Peter's Blog

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 […]

In 1775 roughly 80% of Americans owned their own businesses. Most of these were farmers, and their responsibility to the nation became deeply intertwined with their own livelihoods as they owned a bit of earth and let their love of self turn into love of country. They planted the seeds of survival and reaped the […]

Although deregulation is not often supported by those who support big government, it is actually the most realistic path forward for those who support an expensive state. Decades of deficits and poor management have led to a massive national debt and ever-growing interest payments. The interest payment is now similar to traditionally large expenses like […]

Regulation is routinely sold to the public as consumer protection, but its actual effect is to shield incumbent firms from competition by controlling who may enter a market and how they may operate. The airline industry illustrates this dynamic well, where a state-organized cartel produces the illusion of competing brands while regulatory minimums quietly become […]

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 […]