IP Team

Voltaire Was the Original Newsletter Writer

Voltaire Was the Original Newsletter Writer

Before Substack, before email there was a man in a powdered wig writing letters at a furious pace. François Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, churned out more than 20,000 letters during his lifetime. That’s not correspondence. That’s a content empire. Most people picture Voltaire hunched over philosophy books or scribbling plays by candlelight. But […]

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The Paradox of Progress- Why Locke Thought We'd Get Less Free Over Time

The Paradox of Progress: Why John Locke Thought We’d Get Less Free Over Time

John Locke never said this explicitly, but buried in his ideas about government lies an uncomfortable truth: the very systems we create to protect our freedom will inevitably eat away at it. This isn’t a bug in the Lockean system. It’s a feature. And we’re watching it play out in real time. Most people remember

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Why the Most Alert Entrepreneurs are Often Social Outsiders (Israel Kirzner)

Israel Kirzner on Why the Most Alert Entrepreneurs are Often “Social Outsiders”

Everyone has walked past a gold mine at some point. The opportunity was there, sitting in plain sight, but we simply did not see it. Later, someone else noticed it and made millions. We slap our foreheads and wonder how we missed something so obvious. Israel Kirzner, an economist who spent decades studying what makes

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Why You're Still Single- A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Modern Dating Market (Gary Becker)

Gary Becker on Why You’re Still Single: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Modern Dating Market

You swipe left. You swipe right. You send clever messages into the void. You show up to coffee dates with people who looked better in their photos and told better stories in their bios. Six months later, you’re still doing the same dance. But here’s the twist: staying single might be the most rational decision

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The IQ of a System According to Herbert Simon

The IQ of an Effective System According to Herbert Simon

When we measure human intelligence, we use IQ tests. When we measure computing power, we count operations per second. But how do you measure the intelligence of something bigger and stranger, like a corporation, a city government, or an entire economy? Herbert Simon spent his life answering this question, though he never put it quite

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NATO is the New Delian League- And We All Know How That Ended (Thucydides)

NATO is the New Delian League: And We All Know How That Ended (Thucydides)

Thucydides watched Athens destroy itself through the very alliance meant to protect it. Twenty-five centuries later, we might be watching a rerun. The Delian League began with the noblest of intentions. Greek city-states, exhausted from repelling Persian invasions, needed collective security. They needed someone strong enough to coordinate defense, wealthy enough to maintain a navy,

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Beyond Income Tax- Why We Should Be Taxing Your Lifestyle, Not Your Labor

Beyond Income Tax: Why We Should Be Taxing Your Lifestyle, Not Your Labor (Nicholas Kaldor)

Every April, millions of people experience the same ritual humiliation. They calculate how much money they earned through honest work, then watch roughly a third of it vanish into government coffers through income tax. Meanwhile, the person living off inherited wealth in the penthouse upstairs pays less tax than the janitor who cleans it. Something

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Stigler's Razor- If a Regulation Exists, Someone is Making Money Off It (George Stigler)

George Stigler’s Razor: If a Regulation Exists, Someone is Making Money Off It

The Story We Tell Ourselves About Regulation When you think about regulations, you probably imagine stuffy government bureaucrats protecting you from dangerous products or crooked businesses. That mental picture makes sense. After all, that is what we learn in school. Regulations exist to protect the little guy from the big bad corporation. They keep our

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Your Empathy is Your Weakness- Musashi's Brutal Truths on Conflict

Your Empathy is Your Weakness: Miyamoto Musashi’s Brutal Truths on Conflict

Miyamoto Musashi killed his first man at thirteen. By the time he wrote The Book of Five Rings, Japan’s most legendary swordsman had fought over sixty duels and never lost. His advice on conflict strips away every comfortable illusion we hold about human nature. And nowhere does he savage our modern sensibilities more than in

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