society would develop a system [...]

I’ve been thinking about the nature of government and why some form of it exists in every territory on Earth. About two years ago, my thinking brought me to oppose the very existence of the state, on the grounds that it is necessarily a coercive institution. Matt Palmer writes on Mises Daily about Rothbard’s view [...]

I wrote yesterday on the Supreme Court’s ruling on campaign financing. A good friend of mine left a great comment. My response ended up longer than any post I’ve made on this blog, so I’ve given it its own post. corporations are solely obligated to act in the best interest of their stockholders. They don’t [...]

When people think of things from which they need protection, there’s nature and there’s other people. Nature is easy enough to deal with, mentally: have shelter available, leave the snakes alone, don’t live in the path of annual hurricanes. Through division of labor, we’ve managed to thwart much of what nature throws at us. But [...]

When I think of what’s really going as we drive around in our cherished automobiles, particularly when comparing to times before Henry Ford, I’m often amazed that we aren’t all fucking dead. (I’ll credit my brother for voicing this after the big spinout, but it had previously occurred to me in the same words.) I [...]

Reading The Case Against the Fed today, I learned of the complex election of 1896, and the battle waged between McKinley and Bryan. I had a thought. What would our country’s history look like if the all our presidential elections had gone to the runners-up? Of course, it’s moot because we’d have likely had completely [...]

To accurately compute and track all the interactions of all elements in a system, you’d need a computer/device/modeler at least as complex as the system. In order to track all particles in the universe and predict reality, in order for determinism to be valid, the mechanism of determination needs to be at least as complex [...]

People will eventually figure out how to augment the brain’s senses. We’ll increase our audible frequency ranges, we’ll see more colors, and we’ll have new senses we can’t imagine yet. Magnetic field detectors seem like a good idea. We currently have forms of art for all our senses: food, wine, music, painting, sculpting, film, massage, [...]

The foundation is a blank slate. No claims to any kind of knowledge. Do I have free will? If yes, any amount of it, explore implications. If no, stop here, relax, forget all this, die. I choose to assume I have free will, at least some amount of it. If I’m wrong, I was predestined [...]