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 […]

The AI bubble has become a frequent fixture in the financial news cycle as pundits and institutions express their fear that, when it pops, it could drag the global economy into crisis. Central bankers and institutions like the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) are sounding alarms about debt-fueled AI investments, overexuberance, fragile funding structures, and […]

Going from zero to one is creating something that is fundamentally new. While creating another software-as-a-service company could be extremely lucrative, it is something fundamentally different from going zero to one, as it is more like going from 28,332 to 28,333. Business ideas that already exist can be optimized and maximized by clever people but […]

Although most stablecoins are touted as the next step for currency and a needed player in financial innovation, they have several fundamental flaws that make them even less suitable than the American dollar. Stablecoins are electronic currencies tied to USD, and in most situations, stay within a few percent of the dollar’s value. While historically […]

Most Americans understand the visible harm that excessive regulation causes – higher costs and fewer choices in the marketplace. Those less familiar with Austrian economic theory may not appreciate that government regulations also actively create monopolies by shielding politically connected industries from the competitive pressures that drive innovation and spread knowledge. The following article was […]

The FTC was founded on the premise that collusion can be sustained indefinitely, and only regulation can destabilize it. This hypothesis has been questioned many times and in many different ways, but in the last six years, the FTC has had an unusual amount of utilization, primarily spurred by political motivations. Even the FTC acknowledges […]

The Chinese government anti-spy agency has recently been warning the youth to avoid lying flat. In a time of more limited economic mobility than the past, and with the same Chinese intense work culture in full effect, young people have started doing what they call lying flat. This is where they find ways to avoid […]

We are constantly being worned by politicians about the threat of private credit. Even some business leaders have warned the world about how private credit has the potential to destroy the banking system. This exposure to private credit could actually end up being quite similar to the 2008 financial crisis for the same reasons that […]