Tax Your Imagination A free market critique

By Kristopher Joseph
Oct. 22, 2014

The following is a critique of the online book, Tax Your Imagination by
Steve Consilvio found on behappyandfree.com

--

First of all, I want to whole-heartedly applaud you Steve for the well-
reasoned and forthright work you have accomplished in writing this book. It
was both inspirational and though provoking. You truly made me reassess
many of the long-held beliefs I have about politics and the economy. You
should be proud of your effort to bring your ideas out in the open.

While reading this I highlighted several passages that I wanted to directly
comment on so you can digest my perspective on some of your tenets and
ideas. On the whole I find no objection to your views on the current state of
the economy in relation to the effects of how money is used and abused.

But before I get into the nuts and bolts of my general critique to certain
passages, I want to say upfront that regardless of my personal opinion to
how you believe we can get out of this mess, it can only be feasible with a
sharp reduction in the state, and not an increase. I will explain why in
further detail later but the immediate reason is that the vast majority of
economic ill is due to the injection of the state in the private affairs of
citizens. Again, I will cite reasons why as I respond to select passages.

I am in favor of a free society with strictly limited government because I see
it as a natural progression of the history of politics. As society was ravaged
century over century by the death, destruction and tyranny of the marriage of
church and state, we evolved our politics to demand a separation of church
and state to set us free from the gross infractions on basic liberty, justice and
individual rights.

I believe now we are entering the next evolutionary period where the people
should demand a separation of the state from the economy. The infractions
here are sometimes more subtle and more complex for everyday people to
see, and the political structures so jealously guard their justifications for
meddling in the economy that they have become masters of propaganda and
scare tactics to keep people of the basic mindset that the state must intervene
in the economy or else the wheels will fall off.

The struggle of ideas of the states involvement in the economy is to
ultimately decide on the existence of the state itself. If history is any guide to
this discussion, there is overwhelming evidence that the biggest hindrance to
economic growth and the standard of living of the masses is directly related
to the size and scope of the state in economic affairs. Indeed, those areas of
the world that has the most economic freedom from government enjoy a
higher quality of life and are open to more opportunities than those that have
less economic freedom. I often use the example of Hong Kong in relation to
Mainland China.

I know this does not get to the heart of your argument, but it is a necessary
statement to make as this critique is developed. In more direct relation to
your argument, I concede that massive corruption, inequities and moral
hazard is rampant in todays economic landscape. On these points I do not
defend or chastise the extremes of the free market or totalitarianism. The
system is not the problem as you eloquently point out, its the math (2+2=5)

From my point of view, even if we as society accept the premise that
(2+2=5) is the cause of our calamities, this will not be enough for a society
to achieve the enlightenment it needs to move forward. But I will concede
that this realization is a vital step in the right direction.

My main concern here is not to dispel the theories that you laid out in your
book, but rather to argue for the preferable economic environment in which
your ideas could be set into motion. I am of the opinion that every idea
should be allowed to see the light of day to see if it can be a benefit to
society. Only then can we learn about ourselves to make informed decisions
on how to evolve and move forward.

Ideas have the biggest chance to take stage when a society is most free to
exercise them. True freedom means that in any part of a society, people can
experiment with their ideas without fear that a bureaucrat will shut them
down or alter the original concept. A society must be as free as possible so
sharing of the most effective ideas can rise to the top. The state has a vested
interest in justifying their existence, and part of that existence is adherence
to a limited set of ideas. The more free a person is, the smaller role the state
plays in their daily lives, because they are too busy exploring new ideas to
make their lives better and more enjoyable.

Therefore, my final conviction will be that if you really want to see the ideas
of your book see the light of day, and you are presented with a choice of
having a free society (anti-statist) or a regulated society (statist), you must
choose a free society without reservation. I say this in the anecdotal
agreement that everything you say in your book is right.

Another way of saying this is to suppose that in a true free society, you
could freely associate with people who are of in total agreement with your
ideas and you could freely practice them by creating your own
commonwealth. We see this in a related form in America with the Amish.
While at the same time, in another area, there are people practicing
capitalism, and in another area there are people practicing socialism.

The state would play little role in these separate affairs and would only exist
to protect the individual rights of each citizen from physical harm or fraud.
In a free society, it is completely feasible that the success of your
commonwealth will spread like a positive virus and infect all the capitalists
and socialists and they could join you in creating a new society with all the
benefits that you talk about in your book. It must be reiterated that this could
only happen when there is a complete separation of state from the economy.

A free society must be free. It must be free to make mistakes, learn from
them and try new ideas, make more mistakes, evolve from them and grow.
Our history of centuries upon centuries of murder and tyranny finally gave
way to the experiment of free markets and individual rights. These of course
were not without error. They too are making the same mistakes as a dictator
or a king. But these mistakes must be made by free people without the hand
of the state trying to intervene. When a state intervenes it halts the natural
evolution of a society to grow and learn. Most of history was a struggle
against the state to live another day. Now we are in a struggle with the state
to manage our own affairs as free people.

If we continually decide that the state must play a bigger and bigger role in
our lives, we will get exactly what we wish for Our lives run by the state.
Under this model there is no room for a commonwealth or a free market to
be tried. There is no room for new ideas to be experimented with. There is
no room for enlightenment. When the state is handling every step of our
private affairs we cease to think for ourselves or others. We become nothing
more than mindless parrots of whatever the state wants us to do to maintain
order.

Indeed, it is safe to say that a true free market has never been tried, and to
the extent that a market was free, so too were the best and brightest seeds of
ideas allowed to be planted and grow. That is not to say there are not
monetary problems and harm done by the profit motive, but we will not
learn from these mistakes if the state is always there to sweep up our messes
when we get out of line. More often than not, their solutions only make
small problems bigger ones. If you really feel that the profits gained from
2+2=5 are the root of all problems, then this idea needs to be allowed to play
out its course to fruition in a free society. You cant just stop the music when
a sour note is played, you must keep playing until the movement is over.
Only then can we as a society judge was is beneficial and what must be
removed. The state in this regard distorts this process by injecting
unnecessary controls of things that are uncontrollable.

In a sense, Im on your side. I ultimately want you to have the freedom to
see your idea of a commonwealth can be a success. I want you to be able to
influence those around you to practice what you preach. Let people decide
freely without legislation how they want to handle their economic affairs. If
youre right, great, I applaud you and would gladly join you if I thought that
your way of life would benefit all of society. But the prerequisite is that the
state must be reined in or else the prevailing idea will be abused into an
abhorrent form of what was originally intended. This is where history is
again our guide. I have no doubts that countries of communism and
socialism could have saved lives of millions of people if the governments
that practiced them did not so horribly distort them.

