Entrepreneurial Opportunity Cost

I am wondering out loud here: when people attempt to do some kind of modeling of the various opportunity costs of having government provide X, versus having “the market” provide X, do they factor in the opportunity cost of lost entrepreneurial progress inherent in bureaucratic provisioning?

For example, if someone was arguing that the government should control automobile production, is there any calculus attempted that examines the present value of foregone future improvements in automobile production and design that will inherently be included in bureaucratic provisioning?

A further example– the roads and highways we drive on, which have been provisioned by government for decades, haven’t changed all that much. But cars have made huge technological leaps in terms of how they’re designed and built. Cars have entrepreneurs behind them, roads and highways have bureaucrats behind them.

I’m not sure I am articulating my inquiry as coherently as I might like to but there it is nonetheless!

The Concentration Of Wealth Is A Social Blessing, Not A Curse

A common condemnation of a free economic system is the insistence that without periodic redistribution of wealth by a central authority (the government), wealth would come to be concentrated increasingly in the hands of a select few who would, via such concentration, deprive everyone else in society through their hoarding and thereby impoverish the great mass of the people. Even more horribly, over time, the economic wealth of a society comes to be vested in the hands of the do-nothing descendants of the original wealthy, meaning that not only is wealth controlled by a few but now those few didn’t even do anything (good or bad) to acquire the wealth save to be born into privilege.

Aside from the obvious and upfront nefarious implication of this belief (namely, that it’d be a social “good” for any private person to randomly steal from such a wealth accumulator, as such redistribution would be a form of dissipation of accumulated wealth which is itself a bad, making the theft a good), this fear rests on a multitude of fallacies and ultimately leads to several absurd conclusions.

None of these make any sense. Each will be examined in turn. But first, let us start with an exposition of the actual operation of an unencumbered (intervention/violent redistribution-free) economic system.

In a free market, capital is always in the most capable hands

According to the common criticism of free economic systems, the normal functioning of voluntary exchange amongst willing individuals will inevitably result in accumulation of real wealth by a select few and de-accumulation of real wealth by most others.

The insinuation is that exploitation is involved– the only way someone could come by “more than their fair share” is if they steal from or defraud others.

While this is certainly a true observation with regards to the operation of a band of thieves, or an agency of government (aka, an official crime syndicate), this makes no sense in the context of a market consisting of voluntary exchanges amongst willing individuals.

In a free economic system, wealth is defined subjectively according to individual preferences and values. Similarly and importantly, wealth is exchanged on a voluntary and subjective basis. The existence of an exchange implies that each party believes he is getting more than he is giving up. If this were not true, a voluntary exchange would not occur.

What people are exchanging is that which is produced. To be able to make more exchanges, one must therefore be more productive (defined as being more able in terms of producing things people want in quantity, or things people strongly desire above other things they might exchange for).

It follows, then, that wealth in a free economic system tends to concentrate in the hands of the “most able”, where “most able” is a synonym for “most productive” and where most productive is defined in terms of having strong ability to produce for others the things that they desire.

In short, in a free economic system, capital finds its way over time into the hands of those who are its most able owners, for the benefit of everyone in society.

The benefits of naturally occurring wealth concentration in able hands, even across generations

Why is this wealth concentration a benefit for all of society and not just those few who come to own it?

Because that wealth is only valuable insofar as it is used to produce goods and services for others.

This idea is dependent upon the fact of an economic technology known as “the division of labor”. The division of labor adds value to society through operation of what is known as “comparative advantage”, namely, that everyone is relatively more skilled in some forms of production and relatively less skilled in other forms of production and that individuals can increase their own productivity by specializing in those tasks which they are relatively best suited for and leaving those tasks which they are relatively unsuited for to others in society (the division of labor) who are relatively best suited for them and then exchanging part of their production for the product of others in these areas in which they chose not to specialize.

Further, it is by the concentration of wealth (the accumulation of savings, or capital) that allows for the supercharging of the division of labor. Capital supercharges the division of labor in two primary ways:

• through the mechanism of time-saving
• through the creation of certain technologies which enable production methods which can not be replicated by manual labor, no matter how vast

Capital provides a means of leveraging a productive process through time-saving (in essence, this is what capital is– labor-productivity stored across time for later use). It enhances the division of labor because the multiplier effect of saved time is akin to employing even more individuals in the division of labor and applying them to a specialized task. Similarly, capital allows for the creation of certain technologies which possess productive attributes that can not be matched by even an infinite number of skilled individuals (consider a nano-circuitry robot which is able to perform tasks on a circuit board at a scale no human can).

