I have edited into the post answers to questions put here on the day of the post. Will probably do another AMA in a year or so, perhaps make it the first post of the year.
As a moral libertarian, I grapple with the 'flashlight problem' (e.g., photons from your light invading my property as a NAP violation). I call this the 'Threshold Problem' and propose resolving it historically: Since all actions have minor impacts on others, why not set a practical threshold above which intrusions count as aggression/violence? Does this address libertarianism's oversimplifications?
Or along the same lines, let the restitution be proportional to the violation. Then let the injured party decide whether it is worth hiring a lawyer to collect the five cents they might be owed for being assaulted by the photons from a flashlight.
A right can always be waived. Consent can be given. If a right is frequently waived when violated in unimportant ways (ways the right holder doesn’t care about), that is not the same as saying it is not a right.
Given your exposure to economics, law and medieval history, what is your speculation for why the industrial revolution didn't happen during the Roman/Byzantine times or alternatively in ancient China? I've read so many things on this but to me all the theories seems implausible and just so stories. People say things like abundant cheap labor in Rome putting downward pressure on technical improvements, but there were so many famines plagues etc in the 2 millennia between the founding of Rome and fall of Constantinople and nowhere did this relative price happen to cause such a mechanization boom. Yet somehow we're certain that's the cause in England etc... People claim coal and the steam engine but Heron of Alexandria even had a demo of a steam engine like toy. People also claim things like the stock exchange invented in the Netherlands or other financial instruments but to me that sounds like more of a result of a lot of surplus rather than the cause.
So ye. What's your theory of the cause of the industrial revolution?
In your March 25 "Interesting Times" post you wrote that you approved of some of Trump’s actions and had reservations about others. With nearly a year of his presidency now in the books, would you judge Trump’s presidency so far to be a net positive or net negative for the country, relative to the Harris presidency you would have expected?
Which aspects carry the most weight in that judgment: economic outcomes; institutional norms and precedent; executive power and separation of powers; civil liberties; foreign policy and military risk; the behavior of the administrative state; and longer-term effects on social trust and polarization?
Trump may have been good in invisible ways; the stock market has gone up and I don't know why, possibly things Biden was doing that he stopped doing.
Abandoning government support for DEI and for holding down carbon emissions were both, in my view, good, as was reducing the amount of government funding for the left. His tariff policy and immigration policy were bad.
The only good effect he has had on institutional norms was to make it obvious how fragile they were. Ditto for executive power and separation of powers. If we get a Democratic congress they may finally repeal the legislative basis for presidential control of tariffs and wars.
At least if they are not sure of future control of the White House.
His foreign policy had the good effect of convincing the European powers that they should be able to defend themselves but we don't yet know if they are going to go through with it. It has had the bad effect of offending a lot of foreigners unnecessarily.
My past description of Trump as a loose cannon was correct. He does a lot of things for attention or the pleasure of pushing people around, reminding me of Kipling's "A Servant When he reigneth": "He knows no use for power except to show his might."
He is in several ways a disaster but I don't know how much of a disaster the alternative would have been.
Uncertainty shouldn't prevent a preference as we rarely have perfect information about the path not taken. We make decisions all of the time with suboptimal information.
With what you know today, are you glad Trump won? If you could push a button today to swap this reality for the Harris alternative, would you press it?
If I had the button I would probably not push it, not because I prefer one alternative but because I feel responsible for the consequences of action but not of inaction. That sounds contradictory, but that view is shared by almost everyone. Any well off person in the developed world could save a life in a poor country if he chose, but we do not all feel like murderers.
Professor Friedman, I phrased my earlier question poorly. I am not asking whether you want to bear responsibility for altering an election outcome. I am simply trying to understand whether, all things considered, with what you know today, are you glad that Trump was elected.
I am not glad he was elected, but probably would not have been glad if Harris had been elected either. The one predictably good consequence of that would have been weakening Trump's control of the Republican party.
I phrased my earlier question poorly. I am not asking whether you want to bear responsibility for altering an election outcome. I am simply trying to understand whether, all things considered, with what you know today, are you glad that Trump was elected.
For me, whatever positive effects his presidency may have had, such as encouraging allies to shoulder more of the defense burden, reducing politics intrusion into research, or shrinking parts of the federal bureaucracy, have been overwhelmingly offset by the damage.
