#history
16 items · 16 articles
Articles
The Price of Blood
Every civilization before the modern state treated crime as a debt owed to the victim, enforced through restitution and community insurance.
The Merchant Court Returns
Justice is a service that degrades under monopoly and improves under competition. Merchants proved this; now builders are proving it again.
Self-Liquidating Credit: The Instrument That Destroys Itself
Bills of exchange carried a built-in death date and extinguished themselves as goods reached market; modern debt compounds forever by design.
A Constitution for the Ungoverned
Medieval merchants and diaspora communities built functional legal systems without states; their principles can now govern disputes in cyberspace.
The Moral Case for Debt Repudiation
Public debt differs fundamentally from private debt: politicians pledge our wealth, bondholders knowingly invest in future theft, so repudiation restores justice.
Protocols for the Ungoverned
Functional legal orders emerge from voluntary adoption and competitive governance, not top-down decree; history proves that polycentric law outperforms territorial monopoly.
The Poverty Lever: Why Regimes Want You Just Above Starving
Maximum political control comes not from wealth redistribution but from calibrated poverty: desperate enough to depend, not desperate enough to revolt.
The Colossus Falls - How to End All War
Wars persist because each generation consents to fight them; a generation that refused would be history's last to die in trenches.
Credit Before Coin: How Markets Bootstrap Sound Money Economies
Bills of exchange don't just provide elasticity within existing monetary systems; they can bootstrap entire economies that lack base money.
The Praxeology of Privacy ~ Chapter 18: Lessons from History
DigiCash, e-gold, and Silk Road failed through centralization and poor OPSEC. Bitcoin succeeded through decentralization, open source, and properly aligned economic incentives.
The Praxeology of Privacy ~ Chapter 12: The Crypto Wars
The Crypto Wars pit states against privacy technology. Mathematics ignores legislation. Developers face prosecution. The fundamental conflict is permanent and intensifying.
The Market's Money: Bills of Exchange and the Credit System Governments Killed
Bills of exchange were capitalism's self-regulating credit mechanism for seven centuries, until governments monopolized money creation and destroyed the entire system.
Free Men Will Build the Roads
Nobody asks who will bake the bread because markets already do it excellently; the roads question reveals statist capture of imagination.
The Predator's Pedestal
The state is not society's protector but its predator, surviving through ideology and intellectual capture, growing through war, vulnerable to withdrawn consent.
The One Rule That Creates All Wealth
Prosperity has one prerequisite: do not steal. Secure property rights enable voluntary exchange, which accumulates capital fairly. The West is collapsing because governments have become systematic thieves.
The Sacred Leaf: Paraguay, Tereré, and the Gods Who Understood Hospitality
Yerba mate outlasted every empire that tried to control it because the Guaraní built their ritual on hospitality, not permission.