The only way to enjoy these benefits is through the accumulation of wealth. And the more wealth is accumulated by one individual, the more hyper-specialization through the leveraging of capital can occur with regards to a particular task or method of production.

And obviously, these effects persist across generations, so if X was accumulated in generation 1, the further accumulation of capital by a factor of Y in generation 2 means there is now X+Y capital available to enhance the division of labor in the current and subsequent generations.

The natural dissipation of wealth from unable hands

The fear of increasing concentration of wealth in unable hands across generations through the unencumbered operation of a free economic system is groundless.

As we have seen above, wealth only accumulates in the hands of the able– those who are more productive are more successful at accumulating wealth because other market participants are more eager to exchange for the value they produce.

The image of the lazy, idiotic wealthy heir to a fortune who comes by a greater fortune over time simply because he inherited much to begin with is a contradiction. Either such a person is unproductive and gradually manages to dissipate their accumulated, inherited wealth over time due to their inability, or else they have been mischaracterized for, as “lazy” and “idiotic” as they may be, if they as owners of their accumulated capital manage to grow it over time, they have demonstrated they are productive and to that extent they are able.

No one deserves condemnation for ableness in increasing their wealth simply because they were born with much to begin with– their ability to produce further wealth stands as a testament to their ability to produce and thereby “contribute to society”. And one does not need to be condemned for disability in this area, as the gradual diminishing of one’s accumulated wealth is punishment (and judgment) enough.

The subjectivity of ableness

Ableness with regards to wealth creation (productive ability) is at all times a subjective notion.

In terms of market exchanges, other individuals in the market place will only reward the production of wealth they find subjectively valuable.

Ableness is not constant nor is it objective. Ableness can grow and diminish within a person or organization over time. It is subject to dynamism, the constant changing whims and preferences of the market place. It is not permanent. One may be able at producing X but not Y and once the market favors Y, one is no longer able.

The contemporaneous nature of ablest hands

The caricature of “permanent wealth” is another fallacy, the idea of an indomitable tycoon who can’t help but grow his wealth ever larger and whose descendants only become wealthier still are phantasms.

Because ableness is a subjective consideration, it is also contemporaneous. A man who is a legend in creating wealth through horseshoes may be reduced to miserliness in an era of automobiles.

In a free economic system, concentrated wealth can only remain concentrated across time to the extent that the current owners of it respond to the popularity of certain goods and services through time. The aforementioned horseshoe-fortune can not perpetuate itself indefinitely following the advent of automobiles unless the heirs to the fortune re-allocate capital to this new technology (or some other profitable venture) and away from the now unprofitable technology of horseshoes.

In this way, the constant service of concentrated wealth is guaranteed toward the highest valued uses of society viewed as a whole. One can not create a fortune in horseshoes and then “hoard” this wealth in this useless industry as automobiles arrive on the scene and expect these riches to further accumulate over time.

How many John Rockefellers have begotten new John Rockefellers in the immediately subsequent generation?

Ableness is subjective. Few heirs can match their forefathers in ableness in the family industry and rarely does the value of the family industry to society at large persist for long periods of time (generation after generation).

The impossibility of wealth being “hoarded”

Only a very small fraction of a person’s fortune is being consumed by them at one time. If they suddenly consumed it all it’d be gone forever and they’d be impoverished.

True, wealth is accumulated by most people in order to be consumed. It is assumedly subjectively valued as wealth so that it can one day be consumed. But wealth can not be both possessed and consumed. One can not have their cake and enjoy its sweet, supple flavors at once. These ends are mutually exclusive, doing one makes impossible the other.

It makes no sense to accuse those who possess concentrated fortunes of “hoarding” wealth, of keeping it out of the hands of others.

Wealth can be:

• consumed
• invested
• loaned

If it is loaned, it is being made useful to others. If it is invested, it is being made useful to others and is engaged in the production of further goods and services demanded by individuals in society. If it is consumed, it is used up by the one who had produced or exchanged for it and so long as they didn’t do anything criminal to acquire it in the first place, this is their right. Consumption could come in the form of literally consuming or using something up, such as eating a foodstuff or utilizing a machine which can wear down, or it could come in the form of accumulating a stockpile whose sole purpose is to aid its owner in providing the comfort of knowing it is there. Such a stockpile could only be acquired by voluntary exchange in a free economic system so it would be within an individual’s right to “waste” it in such a manner.