As much as I disagree with collectivist economic theory it matters not in the
grander goal of allowing people the freedom to practice whatever theory
they desire. In the end, the systems are economic; they are not inherently
evil in that all systems are just blueprints on how to manage an economy. An
economic system does not murder people, only governments have the power
to institute death as economic policy.

Since I believe in a society free from statism, is goes that I also support
those systems which operate from models that do not require the state to
function, i.e. free markets and laissez-faire capitalism. I can argue until Im
blue in the face that socialist theories are immoral, but that only creates
breakdowns in communication, because people are usually so attached to a
certain theory that the only way for them to change their mind is to live in
different societies that practice different systems so they can make an
informed judgment.

To argue for a free market is not say that I think its the system for an ideal
future, Im saying that its the best system where new ideas in innovation
can flourish. Another way of saying this is its the best system to evolve into
or build a commonwealth than a system that is run by a controlling state.

--

For the following passages from your book in italic, I offer my personal
analysis in red for your consideration:


There is no worse example of the ends justifying the means than the
banality of profit.

This sounds like a very narrow view of the basic utility of profit. If I sell
something for more than it cost me to produce it, the profit I make is only
the result of the buyer that willfully valued what I produced more than the
price that I sold it for. If it were less valued at the given price, then he
wouldnt buy it. The profit is then used to buy or trade other things that other
people produce that are of value to the seller. It is also spent on producing
more of the product that is being sold or it is spent on feeding and providing
for family or friends that cannot produce wealth for whatever reason.

The natural law and invisible hand claims of a self-regulating marketplace
are dead wrong.

To make such a claim is to deny historical fact that the relative free market
that was created in the 19
th
Century exponentially raised the standard of
living of millions of people living in abject poverty for over ten centuries
during the dark ages. A regulated market that was prevalent before self-
regulating market gave no thought to the common man or the free will to
raise his standard of living through his own means. People were subjects
of some authority and their labor was only to serve a master who had
arbitrary power over their means of survival. A self-regulating market
works in that it assumes an environment that leaves people free to pursue
their own economic ends without coercion from an external force. The
invisible hand is simply saying that a possible by-product of me pursuing
my interests has the potential to indirectly benefit those whom I engage in
economic activity. The beautiful illustration by Adam Smith was that of the
bread maker, who not through his interest of feeding his man, but through
his self-interest of feeding himself and his family was he able to indirectly
benefit other people because traded his bread for other forms of value that
the bread maker could then buy products to feed and care for himself and his
family. The purchased bread is able to feed another who then has the
strength to pursue his own interests and so on. The more successful the
bread maker is the more he is able to indirectly benefit even more people to
pursue their interests. All of this done not for any direct purpose to help his
neighbor eat. Yet all parties involve benefit, not lose from these exchanges.

The proper purpose of money is for the good of all the people

This is a patently false statement as money is nothing more than a means to
conduct trade. Money has no inherent good or bad purpose; only people
have good or bad purposes. Money if anything, is good in the sense that it
allows transactions of trade to be made much more conveniently. It frees
man from having to toil to produce all that he wishes to have for his
happiness.

As a practical matter, the system needs to produce and distribute the
wealth of society

This statement is suggesting that wealth is not currently distributed. This is
not true in the proper perspective. Wealth is a relative term to each
individuals personal values. What you consider wealthy is not what another
considers, the same goes for society. The system is producing wealth
everyday. A persons ability to obtain wealth in a free society is unlimited
whereas in a controlled society it is severely limited.

The problem of how shares get distributed, and who makes the decision, is
the role of politics.

This statement is a vote for government statism to intervene in economic
affairs. Politics has shown to be the worse method of deciding how to
distribute shares. This has been proven time and time again that an elected
few or even a democratic majority cannot stop the momentum of people who
want to express their economic goals. Politics will always enact a single
strategy for a diverse group of people with different points of view of how to
achieve their dreams. The well-intended act of wealth distribution does
nothing but create unnatural distortions in the economy that should be
allowed to naturally evolve over time. Politics is too eager to try and speed
up a natural process by enforcing an unnatural one in the name of wealth
distribution. In this environment, people will always disagree with the
proper share they are receiving and ask for just a little more. In a free
market, people will much better learn how to cure the inequalities they are
experiencing because the results will be plain as day to see. When
government intervenes, the solutions and evolutions to a better distribution
become muddled and overly politicized.

Wealth generically, and money specifically, are where the ideas of
commonwealth and fascism intersect. Sometimes they are hard to
separate. Dissonance allows a person to be of two minds: selfless and
selfish.

This statement suggests that one must either be wholly selfless or selfish,
since you call it dissonance when the two are intertwined. There is nothing
inherently wrong with people viewing their wealth in different forms over
different times. Indeed, some of great progress of modern history was due to
men who made vast amounts of wealth through business ventures that
benefitted large masses of people. The so-called robber barons of
Carnegie, Rockefeller and Morgan created more economic prosperity for the
common man than any government in history. Their selfishness to profit is
what gave us the uses of oil, railroads and electricity that raised every
Americans standard of living ten-fold. They created tens of thousands of
jobs and related businesses and allowed people a far better existence than
what their previous generation had when they came to America. Then after
the accumulation of such wealth and prosperity, they selflessly gave large
sums of it to charitable and productive ventures such as universities, music
centers and other job-creating businesses. So to be of two minds in terms of
wealth can be beneficial when looked through another perspective. There is
in the same vein, nothing intrinsically wrong with someone being wholly
selfish or wholly selfless. A free society allows any flavor of wealth
accumulation or free distribution thereof. A commonwealth does not need
statism to achieve their ends and therefore a desirable endeavor, whereas a
fascist state requires the state to subjugate the masses under a common
nationalist goal.

Progress comes from wisdom, not force.

This is probably the most profound statement you could make which
illustrates my point of why we need a free society. Whenever force,
coercion, controls or regulation is injected into human affairs by the state,
there are always unintended consequences that were not foreseen by those
enacting the force. Force is an immoral act because it is in violation of our
basic human rights of life and liberty. Progress is impeded by force, and
wisdom is hard to come by when we are too busy dealing with the added
dissonance of the state. Force should only be used as a defense against
another force that seeks to physically harm us. This is precisely why the
state, who has a monopoly on force, must have no role in the economy. We
will gain more wisdom from letting different systems be practiced in a free
society than by governments trying to export their systems to countries that
want to practice something else.


