CONTENTS

1.) To Hell with Swords and Garter

2.) How Good Do You Want to Be?

3.) It’s Not How Clever or Smart You ARE: It’s How Clever and Smart You WANT to Be

4.) Wickedly Cool

5.) Ten Authentic Signs of Intelligence that Cannot be Faked

6.) How to Penetrate People’s Brains as though You’re Telepathic

7.) How to Charm the Pants Off Anyone Without a Single Word

8.) How to Have People Dying to Hear What You’ll Say Next

9.) How to Answer the Age-Old Question: What Do You Do?

10.) How to Become a Freakishly Brilliant Small-Talker

11.) How to Come Across as Diabolically Clever

12.) Lynchpin

13.) Are You Fascinating?

14.) How to be Unforgettable

15.) How to be the Smartest Person in the Bar

16.) 101 Things to Do Instead of College

17.) The Art of Independent Thinking

18.) What is Friendship?

19.) Laissez-Nous Faire

20.) How to Drop Out of School, Fire Your Boss & Change the Word

Did you feel that tug?

Like a half-forgotten idea you can’t quite put out of your head — the escalating sensation in the center of your chest telling you it’s time to shift your life?

Nothing outrageous — no come-to-God moment, this — but rather a soft yet persistent pull in another direction: an urge, sourced somewhere deep within, impelling you to do that thing for which you were born:

Create.

Admit it. You often feel it swelling up and pulsing inside you.

And once you acknowledge it, it begins to intensify, struggling to take shape so that it might burst open at last, like a tarantula-firework, illuminating a dark world desperately in need.

Yet, at the same time, an oppositional force tugs at you too: the uncertainty and fear of breaking away from the pack, of leaving your staid but secure position, of running out of money, not making your bills, evicted, hungry, homeless.

And so you ignore the pull to create, and you do nothing about it.

You bury yourself back in the safety of your soul-sucking job.

Oh, you tinker with your passions, here and there. You become something of a hobbyist.

But, in the end, you evade and ignore your dreams, and you meanwhile drown yourself in booze or food or drugs or sex or whathaveyou. And you tell yourself that staying in your current lifestyle is the right thing to do.

Still, that irrepressible part of you can’t be completely suppressed. It’s like a little creative beastie pulsing with life and pushing and kicking to break open inside you, yearning to grow.

Have you ever watched the slow, silent death of a thing?

Have you witnessed the life-force leaking out of a living organism, bit-by-bit, and gradually draining that organism of all its beautiful vitality, until one day, one hour, one minute, one second, the organism is suddenly no longer alive?

It is wrenching to see.

It is also ominously familiar.

And yet, and yet …

And yet what you always hear about pursuing your dreams and if you do everything will work out — this is, to a certain extent, a lot of nonsense.

You can run out of money.

You can get evicted.

You can go hungry.

Your life, in short, can nose-dive.

I’ve been there.

It is not pleasant: showering at the beach, brushing your teeth in the bathrooms of all-night convenient stores or laundromats, unable to write because you can’t concentrate, because you’re so worried about what’s going to happen to you.

And so knowing this is possible, what do you do?

You tell yourself you’re being prudent after all. You’re being sensible, practical.

You tell yourself that you need to first do this and then that and then you need to go back to college and then you need to do this other thing, and then, perhaps — perhaps — you’ll pursue your passion to become a creator, at last.

The truth is that you’re stalling because you can’t muster the courage to take the plunge.

You have the power within you right now to change everything for the better — and if you don’t try, do you know what will happen?

You’ll die without ever knowing what you could have done.

Am I telling you, then, to quit your life of safety and security?

Yes, I am.

I’m telling you that if the life you’re living is stultifying you and preventing you from bringing forth that which is most vital within you, you should indeed quit your safe secure life.

I’m telling you to stop treating your passions as hobbies.

I’m telling you to stop glutting yourself on the things that drown out your dreams.

I’m telling you to start thinking of your passions and your dreams as your profession: your life-force, your reason for living.

Start today.

Start now.

You just have to do it.

Slash your expenses.

Plan it.

Map it out.

Focus your brain.

Find a freelance or part-time gig.

Construct a fall-back plan for when everything goes straight to hell, which it might.

Frightening?

Inexpressibly.

Difficult?

You bet your fucking ass.

Every great achievement is difficult, and every path leading to it frightening.

We each live primarily inside of our own mind. Our lives are largely an attempt to give form to our psychological existence. We do that through what we create.

It’s do or die:

Life is do or die.

So go and do.

And to hell with swords and garter — and anything else that strangles the creative beastie so desperately yearning to hatch open and take shape inside of you.

How Good Do You Want to Be?

Does it keep you awake at night?

Do you burn in a white-hot fever?

Make it hotter, baby.

Stoke it.

Let it burn.

***

Because it’s as you always suspected:

You are not the product of your genetic code, and nobody is genetically doomed to mediocrity.

In actuality, it’s the opposite of what you’ve always been told. Your life is yours to shape and mold.

Genes are not blueprints dictating precisely what you become.

Your genes are only one of countless components, in a complex interplay of components, that go into the making of an almost infinitely complicated organism, the sum total of which is determined fundamentally by your desire:

Your will to become the person you most want to become is the main factor in determining your future.

The drive to persist even in the face of overwhelming odds comes chiefly from within.

So I ask again:

How good do you want to be?

That desire is far more important than your pedigree.

***

Brandon Mroz is the first ice skater in human history to complete, in sanctioned competition, a jump called a quadruple Lutz. He did this on November 12, 2011, at the ripe age of twenty-one.

Perfecting this jump requires untold hours and days and weeks and years of practice, and much of that time Brandon spent falling down on the cold, ungiving ice.

He began skating when he was three-and-a-half years old, and he performed his first successful quadruple Lutz — non-sanctioned — in 2010. A cursory calculation tells us that in his lifetime of practicing, he fell approximately thirty thousand times before landing a successful quadruple Lutz.

Yet those thirty-thousand spills were not in vain: through them, he became excellent. He raised the standard and in so doing he changed a certain sector of the world.

This story — the story of falling on your ass thousands of times and getting back up, over and over again to master a skill, of spending your time in this way — it is in many ways the perfect metaphor because it goes to the very essence of where human excellence originates, in any endeavor:

Falling down thousands upon thousands of times and getting back up and practicing it again and again — day in day out, week in week out, year in year out — that is how people learn to master a given skill.

That is how women and men of every stripe and variety achieve great things.

It is how humans grow wings.

***

It also raises a profound and inevitable question:

Why would anyone put him or herself through so much falling for a reward that looms so far into the future and the success of which is hardly assured?

Why, indeed?

Concerning exceptional achievement, it is, perhaps, the deepest inquiry that exists. And the more you think about it, the more you see that the inquiry is nearly bottomless, going so far down into the human psyche, beyond psychology, that it may well be that no one from the outside can penetrate it fully.