A man may be worth $100M. But this does not mean he enjoys the ability to consume $100M worth of wealth at all times. In reality, he might own a few homes of a few million each, wear clothes worth thousands of dollars, eat food costing hundreds. The vast majority of his millions of accumulated wealth are not utilized for direct consumption, not now and likely not ever.

If he ever actually utilized this wealth all at once, consumed it (likely, made his worth liquid by exchanging his capital for cash, and then spending it on consumption goods and services) it would be gone. Assuming he was not employed by someone else and in possession of a current income as a result, the liquidation of his various equity positions would leave him not only penniless after this consumptive spree, but wealthless. He would have had his “last supper.”

He would go, in a matter of moments, from a wealthy man, to a pauper.

Wealth can not be “hoarded” and kept away from others. And if it is consumed, it is consumed for good. Consumption is not a renewable process, unlike production.

Wealth implies capital accumulation and preservation

The individuals in society who manage to amass great fortunes (accumulate large amounts of wealth or capital) in a free economic system have demonstrated a great ability not only to produce, but to restrict their own consumption, that is, to save.

Without borrowing, a person can consume only that which they produce. And a highly productive person also has the privilege of being a highly consumptive person. They can make many more exchanges with their additional product and consume an equivalent amount of goods and services they have exchanged for.

However, if instead of maintaining a net worth of zero, their net worth grows over time, they are exhibiting their discipline for restricting their own ability to consume. This means, rather than consuming all that they could because of all they produce, they actually reserve part of it and, through loans, investments and even voluntary acts of charity, allow other people to use this wealth to produce and consume themselves.

The caricature of the wealth accumulator is one of a cruel miser– somehow, by managing to gather into his arms a great fortune, he has denied many others their ability to consume.

But the reality is just the opposite! The only person whose consumptive desires have been denied are the wealth accumulator’s, while instead everyone else in society is allowed to make use of his additional capital in their own projects and consumptive desires.

The act of saving, the presence of accumulated wealth or capital, indicates a disciplined decision to underconsume relative to productive capacity. It implies a permanent restriction on total ability to consume insofar as this pile of wealth is maintained or even grows.

The encumbered market

None of the above applies to the context of a system of exchanges which are partially or primarily involuntary in nature. In other words, none of the above applies to wealth accumulated via means of plunder, whether they be public or private means.

Outside of this context, however, the accumulation of wealth is not a curse for society and, in many ways, it is a blessing. Further, it is not permanent nor is it arbitrary. The concentration of wealth in an unencumbered market always, over time, reflects the greatest ableness as defined by the greatest social uses and values of the time in question. No one who comes by wealth comes by it accidentally and those who were the special beneficiaries of luck or heritage must demonstrate their own ableness lest their wealth get away from them and into the hands of those who are more capable than themselves.

No individual can consume his wealth in its entirety and expect to remain wealthy. And those who restrict their consumption in order to preserve their wealth merely act to make their wealth available to others for their productive or consumptive use.

Those who have amassed great wealth by voluntary means should be cheered, applauded and thanked for the service they provide to everyone in society. Those who come by their wealth through plunder and malice should rightfully be derided, castigated and even violently prevented from further predations, if judgment calls for it.

Review – The Enterprise Of Law: Justice Without The State

Bruce Benson’s The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without The State is almost guaranteed to shock and upbraid the ear of a mainstream political thinker, but for those considering alternatives or who are already familiar with or sympathetic to the kind of argument Benson puts forth, the work proves musical.

As Benson states in the introduction,

Anyone who would even question the “fact” that law and order are necessary functions of government is likely to be considered a ridiculous, uninformed radical by most observers… But even though most academics do not question the logic of government domination of law and the maintenance of order, large segments of the population do… Privately produced crime detection and prevention, arbitration, and mediation are growth industries in the United States.

Benson’s study is an example of applied economic theory. Rather than attempting to develop a new body of economic theory which explores the logic of market-supplied legal and security services which are currently provisioned (poorly) by the State, Benson is instead taking that theory as developed by earlier thinkers and applying it in a variety of ways to historical and imagined human experience. He first sets out to survey the history of law through this lens to show the way in which the State encroached on privately-provided law to further its other social agendas. He then moves on to an examination of various econo-historical studies performed by academics to show the current extent to which private citizens in the US have already turned to market-supplied legal and security services. Following this, Benson turns to similar studies to demonstrate empirically the failure and corruption of government law. Finally, he explores the logic of how market-supplied law might come to totally supersede government law in the future and why this would not be an epic social disaster.

