There is a peculiar trick that language plays on us. Add an adjective to a noun and you can destroy the noun entirely. “Social justice” does to justice what “people’s republic” does to republic. It negates it while wearing its clothes. Ayn Rand understood this better than most. She called the concept of social justice […]
Why “Social Justice” Is the Enemy of Actual Justice Read More »
Adam Smith is the patron saint of free trade. His name gets dropped in every debate about tariffs, usually by the side that wants them gone. Politicians wave around copies of The Wealth of Nations like it is scripture, quoting selectively, proving whatever they already believed. Smith said free trade is good. End of discussion.
When Tariffs Win: The Tiny Exception Smith Made for National Security Read More »
Over a century ago, a strange, socially awkward economist from rural town noticed something that most people still refuse to see. Thorstein Veblen, a man who could not hold a university job to save his life, looked at the American economy and saw two civilizations living under one roof. On one side stood the engineers,
The Engineer vs. The MBA: The Eternal War Between Making Things and Making Money Read More »
There is a particular kind of confusion that hits you in a luxury department store. You pick up a jacket that looks like it was rescued from a dumpster behind a community theater. It is wrinkled. The color is somewhere between mustard and regret. The fit appears to have been designed by someone who has
Ugly Fashion is a Status Symbol: Why the Rich Choose to Look “Bad” Read More »
You have never held an opinion in your hand. You have never locked one in a safe, insured it against theft, or watched it appreciate in value on a shelf. And yet, if someone tries to take one from you, something inside your chest tightens in exactly the same way it would if they reached
Most people carry around an unexamined belief that goes something like this: profit is what businesses extract from society. The entrepreneur takes. The customer loses. The margin between cost and price is a small act of theft repeated millions of times until someone ends up on a yacht. It is a tidy story. It is
The Profit Paradox: Why Making Money is Actually a Social Service Read More »
Most people who have heard of Auguste Comte know him as the father of sociology, the man who coined the term and insisted that human society could be studied with the same rigor as chemistry or physics. Fewer people know that he also designed, in painstaking detail, a complete society from scratch. And almost nobody
The Role of the Banker: Comte’s Ideal Financial System Read More »
There is a question that political theorists have been circling for centuries, usually with great seriousness and very little resolution. Between Thucydides and Machiavelli, who actually understood power better? Both men watched civilizations make catastrophic decisions. Both wrote about it with uncomfortable clarity. But if you sit with their work long enough, a distinction emerges
Thucydides vs. Machiavelli: Who Really Understands Power Better? Read More »
You probably reached for your phone within ten minutes of waking up this morning. Maybe within ten seconds. You did not check it because something urgent happened overnight. You checked it because not checking it felt wrong, the way forgetting to bring your wallet used to feel wrong, or leaving the house without shoes. The
You have never read the most important book in your life. Nobody has. It was never printed. It has no author, no table of contents, no index. Yet you consult it every single day. You use it when you shake hands instead of bowing. You use it when you laugh at a joke that would
Why Culture Is Just a Massive, Unspoken Glossary Read More »