I recently encountered the Proust Questionnaire. It is a regular feature in “Vanity Fair” magazine, where it is answered by a guest celebrity. When I got about halfway through I thought, “Voila! This would be a good architecture for an interview with a very objective voluntaryist.”
Tag: wisdom
Stop Looking For Something That Works
Sometimes things will work really well for other people, but they won’t work so well for you. Sometimes things won’t work out for other people, but they’ll work really well for you. Professional advertisers have a phrase for this: “Individual results may vary.”
Be More Than a Spectator in Your Own Mind
Without a correct understanding of how to use their potent minds to receive new information, intelligent people will lead lives of wasted opportunity. The principles of effective thinking are what allow you to tap into the totality of your capabilities. Effective thinking makes your curiosity viable.
Free Market Capitalism Saves Lives
It is not only that Free Market Capitalism has raised our level of comfort and given us enormous product variety, but also that many people throughout the world have come to depend on these technological innovations for their very existence. The wealthier society sees technology as luxurious but unnecessary and superfluous. The poorer society sees technology as an oasis in a vast desert.
Embody Peaceful Anarchism
It is never too late to attempt to live as an Anarchist or Voluntaryist. One need not wait until a truly voluntary society is realized. One can embody Peaceful Anarchism right now. Do not acknowledge the State, to the best of your ability. Live your life with gentleness, kindness, compassion, and love. Live your life according to your principles.
The More Words, The Less Meaning
There are times I can be quite chatty (and possibly obnoxious and overbearing). But I wonder if maybe the reason that I talk so much is that I am trying vigorously to communicate something for which words do not exist. Something that can only be felt in the deepest part of being. Something that goes beyond words and their usefulness.
State Education: Money
Eventually, per Rothbard, the pols saw that leaving the marching minions holding promises instead of solid specie was a dream come true. But they did also realize that an honorable verbal promise was an oxymoron. Enter the written promise, aka the IOU, aka scrip, aka paper currency. The typical note promised exchange for the purported full amount in gold, not sooner than 1 year hence. Many of the veterans began to barter these slips of paper for those things for which they could not wait a year — things like food!
The Lament of the Merely Decent Economist
The first eye-opening moment for an attentive student in a good introduction-to-economics class occurs when that young man or woman learns to see – or learns to look for – that which remains invisible to most people. Such a student starts to search for the unseen jobs lost as a result of the ‘seen’ jobs created or protected by tariffs. He or she begins to understand that government-imposed prohibitions on the free movement of prices and wages have unseen consequences – invariably bad, and typically borne disproportionately by the very persons the prohibitions are ostensibly meant to help. The man-in-the-street has lots of wrong-headed ideas about economics.
Why Children Protest Going to School
Why all this protest? Education is a good thing, right? Children need to become educated to do well in society. Society goes to tremendous expense and trouble to provide schooling—lots of it!—for every child (whether they want it or not). Are these kids just spoiled ingrates?
Obedience Is The Enemy Of Morality
It is very difficult to judge law enforcement officers and soldiers on the basis of their individual actions because they pride themselves on not acting as individuals, but rather as being the physical manifestations of the State. Nevertheless we must make the effort.