A competitive system must have winners and losers. Only in a cooperative
system can everyone win together.

I think you mischaracterize the merits of competition and why its generally
a good thing for consumers. First of all, cooperation does happen in a free
market to the extent that the buyer and seller make transactions where both
parties benefit. The seller benefits because he received the money you pay
him. And the buy benefits because he has now obtained a product that he
values more than the money in his pocket. This is a win-win by any
conceivable notion.

When businesses compete for customers, they are trying to make a product
that appeals to as many people as possible. If two or more businesses create
the same product, they must find and create uniqueness in their product to
separate it from their competitors. The result is that customers have a wide
array of choices in the market to fit their personal needs.

So this notion of competition being so bad is actually an overall benefit to
consumers and businesses alike. Consumers in planned economies could
only buy one brand of government cheese, whereas a capitalist economy
could choose 10 or 20 brands of different size, shape and flavor.

Competing businesses also benefit because they are forced to create the most
efficient product as possible to gain a share of the market. If there was no
competition, then the people would have no choice but to take the same drab
product that everyone else has to buy.

Cooperation and competition in a free market can be desired or not. The
point is the free market of people trading value for value should alone
determine what the market will ultimately evolve into. Even if the market
became so wretched because of the evil of competition, there would and
should be wisdom gained from this and the people should evolve to
cooperate on their own terms. There is no need for any control mechanism to
be put in place to create cooperation. If you, in a free market, hated the
results of competition there would be nothing to stop you from associating
with people and businesses who shared your desire of cooperation and
would join you in that venture.


Money, in contrast, mimics a zero-sum game. The gain for one party is
always a loss for another. My profit is your expense. We have hunger in
the world because we sell food for money. If we shared food, no one would
ever go hungry.
The phrase my profit is your expense is simply too vague and over
generalizing for your readers to get a proper perspective. When a person or
business profits from a transaction, it is a mutual and voluntary exchange
where both parties are in agreement to the terms. Both sides profit in
different ways in a free market. No one is forced to buy or sell anything. If I
give my money to a business to purchase their product, I have not lost
anything, I have only traded the money in my pocket for that which I value
more than the money, be it an apple to eat or an Apple computer.
The only way people can lose from a money transaction is if they give their
money away and receive nothing in return, get is stolen, or if the money is
taken from them from the government through taxes.
The idea that there is hunger in the world because we sell food for money is
an egregious stretch of the imagination. The fact is, there has ALWAYS
been hunger in the world. Since man evolved from the apes, he has had
hunger. How man obtains food over the history of time has evolved too. You
can plant food, you can pick food from nature, or you can buy it or trade it
from someone else. Hunger has nothing to do with the fact that food is sold.
And there is no counter to the fact that the capitalist free market that came
out of the 19
th
century industrial revolution led to more masses of humans to
be fed than any other time in history.
The countries with the largest number of hungry people are those
governments that maintain stifling control over their economies and limit
trade and international relations, i.e. North Korea. Hunger is also a relative
term. A hungry person in the US is well-fed compared to someone hungry in
Cambodia.
Finally, there has been no other time in our history where food was more
plentifully shared than right now, today. There are countless non-profits and
aid organizations that feed millions of people around the world. Sure these
people are not well-fed to a middle-class standard, but there is not wide-
spread epidemics of hunger going on right now in relation to the past. Every
day, people are coming up with innovative ways to feed the poor and the
best thing we can to end hunger is free people from those governments that
are abusing and wasting the benevolent government aid they get from rich
countries.
A higher quality of life has always been the primary incentive. Money is
only a means to an end. It is a distortion to use it as either a carrot or a
stick.

A higher quality of life is another relative term. My higher quality is
different than my neighbors and his is different from indigenous Indian
tribes. But yes, generally man seeks to improve his quality of life if he
chooses to. Money is a means to an end and people can abuse it or use it for
productive means. Human nature cannot be controlled in this regard. Man
must naturally learn from his error and seek to improve himself.

Desperation drives activity into non-productive endeavors, like people
becoming day-traders for a living. Moving numbers through a maze of
numbers is wasted labor.

That is an opinion that is not well thought out. A day-trader is just another
service job that is acting on behalf of a person who owns stock to make
trades and give advice on trades. It is no less wasted labor than another job
that services a person for activities that they dont have time for.

People who trade their own their money for a living on the stock market is
doing so because the market allows him too. You have a right to think this is
wasted labor, but productivity is also relative. In the future, if people deem
that the stock market is not a good thing for society, then people will end it.
Those day-traders will have to find other work just as naturally as those who
picked up horse dung on streets had to find different work when cars were
invented. In the end, the fact that someone can sit in their pajamas in the
comfort of his home and make a living trading stock is still an improvement
from slaving 17-hour days on subsistent farms just to get your next meal.

Recognizing that we do not own the money is an important first step.
Everybody could break-even at the same time. If there is profit, then there
must be loss. Money is a misunderstood and mismanaged tool.
Commonwealth eliminates both profit and loss, and only wealth remains.

It is commonly known that money is not owned, so I dont know why this
needs to be stated. If there is profit, there is not just loss. Whatever money I
gave away to get what the business profited off of is because I gained
something too. I also profit when a business profits, because the money
they make is used to create better products, more jobs, and more investments
in other businesses. I dont have a problem with you wanting to break even
and only provide wealth in a commonwealth. In a true free market you can
set about to make that happen.

The wealthy are good at generating profit, the poor and young are not,
and are forced to borrow.

This statement is disingenuous because it dismisses the millions of people
who started young and poor and became wealthy through their own will and
managing of resources.

No one is forced to do anything, except for what the State forces. If I borrow
money it is because I choose to make that transaction. If I dont want debt, I
dont borrow. Forced to borrow is a propagandist phrase that only stirs up
an irrational knee-jerk response to those who dont think through the fallacy
of the statement. You are also assuming that money is a necessity for
survival, its not.

Lenders get rich on other peoples debt, which makes it easy for the rich to
get richer, and the poor to get poorer.

Lenders only get rich if people pay back the debt with interest, which was a
voluntary contractual agreement. Now, the only thing that makes it easier for
the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer is none other than the state.

If we take the US, the Federal Reserve, through fiat money and fractional
reserve banking, can print any amount of money it wants at will and set any
arbitrary interest rate it wants at any time. This fact alone means that as long
as this exists, the US does NOT HAVE A FREE MARKET.

