As any good conversation about liberty ought to, it turned to the question of anarchy. Not in the positive, bomb-throwing sense. Anarchy simply meaning society without a political ruler, or without the initiation of violence. I shared with him a deep and rich body of thought, from Linda and Morris Tannehill, to Lysander Spooner, to Frank Chodorov, to Roy Childs, to David Friedman (Milton’s son), to Spencer Heath MacCollum, to Murray Rothbard, to Leo Tolstoy, to Leonard Read, to Randy Barnett, to John Hasnas, to Bruce Benson, to Robert Higgs, to Edward Stringham, to Peter Leeson, to Jeffrey Tucker and more.
Category: Education Through Entrepreneurship
Guns and History
The enslavement, oppression, torture, genocide, forced starvation, concentration camps, and wholesale mass murder wrought by governments on unarmed citizens utterly dwarf by orders of magnitude harms, crimes, and accidents done by armed citizens to one another throughout history.
The Formula for Anxiety
The magnitude of anxiety seems to be equal to the delta between expectations and self-assessment. That means there are two variables to work on to reduce anxiety. Expectations and assessment.
Bojangles vs. Bureaucracy
Unlike the Bojangles employee, the woman working for the bureaucracy has no agency. She has no ability to read the situation, adjust, and do the simple thing that gets the spirit of the law right despite errors in the letter.
Kids Aren’t Stupid
A bunch of people are clamoring to ban vaping, ostensibly because young people are doing it and it’s bad for their health. Young people aren’t stupid. They know it’s not good for their health. Neither are sugar, caffeine, alcohol, sitting around all day, or school. Driving a car dramatically increases chance of death or injury. They know all this too. And, just like all humans, they choose a level of risk they are comfortable with.
Straightforward Communication
What was novel and wild is now kind of tiring. Everyone sounds the same to me now. And they sound the same while not really saying anything. Or at least not anything interesting. They are shouting and flashing big neon lights but my senses are adapted to a noisy, bright environment.
The Battle for Moderate Control Isn’t Worth It
What’s torturous is having a little control but constantly battling with forces outside my control to maintain that sliver. Like sitting in traffic. I control the vehicle, but am at the mercy of other forces for most of the progress that can be made. I’d rather be on an open freeway with total control or in an airplane with none. In the former, I get to call the shots. The latter I get to totally free my mind and laugh at whatever fate brings.
Customer Service as a Way of Life
I’m sitting in a lab lobby waiting to get blood drawn. The receptionist is one of the rudest people I’ve ever overheard. Every time someone checks in, every word she says is edgy and nasty and she seems to have no tone except one that makes people feel like idiots. It was like this last time I came here too. I don’t know what’s going on in her life or why this business allows her to keep her job, but it got me thinking about customer service. How is it learned?
Is There a Market for an ISA Marketplace?
There is so much that could be done to better allocate money across time slices to get capital to its highest time value location for individuals. When you need money isn’t always when you have it and vice versa. I’ve blogged before about a world where you can sell shares in yourself and securitize your future potential wealth.
The Equality of the iPhone
My daughter brought home a busted up Motorola Razor flip phone yesterday. She got it trading stuff with neighbors. It’s still a beautiful piece of hardware. She couldn’t understand how it was so cool when it came out despite doing nothing but calls and texts. I couldn’t explain.