Why do people who become great pay the price they must pay in order to get there?

***

One thing we can clearly see:

People who achieve excellence learn to love the task they’ve chosen. They therefore focus almost exclusively upon the task.

It’s a type of monomania, a singleminded and often obsessive focus.

In essence, people who become great say to themselves: how can I solve this specific problem?

They do not say: how will solving this problem benefit others or me?

Or:

What is the higher cause in solving this problem?

They instead focus laser-like upon the task itself.

When that task is taken care of, they move to the next task and focus upon it with the same intensity, and then move on, and so on.

***

The creator must be driven and must have focus. That focus first comes from within, but the most crucial point to recognize — and it is absolutely vital — is that neither the passion nor the focus start out fully formed.

Passion and focus, in other words, do not spring full-blown from the head of Zeus. They do not accompany us into the world like the parts of our body. They develop as our interest in the thing develops.

Which is why great performers, whether musicians or athletes, scientists or painters, writers or architects or anything else, start out as all of us do: learning things slowly and tediously, often when we’re young, perhaps taking lessons that are more-or-less forced upon us.

The difference between the good and the great, the hobbyist and the expert, the mediocre and the excellent, is that at some point, people who become great choose to pursue the given activity and make it the focal point of their life.

The significance of this cannot be overstated.

As one jazz virtuoso explained it to me, describing the precise moment in childhood that her piano lessons ceased to be a chore:

“One day, when I was twelve or thirteen, after having taken [piano] lessons for years, I was struck in an almost epiphany-like fashion with the range of possibilities that lay before me. It seemed endless and at my fingertips, the potential for artistic expression inexhaustible. It was at that moment that I made my decision and ceased thinking of piano as a hobby.”

Passion develops.

It does not emerge fully formed.

First we must endure the effort of early practice, and then we must decide if the activity is what we wish to pursue.

In this sense — a general sense — creativity represents the highest levels of human excellence.

This is true no matter the domain in which you work, no matter the subject.

***

Every single person born healthy has the power within to become extraordinary. And in the bud and blossom of life, everyone sees for herself or himself a big and bright and beautiful future.

To be exceptional, you must first forsake many things that are unexceptional — forsake the foolish and live: it is a corollary.

It’s also, for most, the biggest obstacle.

***

Purpose and self-development are the aim of life.

Vice smothers self-development and purpose, and it can make the pull of mediocrity almost irresistibly strong.

Most won’t overcome it, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Mediocrity is not fated. It is accumulated.

The life you’ve always imagined for yourself is within your reach — it’s yours to control — but reaching it requires a great deal of effort. That’s why the overwhelming majority of people retreat into the relative safety of the group. Which group? Whichever one most represents the values any given person has accumulated over the years.

The way out of mediocrity isn’t college.

The way out of mediocrity is to focus first upon the task — on developing knowledge.

The way out of mediocrity is the decision to do, and the willingness to fail. Because mistakes and failure are part of the process.

The first move, then, is in explicitly recognizing what things you genuinely like to do.

Happiness must ensue.

It’s Not How Clever or How Smart You ARE: It’s How Clever and Smart You WANT to be

The most successful people in life aren’t particularly gifted or talented.

They become successful, rather, by wanting to be successful.

Genetic giftedness is largely a figment.

There are really no such things as prodigies.

Talent is a process.

Have you ever noticed that the smartest kids in school are almost never the ones who go on to be the most successful in life?

School in its best state teaches datum, not ambition or desire or will — all of which things can be encouraged and fostered, but not really taught.

Ambition, desire, will, persistence — these, as you may or may not guess, are the greatest predictors of success.

***

No human being and no living thing begins her life by undercutting it.

No human being, no matter how pampered or abused, no matter how spoiled or mistreated, starts out by giving up or giving in.

No one starts life irrevocably defeated.

Abandoning the dreams of one’s youth comes only after a protracted process of perversion.

The time it takes before this mindset dominates differs for each person.

For most it is a gradual accretion of pressures and set-backs and frustrations and small failures, or by the systematic inculcation of mantras that this life doesn’t really matter, that our dreams can’t be fully realized anyway, and that human existence is accidental or meaningless or both — only to find, one day, that their passion, once a glowing force within, is now gone … but where and how?

Others, having no depth of thought or will, stop at the first sign of adversity.

Only the truly passionate persist. Only the truly passionate retain for a lifetime the vision they had of themselves when they were young. Only a handful maintain for a lifetime the beautiful vision of their youth and go on to give it form.

The means by which we give that vision form is our work.

No matter what any given person may become — no matter how good, bad, ugly, or great — in the springtime of life, each person at one time believes that her existence is important, and that big wonderful things await.
Each and every single human being has the potential to retain that vision, and each and every single human being should retain that vision, because it is the true and correct vision.
College, I submit, can do irreversible damage to it.

***

Unactualized potential is a tragedy.

Nonconformity for nonconformity sake is meaningless.

Nonconformity for the sake of reason and independent thought, however, is a virtue.

Independent thought is a prerequisite of genius, and it takes courage to think for yourself.
Courage is also a virtue.

Blind conformity is the opposite of independent thought.

Ambition, too, is a virtue.

Virtue is human excellence. It is The Good.

The Good is that which fosters human life and promotes it.

The Bad, corollarily, is that which frustrates human life and smothers it. It is pain. It is that which stultifies human thought and human flourishing and prevents gain.

Thinking is the human method of survival. It is for this reason that humans are properly defined as the rational animal, and it is also for this reason that morality — true morality — is rooted not in God or gods or devils, but in the human quiddity: our rational faculty.

As a thing is defined by its identity, so humans are defined by their acts — which is to say, their actions.
Our actions are in turn shaped by our thoughts.

Your brain is the most powerful weapon in your arsenal. Nothing increases its strength like thinking. Cultivate, therefore, deliberate thought.

It is the greatest asset you’ve got.

***

Your life is largely a process of turning your interests into talents, which is done through a process of practice.
Talent is learned. It is cultivated.

Talent is not fated.

Your talents are rooted in the things you most enjoy doing.

It is in this sense that your passions are primarily willed.

Find your passions and grow them, and the more you do this, the more completely you’ll be fulfilled.

***

If you want to go to college, go.

If your true desire in life requires something specialized or technical — like medicine or engineering or law — go.

By all means, this.

The point here is not to condemn college categorically, for condemnation sake.

The point here — the only point here — is that if you’re going to college because that’s what you’ve been told you should do, or because you’ve been told that you must go to college in order to have a more complete or successful life, do not go.

Do not go to college merely for lack of anything better.

If you don’t yet know what you want to do, do not go.

Don’t go back to college for that Bachelor’s degree in sociology.

Don’t go back to college to try and motivate yourself to write, or in an attempt to fill your time, or your head.
Cultivate your brain instead.

Read. Think. Blink. Drink.