Some examples (from my perspective): alienating allies rather than coordinating with them; discouraging talented students and researchers from coming to the U.S.; turning the presidency into a vehicle for personal enrichment; degrading press freedom through intimidation and coercive economics; using tariffs as a personalized tool of retaliation rather than a coherent economic policy; and engaging in empire-building that increases, rather than reduces, military risk with China over Taiwan, his effective efforts to increase polarization and tribalism, and on and on.
Taken together, those effects lead me to conclude that his presidency has been a significant net negative relative to the likely alternative.
Isn't it the case that the core of the Economic Calculation Problem argument is that coordination without markets is impossibel because there is no price system? Even within the enterprise, economic calculation is possible because firms are price takers from a lot of the inputs that get their prices set in the market. A central planner doesn't have that tool, making an efficient outome from central planning impossible. Don't know if I'm mistaken somewhere.
Are you sure about the currency thing? Say EUR and USD are at parity, and firm A values the gadgets it produces at €0.95 and firm B values them at $1.05. At this point, firm B is happy to buy them from firm A. USD then drops to €.9, and the transaction is no longer possible. It would seem to me that these two firms would have an easier time if they used the same currency.
Prices can change for all sorts of unpredictable reasons -- weather, natural disasters, labor troubles, shifting priorities, new competitors, changing customer preferences. I don't see why currency fluctuations are any different.
Prices are generally sticky, and long-term contracts with fixed or inflation-adjusted prices are common. Currency risk is a real thing that firms pay a bunch of money to try to avoid.
Probably, but the ones I know best, such as saga period Iceland and northern Somalia before the creation of the country of Somalia, were not clan based.
The same way — by leaving people free to choose. Parents have some control over their children and there should be institutions individuals can use to make binding commitments, such as not to drink or not to spend more than two hours a day playing video games.
“ the argument [Mises calculation provlem] applies to a firm as well as to a government, since a firm is doing the same thing on a smaller scale”
Doesn't that miss the point? The point being that it is impossible to calculate profit without genuine money prices.
A firm uses market prices to help it decide what to produce and how to produce it. They can decide what to outsource and what to make in house, or pivot to an entirely different product. If they run up enough losses, they go out of business. Central planners would have no market prices to guide them and would make everything in house. They cannot use profit to decide what to make more of or which way of producing it best economizes the resources they use.
It is a claim about central planning. Ordinary governments that do not try to confiscate the entire means of production and plan all output are in an intermediate category. They have markets available to supply them with resources and prices, but since their “profit” resists ordinary accounting methods and monetary losses do not put them out of business, they have more discretion than a firm, or at least, face a different sort of discipline.
It does not pay wages? I guess your point is that it is not clear how particular input costs relate to profits when done by wage earners instead of piece workers.
At least, there are prices that allow comparison between renting and buying equipment or land. Governments have these data but typically don’t much care about them, while a central planner simply would not have them.
Central planners have no profits to compare input prices to (assuming they ginned up artificial prices at all). And ordinary governments at least know the difference between a million dollar boondoggle and a billion dollar boondoggle. It requires an enormous abstraction to say that they are all doing the same thing.
No doubt we can find places where they do the same thing, but others where they do different things. The question then is, what characteristics does Mises' argument depend upon, and which entities have those or to what degree?
Coase and Mises are analyzing different aspects of production. Coase is asking why competition to please consumers best doesn’t end up at either extreme of the spectrum between one giant monopoly that makes everything and an atomized market where every person is a separate firm and all land or equipment is rented rather than bought. Mises is criticizing the idea of eliminating profit and competition and replacing the decentralized process with a centralized, unified, supposedly rational plan.
If Coase considered them all to be doing the same thing, why did he not advocate central planning? After all, transactions costs mostly disappear when production is centralized and money prices are eliminated. It is because central planning replaces transactions costs with economic blindness.
The firm pays wages but it pays the same wage whether the employee does A or B, so the wage doesn't tell it which to allocate his time to.
"If Coase considered them all to be doing the same thing, why did he not advocate central planning?"
His view was that there was a tradeoff between the costs of hierarchical coordination, the sorts of problems pointed out in the calculation controversy, and the costs of market coordination, with the former generally increasing with the number of people being coordinated. Firms grow up to the point where the cost of doing another thing in-house passes the cost of doing it through the market, different for different sorts of firms. So a market system with firms minimizes the combined costs.
