You probably think you are a free thinker. You do not go to church. You do not pray before meals. You roll your eyes at televangelists asking for jet money. Maybe you even call yourself an atheist, a skeptic, a rationalist, or some other label that lets you sleep at night feeling intellectually superior to […]
3 Toxic Ideas You Inherited From Christianity (According to Nietzsche) Read More »
A French economist named Frédéric Bastiat died in 1850, long before anyone had heard of a federal student loan, a Pell Grant, or a TikTok video explaining why your $80,000 in debt is actually society’s fault. And yet, somehow, he wrote the most devastating critique of student loan forgiveness ever published. He just did not
The Unseen Price of Your “Free” Student Loan Forgiveness Read More »
Most people want to be happy. That sounds so obvious it barely deserves a sentence. But John Stuart Mill, one of the sharpest minds of the nineteenth century, looked at that universal desire and said something strange: happiness is not enough. In fact, the wrong kind of happiness might be worse than no happiness at
Most people treat history like a museum. You walk through the halls, nod respectfully at the artifacts, maybe pause to read a plaque about some long dead king, and then leave feeling slightly more cultured than when you arrived. History, in this view, is something to admire. Something to preserve. Something that, if you are
The Role of History According to Friedrich Nietzsche Read More »
John Stuart Mill, writing in 1861, made a claim that drove the more egalitarian philosophers of his time slightly mad. He argued that not all pleasures are created equal. Some pleasures, he said, are higher. Others are lower. And no amount of intensity in the lower ones could ever match the quieter, deeper satisfaction of
Why AI-Generated Art is a “Lower Pleasure” (And Why It Matters) Read More »
There is a strange comedy playing out in modern wellness. People will spend three hundred dollars on a continuous glucose monitor before they will spend three dollars on a bag of lentils. They will research the optimal time to take magnesium glycinate but cannot remember the last time they walked somewhere instead of driving. They
Pareto’s Diet: Why 80% of Your Health is Decided by Two Simple Habits Read More »
In 1850, a dying French economist named Frédéric Bastiat sat down and wrote a short book called The Law. He had tuberculosis. He had months to live. And he was furious. He was not furious about taxes, exactly. He was not furious about politicians, exactly. He was furious about something much weirder and much more
I Read “The Law” So You Do Not Have To: Here Is Why You Are Being Robbed (Bastiat) Read More »
There is an old joke from the Soviet era that goes like this. A worker says to his boss, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” Everyone laughs. Then everyone goes home to an empty fridge. That joke is not really a joke. It is an economic theory wearing a clown nose.
Zero Profit, Zero Effort: The Marxist Incentive Death Read More »
Somewhere in a coffee shop right now, a person is telling another person how slammed they are. Their week is insane. They have not had a proper weekend in months. They are running on four hours of sleep and three espressos. They say all of this while sitting still, drinking a latte, with absolutely no
In 1845, a French economist named Frédéric Bastiat sat down and wrote one of the most devastating pieces of satire in the history of economics. It was called “The Candlemakers’ Petition,” and it pretended to be a formal complaint from the makers of candles, lamps, and lanterns. Their grievance? A foreign competitor was flooding the
The Bot-Made Petition: If Robots Could Write a Letter to the Government Read More »