Relax.

Be self-taught.

Learn to play the piano or piccolo or sax.

Read and think a lot.

There is no hurry — I assure you, there is no hurry.

I assure you, you need not worry. In fact, it is a good thing to not yet know what you want, because life is a gigantic canvas and there’s so much with which to fill it, so much to do — have you not heard? So much, indeed, that choosing one thing at twenty or thirty or even forty is absurd.

College is far from the be-all-and-the-end-all. College is a lot of conformity and groupthink.

It can truly stunt your brain, every bit as much as lack of nourishment or food.

College is very often nothing more than pointless debt accrued.

***

Your desire to become the person you most want to become is ultimately the only thing you need.

In its elaboration, this will require a great deal — focus, discipline, practice — but the desire is the fundamental thing.

As long as there’s a fundamental desire and it burns like a fire, there’s no limit to anyone’s achievement. You needn’t be a savant. The desire to excel is the most important ingredient in becoming what you want.

***

“Life is an unceasing sequence of single actions, but the single action is by no means isolated,” wrote Ludwig von Mises.

Your life is largely a process of transforming your interests into talents, which, in turn, comes about through a process of practice.

It is in this sense, I say again, that your passions are primarily willed, and not inborn or innate.
Even genius is willed. You make yourself great.

***

Life is work.

Jobs are healthy. Work is good. Work is good for the soul. Be happy in your work.

Nothing more fundamental than labor is required for the production of abundance and the good things that you want for your life.

Labor takes many forms.

Blue-collar jobs build character, as they build invaluable work habits that you’ll never lose.

In her book No Shame in My Game, Katherine Newman points out what for many of us has been blindingly obvious for years: namely, that so-called low-skilled, blue-collar jobs, whether fast-food, waitressing, bartending, barista, custodial, clerking, so on, they require talents completely commensurate with, or even surpassing, white-collar work:

“Memory skills, inventory management, the ability to work with a diverse crowd of employees, and versatility in covering for co-workers when the demand increases,” she writes.

Among many, many other skills, I add.

Servers, bartenders, baristas, expos, clerks, et cetera, must multitask and remember every bit as much as, for example, an ER doc.

That’s one of the many reasons these jobs are good, and not something anybody should knock.

***

What do you value? Parties and thumbs-ups and reblogs and other time-killers, day and night? Or the active work of your body and brain?

Find work that you enjoy and embrace it. Become good at it. Become better. Pour your energy into your work like rain. Enjoy the motions of your body in concert with your brain.

He who’s faithful in a little is faithful in a lot.

Everything you do, therefore, do it with all that you’ve got.

Wickedly Cool

Personality is personal style. It is nothing more and it is nothing less. The art of charisma is really the art of personality.

Which is why there are as many different ways to be charismatic as there are different styles of personality.
Personality is the sum total of one’s many individual characteristics as they come together and create the person presented to the world.

Just as a thing is defined by its identity, so humans are defined by their acts, which are in turn defined by their thoughts.

Since we’re each the shapers of our own thoughts — and only our own thoughts — we each have the power to change and to mold our own personality.

For this reason, charisma begins (and ends) in the brain.

Charisma is magnetism.

Magnetism, as the very word implies, is the power to attract.

People can be magnetic and charismatic in a multitude of different ways:

You don’t, for instance, need to be extroverted to be charismatic.

You don’t need to be gregarious or boisterous. Many of the most charismatic people you’ve ever seen are silent and strange.

Nor is physical beauty alone charismatic — or, at any rate, not in the full sense of the word:

Physical beauty attracts, esthetically, sexually, whathaveyou, but its power of attraction is limited, precisely because humans are conceptual: this means we think and ruminate and interact.

Magnetic qualities are ultimately qualities that demonstrate one’s skills at living life as humans are designed to live it — which is to say, conceptually.

This is why contemplation is the highest occupation of the human species — because your personality and your behavior are a complex interplay of contemplation and action mixed. But it all begins in the brain.

Which, in general terms, is the reason that the most magnetic quality anyone can possess is the genuine happiness and the relaxed disposition that comes from a life that’s been thought about and thus lived well, and then the genuine confidence which is the natural elaboration of that.

Perfection, however — and this is important — is not the determining factor in matters magnetic and charismatic:
Flaws, faults, foibles, and fuck-ups do not an uncharismatic person make.

How one deals with one’s own flaws, faults, foibles, and fuck-ups is what’s at primary issue.

Happiness is charismatic.

Understanding is charismatic.

Actual self-confidence is charismatic insofar as it discloses efficacy and worth.

Have you ever observed that you’re at your best when you’re doing something you really grasp?

Have you ever observed that you’re at your most relaxed and comfortable when you’re doing something you enjoy — i.e. something that you’re genuinely confident in?

That state of mind is charismatic.

Have you, on the other hand, noticed that when you’re put into a situation about which you know little or nothing and want no real part of, you feel diffident, timid, unhappy?

This is the opposite of charismatic.

The primary method of human survival is our rational capacity, because of which human survival isn’t just physical but psychological.

That’s why happiness is the goal.

The goal of life, then, is emotional. But the means of achieving it are not.

The means of achieving it are cognitive:

We must use our brains.

We must think.

Charisma stems from this uniquely human faculty.

Charisma comes from thinking.

So cultivate your power of thought.

Cultivate contemplation.

Contemplation, I repeat, is the highest occupation of the human species.

In the very decision to do this — and even more in the sincere follow-through — your charisma will EXPLODE.

Purchase the full book here, for fucksake!

Her name was Kelly Carlyle. She was twenty-years-old, and she was the girl Kristy Reed had seen over a year before in the classroom, who had shown him the book.

Some twenty days after this meeting in the diner, he visited her at her home, when she was sick with a high fever, and the lights of the city hung in a rippled haze beyond her window. She lived in a bare spacious flat far west of town, in a subdivision along the fringes of the desert. She lay upon her back on a wide black futon on the floor. Her slender white fingers looked flowerlike across the dark-blue sheets. He brought her a bottle of icy-cold water.

“I would say that I’m surprised to see you,” she said, “except for some reason I’m not surprised to see you. I think I half expected it.”

“They told me you were sick,” he said.

She lolled her head on the pillow and looked at him from under heavy eyelids. He did not speak but regarded her frankly.

“I think I was hoping you’d come,” she said.

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“No.”

They were both silent, and in the silence a big generator throbbed stupidly outside.

She apologized for the noise and told him she was unable to sleep because of this noise, because city road-crews were tearing up the entire street right out front and rebuilding it. She said that even though they stopped working at 5:00pm, they left their klieg lights on all night long, for some reason, and the generator too, and she said that it was very loud and bright and that the lights and the noise kept her awake, even though she had heavy black drapes. She said she’d even called the city and complained about it, and they told her there was nothing that could be done, that that’s just the way it was.

“You can’t fight the city hall,” she said.