Hi David, I think you are failing to adress the core issue. It's true that the wage itself doesn't indicate where to allocate time, but profits and loss do, and for that you need prices. If you allocate x amount of employees to project A, you have a mechanism to asses if that decision was profitable or not. It's not automatic, but you have a mechanism of adjustment. That's something the central planner doesn't have, and that goes beyond the trade off established by Coase.
Profit provides a measure of how the firm is doing, but a socialist government can have measures of outcomes that matter to it, perhaps a weighted combination of several observables such as mortality rates. Neither firm nor socialist state have an internal price system to allocate resources in order to maximize the measure. That is done, in both cases, by someone figuring it out as best he can and telling everyone else what to do.
Ok, I think I understand what you are saying, but I see the following problem. The measure of success of the central planner is arbitrary. Planning an economy is actually quite easy; you distribute half the workers to the fields and half to the industry. There, you have a plan. A lousy one, but a planned economy in the end. The thing is that without prices the central planner has no way of knowing how much value its internal capital allocation is providing to others. Without price system, you have a planner with a desired outputobjective. With a price system, you have feedback, through profit and losses, on wether your internal planning is generating value or not.
But it does have the price signal from the outcome of its decisions. Maybe the firm doesn't have an internal market for employees, but thanks to the price system it can asses if putting workers in this or that project was good. The central planner doesn't have that tool to evaluate the outcome of its planning.
What price signals? HR has one clerk handling monthly meetings, Christmas parties, and the like. He appears to not be fully occupied, so they move responsibility for restriping the parking lot and replacing lost security fobs to him from a clerk who was complaining of overwork.
Handling meetings is still an activity which can be evaluated through profits and loss. Maybe the mechanism is not obvious or automatic, but you have a way to asses if employees time is being occupied in a profitable way or not.
Planning birthay parties still needs a price system to take place. How doe sthe central planner know if gifting an iphone to every employee on its birthday is a good use of its resources?
There is profit and loss. Accounting so that profits and costs can be understood at a fine grain is difficult, but a maybe possible. Even if we stipulate that such fine grain accounting doesn’t work, profit and loss remain at the large scale. Firms face a discipline that governments do not, and that has no relation to central planners. There are similarities, but also clear distinctions.
Have you an answer to Million Friedman's point about definition of property right in airspace above one's property?
It appears to show an unavoidable lacuna in the libertarian conception and the claim is thus made that property rests essentially on convention accepted in particular societies.
Or a market decision, depending on how rules are made. Consider such issues in a proprietary community or an A-C legal system. But I agree that there isn't a philosophical solution.
Consider a proprietary community that starts our owning all land and air rights under state law, decides how to bundle them for the customers buying in. Or the market mechanism for creating law in a stateless society described in my first book:
Followup on HR25 The Fair Tax Act. Two prinicpal benefits of taxing consumption with a flat rate sales tax are (1) simplicity, transparency, and much reduced compliance cost and (2) the potential for faster economic growth. I think it would be fabulous if you had time to write a whole essay about the benefits and costs of a national retail sales tax to replace all other federal taxes. What do you think? Any chance?
Not likely. My present project is writing the Substack and turning collections of posts into books. At some point I may get back to my project of collecting and writing essays about works of literature that contain economic lessons.
Maybe get back to Living Paper, my project for creating programs to teach economics, probably as an open source project with other people writing the code. Will probably never get back to the sequel to my first novel.
It's your Substack that I was thinking of. Just your usual sort of essay. I get it, though. Lots of opportunity cost. Time presents the ultimate scarcity.
We agree drug laws are an important issue! And once again, even while you were stating this, you wrote very little about them. Why so little to say? (This is not a gotcha question, there could be many perfectly reasonable answers; I'm just curious.)
If you reflect back on your life and your opinions and ideas, is there anything where you turned out to be completely wrong and changed your position ?
I have edited into the post answers to questions put here on the day of the post. Will probably do another AMA in a year or so, perhaps make it the first post of the year.
As a moral libertarian, I grapple with the 'flashlight problem' (e.g., photons from your light invading my property as a NAP violation). I call this the 'Threshold Problem' and propose resolving it historically: Since all actions have minor impacts on others, why not set a practical threshold above which intrusions count as aggression/violence? Does this address libertarianism's oversimplifications?
