People like to debate whether humans are born with either the natural inclination for peace or for violence. I believe this is a false dichotomy. I think history has proven that humans are born with both the natural inclinations for peace and for violence.
Tag: scarcity
Voluntary Law and Order
People are not all the same, and they make different choices because they have different values, circumstances, and levels of understanding. Sometimes those choices are peaceful and wise; sometimes they are not. So what are the best ways to promote good choices and cooperation while preventing and providing resolution for conflict?
Welfare States Encourage Bad Economic Thinking
In the absence of sound economic thinking, which explains why particular resources end up in the hands of particular members of extended social order, there appears a tendency to invent arbitrary pseudo-reasons as to why one’s position in this order is not as satisfactory as one would like it to be.
“Price-Gouging” is Necessary, and Noble
This article by Thomas Sowell from 2004 remains strikingly wise, lucid and elegant, so much so that I always remember it when reading of “price-gouging” accusations.
The Division of Labor is Valuable Even in a Perfectly Equal World
If I can imagine a single scenario in which two people with zero difference in skill or preference can both benefit from the division of labor and exchange, my answer was correct and the professor was wrong. (This was like 10 years ago. Still, can’t let it go.)
Immigration and Social Engineering
Social engineers of all parties and persuasions talk as though an economy is some kind of mechanism to be centrally fine-tuned and overhauled occasionally according to a plan. Even those who style themselves free enterprisers display the central-planning mentality when it comes to immigration.
Become What You Are
Existential development requires you to move beyond physical needs and mental concepts. In that space, you begin to identify yourself as what you are before motion and value judgment. Holding onto this state, even as the world turns on its own axis all around you, is how you mature from your childish beginnings to the potential adult that was always within you.
A Conversation Between Voluntaryists: What’s with IP?
Kilgore and I have had another discussion. This time about intellectual property (IP) laws and their role, if any, in a free society. This topic is not as much of a debate as the last, but still worth having.
Influences I
Whenever someone asks me which philosophers I follow, I very quickly branch off into persons who do not seem to be philosophers within the narrow meaning of the term, lover of knowledge. But how could Mark Twain possibly be not that? If asked who are the great wits, I will come up with a list from all over the place. In what universe would we think Lewis Carroll was not as witty as could be?
Markets and Politics Are Both about Scarcity
People succeed in markets by reducing scarcity–that is, by easing scarcity’s grip on their fellow humans. And the more they ease scarcity’s grip, the greater their success. Profits are earned in competitive markets only by successfully making desired goods and services less scarce than they would otherwise be.