“What is that?” he said.

“Just an expression.”

He looked contemplative. She was in this moment struck by his sprawling and haphazard education, which in the past two weeks she’d come to know: she found endearing the gaps in his knowledge but also the depths, which stemmed from his upbringing, his autodidacticism, his singleminded decision to take upon himself the task of his own education.

“I think it means you can’t fight bureaucracy,” she explained, “because there’s no one human there.”

“Have you tried?”

“No.”

He looked thoughtful again, deeply thoughtful, his eyes narrowed as thin as saber slashes.

“I suggest earplugs,” he said. “For the noise,” he added, “not the city hall.”

He smiled, and she weakly laughed and said:

“Don’t make me laugh: it hurts my head. I’ve tried earplugs. They don’t really help. I’m resigned to the noise. Besides, I can hear my heartbeat when I wear earplugs, and I don’t like that. It reminds me too much of my own mortality, and that definitely keeps me awake.”

But that night, the lights and the big generator indeed went simultaneously silent and black.

***

 

That next morning, the foreman found the generator disconnected — no small job since the generator was fenced-off and secured. He asked the nightwatchman about it. The nightwatchman said he’d witnessed nothing, and so that next night the foreman stationed himself, with a large thermos of coffee, in a hidden alcove very near the high fence that enclosed the generator.

Near midnight he saw a hooded figure sweep through the darkness, leaping lightly over the fence and shutting off the generator by removing the wires and the boot from the spark plugs and thereby instantly abolishing the lights and the noise. This figure then hopped back over the fence and ghosted away into the darkness.

It happened so rapidly that the foreman scarcely had time to react.

The next night, he was better prepared: He had men with him.

Thus when the figure came, they were all three waiting in the dark, and when the figure got inside the fence, the men sprung.

But it was almost as if the figure expected them: he vaulted like a puma over the other side of the fence, and he bound off into the darkness.

The men gave chase.

“Halt!” the foreman yelled. “STOP! This is government property. You are trespassing.”

The figure did not stop but kept running: a hooded blur in the darkness.

The men followed after him at top speed.

The figure did not know that a high cement wall awaited him.

But the men knew.

When the figure came to the wall, he hesitated for just a fraction of a second, but he didn’t stop running. There was a slight hitch in his step, and that was all.

He leapt with all his might and ran two steps up the concrete facade which stood glowing brightly under an apricot klieg and then one more shorter step before leaping again — a wild effort in which he reached for the top of the wall.

He caught it.

Just barely, but he held on with his left hand and hung there for a split second. Then he swung his other arm around and grabbed hold of the top of the wall with his fingertips and started to pull himself up — until one of the men below, who was agile and strong, ran the wall as well and leapt and grabbed hold of the hem of the hooded jacket, striving to pull the figure down, momentarily stopping the figure from climbing over. No sooner had he grabbed hold of the jacket-hem, however, than the figure slipped out of it, leaving the man empty-handed and back on the ground, but exposing the figure’s face as he did so.

It was Kristy Reed.

All three men saw him in the light.

Kristy slipped up and over the wall and dropped down and then vanished into the night.

***

 

Four days later, on a Friday afternoon, when Kristy learned that a nameless boy had been caught and jailed for trespassing on government property and shutting off the generator, he went down to the police station and turned himself in. A little later that same day, the foreman and his two men definitively identified Kristy as the person they’d chased and who had evaded them.

He was arraigned three days after that, on Monday, and brought before the judge. The courtroom was spacious and mostly empty. Along the righthand side of the room, a screenless window stood open to receive the desert breeze.

When the judge asked him why he’d done it, he said because he cared for the young woman, who was his friend, and who was ill and unable to sleep for the lights and the loud noise. He said a second time that he cared about her.

“Did you know you were trespassing?” the judge asked.

“Yes.”

The judge looked at the papers before him.

“It is my understanding also that you’re a runaway who’s been arrested at least once for truancy, and that you’re not yet eighteen-years-old — not until next month.”

“Yes, that is correct.”

“How do you plead?”

“Not guilty.”

The judge looked at him. Kristy spoke:

“There is deep legal precedent, judge, going back to at least 1786, for escaping and running away with impunity, even from police or other government personnel, when matters of personal safety, injury, and security are at issue.” Kristy paused. “Judge, in a land of freedom, life is worth living because in such a land, under such circumstances, life is full of promise, and it teems with potential. I was born in no such place. I was brought up in no such place. I was brought up in a place where we are not allowed to own the fruits of our labor, which is property, which is an extension of person. In running, I sought to come into such a place. Frederick Douglass said ‘Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails and any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.’ That is what I come from, judge.”

The judge cast Kristy a long, steady stare.

“You may say that at your trial,” the judge said. “Your bail is set at twenty-thousand.” He hammered the gavel.

The bailiff then came to lead Kristy Reed away, back to the jail cell. He reached over gently for Kristy’s arm, but Kristy slipped lightly out of his reach, and in a liquid-like manner, he went for the open window. He jumped out.

The police chased him, but they did not catch him.

They pursued him down the alleys and the backstreets and the neighborhood lanes, and they pursued him down the labyrinthian ways — and they lost him. They put out an all-points-bulletin, but he was not found.




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Did you know that in present-day America, there exist many, many isolated pockets of Utopia?

These are places wherein healthcare is 100 percent free.

Where housing is fully provided by money that pours freely in.

And food as well is provided.

In these Utopias, everyone has access to education, and education, too, is 100 percent free.

There is no such thing here as bourgeois property — also known as private property.

Property is instead shared and held in trust by a benevolent bureaucracy which oversees everything, and which grants more money to these places than to any other single place in the United States.

Do you know these Utopian pockets I’m referring to?

Informally, they’re called Indian Country. Formally they’re known as Native American Indian Reservations.

Here the leading cause of death among young men is suicide.

These Utopias also have the highest rate of poverty among ANY racial group in the country — more than twice the national average — and are often environmentally dirty and unsanitary, all of which is quite strange, when you think about it, considering their Utopian nature and the sheer amounts of money they receive.

They also have the highest unemployment rates in the country, and perhaps there is a clue there:

In 2016, the last year for which the census data is available, the average household income on reservations was approximately 70 percent below the national average of $57,617. Just over 20 percent of those households earned less than $5,000 a year. More the 25 percent of the reservation populations live below the official poverty level, compared with 13 percent of the United States as a whole.

This, reader, is socialism.

Quoting history professor Dr. Andrei Znamenski:

In the 1990s, I had a chance to travel through several reservations. Each time when I crossed their borders I was stunned by the contrast between the human landscapes outside and those within Indian reservations. As soon as I found myself within a reservation, I frequently had a taste of a world that, in appearance, reminded me of the countryside in Russia, my former homeland: the same bumpy and poorly maintained roads, worn-out shacks, rotting fences, furniture, and car carcasses, the same grim suspicious looks directed at an intruder, and frequently intoxicated individuals hanging around. So I guess my assessment of the reservation system will be a biased view from a former Soviet citizen who feels that he enters his past when crossing into Native America.