Or along the same lines, let the restitution be proportional to the violation. Then let the injured party decide whether it is worth hiring a lawyer to collect the five cents they might be owed for being assaulted by the photons from a flashlight.
A right can always be waived. Consent can be given. If a right is frequently waived when violated in unimportant ways (ways the right holder doesn’t care about), that is not the same as saying it is not a right.
Given your exposure to economics, law and medieval history, what is your speculation for why the industrial revolution didn't happen during the Roman/Byzantine times or alternatively in ancient China? I've read so many things on this but to me all the theories seems implausible and just so stories. People say things like abundant cheap labor in Rome putting downward pressure on technical improvements, but there were so many famines plagues etc in the 2 millennia between the founding of Rome and fall of Constantinople and nowhere did this relative price happen to cause such a mechanization boom. Yet somehow we're certain that's the cause in England etc... People claim coal and the steam engine but Heron of Alexandria even had a demo of a steam engine like toy. People also claim things like the stock exchange invented in the Netherlands or other financial instruments but to me that sounds like more of a result of a lot of surplus rather than the cause.
So ye. What's your theory of the cause of the industrial revolution?
Good question but I don't have a good answer.
In your March 25 "Interesting Times" post you wrote that you approved of some of Trump’s actions and had reservations about others. With nearly a year of his presidency now in the books, would you judge Trump’s presidency so far to be a net positive or net negative for the country, relative to the Harris presidency you would have expected?
Which aspects carry the most weight in that judgment: economic outcomes; institutional norms and precedent; executive power and separation of powers; civil liberties; foreign policy and military risk; the behavior of the administrative state; and longer-term effects on social trust and polarization?
Trump may have been good in invisible ways; the stock market has gone up and I don't know why, possibly things Biden was doing that he stopped doing.
Abandoning government support for DEI and for holding down carbon emissions were both, in my view, good, as was reducing the amount of government funding for the left. His tariff policy and immigration policy were bad.
The only good effect he has had on institutional norms was to make it obvious how fragile they were. Ditto for executive power and separation of powers. If we get a Democratic congress they may finally repeal the legislative basis for presidential control of tariffs and wars.
At least if they are not sure of future control of the White House.
His foreign policy had the good effect of convincing the European powers that they should be able to defend themselves but we don't yet know if they are going to go through with it. It has had the bad effect of offending a lot of foreigners unnecessarily.
My past description of Trump as a loose cannon was correct. He does a lot of things for attention or the pleasure of pushing people around, reminding me of Kipling's "A Servant When he reigneth": "He knows no use for power except to show his might."
He is in several ways a disaster but I don't know how much of a disaster the alternative would have been.
Uncertainty shouldn't prevent a preference as we rarely have perfect information about the path not taken. We make decisions all of the time with suboptimal information.
With what you know today, are you glad Trump won? If you could push a button today to swap this reality for the Harris alternative, would you press it?
I am glad I do not have to make that decision.
If I had the button I would probably not push it, not because I prefer one alternative but because I feel responsible for the consequences of action but not of inaction. That sounds contradictory, but that view is shared by almost everyone. Any well off person in the developed world could save a life in a poor country if he chose, but we do not all feel like murderers.
Professor Friedman, I phrased my earlier question poorly. I am not asking whether you want to bear responsibility for altering an election outcome. I am simply trying to understand whether, all things considered, with what you know today, are you glad that Trump was elected.
I am not glad he was elected, but probably would not have been glad if Harris had been elected either. The one predictably good consequence of that would have been weakening Trump's control of the Republican party.
I phrased my earlier question poorly. I am not asking whether you want to bear responsibility for altering an election outcome. I am simply trying to understand whether, all things considered, with what you know today, are you glad that Trump was elected.
For me, whatever positive effects his presidency may have had, such as encouraging allies to shoulder more of the defense burden, reducing politics intrusion into research, or shrinking parts of the federal bureaucracy, have been overwhelmingly offset by the damage.
Some examples (from my perspective): alienating allies rather than coordinating with them; discouraging talented students and researchers from coming to the U.S.; turning the presidency into a vehicle for personal enrichment; degrading press freedom through intimidation and coercive economics; using tariffs as a personalized tool of retaliation rather than a coherent economic policy; and engaging in empire-building that increases, rather than reduces, military risk with China over Taiwan, his effective efforts to increase polarization and tribalism, and on and on.
Taken together, those effects lead me to conclude that his presidency has been a significant net negative relative to the likely alternative.
