Peter's Blog

Modern institutions have embraced the belief that more data, more regulation, and more centralized coordination will always produce better outcomes, but that assumption is increasingly running into its own limits. As bureaucracies drown in information they cannot meaningfully interpret, the very mechanisms built to improve performance begin producing the opposite result, a phenomenon that undermines […]

Socialists rarely abandon their ideology no matter how badly socialist economies perform, and that persistence makes sense once the goal is understood as the establishment of state control rather than genuine prosperity. Even the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ongoing crisis in Venezuela have failed to move true believers, who simply argue that […]

Austrian economist Murray Rothbard famously described government as a large and successful criminal gang, arguing that it relies on coercion and violence to achieve its ends. The Microsoft antitrust case of the late 1990s illustrates this concept, as the government used its power to target a successful private company for alleged anticompetitive practices. By threatening […]

Defenders of big government often argue that roads, courts, and national defense prove the state is indispensable to prosperity, but this reasoning contains a fatal flaw. The state has no independent source of wealth: it first expropriates resources from private producers through taxation, then provides services with those resources, and finally points to those same […]

Life is infinitely divisible. It is impossible to break a situation down to its most fundamental level. The infinite complexity of the world means that we only run out of information when we stop asking questions. Physically, we proceed from molecules to atoms to quarks and particles, and finally to the intersection of energy and […]

Anaxagoras developed a vision of matter that can deeply impact our own understanding of societal frameworks. He wrote that within each part of matter in the material world, there was potential for all other parts. Each bit of matter was infinitely divisible, and could become anything based on the bidding of the Nous. This Nous […]

While it’s been known for many years that Germany’s economy is in poor health, the debate about the cause is quite contentious. Some claim that the government should have stepped in earlier while others claim that the government was the problem the whole time. Numerous German governments have tried to tackle this problem, but to […]

One of the key tenets of Austrian economics is a deep focus on process rather than outcomes. While many other forms of economic or political theory have a stronger emphasis on results, Austrian economics is unique in that it believes that the best results will ultimately arise from the enablement of good processes rather than […]

Political science is a great misnomer that disguises the true nature of the art of ruling. It pretends that politics is an objective science that can be examined using the same boundaries of knowledge as the physical sciences. However, politics bears a great burden that will forever separate it from the natural sciences: it is […]

Peter recently Ed Siddell on The Retirement Trainer podcast to walk listeners through how capital flows, political promises, and central bank policy shape the dollar — and why none of it bodes well for the unprepared saver. He frames the dollar’s past strength as a function of market performance and capital attraction, warns that recent […]