I am going to make a brief excursion into the intellectual sources of this “socialist archipelago.” Since the 1960s, the whole theme of Native America had been hijacked by Marxist scholarship and by so-called identity studies, which shaped a mainstream perception that you should treat Native Americans not as individuals but as a collection of cultural groups, eternal victims of capitalist oppression. I want to challenge this view and address this topic from a standpoint of methodological individualism. In my view, the enduring poverty on reservations is an effect of the “heavy blanket” of collectivism and state paternalism. Endorsed by the federal government in the 1930s, collectivism and state paternalism were eventually internalized by both local Native American elites and by federal bureaucrats who administer the Indians. The historical outcome of this situation was the emergence of “culture of poverty” that looks down on individual enterprise and private property. Moreover, such an attitude is frequently glorified as some ancient Indian wisdom — a life-style that is morally superior to the so-called Euro-American tradition.

Before we proceed, I will give you some statistics. Native Americans receive more federal subsides than anybody else in the United States. This includes subsidized housing, health, education, and direct food aid. Yet, despite the uninterrupted flow of federal funds, they are the poorest group in the country. The poverty level on many reservations ranges between 38 and 63 percent (up to 82 percent on some reservations),4 and half of all the jobs are usually in the public sector.5 This is before the crisis of 2008! You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in economics to figure out that one of the major sources of this situation is a systemic failure of the federal Indian policies.

These policies were set in motion during the New Deal by John Collier, a Columbia-educated social worker, community organizer, and utopian dreamer who was in charge of the Native American administration during FDR’s entire administration. English Fabian socialism, the anarchism of Peter Kropotkin, communal village reforms conducted by the Mexican socialist government, and the romantic vision of Indian cultures were the chief sources of his intellectual inspiration. Collier dreamed about building up what he called Red Atlantis, an idyllic Native American commonwealth that would bring together modernization and tribal collectivism. He expected that this experiment in collective living would not only benefit the Native Americans but would also become a social laboratory for the rest of the world. The backbone of his experiment was setting up so-called tribal governments on reservations, which received the status of public corporations. Collier envisioned them as Indian autonomies that would distribute funds, sponsor public works, and set up cooperatives. In reality, financed by the BIA, these local governments began to act as local extensions of its bureaucracy.

(Source)

If you believe — and I mean even vaguely, because politics isn’t really your bag, and you don’t particularly like thinking about boring economics (and I’m with you, I truly am) — if you believe even vaguely in “free” healthcare and education for all and other things of this nature, or if you believe bureaucracy is okay and probably good for health, safety, the environment, and so on, I vehemently urge you to spend a little time traveling through Indian Country: “Socialist Archipelagos,” as Dr. Znamenski termed them, and what I call pockets of American Utopia.

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The Party of Science is, as you know, the Left, and they are quick to call out (correctly so) the knuckle-draggers on the Right who place faith above reason: the right is absurdly antiquated on any number of issues — ranging from gay marriage (which, incidentally, the left was also against, for 238 years, before, unlike those of us who believe uncompromisingly in laissez faire, they were suddenly for it, beginning about four years ago), to human sexuality, to God-in-the-Constitution, to much more.

The left, however, is hardly more scientifically enlightened.

In fact, their knuckle-dragging equals or eclipses the right in manifold areas — nuclear energy, for example, the woeful (mis)understanding of how much hard-core fossil-fuel energy goes into making and sustaining all forms of so-called renewable energy; how filthy with externalities the “clean” energy racket really is, and much more.

But it’s in the realm of economics — the science of production and exchange — that the Party of Science is found at its most knuckle-draggingly unscientific.

I’m talking about basic economics, mind you, and not the more complex theories — Marx’s thoroughly discredited Labor Theory of Value, for example, which many on the left still inexplicably cling to.

For instance, an entire nationwide movement sprung up around the shibboleth “We are the 99 percent.”

I’ve recently been criticized a little over my use of that term — it being all of seven years old now, you see — but I’m here to tell you that the mentality behind it is not only alive and well: it’s stronger than ever.

This movement persisted for over a year, and it was based entirely on an elementary misunderstanding of an economic law — a law so elementary, in fact, that the left’s misunderstanding of it makes the right-wing position on, for instance, evolution look halfway normal.

That elementary principle is this:

The so-called 1 percent is singlehandedly responsible for creating all the wealth from which the 99 percent prospers — wealth put into full use during the whole movement: televisions, cameras, computers, tablets, iPhones, Androids, social media, reliable transportation, plumbing, concrete, clean food (which was trucked in by means of fossil fuel), clean water, the infrastructures providing clean water, shelter, state-of-the-art medical facilities, and much, much, much, much more.

America, incidentally, though 50 percent socialized in medicine already, as it has been for a long time (driving up the costs astronomically via economic laws neither the Right nor the Party of Science can apprehend), is still, because of the 50 percent that hasn’t yet been socialized, the country everyone comes to for major medical procedures: all the princes and princesses and premiers and presidents and sheiks and kings and queens and movie stars and sports stars and everyone else, if they need heart or brain or spine surgery or cancer care or any one of thousands of other things, they do not go to Cuba, they do not go to Russia, they do not go to China, they do not go to England, or Australia, or Japan, or France, or Canada, or Scandinavia. They come to America for America’s technology and America’s doctors, which the so-called 1 percent created and sustains.

All these things and innumerable others besides — including most importantly any number of job markets in which the 99 percent work — are created by the capital and capital investment and the wealth of the 1 percent.

Capital and capital investment ALONE creates wealth. It creates innovations. It creates production and inventions and jobs and the division-of-labor and vastly greater transmission of knowledge and everything life-sustaining.

Equally important — and please take a moment to process this as well — the 99 percent scale is still in America not fixed.

This is crucial, and it is entirely missed by everyone within the movement to whom I’ve ever spoken.

In many ways, it’s the only thing that matters:

Through hard work, persistence, and good ideas, anyone and everyone is perfectly free to move up that scale — all the way to the 1 percent. And people do, all the time. It happens all the time in America, every single day, that people go from nothing or very little to abundance.

This, by the way, is one reason that the 1-percent-99-percent statistic is not quite accurate. It fluctuates, but the mean is more like 3-percent-97-percent. It needn’t stay there, however. It’s not locked in, and the more wealthy people there are, the more innovation and invention and progress there will be. The primary things that determines it are ambition and good ideas that people willingly pay for.

Prosperity happens under systems of freedom.

That is observable, evidence-based data — as is the fact that heavy taxation, socialization, inflation (i.e. money printing), licensing law monopolies and many other state-created things, they stifle prosperity.

In socialized countries they call this The Brain Drain.