Isn't it the case that the core of the Economic Calculation Problem argument is that coordination without markets is impossibel because there is no price system? Even within the enterprise, economic calculation is possible because firms are price takers from a lot of the inputs that get their prices set in the market. A central planner doesn't have that tool, making an efficient outome from central planning impossible. Don't know if I'm mistaken somewhere.
Are you sure about the currency thing? Say EUR and USD are at parity, and firm A values the gadgets it produces at €0.95 and firm B values them at $1.05. At this point, firm B is happy to buy them from firm A. USD then drops to €.9, and the transaction is no longer possible. It would seem to me that these two firms would have an easier time if they used the same currency.
Prices can change for all sorts of unpredictable reasons -- weather, natural disasters, labor troubles, shifting priorities, new competitors, changing customer preferences. I don't see why currency fluctuations are any different.
Prices are generally sticky, and long-term contracts with fixed or inflation-adjusted prices are common. Currency risk is a real thing that firms pay a bunch of money to try to avoid.
Do the experiences of clan based legal systems shed any light on the feasibility of libertarian legal systems?
Probably, but the ones I know best, such as saga period Iceland and northern Somalia before the creation of the country of Somalia, were not clan based.
As a follow up to the drug question, how do you think the problem of the tendency of the market to provide superstimuli should be addressed?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jq73GozjsuhdwMLEG/superstimuli-and-the-collapse-of-western-civilization
The same way — by leaving people free to choose. Parents have some control over their children and there should be institutions individuals can use to make binding commitments, such as not to drink or not to spend more than two hours a day playing video games.
The problem is that the market can create new superstimuli faster than social mechanisms can arise to counter them.
“ the argument [Mises calculation provlem] applies to a firm as well as to a government, since a firm is doing the same thing on a smaller scale”
Doesn't that miss the point? The point being that it is impossible to calculate profit without genuine money prices.
A firm uses market prices to help it decide what to produce and how to produce it. They can decide what to outsource and what to make in house, or pivot to an entirely different product. If they run up enough losses, they go out of business. Central planners would have no market prices to guide them and would make everything in house. They cannot use profit to decide what to make more of or which way of producing it best economizes the resources they use.
It is a claim about central planning. Ordinary governments that do not try to confiscate the entire means of production and plan all output are in an intermediate category. They have markets available to supply them with resources and prices, but since their “profit” resists ordinary accounting methods and monetary losses do not put them out of business, they have more discretion than a firm, or at least, face a different sort of discipline.
What am I missing?
The firm is making internal allocation decisions, what employee should do what when, for which it does not have price signals.
It does not pay wages? I guess your point is that it is not clear how particular input costs relate to profits when done by wage earners instead of piece workers.
At least, there are prices that allow comparison between renting and buying equipment or land. Governments have these data but typically don’t much care about them, while a central planner simply would not have them.
Central planners have no profits to compare input prices to (assuming they ginned up artificial prices at all). And ordinary governments at least know the difference between a million dollar boondoggle and a billion dollar boondoggle. It requires an enormous abstraction to say that they are all doing the same thing.
No doubt we can find places where they do the same thing, but others where they do different things. The question then is, what characteristics does Mises' argument depend upon, and which entities have those or to what degree?
Coase and Mises are analyzing different aspects of production. Coase is asking why competition to please consumers best doesn’t end up at either extreme of the spectrum between one giant monopoly that makes everything and an atomized market where every person is a separate firm and all land or equipment is rented rather than bought. Mises is criticizing the idea of eliminating profit and competition and replacing the decentralized process with a centralized, unified, supposedly rational plan.
If Coase considered them all to be doing the same thing, why did he not advocate central planning? After all, transactions costs mostly disappear when production is centralized and money prices are eliminated. It is because central planning replaces transactions costs with economic blindness.
The firm pays wages but it pays the same wage whether the employee does A or B, so the wage doesn't tell it which to allocate his time to.
"If Coase considered them all to be doing the same thing, why did he not advocate central planning?"
His view was that there was a tradeoff between the costs of hierarchical coordination, the sorts of problems pointed out in the calculation controversy, and the costs of market coordination, with the former generally increasing with the number of people being coordinated. Firms grow up to the point where the cost of doing another thing in-house passes the cost of doing it through the market, different for different sorts of firms. So a market system with firms minimizes the combined costs.