So now lets examine the environment this creates on the un-free market.
Banks lend out money and then can turn around use their profit to gamble it
on future derivative swaps. Banks get rich off this scheme, but this does not
make the poor poorer. What makes the poor poorer, is when government
creates a backstop for these banks and guarantees their livelihood should
they become overly risky and default. Then when the banks crash, it is the
tax payer who has to bail them out, in addition to the interest payments they
are making on their loans. Couple that with an artificial rise in inflation
because the Fed is overprinting money at the states whim to pay for their
social programs, and you have created an environment where the poor get
poorer. Again, this is a result of the state being too involved in the economy,
first by the Fed printing money and setting interest rates, second by
government bailing out banks, third by artificial inflation.

If the market printed money, it would have to be worth something of real
value of exchange, not just because the state says it is out of thin air. This
was the beauty of the gold standard. It is also the market that should set the
interest rates so the consumer knows what the market can bear in terms of
providing credit. There is a natural flow here, when interests rates are high,
people save and accrue good interest, when rates are low, people spend and
take on credit. If the rates are set artificially low during a time when the Fed
is overprinting money, then everyones savings accounts are not worth
anything and prices have to rise due the over saturation of money in the
economy.

Exchanging money with interest can be a volatile practice, but the situation
is made much worse with the state in complete ownership of the creation of
money and interest. If the state got out of the way, people would naturally
come to conclusions and new solutions to make money exchange more
equitable and cooperative. Or we could decide that we dont need money
and we use a more advanced form of exchange. Im open for anything, but
its the people that should have power over their economic affairs and not
the state who have no clue the impact they have by their manipulations.


We all have a right to a measure of equality when we trade with each
other. It is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, gender and other
criteria, but it is acceptable to discriminate for no reason at all.

Yes in a free society, we are equals in terms that we are all human and have
a right to our own life and our own liberty. Trades are just that, trading value
for value on mutually agreed terms. Free people are also free to not trade
with whomever they want, and they will have to bear the consequence for
that discrimination. In a free society, if I have a business, and I choose not to
allow black people in my store, I will suffer the public outrage that will
ensue, the harsh scrutiny of the media and the negative attention that goes
along with such preposterous bigotry. This business decision would most
likely lead to boycott and business failure in a modern, free society. There is
no need for the state to intervene in how a private business conducts trade on
their property. Mans natural social evolution will bear out such inequities
and move forward the way it was intended to. This is why slavery and
segregation would not work today. One, slaves are exponentially more
unproductive than free workers, and segregation is so detestable that no
business could thrive with such a policy. It is clear enough today, there are
clubs and organizations that are specifically catered toward a specific
demographic. As long as these clubs do not violate the right to my life and
liberty to not associate with them, then so be it. You cant legislate morality

Because we are all bound to the government, we are all bound to one
another by proxy. We cannot escape the economy. We cannot escape
commonwealth

The better way to say this is the government is bound to us, and serves us in
those functions we deem necessary to protect our individual rights.

Curiously, more money does not allow people to buy more products, it only
allows them to pay more for the same product.

Nobody pays more for something than they cannot bear. If the price of milk
goes up and I deem that this price too expensive, then I vote with my wallet
and dont buy milk. If enough people do this, then the demand for lower
priced milk will go up and price must come down.


Free-market capitalists want more freedom to compete, progressives
believe that they already have too much power, and competition generates
waste, not efficiencies. Corporations were granted charters as a means to
serve the people, but instead people are expected to serve the corporations.

Corporations are given their power through the state. If the state was not
involved, corporations could not wield the influence they have over society
because there would always be someone to come along and out compete
them. Corporations who have the defenses of the state loose their natural
incentive to benefit their customers. It is that state that creates these fascist
regimes of corporate fiefdoms.

We can learn quite a bit from this simple model. The inflation was
created by the sellers, not by the government.

This is patently false. The market does create inflation, but so does the
government when they print money out of thin air. Injecting large amounts
of cash into the economy devalues everyones money and causes prices to
rise.

Free trade is only one component of many, yet it is invariably trade that
generates the most trouble among all people.

Trading stock or buying a coffee does not nearly cause as much trouble as
the state that colludes with business to distort the market and create rampant
moral hazard.

On the whole, poverty is primarily a result of risks taken within the system,
rather than a characteristic of the economic system itself.

This is disingenuous since it suggests that taking risks is overall a bad thing and
should be discouraged. People risking life and property have led to more
movements of freedom, prosperity, innovation and discovery than almost
anything else. The historical characteristic of the economic system before the
Industrial Revolution was one of abject poverty for the vast majority of the
world. Peoples lives were at the mercy of the church and state creating an
impossible situation in terms of bettering ones quality of life. This is not to say
that it is wrong to live in an insulated bubble and just subsist. Rather, Im
advocating that risk is a prime factor of what drives humanity forward into new
territories of thought and life. No one is required to join any new movement,
they should be free to decide, like the Amish or Indians, to live a simple, basic
life. But to discourage those who want to take risk in discovering new
territories of life is simply short sighted.

The entire system is constantly at risk, and there are frequent collapses
because of the inherent weakness of the fractional equation.

The system is at risk from various factors mostly due to the deadly mixture of
government controlling the supply of money, setting false interest rates and
meddling in the economy. The fractional reserve banking system is a ponzi
scheme and will fail due to the bad math as you suggest. I would like to see the
government play no role in the economy and let free people associate to
determine what the market produces. If it fails fine, but as long as the
government props up this failing situation, the crash will be much worse for
everyone.

To eliminate extremes of poverty, there must be the self-restraint to prevent
extremes of wealth.

This is a much-maligned statement of neo-liberal propaganda. Extremes in
poverty have absolutely no direct correlation to extremes in wealth. Insofar that
they do is because the state is supporting such a situation because of bad
economic policies. The states tax and money supply policies are such that the
rich can always find ways to avoid paying tax while the middle class and poor
have increasingly less purchase power due to higher tax brackets and inflation.
The state is making the rich richer and the poor poorer. The rich are able to get
corporate welfare, which gives them the moral hazard to destroy the economy
knowing they will get bailed out. If the state were not involved, everyone
would have to be prudent within the finance world. Banks, corporations and
businesses have no incentive to ruin their customers purchasing power if the
market were allowed to control the supply and interest rates of money. People
would not take undue credit risks if the interest rates were at proper market-
driven levels.

Historically, poor people benefit from people getting rich in the sense that rich
people by and large invest their money into new business ventures that create
jobs and more opportunity for the poor to enter the market. The worst cases of
countries with mass starvation are those countries with little to no market
freedom.