Quoting the economist Dr. George Reisman:

“All of us, 100 percent of us, benefit from the wealth of the hated 1 percent. The protesters are literally kept alive on the foundation of the wealth of those whom they protest and hate…. For one small example, the fuel that powers the tractors and the trucks and the airplanes and the trains that power production and delivery of the food the protesters eat. The protesters and all other haters of laissez faire hate and protest the foundations of their very existence” (source).

As I’ve said before — and can never say enough — there are 5,000 arguments against laissez faire, and every single one of them is predicated upon a fraudulent premise, which is in turn usually predicated upon The Entrenchment Fallacy.

Some of the smartest people I know and some of the smartest people I’ve ever heard and read believe in total, unadulterated laissez faire, and I can absolutely assure you that any objection you might think of has been thought about and considered in great, great detail: whether economic or political, whether ethical or legal, whether environmental or civic, it’s been considered and addressed. It’s been discussed and written about so exhaustively, in fact, that the amount of data on the subject has long outstripped any one person’s ability to read it all. And it will continue to be addressed and elaborated.

You will not think of something new that will in turn justify the legal violation of person and property as a tenable social system.

You will not think of something that suddenly makes political corruption and lying and political pandering and 100,000 pages of bureaucratic legislation good government.

Dismissal, prevarication, ridicule — the most common ways the majority of people deal with laissez faire — these do not touch it. These don’t alter the facts.

Nor does ignoring and avoiding the arguments alter the facts.

Also, behind every major victory for personal liberty — legalizing gay marriage, for instance, or pot legalization, justice for Native American children, or allowing insurance companies the freedom to trade across state lines, abolishing all trade tariffs, et cetera — you will find there the bedrock principles that undergird laissez faire.

You will not find leftwing or rightwing politicians — and, make no mistake, liberal politicians have thrown as many people in jail for prostitution and pot as conservatives (probably more), who have also thrown countless thousands into jail for such non-crimes.

Ultimately, though, the reason laissez faire triumphs is not because of more skillful argumentation or polemics or debate.

Laissez faire triumphs, rather, because it is right and it is just.

Laissez faire arises naturally out of humanity itself. It is not created. It’s what happens naturally when people are left alone.

Through the inalienable right to person and property and through voluntary exchange, trade, and transactions, people are perfectly free to become wealthy — and the anger and envy of those who have not become wealthy does not negate this basic freedom.

It will always remain a fact that no one and no institution has or will ever have rightful authority over the person or property of another — no matter how dire-sounding the catastrophes, no matter how charged with punishment the religious scroll, no matter how seemingly sophisticated the counter-arguments, no matter how convoluted the equivocations, no matter how numerous and righteously indignant and hysterically irate the opponents (and I’ve dealt with plenty of them), the basic premise of laissez faire will remain true:

We are each individuated and sovereign, and we each have a property in our person, and property is an extension of person.

This is why anyone who actually cares about what’s just and good and (scientifically) right will inevitably be led back to laissez faire.


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You’re part of the ninety-nine percent, you say.

What of that?

Your status isn’t fixed, and you are not stuck there.

You’re free to work your way along the spectrum — as, indeed, most people do. You’re free to run clear up to the top percent — as, indeed, many people do. Your motivation and your desire and your persistence primarily determine this. The spectrum is fluid, and you are mobile along the spectrum. For the first time in human history, the formal recognition and the advance of freedom made such mobility possible and also legally permissible. Under feudalism or any other statist regime, no such mobility exists at all. Under such regimes, your status and your class are fixed. In this way, America expunged the entire idea of class.

Please consider also that under a system of laissez faire, you are completely free to practice any form of government you want: buy your land and build your commune and set up your rules and live that way.

The opposite, however, is not true: virtually any other form of government strictly prohibits — under threat of fines, imprisonment, gulags, concentration camps, and death — its citizens from practicing true laissez faire, which is the full and inalienable right of action, use, and disposal.

That, in many ways, is all anyone ever need know.

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“I’m in bed the next day, she brings me cafe-au-lait, gives me a cigarette. My balls feel like concrete.”

— Ricky Roma, Glengary, Glenross

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, a surveyor reported on two houses in London:

“I found the whole area of the cellars of both houses full of sewage, to the depth of three feet, which had been permitted for years to accumulate from the overflow of the cesspools … and no doubt the entire neighborhood had been infected by it.”

In Manchester:

“Many of the streets in which cases of fever are common are so deep in mire or so full of hollows and heaps of refuse that the vehicle used for conveying patients to the House of Recovery often cannot be driven along them.”

Plague, dysentery, all manner of sickness and disease — not to mention the foul stench — these were commonplace results of pollution prior to industrialization.

Here, however, is an account of early industrial pollution, which is also no joke:

“No industry has been more destructive to beauty than the petroleum industry. All about us rose derricks, squatted engine-houses and tanks, the earth about them streaked and damp with the dumplings of pumps…. If oil was found and the well flowed, every tree, every shrub, every blade of grass was coated with the black oil, and tar and oil stained everything in the vicinity. If the well went dry, oily holes were left, for nobody cleaned up in those days.”

Wealth, private property, and tort laws solve the degradation and injustices of this latter pollution.

Cronyism does not.

Technology and human progress solve the former two examples — even into the present day.

The wealth generated by successful economies is single-handedly responsible for cleaning up such horrible pollution in America, as in that latter example — including so much pristine sanitation and clean drinking water we enjoy now and which in America, as in most of the developed world, we take for granted.

Clean drinking water has been a plague on humankind for much of humankind’s history — and it still is in much of the developing world today.

Did you know that safe drinking water systems and the infrastructure that provides them are still far beyond the reach of many poor Indian and African villages, where dysentery often spreads because the simple preventative measure of installing concrete rims around the communal drinking wells are made impossible by a combination of internecine disagreements, first-world environmental groups, who believe it’s their responsibility to keep developing places from developing, and (most of all) poverty?

Did you know that reliable, lasting concrete requires mining?

Did you know that a single wind-turbine — or “bat-and-condor Cuisinart,” as the Audubon Society calls them — requires 20 MILLION tons of concrete sunk deep into the earth to anchor?

Did you know that wind-energy proponents would have us, right now in America, cover an area the size of Germany every single year with wind-turbines, despite the fact that wind power is inefficient and intermittent and requires so much hard-core industrialized mining and fossil fuel?

If you think Ricky Roma’s balls require a great deal of mining, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Do you know how much heavy-duty industrial mining and manufacturing the concrete ALONE would require for thousands upon thousands upon thousands of wind-turbines YEARLY — forget everything else (and there is much)?

If your answer is no, please don’t worry:

Most people don’t — especially the people most vehemently calling for it.

This doesn’t even touch the topic of Neodymium, which is an environmentalist tragedy that borders, in my honest opinion, on the criminal.

Nor does it touch the subject of solar cells.