Customary Law and Restitution

Benson’s arguments about the failures of the modern legal system as administered by the State seem obvious when one learns of two legal concepts which have since been lost to history, the origination of law through custom and social practice, and the focus of law on providing restitution to victims rather than punishment to aggressors. Benson defines law as,

both rules of conduct and the mechanisms or processes for applying those rules.

Under customary law, which is prevalent in all “primitive” societies without developed State institutions (and which undergirds modern American statutory law as the much heralded “Common Law” tradition), rules of conduct emerge from the values, beliefs and interactions of communities of people. When a conflict arises, the aggrieved parties take their case before a mutually-trusted third party, a judge, who hears the concerns of each party and attempts to place their disagreement into the context of previous decisions and existing cultural practices while also considering any novelty to the present circumstances. He then provides a ruling and a judgment of the restitution the aggrieved party might seek from his aggressor to make him whole.

Although customary law develops on a case-by-case basis,

collective action can be achieved through individual agreements, with useful rules spreading to other members of a group.

Under customary law, incentives matter and

good rules that facilitate interaction tend to be selected over time, while bad decisions are ignored.

The end result is that customary law is characterized by:

1. being socially and culturally aligned with the population in question, which increases the likelihood it is respected and considered valuable by all social participants
2. responsiveness and continual “improvement” and updating as social norms change through practice and experience
3. simplicity, because rules are only developed as needed due to novel circumstances, and often disagreements are settled by referring to existent custom or prior precedent
4. fairness, because the emphasis is making a wronged party whole, thereby permitting the guilty party to return to civil society after “repaying their debt”

Compare this to the legislative law of the State, which is characterized by:

1. a professed goal of molding or shaping the target population to behave in novel ways according to the new law, without regard to previous cultural practice
2. both stagnation and hyper-novelty; stagnation in that a law once on the books rarely comes off and may continue to remain “in force” even when the circumstances it addressed are no longer relevant, and hyper-novel in that the law might be changed and added to more quickly than local cultural practice changes
3. complexity, because rules are developed and adopted as quickly as special interest groups can lobby for them, and no existing dispute or claim of harm need come before a law can be passed
4. lack of fairness, because restitution is rarely made to actual victims under the law and many laws promote cases which have no empirically-identifiable victim other than “the State” whose laws have been violated

An important corollary idea here is that true law is discovered through practice and experimentation, whereas statutory law is created and imposed by special interest group pressure and a desire to redistribute social resources.

The Rise of Authoritarian Law

There’s a bit more to it than that, but for a general outline to support the argument this will suffice for now. If customary law is superior to legislative law in providing responsive, fair (ie, “just”) legal structure for society, how is it that legislative law has come to dominate in the modern era? Could customary law not keep up with the rapid pace of change in society marking the modern era, or was there some other flaw or shortcoming of the approach that made State-administered law more “practical” and thus dominant?

Two facts of social history help explain the rise of legislated law. The first is that the philosophy of freedom is a recent phenomenon as a coherent and consistent body of thought. It was incredibly difficult for groups of people even a few hundred years ago to articulate resistance to encroaching State power in terms of abstract personal liberties that were being conceded now or in the future as a necessary consequence of some new rule being imposed. Philosophically, no true, long-term oriented resistance to the principle of State law was being advanced or could be advanced. The second is that history (especially early Western history and, relevant to the experience of Americans, early British and Anglo-Saxon history) is marked by continuous warfare amongst social groups, and warfare promotes the centralization of power in the hands of a dictator (read: a king) who is tasked with leading the group to victory over its enemies. This warfare not only increases the king’s prestige and makes it easier for him to make new claims on power as necessary to protect the population from outside aggression, it also creates the conditions which necessitate his continually raising finance to prosecute his wars which make mulcting via the legal system a logical course of action.

