Peter's Blog

Inflation, high prices, stagnant wages, and recurring financial crises are usually treated as separate problems, but Austrian economists argue they are connected consequences of interventions that distort the price signals a market economy relies on to coordinate itself. Sound money, free prices, secure property, open competition, capital accumulation, and profit-and-loss discipline are the key to […]

On a recent podcast with Theo Von, New York mayor Zohran Mamdani defined socialism as “everyone having access to the things necessary for a dignified life.” Theo Von seemed to empathize with him, talking about how at a certain point economic issues are bigger than politics, and that incumbents can be challenged by longshot socialist […]

Since Trump’s first term, a driving force among nationalist conservatives is a desire to limit immigration. The whole movement has an aura of survivalism about it. Conservatives feel that they are being replaced by people with a different culture than themselves. They are afraid that through democracy, their country will be taken away from them, […]

A troubling  statistic has made the rounds through social media. It should be a warning to anyone, but in particular those who understand the dangers of fiscal irresponsibility: the US government must now spend more of their budget on interest payments than defense. Our own inability to stop consuming has turned interest into one of […]

Socialism’s historical record includes well over 100 million civilians killed by socialist regimes over the past century, yet the ideology has seen a resurgence in popularity, particularly among recent college graduates. Its persistence and appeal lies in exploiting contempt, envy, and a fear of personal responsibility rather than in any coherent economic case against private […]

A decade of populist anger on both the right and left has correctly identified that America’s institutions serve the political class rather than ordinary citizens, yet virtually every goal that anger was meant to achieve, ending DC corruption, winding down foreign wars, reducing inequality, has only gotten worse. Ron Paul’s generation of populists correctly identified […]

Wilhelm Röpke warned us 80 years ago about a threat that would only grow after his death. He saw that Nietzsche and other philosophers of the 19th century almost worshiped size. They believed that scale was a good in itself and they pedestalized it. Whether glorifying powerful states or leaning into the depersonalized aesthetic, the […]

To help simplify this analysis, imagine that there are only two components of a good life: agency and material goods. Agency is the ability to make choices and have those choices be capable of enabling real change at least in a person’s immediate circumstances. While an individual doesn’t need agency in every part of life, […]

Distributism is a recently resurgent form of social and political thought that attempts to create a free society ordered in a specific way through state intervention. This sounds like a paradox, because it is one. Distributists do not like to believe that they are proponents of larger forms of government, however their policies almost inevitably […]

Rather than being a radical antidote to the perceived errors of market capitalism, socialism is actually very similar to capitalism, but with some extra steps of inefficiency. Capitalism often consolidates the means of production through increasing returns to scale, and sorts people through the pice system into the roles where they would add the most […]