Coming from a mining town, as I do, and a mining family, I can tell you with absolute authority and certitude that all the jet-setting politicians and the Hollywood elites and all the enviros and the hippy-dippies — and I have many hippy-dippy friends, I assure you, good friends, many of them — they have not the first or faintest idea how much mining is required for their day-to-day lives.

I can tell you also with great authority that the jet-setting politicians and environmental groups make up lies out of whole cloth. They’re also responsible for a great deal of environmental disasters and degradation, and they don’t want to be held liable for it.

All transportation requires mining — all of it.

“If you use any of these modes of transport — aircraft, boat, car, bus, train, motorcycle, bicycle, scooter, or segway, then you are relying on the by-products of mining for your transportation. A significant variety and quantity of minerals are required to manufacture these vehicles without even considering the fuel to power it. Now lets think about the surface most of these vehicles travel on (including you if you walk). The roads, rails and concrete paths, they’re only possible because mining companies mined the minerals used to make these surfaces for you. The same applies to the equipment used to control the flow of traffic and make it safe and reliable for you to travel. Mined minerals and more mined minerals.” (Source)

Your home or apartment is made mostly of minerals.The foundations are made mostly of concrete and steel.

“The basic services in your home (water, electricity, gas) are conducted through copper and steel wires and plastic pipes. Think about that the next time you turn on a tap or flick a [plastic] light switch on. Your bathrooms and kitchen are fitted out with essential and non essential products that also contain many minerals only made possible from mining. Yes mining provides you with the basic elements of your life — that you take for granted. You fill your home with all sorts of electronic gadgets to improve your quality of life. None of them are possible without mining the minerals that they are made from. Did you know that your television contains several rare-earth minerals? How many of us use wooden or plastic frying pans, pots, plates, cups, glasses and cutlery at home? That’s right, the majority of us use these items that are made of minerals. Minerals that have been mined.” (Ibid)

And this doesn’t even begin to capture the full extent of it, I promise you.

Neither does it touch beauty products, clothing, bedding, paint, jewelry, watches, clocks, medical equipment, office supplies, phones, computers, staples, if you still use them, and of course energy itself.

Please read more about the nature of wealth and poverty, and the indivisible link between property and person — and please celebrate the beautiful, life-sustaining industry of mining:

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She drove him six hours into a small mining town in eastern Nevada, near the Utah border. During the drive he told her what had happened. She listened intently but did not speak. A green-colored half moon hung low in the sky, the horizon beneath it a band of xanthic light which glowed like something prehistoric.

They drove in silence for a long time, and then he said something to her that she thought very strange and poignant, something which afterward she’d think a lot about, and which she’d never forget:

“Work,” he said, “what you do, the movements of your body guided by your brain — that is the meaning of life.”

She looked at him quizzically.

He told her that there’s nothing more important in life than how you work — whatever that work may be. The motions and movement of your body, he said, as dictated by your brain. He said that human ability is rooted in the human brain, and that whatever else you are and whatever else you become, it grows from this foundation. He said that nothing more fundamental than work is required for the life you want for yourself, and that no matter what moral code anyone tries to force upon you, whether secular or non-secular, the final measure of value is in the work. He told her that everything else you’ll hear is a swindle, and that competence is the only ethical code you’ll ever need — that anyone will ever need.

She listened closely but did not reply to any of this.

A long silence ensued.

“In the sacred house of the human spirit, each of us dwells alone,” he said.

“Where did you hear that?” she said.

“Something I once read, long ago.”

“Is it true?”

“Yes, it is.”

She glanced over at him but said nothing, and after that they rode in silence the rest of the way, down the long lonely road, the moon above like a giant squeeze of lime among stars winking with a cold and icy light. At last they came to the outskirts of a town she’d never been to, and he got out of her car and stared at her through the open window but did not speak. Then he said goodbye.

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This is excerpted from my latest novel: Reservation Trash, which for the next five days is free on Kindle. Download it and I’m eternally grateful.

It’s the story of a young Navajo runaway named Kristy Reed, his monomanaical pursuit of life, happiness, and the sub-four-minute mile, which for him represents freedom and human ability. It’s my seventh published book?–?but it’s the one I’m most pleased with … by far.

The Indian who visited Kristy at his work was tall and thin and handsome. He had very white teeth and a kind smile. He was middle-aged, clean-shaven. His polished shoes gleamed like obsidian. He wore a black suit-jacket and a navy-blue necktie, his thick hair cut high-and-tight.

“You’re Native,” the man said.

“Yes,” Kristy said.

“What tribe?”

“Navajo.”

“Diné,” the man said.

“Yes,” Kristy said.

“What does that word mean? I’ve never known.”

“It means ‘The People.’ Some say it means ‘Children of the Chosen People.’”

“Very interesting. Thank you.”

Kristy didn’t reply.

“You’re a minority,” the man said.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re part of a subordinate group whose members have significantly less control and power over their lives than members of a majority group.”

“I’m a human being.”

“You’re part of a group that experiences a narrowing of opportunities — by which I mean, success, education, wealth, and so forth — which is disproportionately low compared to your group’s numbers in the society.”

“I’m an individual. That is the smallest minority there is.”

“Young man, you should have an awareness of subordination and a stronger sense of group solidarity, if you’ll permit me to say. You are a victim of privilege.”

“I don’t feel like a victim. I feel like an individual human being.”

“And yet you might be entitled to certain — you know — reparations which are owed to you.”

“I don’t want them,” Kristy said.

“No? Why?”

“Because you cannot correct injustice with more injustice. The only way to correct injustice is to allow equality before the law. You cannot correct racism with more racism.”

“What I’m describing is hardly racism. I frankly find it a little offensive that you imply this.”

“I imply no such thing,” Kristy said.

“I’m sorry. That’s how it sounded.”

“Like an implication?”

“Yes.”

“Then I haven’t made myself clear: I’m stating very explicitly that what you’re espousing is racism.”

The tall slender man raised his eyebrows and unconsciously stepped back one pace.

“Racism,” Kristy said, “in addition to being another deterministic philosophy, is also another form of collective-tribalism — of the most barbaric kind. It is a primitive ideology that tries to grant moral-sociological significance to one’s DNA code. It holds that human character is at least to some extent the result of one’s genetic chemistry. It ascribes moral worth to racial pedigree and the genes we’ve inherited. But that’s the opposite of what’s actually true: our rational faculty determines our character. Race is unchosen. Moral worth and character apply only to the realm of choice. Humans are the rational animal. And rationality is a choice. Thinking is a choice. We are born with the rational faculty, yes, which is biological and genetic, but the convictions and thoughts and ideas which shape our minds which in turn shape our actions which in turn shape our character — this is not inherited. This is chosen. Racism is a desire to achieve virtue merely by virtue of one’s genetic inheritance. It’s not so easy or simplistic: Virtue — by definition — must be chosen, or it falls outside the realm of morality. Now please leave me alone.”