At any one moment, the economy is a zero-sum game. If you manage to get
more money from the other players, than they get from you, then they go
bankrupt instead of you.

The economy is not a zero-sum game, this is another statement of neo-liberal
propaganda. The idea that there is a fixed pie of wealth where the rich are
stealing the pie from others is simply a canard. New wealth is created by
individuals everyday. People do not go bankrupt because they are trading for
profit. If a man lives alone in the woods and all he has is a saw and wood
chipper, he can take those tools to cut down a tree and make a chair or desk. He
can then sell that chair or desk for a fair market price that allows him to go into
a town and buy goods. He created wealth on his own through his own labor, he
did not extract someone elses wealth and send them ever closer to bankruptcy.

Government is a primary agent in the economy because it coins the money. It
also has the impossible task of trying to placate two people who are fighting
over money, and expects a share of their money through taxation.

This is why I argue that the government should have no role in the economy. It
is impossible for a room full of bureaucrats to know what is best for a large,
complex economy of separate people pursuing their interests. Any action they
take is at the expense of one group for the other. This creates the constant
lobbying for government favors between interest groups. Government chooses
winners and losers and poisons the market with false incentives, false supply
and demand and rampant moral hazard. As long a government supplies the
currency, there is no free market. The tax system is set up to favor the rich and
hurt the poor. Taxes are an affront to a free society and a direct act of
aggression by the state. If the government played no role in the economy, taxes
would be so low that they would be almost obsolete to most taxpayers.

The free-market advocates claim that any choices the businesses make are
best, and any choices the government makes are wrong. Their claims are
illogical. What is important is the quality of the decision, not who makes it.
The claim by free-market advocates is not that their choices are the best, it is
that their choices should be their free choices, and not the government. People
will invariably make bad choices, but they should be free to make them right
along side their good choices. Quality choices are in the eye of the beholder
and cannot be objectively determined by an external force or majority. History
has shown that man can learn from his mistakes and find better ways of
improving his quality of life; he just needs the freedom to do so. There was a
time when governments did not want the masses to read for fear that they
would revolt from learning to think for themselves. Look how far weve come
since then.
The fact that we cannot pay ourselves to manufacture the goods we consume
is a sign that the system is in deep disarray.

You do pay to manufacture the goods you consume. Every time you buy a
product, it is a monetary vote to that business to keep producing it at a quality
you will accept.

If one man goes hungry, then all men share the shame. The hunger needs to
be dealt with directly and immediately by the collective.

You cannot cure hunger by direct, immediate action from a collective. There is
no planned utopia, life happens good or bad the way it was meant be through
free people making thousands of choices every second. As man learns, adapts
and evolves in this thinking and action, hunger is declining with every passing
generation. Impatience is what causes people to implore the state to take
drastic, unnecessary action that has horrible unintended consequences. The War
on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terrorism, etc. are all great examples of
trying to force a situation and just making it worse. In a free society, there is
nothing to stop free people from helping as many hungry people as they wish.
More power to them.

If the nation is $16 Trillion in debt, then there needs to be $16 trillion in
assets and equity in the private sector.

No, because a lot of this debt is borrowed from other countries or it unfunded
liabilities the government itself created from entitlement programs. The private
sector should not be responsible for paying off the govt debt. The government
must reduce spending and lower tax in order in order to balance itself. The state
has no political will to take the necessary steps to get out of the debt.
Reductions in spending will mean that people who are dependent on the
spending will suffer in the short term and the politicians do not want an
economy to suffer during their tenures. Economics 101 will tell you that lower
taxes always leads to higher federal revenues because when the people have
more of their own money they find lucrative way to spend their money and
create new wealth. New wealth leads to more tax revenue. Over-taxing leads to
reduced revenues, because businesses put their taxes onto consumers, hire
fewer workers, move operations over-seas, etc. This is why we need a shift
away from politics and toward free enterprise.

Reselling your goods at a yard sale, the local school bake sale, and sales by a
non-profit all generate inflation.

Inflation is complex and has more than one source. One of the natural causes of
inflation is when more wealth is generated; more people have money to spend.
When people are spending more money, demand for products goes up. Prices
rise for businesses to produce the supply that is demanded. This is a normal
thing, as long as the natural forces of the market are causing the inflation.
Government supplying too much money in a market that cannot meet the
demand causes the unnatural inflation. This causes a gross depreciation of the
currency relative to natural rise in inflation. Indeed, if the money that is printed
is not backed by anything, the state can print as much money as it wants to try
and fix the economy. As a result we see the relative purchasing power in the
currency has greatly declined in relation to when a fixed commodity backed the
currency. If the state was no longer in the business of supplying the currency,
then we would be free to use any accepted form of trade to make transactions.
Inflation would be in lock step with the overall rise of economic growth and the
each accepted currency would compete with one another to keep transactions
localized and not pegged to how fast the Saudis can extract oil from the Middle
East.

The baseline of trade is that any revenue for one is an expense for another.
On the grander scale, the revenue for the private sector is the debt of the
government.
The baseline of trade is that both parties participate in win-win transactions.
You profit from the sale of a good and I profit because the good I bought was
more valuable than the dollars in my pocket. Therefore it is a voluntary expense
I chose to make because buying the good with money at the agreed price was
more convenient than me going out and producing it myself.
The revenue of the private sector is not the debt of the government; it is also
revenue of the government since they take the revenue of the private sector in
taxes. The only debt the government has is the promised entitlement payments
and spending plans that should not have been created in the first place.
We need to find the stability that self-sufficiency offered in a co-dependent
system. Cooperative labor has many advantageous.

I am all for this. In a truly free society, you are more than welcome to practice
this and get like-minded people to join you. You just need the freedom from the
state to do it. If the state owns too many sections of the economy, this is nearly
impossible.

It is important to recognize that inflation starts in the private sector.
Monopoly demonstrates that conclusively, there is no government overhead
in the game. Poverty is the responsibility of the citizens, not the government,
as a consequence of inflation: buy-low and sell-high.

Yes there is inflation in the private sector, but private sector inflation is a result
of more and more people creating and spending their wealth. The steady rise of
private sector inflation should coincide with the growth of the overall economy.
When the state prints money to help a struggling economy, it distorts inflation
and reduces everyones purchasing power.

Monopoly is not a phenomenon of the private sector. Indeed no monopoly can
exist without exclusive help from the state, because in a free market there will
always be competition or options for people to choose from. Any monopoly
that has ever existed has some help from the state to exist. USPS is a monopoly
on first class mail delivery. It has been bankrupt for years because it does not
know to manage the relative demand for higher wages in relation to the fact
that people are sending less and less first class mail. The best thing for the state
to is to privatize it but they insist on keeping it a public entity for no good
reason other than politics.