Hi David, I think you are failing to adress the core issue. It's true that the wage itself doesn't indicate where to allocate time, but profits and loss do, and for that you need prices. If you allocate x amount of employees to project A, you have a mechanism to asses if that decision was profitable or not. It's not automatic, but you have a mechanism of adjustment. That's something the central planner doesn't have, and that goes beyond the trade off established by Coase.
Profit provides a measure of how the firm is doing, but a socialist government can have measures of outcomes that matter to it, perhaps a weighted combination of several observables such as mortality rates. Neither firm nor socialist state have an internal price system to allocate resources in order to maximize the measure. That is done, in both cases, by someone figuring it out as best he can and telling everyone else what to do.
Ok, I think I understand what you are saying, but I see the following problem. The measure of success of the central planner is arbitrary. Planning an economy is actually quite easy; you distribute half the workers to the fields and half to the industry. There, you have a plan. A lousy one, but a planned economy in the end. The thing is that without prices the central planner has no way of knowing how much value its internal capital allocation is providing to others. Without price system, you have a planner with a desired outputobjective. With a price system, you have feedback, through profit and losses, on wether your internal planning is generating value or not.
Don’t know if it makes sense.
But it does have the price signal from the outcome of its decisions. Maybe the firm doesn't have an internal market for employees, but thanks to the price system it can asses if putting workers in this or that project was good. The central planner doesn't have that tool to evaluate the outcome of its planning.
What price signals? HR has one clerk handling monthly meetings, Christmas parties, and the like. He appears to not be fully occupied, so they move responsibility for restriping the parking lot and replacing lost security fobs to him from a clerk who was complaining of overwork.
There are no price signals.
Handling meetings is still an activity which can be evaluated through profits and loss. Maybe the mechanism is not obvious or automatic, but you have a way to asses if employees time is being occupied in a profitable way or not.
Planning birthay parties still needs a price system to take place. How doe sthe central planner know if gifting an iphone to every employee on its birthday is a good use of its resources?
There is profit and loss. Accounting so that profits and costs can be understood at a fine grain is difficult, but a maybe possible. Even if we stipulate that such fine grain accounting doesn’t work, profit and loss remain at the large scale. Firms face a discipline that governments do not, and that has no relation to central planners. There are similarities, but also clear distinctions.
Have you an answer to Million Friedman's point about definition of property right in airspace above one's property?
It appears to show an unavoidable lacuna in the libertarian conception and the claim is thus made that property rests essentially on convention accepted in particular societies.
One can make an efficiency argument for particular allocations.
But doesn't "an efficiency argument" imply a political decision?
Or a market decision, depending on how rules are made. Consider such issues in a proprietary community or an A-C legal system. But I agree that there isn't a philosophical solution.
Yet markets presume already defined property rights and thus won't it be circular to expect market to define property right?
Consider a proprietary community that starts our owning all land and air rights under state law, decides how to bundle them for the customers buying in. Or the market mechanism for creating law in a stateless society described in my first book:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery 3rd Edn.pdf
Which active economists do you still follow closely, if any?
What are your top five books you would recommend to others? Purposefully broad.
To follow up on the cryogenics, where do you place the probability at the moment?
Is it something you're considering?
Followup on HR25 The Fair Tax Act. Two prinicpal benefits of taxing consumption with a flat rate sales tax are (1) simplicity, transparency, and much reduced compliance cost and (2) the potential for faster economic growth. I think it would be fabulous if you had time to write a whole essay about the benefits and costs of a national retail sales tax to replace all other federal taxes. What do you think? Any chance?
Not likely. My present project is writing the Substack and turning collections of posts into books. At some point I may get back to my project of collecting and writing essays about works of literature that contain economic lessons.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Fictional%20Economics/Embedded%20Economics.html
Maybe get back to Living Paper, my project for creating programs to teach economics, probably as an open source project with other people writing the code. Will probably never get back to the sequel to my first novel.
It's your Substack that I was thinking of. Just your usual sort of essay. I get it, though. Lots of opportunity cost. Time presents the ultimate scarcity.
We agree drug laws are an important issue! And once again, even while you were stating this, you wrote very little about them. Why so little to say? (This is not a gotcha question, there could be many perfectly reasonable answers; I'm just curious.)
If you reflect back on your life and your opinions and ideas, is there anything where you turned out to be completely wrong and changed your position ?