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Note:

This is Chapter 7.

The full book is available in bookstores everywhere.

You disparage wealth who have never known poverty. You disparage cleanliness and health from a tower of health and cleanliness. Let me tell you something:

Poverty which is neither sin nor vice is also neither noble nor good.

Poverty is hardship.

Poverty is sickness.

Poverty is misery.

Poverty is death.

The words well, weal, and wealth are etymologically related.

Wealth, in a fundamental sense, is that which humans need to survive and prosper.

Wealth is agriculture. It is clothing. It is carpentry. It is masonry. It is mining. It is fishing. It is transportation. It is technology. It is art, banking, finance, accounting, service industry. It is everything humans need in order to flourish.

Wealth is created. Resources are created.

Wealth is not a finite pool from which we draw and which will one day dry up. It is the opposite:

Like intelligence — and for the exact same reason — neither wealth nor resources are finite or static but developed. They are limitless, just as the human capacity for producing them is limitless.

For all of human history, oil was not a resource, until recently, in the late 1800’s, when human ingenuity created the resource, created this wealth.

New wealth awaits. It always awaits. New resources await.

The source of human progress is human ability, which means above all intellectual ability, and then the physical counterpart of carrying that through.

This process is work.

Liberating human beings — unshackling the brain and the body by allowing humans to innovate and invent and grow and produce and become limitlessly wealthy — this is how you enrich all of society. This is how wealth is created.

It is not trickle-down.

It’s a never-ending deluge, an explosion, an interminable torrent of creativity and wealth.

New wealth arises when someone discovers a new method by means of which humans might better prosper, whether it’s the microscope, the microchip, or the potential energy at the nucleus of an atom. It is in this sense — the literal sense — that wealth is inexhaustible: because the human mind is inexhaustible.

Wealth brings progress.

Wealth brings health.

Wealth brings cleanliness: clean food and clean water and medicine.

Wealth brings homes that are warm in winter and cool in summer.

Wealth brings better methods of travel, more security, more comfort, more peace of mind, greater happiness.

And what brings wealth?

Production brings wealth.

What is production?

Production is work. It is labor — and nothing more fundamental than labor is required for the production of wealth.

What brings this about? What creates production? The answer will surprise you:

Private property, which includes money, which is only a medium.

This and this alone is ultimately what creates production which creates wealth, which creates health and food and shelter and clean water and medicine and comfort and better human life.

The abundance that you’ve always had and that you take for granted — the abundance you enjoy that so many of you want to deprive others of — it was created by the freedom to act and work and the right to own and enjoy the fruits of your acts and your work.

That is private property. It is as much the right to an act as it is to a thing.

Property is an extension of person — we each have a property in our person — and you cannot in any meaningful sense be said to have the right to your own life but not your own property. That is a contradiction in terms.

Property is freedom.

Property is privacy.

Control the property, control the person.

The only alternative to private property is government or communal ownership of property, both of which amount to the same thing in the end: an elite bureau determining for the rest of us what we can do with our actions and the things our actions produce.

I come from exactly such a place. It is a nightmare.

We’re told that no matter how poor we are, we’ll become rich if we but give. Give freely, we’re told, give gladly. Yes, if you choose. But before you can give, you must first have something to give.

Production comes before giving.

And what comes before producing?

The freedom to produce.

Why are some countries so much poorer than others?

The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto on property and capital, wealth and poverty:

“Many of the poorest countries in the world possess enormous amounts of capital, but their ownership is insecure because of faulty or nonexistent property law or property rights protection. The value of private savings in the ‘poor’ countries of the world is forty times the amount of foreign aid they have received since 1945. [The citizens of poorer countries] hold these resources in defective forms: houses built on land whose ownership rights are not adequately recorded, unincorporated businesses with undefined liability, industries located where financiers and investors cannot see them. Because the rights to these possessions are not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned into capital, cannot be traded outside of narrow local circles, cannot be used as collateral.”

This is why in so much of the world poverty runs rampant.

The greatest environmental degradation and disasters have occurred under regimes with the greatest government control.

True freedom promotes healthy clean environments because true freedom promotes private stewardship and taking care of what’s yours, which among other things increases value.

True laissez faire promotes conservation because it seeks innovation and invention which fosters gain at the lowest expense, which is why developed countries went from using, for instance, expensive copper to less expensive silicon to even less expensive satellite signals and so on.

Freedom promotes better environments because it promotes the constant pursuit of more efficient technology.

You hear endlessly about conditions during the industrial revolution, but you never hear how much worse the conditions were before industrialization. You never hear how nobody forced people, including children, off the farms and into the factories — because they went willingly, because it was a far better alternative to working all day and night on the farms and still starving to death. Or selling their teeth. Or selling themselves or their children into prostitution or even sex slavery.

You never hear how it was only a relatively short time before technology progressed beyond those early working conditions. So that the new inventions and technologies which freedom fosters have lifted us in less than a hundred years to the state-of-the-art place we find ourselves today — and it’s just the beginning. It will only keep going — provided humans are left free and the right to person and property are held sacrosanct.

As long as a society remains poor, the means of dealing with societal issues and externalities, like pollution, necessarily remains poor.

Which is why freer, wealthier countries are cleaner by far than poverty-stricken, statist regimes.

Pollution, waste disposal, externalities, these, no matter what you’re told by government-lovers of every stripe, require technological solutions — not bureaucratic solutions — and laissez faire, with the vast technological superiority it fosters, is not only the best system for such a thing: it’s the ONLY system equipped to deal with technological problems.

Which is why you see, for instance, the utter and nonsensical waste of government-sponsored catastrophes like Yucca Mountain.

It’s why government “solutions” often lead to under-environmental protection, and more cronyism.

It’s why from 1950 through 1970, the amount of volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide in the air fell by more than 20 percent, even though total vehicle miles traveled increased by 120 percent — this before the 1970 Clean Air Act and government involvement.

This was all brought about by means of better, more efficient technology. It was therefore adopted naturally, without coercion.

This is also why the level of sulfur dioxide in the air began falling as early as 1920.

And it’s why the total amount of airborne particulate matter has been reduced by 79 percent since 1940.

Technology, which comes about through wealth-creation, is why water pollution has decreased as world-wide wealth has increased.

When will the monstrous ideology that’s been exalted to the status of God and religion among universities and humans the wide world over — right, left, or middle — when will this ideology be held accountable at last for creating so much misery, so much poverty, so much destruction and death? The ideology that says it’s virtuous to force people to live for one another — through taxation, through the gulag, through the whip, through whatever means necessary?

When?

Because, I promise you, it is an ideology as dangerous and as dogmatic as any religion — and for identical reasons: they’re both predicated upon a policy of pure, unadulterated blind belief.
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Note:

This is Chapter 18 of my latest novel: Reservation Trash.

Which is now available in bookstores everywhere.