History reveals that the central bank was supported by George Washington
because it allowed the executive to wage a war without the need to garner
support from the citizens. He could act without restraint. In Commonsense,
Thomas Paine decried the ability of a monarchy to wage war on his own
whim. The central banking system of the United Kingdom was resurrected in
the United States with the adoption of the Constitution. George Washington
was a new face with a new title, but he came with the old habits of power and
privilege. Any head of government can pursue endless war with access a
central bank, regardless of how they came to power.

Totally agree, which is why the Federal Reserve should be abolished and
money should be privatized in the hands of free people.

When combined with the population boom, there are probably more people
living a miserable existence today than at any other time in history.

This is absolutely false. More people in relation to history are better off today
than they have ever been. Despite the growth in population, overall world
poverty taken in relative terms with the recent and distant past is less than ever
before. I would rather have everything a poor person has at their disposal now,
than a middle class person in the 1940s or a rich person in the 1500s. The
problem is people have no perspective of their situation in relation to the past.
This is understandable for poor people, but for the section of middle-class or
rich people who are horrified by the sweatshops that Apple Company has in
China does not see what the real situation is. To us, those sweatshops are a
miserable existence where the workers have a measly wage and terrible
conditions. What people looking from afar in their cozy living rooms dont
realize is that Apple sweatshop is the best option for the poor in those sections
of China that otherwise would not be there if not for Apple building the
sweatshop. The only other option for those people is to continue to starve on
subsistent farms like the western world did before the Industrial Revolution.
Since China has finally allowed some capitalism, they are experiencing their
own industrial revolution and finally lifting millions of Chinese out of poverty.
Sure, to us it looks like slave labor, but we all had to go through what they did
back in the 19
th
Century because those hard labor jobs were better options than
simply staying on subsistent farms working day and night just for your next
meal. No one forced them to take these jobs; they took them voluntarily
because they wanted to better their situation. This is precisely what the poor
Chinese are doing by taking the sweatshop jobs today. They are finally able to
gain some capital to help their families, save money and create new
opportunities that they never would have had if they did not have the injection
of capitalism.

For example, the government could provide free healthcare, adopt a single-
payer model, and completely eliminate the health insurance industry. The
battle over requiring healthcare insurance would be seen as minor compared
to a bill outlawing insurance completely.

Just because a government could do this doesnt mean that they should.
Healthcare should be free market association just as any other service. Free
healthcare from the government is not free in the freest sense of the word.
Taxpayers are paying for it and to make it universal; it would mean a sharp
increase in taxes to pay for the free healthcare. A truly free healthcare system
would be a person employing a doctor by paying him an agreed upon amount to
tend to his medical problem. Medicine is a service, not a right. To claim that
healthcare is a right is to claim that a doctor must provide a service at zero
discretion. You are saying that a doctor must be forced to perform medicine
because it is a right. This is in effect making a doctor a government serf to the
masses. This is not freedom. True freedom is where doctors choose to work
pro-bono just as lawyers do to help those who cannot afford it. This is how the
system worked before the state got involved in the healthcare system. The
prices and premiums are so sky high, because govt. subsidizes health insurance
through Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs. Whatever the state subsidizes
creates a false demand in the medical market, this in turn forces hospitals to
raise prices to meet all the false demand. In a free market, hospitals would have
to compete and it would result in cheaper prices and higher quality. People
could create any insurance plan they wanted without having to accept a
government formula that covers them for services they will never use.

This book argues that inflation and debt are the primary source of trouble.

Insofar that the government creates it or exacerbates it, yes.

History is full of individuals with different ideas. Their ideas need to be
tested.

Yes, in a free society.

Selfishness (inequality) is a lethal act, but it works more slowly than a
bomb. Greedy behavior mimics the slave-master who robs the productive
labor of the slave.

Its ok for you to have this opinion, but there cannot be a legislation to stop
natural human actions. The only legislation that can be allowed is to stop
you from physically harming me or defrauding me. Selfishness and
greediness does not meet this criteria because of its subjective nature. You
can argue that everyone is selfish because we all selfishly do what we can to
better our situation if we choose to. Greed is relative to the beholder. If I am
producing all my wealth and am not physically taking from someone, this is
not greed to the person who owns and keeps his wealth. There is no
objective standard for greed because to set a threshold is to judge the
morality of a person based on their free decision to create as much wealth as
they want. If I work hard and become a millionaire, does that mean I was not
greedy when I was only making 40k a year? A persons wealth and what
they do with it is a private matter. In a free society, you can freely associate
with people who are not at what you consider greedy and you can bond
and live and grow with them in a commonwealth. But to condemn a rich
person for bringing down society is knee-jerk revisionism of reality. I am
just as free to be greedy as you are free to not be. That is all there is and all
there can be in a free society.

Commonwealth requires the understanding of a system, the recognition of
our role, and standards of proper behavior for everyone

I dont object to this as long as everyone is free to join or leave the
commonwealth without retribution.

Consensus is an invalid criteria for establishing truth.

This is the danger of mob-rule democracy and why 51 percent should never
be able to decide what 49 percent should do. Individual rights of freedom
and liberty are inalienable and no majority can abolish them for any policy
or system.

For a business to provide wealth it must consume resources of land and
labor

Not true of all business. If I write songs for a living and you pay me to watch
me sing them, this is a free exchange with no land or unwarranted labor
consumed. Besides, no society can escape consuming resources. It is only
that rate that can vary. If you want to live like an American Indian in the
middle of the prairie and hunt and gather for your food and live in a
cooperative commonwealth, more power to you.

Competition is the baseline of our political and economic systems, which
means that the one must always take precedence over the many: one
winner, many losers.

Bad perspective here. Microsoft out competed its competitors and it was not
a monopoly. The products that Microsoft created benefited millions upon
millions of people and created millions of winners as a result. We would not
have the efficient economic system we have today if not for the genius of
Bill Gates. Competition is a by-product of a market that drives innovation
and improves our quality of life. In a free society, you dont have to compete
if you dont want to. If the business world appalls you then dont enter it and
live the simple life. Just let me be free and Ill let you be free.

Free market proponents claim that an organization failing is good and
natural. They are abandoning reason and morality to chance and
ruthlessness, which makes no sense. We want virtue, and organizations
that are informed by virtue, to endure. The marketplace cannot and should
not be trusted.