Benson demonstrates these ideas through reference to the rise of “king’s courts” alongside common law or customary courts in medieval England. Over time these king’s courts not only claimed sole jurisdiction on settling specific disputes (ie, monopoly over competitive private solutions), but they also invented an entire body of offenses (felony crime) with no victim other than “the king’s peace” which allowed the king to extract rents from the population in the form of trial and court fees, fines and punishments, jail bonds, etc. In time, the king’s courts came to dominate legal practice just as the power and prestige of the English king and his state rose accordingly. One social consequence, of many, was a worsening effectiveness of “the law” as a social mechanism and a lowering of the status of the individual and his rights in society, primarily because

The attributes of customary legal systems include an emphasis on individual rights because recognition of legal duty requires voluntary cooperation of individuals through reciprocal arrangements.

In other words, individual rights and customary legal systems go hand in hand, whereas collectivism and legislative legal systems are partners in crime. This is an important and often overlooked point for advocates of greater personal liberty!

Conclusion

What I have summarized above is only the first fifth of the book, and even then it is missing all manner of interesting detail and further argumentation that paint a truly rich philosophical picture for those interested in the role law plays in civil society. While the book is not without its faults, they’re relatively minor overall and Benson’s focus on empirical studies will prove especially valuable for those who prefer concrete evidence of principles in action. This is a title that is not only excellent for returning to as a reference when formulating arguments but whose implications for reorganizing society are profound and worth pondering at length.

 

Review – Panic: The Betrayal Of Capitalism By Wall Street And Washington

Sadly, Panic: The Betrayal Of Capitalism By Wall Street And Washington does not appear to be in print any longer. Luckily, I found a good used copy on Amazon and will cherish its now-secret message all the more.

As I read through this book several months ago, instead of summarizing my thoughts I just want to record a few key ideas and quotes for later reference.

“The Anti-Entrepreneurs”

In any modern state the government will always be the banks’ biggest client and therefore will always make most of the rules, even if it pretends not to.

The ideologues of modern finance offered to make any fool rich if only he renounced the first obligation of the capitalist, the burden of judgment.

This process of confronting uncertainty and successfully resolving it usually by dint of hard work, diligent analysis, and sound judgment is the only source of what many economists have called “entrepreneurial profit” or sometimes “true profit”.

Underpinning the ideology of modern finance is the notion that the insight, judgment and even diligence of the entrepreneur are irrelevant for investing in public securities markets. These markets, we are told, are special, too powerful and too perfect to allow any entrepreneur’s judgment to matter.

If the ideology of modern finance had a motto, it might be “thinking doesn’t work.”

Capitalism demands free markets because it needs free minds.

The bureaucrat of capital dreams of a world in which failure is impossible.

Crony capitalists on the right and socialists on the left united as always behind their most fundamental belief, that wealth is to be captured by power and pull rather than created in the minds of men.

“New Risks in Old Bottles”

The great mission of modern investment theory is to replace all idiosyncratic risk with systemic risk.

The primary skill for finance, under this theory, becomes diversification, which becomes an advanced statistical methodology for making sure a relatively small number of securities accurately represents a much larger class of securities.

If I know nothing, my need for diversification is infinite.

All investment is reduced to insurance.

Ignorance is the father of panic.

“The Misinformation Economy”

One way to think about panic is as a general, nonspecific response to a poorly understood particular and specific problem.

“To build a perfect model of the universe would require all the matter and energy in the universe, because the only perfect model, the only model that shed no information and made no compromises in order to achieve its object, would be the universe itself.”

The mortgage meltdown can be understood as an instance of model failure.

information is differentiation; information is what comes as a surprise against the background of knowledge already possessed.

If uncertainty and risk are nearly synonyms. then information and risk are nearly opposites.

It is not particularly unusual for all thirty stocks in the Dow to go up and down at the same time; that rarely happened when market participants were interested in the value of individual companies.

“The Reign of Risk”

Modern portfolio theory was a late bloom of the great eighteenth and nineteenth century impulse to explain human society by mechanical or “scientific” principles as regular as those of classical physics.

If economics were about entrepreneurship, it would not look like physics. It would look a little like philosophy. Mostly it would look like literature. [The Lion’s note: if you ascribe to the Austrian school, it does!]

To treat investment as a quantitative exercise relying on the efficiency of markets and advanced mathematics to eliminate the hazards of human judgment. [the ambition of investors under Modern Portfolio Theory]

MPT created a field for which PhDs could be granted and journal articles published. Before MPT, investment theory had been mere reflection upon experience, a wisdom literature dominated by amateurs like Benjamin Graham.

[MPT…] can be deeply attractive to those trying to support capitalist lifestyles with only bureaucratic talents.

