I'll Take a Gordon Gekko Over a Central Banker Any Day

Yes, tweets from multi-billionaire investors can temporarily move single stocks by a dozen percentage points, but actions of central bankers can turn entire markets into multi-year bubbles and generate catastrophic business cycles. So much for the dangers of "concentrated economic power" as compared to those of concentrated political power.

And yet, the typical attitude of a layperson - or, worse still, a pseudo-professional - is to cry for ever more "regulation" of those who wield the former by those who wield the latter, as opposed to the other way around. So much for the persuasiveness of economically-informed comparative institutional analysis vis-a-vis the power of a large-scale Milgram effect combined with a large-scale Stockholm Syndrome.

This, my friends, sums up the extent of the intellectual, psychological, and cultural challenge we face. Best of luck to us all.

A Libertarian Allegory of the Cave

A statist reacts to liberty the same way a prisoner who spent his entire life locked in a pitch-black dungeon would react to light - he recoils from blinding discomfort. Which hardly proves that it's better to sit in the dark. More often than not, to see is to overcome artificially induced blindness.

A Slow But Steady Movement Toward a Voluntary Society

Bitcoin, 3D printing, independent online learning, charter cities, increasing cultural interconnection, optimistic prospects for seasteading, growing black market entrepreneurship, boom in homeschooling, growing distrust of state-sanctioned media, unsustainable state debt. A confluence of positive factors is setting the stage for the development of a voluntary society and for the gradual withering away of the burdensome, dangerous, and embarrassing anachronism of statism. There are reasons to look into the future with cautious optimism.

Why Do Libertarians Oppose the Welfare State?

A libertarian does not oppose the welfare state because he does not care about the poor, but because he cares about them too much to believe they deserve being caught in the web of lies, empty promises, perpetual dependence, hate-mongering, and cultural degradation created by self-serving, power-hungry crooks.