As I said before, the free market proponents simply want to be free to live
and die by their free choices. Virtue cannot be forced, it is learned by
mistakes and experiences we make. As time passes, we should hope that we
will become more virtuous through our actions. We will see that it was not
in our best interest to have the state interfere in the economy to try and
legislate virtue.

Progress is change in a single direction, not the cyclical madness of boom
and bust

The bubbles that government creates through bad economic policy primarily
create booms and busts. Get rid of the state in the economy it would reduce
the bad cycles. If we take the recent financial crisis, people like to claim that
it was the unregulated free market that caused the housing bubble and burst.
Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, the banking and housing
industry are two of the largest regulated sectors of the economy.

Second, you have to look at the environment the government created that led
to the crisis. First, it was government policy starting in the Clinton years to
relax lending standards so more people could buy homes. That simple, well-
meaning policy is all it took to erase the free market motivation of the
lenders and homebuyers.

What happened next was one state encroachment after another. Freddie and
Fanny guaranteed risky subprime home loans that the govt encouraged the
market to do. The FED lowered interest rates to encourage people to take
home loan credit. Banks that were too big to fail backed their moral
hazardous derivatives with real-estate furtures. Home values continued to
rise until the FED raised interest rates and crashed the system. People started
defaulting on loans and everyone dumped their stock in an effort to secure
funds.
This crisis from start to finish was planned and executed by the government.
Had there been none of this, people would have only gotten loans when they
had the liquidity to do so, and banks would have had stricter lending
standards to protect their assets and reduce their risk. Banks would have had
no moral hazard or incentive to play casino with derivatives by hedging with
inflated real estate options.

Self-reliance has always requires self-restraint, but the bulk of virtue is in
self-awareness and self-sacrifice. Greed does not fit anywhere in this
paradigm

If those are your values, you are more than welcome to practice them in a
free society.

Strong and stupid would blindly destroy the kind and wise. Not
surprisingly, the genocide of the Native Americans followed, and America
has been perpetually at war. The first promises of democracy, peace and
prosperity, have never been realized.

To a large extent I agree with this, and would only add that Native American
genocide was only possible through direct government policy to expand
Manifest Destiny. War is a product of the state. Take out the state and we
could have lived in peace and traded and lived side by side with the Indians.

Our labor should be guided by regulations that make success easier for
everyone

No, I should be free to sell my labor at whatever price I agree upon with an
employer. I can also work for myself and create my own success if I choose.
Regulations are the killer of a free people to pursue their goals. Well-
intended road blocks are just another hurdle that people will resent and come
up with ways to get around them at the expense of another. Labor and
success are only questions of free will and voluntary action, not regulation.

The freedom to compete, and the freedom to organize, is also the freedom
to engage in denial

This matters not. If what is produced is a detriment to a free society, then
people will learn from this and act to correct it.

Substance must take precedence over process, and we need to stop
indoctrinating delusions of pride.

One of the main incentives of work is the pride we take in it. If you kill that
then you will kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Taking pride in what
someone does is the hallmark of what pushes a society forward. If you have
no pride in what you do then life quickly becomes a life of servitude.

Child labor supported the craving and gluttony of unearned income on
Wall Street. During the 20s, self-sustainability on the farm became less
and less common. People were forced into the industrial workforce in
search of wages.

False perspective here. Child labor was more abundant on subsistent farms
than when they entered the industrial workforce. Kids from the time they
were able worked insane hours on farms and barely had enough to eat. This
was the dire situation for centuries on end. When industries arrived in the
19
th
century, it was already common for children to labor so of course they
worked there too. What industry realized is that child labor was not
productive because they are weaker and harder to manage, so they
eventually did away with it. But as industries grew, workers obtained more
wealth and could afford for their children to go to school instead of work.
This is what capitalism brought to the masses.

People were not forced to leave subsistent farms, they could have stayed
there but they saw how people could raise their standard of living by
working in a warehouse. Many people continued to live on self-sustaining
farms and benefited from the demand for more goods that farms produced
because people had more wealth to spend on farming goods. You are
missing perspective on the real situation. The free market is what progressed
society into the modern era, it didnt hurt it, and no one was forced to
participate, it was a free movement of action. People left their authoritarian
states and flooded into America for a small taste of freedom to improve their
lives.


The free market is grotesquely inefficient and unfair. Land and housing
management is the central problem of modern society. Hunger was the
result of crop failures under feudalism, whereas today it is a systemic
failure of equality

Inaccurate assessment here. The ability to own private land and private
housing is what gave people the freedom to become efficient with their labor
and better control their supply of goods and general welfare. In feudalism,
people did not own the lands or houses they lived on. They could not decide
what they could sell or produce. In this environment they were at the whim
of the landowner who often made bad economic decisions. When everyone
can own their own house and property, you have more leverage to manage
your own affairs as you see fit. You have more incentive to make it as
efficient as possible because you own it.

Slavery and child labor have given way to a perpetual debt trap in
America, and youngsters in third world countries have lost their agrarian
livelihood to become the new equivalent of Americas early 20th century
child labor

Kids in third world countries would welcome the opportunities of anything
different than living on a subsistent farm. The ones that like it are free to live
there and work all and night for a scrap of food. Those that want a better life
should have the free option to work for whoever will hire them. Child labor
is the norm of subsistent farming. Industry is what eradicated it through
efficiencies in production. Only third world countries have child labor
because they have not risen to higher standards of living, which is in direct
relation to how free those countries are to practice capitalism. A familys
wealth allows their children to go to school rather than labor.

Government can make a bad situation better or worse, but it was always
the greedy choices of private individuals that drove conflict and destroyed
the economy.

This is one-sided revisionism. Greedy private individuals was every single
immigrant who flooded into America looking to make their dreams come
true to escape their rigid, over-bearing home countries. Their free actions
with limited government involvement is what caused America to explode
with productive economic activity and become the richest nation the world
has ever seen. The state played little role in the first 150 years and this was a
good thing. Once the state got overly involved, this is where the destruction
of the economy occurred.

A government that fails to house, feed, cure and educate its people has
failed in its role of administrating the public good.

Governments are not efficient in these multi-tasking endeavors because they
try to apply general rules to specific sections of people in diverse areas. It is
much more desirable for people in each local area to provide these markets
based on their relative demand.

The Federal government should be passing laws that mandate a sharing
and cooperative economy of equals.