The most important question any investor can ask: For what are investors paid? MPT’s answer: For accepting risk.

risk is not the foundation of profit but its most dreaded enemy.

The modern theory conceptually severed financial markets from the rest of the economy. [My note, ” Macro is to Micro as Financial is to Real”]

“The Romance of Risk”

Men and societies become richer precisely as they employ insight, skill and experience, effort and discipline to reduce risk.

Investors are paid for being right, not for the possibility of being wrong.

In life, men who make one good judgment tend to make more good judgments; men who make one bad judgment tend to make more bad ones.

the most important but the most difficult-to-identify ability in business management (or investment) is the ability to judge other men’s ability to judge. [meta-judgment]

“Zoom, Zoom, Zoom”

What modern capital markets do very well is raise large amounts of capital from a broad base of investors who are persuaded to give their money to perfect strangers with precious little idea of what those fortunate recipients are going to do with it. [And, I’d add, little control or legal right to have any say in such decisions; “crowd-sourcing”]

different markets make different trade-offs between liquidity and price discovery one one hand and confidence about value on the other.

Public equity investors demand liquidity in large part because they are unsure about value.

Humor is surprise

It is reasonable to call markets better or worse depending on how much surprise they can absorb before convulsing in dramatic disequilibrium

Lacking a more substantial basis on which to make decisions, financial markets set prices to an astonishing extent by watching– prices!

The most dramatic resolution of this conflict is to eliminate most of the shareholders altogether by taking public companies private

public companies have no owners

Companies, like most assets, do better with strong owners than weak owners.

“Strategic Ambiguity”

When New Dealers tried to set up a banking system immune to panic, their top priority was to remove Mom-and-Pop from their role as bank police.

“Insolvent Immunity”

Here is the quickest way to determine whether you are operating in an honest capitalist system or a corrupt imitation thereof: check the bankruptcy rates.

“Black September”

“Things are somewhat amiss when a country’s finance minister plays bond salesman for a supposedly privately owned company.”

By this time the government had: (a) intimated that deficits in the financial sector were so large and widespread that “anyone could be next” (b) terrified private investors from making investments that might preserve the solvency of deteriorating institutions (c) assumed unprecedented responsibility for investment banks outside the Federal Reserve system and then abandoned that responsibility and (d) made clear that its policy would change on an ad hoc basis. [on the US federal government’s initial response to the financial panic of 2008]

To assume that the buying and selling of shares amounts to managing the firm is the most extreme form of efficient market worship.

“Capitalism Without Capitalists”

The term for someone who rests his economic fate on unknowable future events is not “owner” or even “investor,” but “speculator.”

the government, the biggest player and the weakest owner of all. [criticizing the present ownership of major banks]

Another great review of this book was posted by “CP” at CreditBubbleStocks.com.

And after reading this book, I was inspired to purchase Frank Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit for my library for further study.

 

A Future Full of Urban Gulches

Zach Caceres over at Let A Thousand Nations Bloom has penned a rebuttal to a critic, called “In Defense of Urban Life“:

Urban life brings people together for mutual aid, and it opens wealth-generating possibilities for specialization and trade. It can integrate otherwise contentious groups, and it melds culture together to bring about beautiful new hybrids of music and art. We shouldn’t write off cities because of a romanticized ideal of the pastoral.

Indeed. There’s more and it’s a good, brief apologia for the urban environment versus the un-urban (suburbia, rural, pastoral, wilderness) in terms of satisfying human needs and lifestyle preferences. He touched on it briefly but I believe it bears further emphasizing, much of the problems his critic and those like him cite about urban environments are caused by central planning and non-market regulation.

Pollution, economic exploitation, environmental degradation and destruction (a poorly defined term for an ill-premised concept, but even accepted at its face in this situation it makes some sense), resource “overuse”, all of these problems are caused by undefined or poorly defined property rights and arbitrary interference and dictates from governments and other political, non-market institutions.

The solution to society’s economic ills are free markets. And the solution to society’s habitat ills are free cities. More of the current paradigm of Ponzi city construction based upon uneconomic, unproductive government infrastructure, city service and land-use planning will surely doom us all. But free cities, organized voluntarily by the participants and outcomes of local and international free markets, are just as surely the salvation, offering nearly limitless density, technological innovation, economic opportunity and variety in lifestyle.

Imagine the high rise urban wonderland of New York City meeting the honesty, productivity and heroic excellence of Galt’s Gulch.

That’s the way forward.