The idea of mandated sharing is the quickest road to tyranny. You cannot
force morality on people; people must learn this for themselves. Freedom is
the only thing that people need to naturally evolve to higher forms of
cooperation. It is always a particular groups impatience that demands
government mandate change for the good of the people. Almost every
example of this has shown to create more problems than it solves. Just take
the simple example of alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. Every rational
human would agree that alcohol consumption is not in the best interest of the
individual or the collective. Nevertheless, when it is mandated not to drink,
the simple fact that freedom of action is forced away, the natural evolution is
distorted and people will find a way to exercise their natural freedom in spite
of the law.

The reward for labor is a huge problem. The gap between the highest and
lowest within a business is too large. That needs to be regulated to be no
more than a fixed ratio, perhaps 3:1 in a small business and 10:1 for a
large corporation. Ideally, however, it should be 1:1. There is no need
to generate profit, there is only a need to generate value. If everyone were
given a $1000 at birth, they could conceivably have more money than they
could spend in their lifetime.

This does not need to be regulated since it violates peoples freedom to
conduct trade under agreed upon contracts. The better solution is to desire a
free society where commonwealths are freely created and this labor model
can be freely implemented. If the fruits of this system are seen and accepted
by others then they will enter into similar business models if they desire.

The cost of tuition and room and board at my college was $6000, today it is
over $60,000. Same buildings, same location, same food. What changed?
Thirty years of compounding inflation, homelessness, joblessness, gangs,
corruption and pollution.

In terms of education, here again the state has distorted the system by
subsidizing schools and loans. The state through guaranteed loans creates a
false demand for schools. Schools must answer this demand by hiring more
teachers, administrators, creating bigger school infrastructures and
programs. The school must raise prices to answer this false demand created
by the state. By the states funding schools, they can dictate to the schools the
standards that must be met to continue receiving a subsidy. This distortion
reduces the quality of education because the school is operating under a
government standard rather than the true needs of the students. Now with
school prices through the roof, students have little other options but to take
huge loans and amass huge debt without any guarantee of a degree or a job
after college. If the state were not involved in education, the price would be
drastically low because each school would have to compete for students and
thereby offer an education at the lowest price with the highest quality.
Government subsidy creates the opposite effect.

The need for a new currency step will probably present itself eventually.
When it does, we can then establish universal wage standards. Employers
should not be setting wages.

In a free society, this would be no problem in a commonwealth for free
people to agree on wage standards. There doesnt need to be universal wage
standards mandated on everyone. It would be impossible to set wages for the
thousands of different skills, labor techniques, work environments, time
constraints, talent adjustments, etc. Trying to universalize complex
activities across diverse platforms of labor will always result in some group
feeling slighted by the arbitrary standard.

The idea of wage and price controls have been around for a long. Even the
rabid anti-communist President Nixon suggested them. Business-owners
and free-market believers will probably complain the loudest about the
reforms presented here, but business-owners already have complete wage
and price control.

The price controls implemented by Nixon during the 70s energy crisis was a
complete disaster. It caused consumers to want more of the product than
producers have available. When the federal government restricted gasoline
price increases in the 1970s, long lines formed at gas stations and only those
motorists who waited long hours in line received the scarce gasoline.
When the price is too high, there is an excessive amount of the product for
sale compared to what people want. This is the situation with many U.S. and
European farm programs; government, in an effort to increase farm incomes,
purchases the output that consumers do not want. This, in turn, prompts
farmers to raise more cows and convert more land to pasture or cropland.
However, the higher prices discourage consumers from buying farm
products, causing an excess of supply. Government then exacerbates this
situation by continuing to purchase the excess crop at the set price.

Second, business owners do not have complete price control. It is supply and
demand that business owners must adhere to if they want to stay in business.
If they sell too low, they cant pay their overhead, if they sell to high they
will lose patronage.

Economic volatility is created by the numbers we write down. The laws of
mathematics have no mercy, and care nothing about majority rule. If we
write down different numbers, then we will have different results.
Commonwealth is as simple as that.

I can agree with this and I would encourage you to set this in motion by
freely associating with other like-minded people to make this happen in a
commonwealth that you build.

Final thoughts:

I hope by my critique that you will be able to see the point of view I have
tried to illustrate. Your ideas are well thought out and I hope you will be
able to inspire others to join your cause. The only flaw I personally take by
your arguments are when you suggest that your ideas should be implanted
by a legislative force. As well-meaning as your ideas are, to suggest that the
state must intervene to see these ideas to fruition will only lead to outcomes
that are nowhere near what you intended.

This has been the case throughout modern economic history. Whether its
socialism, communism, fascism or even capitalism, the common thread of
where systems went awry was the states inability to avoid tyranny.

Human progress in economic and social spheres did not occur in benevolent
government bureaus, but rather we have progressed in spite of our
government overlords. Every individual human who learns from his
mistakes effects every individual he is associated with. And this
phenomenon compounded between billions of people learning from their
successes and failures over the millennia have brought us to our advance
society we live in today. Of course from our present perspective there are
still deep-rooted flaws, injustice and inequalities that you have also pointed
out. But from a perspective of the conditions from where we came from in
the past, we have clearly progressed in our ability to overcome long-standing
strains of oppression, violence, and atrocities.

History is the evidence of what real solutions to prosperity entail. History is
a story of widespread denial of freedom and recognition of natural human
rights. Freedom is the most radical and untested theory in the history of
civilization. The scarce times that freedom was allowed to humans,
flourishing, progress and prosperity is always the result.

Within the realm of freedom, every human has the environment to pursue
any endeavor, any dream and any system of action. The commonwealth
would undoubtedly flourish, as there would be no boundaries stopping you
from pursuing it.

Therefore, I am not advocating for one system over another. I am
advocating for a free environment without state intervention that
allows people to pursue new systems or ideas. This is not to suggest that
I have rose-colored glasses. Freedom still means that people will make
mistakes, but it is in our mistakes that we learn the most from. The
regulatory state with all its paternalistic tendency to provide safety
nets for the rich and poor, do nothing but exacerbate the problems they
are trying to fix.

The states only role in our lives is to protect our individual rights and
freedoms from others who would do us harm and hinder our liberties.
Violence, fraud, extortion, and any other form of human rights violations
should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This is the only
case for the existence of the state. In this role, the state would allow
people to be free to evolve much faster to higher standards of living and
cooperation.

Let people be free as nature intended and the best and brightest ideas
will rule the day.

Whether it is the freedom to live an agrarian life on the Midwest plains
like the Native Americans or to live in a skyscraper in Metropolitan
Hong Kong, freedom to choose ones way in life is the highest form of
imagination to free us from the taxing life under this state.

#livefree