Theses Index
Curated thesis articles.
Last updated: 2026-07-15
Contents
| File | Summary | Tags | Updated |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-05-10-state-as-parasite-thesis.md | Tests the two-sentence claim that the State is a parasite that disguises itself as symbiosis, and that dictatorships and organized crime are less-skilled versions of the same parasite. Sentence 1 is strongly supported in the anarcho-libertarian corpus (Rothbard, Oppenheimer, Nock, Bastiat, Spooner, La Boetie, Nietzsche, Hoppe), with non-libertarian convergence from Tilly’s historical sociology and adjacent descriptions from Schmitt and Foucault. Sentence 2 holds for ordinary regimes but breaks at totalitarianism in Arendt’s specific sense; her power-vs-violence distinction clarifies why terror is not simply weak legitimacy. | thesis, state, parasite-thesis, evolution-of-the-state, totalitarianism, political-means, protection-racket, banality-of-evil, total-domination, violence-vs-power, state-of-exception, biopower, libertarianism | 2026-06-26 |
| 2026-05-19-argentina-rent-decontrol-2023.md | Reads Argentina’s late-2023 rent decontrol as consistent with the Mises-Rothbard price-control prediction: an effective rent ceiling creates a housing shortage by suppressing the legal return to supply; repeal reopens the offer margin, and early data report listings returning and real rents falling. Confidence is medium because the post-repeal evidence is recent and Argentina’s macro volatility complicates clean attribution. | thesis, argentina, rent-control, price-control, housing-policy, decontrol, buenos-aires, austrian-economics, mises, rothbard | 2026-06-13 |
| 2026-06-03-fomc-april-2026-rate-hold.md | Reads the April 2026 FOMC rate hold not as a judgment call to be graded but as an instance of administering a price no committee can know. The federal funds target is the price of credit; a market discovers it, a committee can only estimate it, and the four-way split is the knowledge problem made visible. Whether the administered rate sits above or below the natural rate — not the hold/cut/hike label — decides whether calculation is being falsified. Contextualizes the report’s two framings: the ‘easing bias’ the dissents oppose is the credit-expansion tilt ABCT names, and the statement’s framing of inflation as partly reflecting global energy prices misnames a monetary relation as a supply shock. Confidence medium: the natural-rate gap is unobservable and a hold is not itself credit expansion. | thesis, federal-reserve, fomc, monetary-policy, interest-rates, abct, knowledge-problem, credit-expansion, inflation, austrian-economics, mises, rothbard, hayek | 2026-06-12 |
| 2026-06-04-trump-ceasefire-moderate-shooting.md | Reads Trump’s ceasefire definition as a war-and-state case: once peace means reduced fire rather than demobilization, defense rhetoric can preserve legitimacy while the protection-racket and political-means apparatus continues. | thesis, ceasefire, war-and-state, state-power, protection-racket, political-means, us-iran, kuwait, israel-lebanon, trump | 2026-06-09 |
| 2026-06-07-somalia-2006-intervention-blowback.md | A BBC profile of a former child soldier supplies a war-and-state case study — Tilly’s racketeer test, Rothbard’s war power and permanent ratchet, and Oppenheimer’s conquest of an already-producing order — where the costs land on an unwilling schoolboy. | thesis, somalia, foreign-intervention, child-soldiers, blowback, protection-racket, war-and-the-state, political-means | 2026-06-13 |
| 2026-06-08-libertarianism-and-the-adoption-problem.md | Tests the claim that libertarianism is correct but unadoptable — out-organized by surveillance, AI, military states, and propaganda, with no way for free individuals to coordinate against the nation-state. The corpus largely concedes the diagnosis (obedience runs on habit; legitimacy is manufactured; the opinion battle is the weakest leg; tribalism gives nationalism a standing edge) and resists only the conclusion. Its honest answer: the three classic routes (withdrawal, opinion, exit) are each necessary but insufficient; the defensible path narrows to one hard floor (the cryptographic cost-asymmetry, the lone lever that does not scale with the adversary’s size or AI), one catalyst worth pre-positioning for (a monetary reckoning, not the war-or-emergency collapse that the ratchet shows grows the state), and one thing the movement has not yet built (a unifying meaning that satisfies the belonging nationalism supplies). | thesis, libertarianism, adoption, strategy, obedience, nationalism, tribalism, public-choice, agorism, surveillance, cbdc, cryptography, monetary-collapse, creed, human-nature | 2026-06-12 |
| 2026-06-12-mega-event-boondoggles.md | Reuters’s finding that World Cups and Olympics rarely pay off is read through caretaker capital consumption and public choice — political owners harvest present prestige while consuming capital they cannot sell, and concentrated organizer benefits survive a vote dispersed taxpayers will not monitor — while ‘build a hospital instead’, taken as a remedy, is rejected for conceding the real defect: allocation by the political means, with no profit-and-loss test, which a hospital built the same way would inherit. | thesis, public-choice, megaprojects, stadiums, public-spending, capital-consumption, caretaker, intervention, white-elephant, boondoggle, world-cup, olympics, mises, hoppe | 2026-06-12 |
| 2026-07-02-bitcoin-frees-the-individual-not-the-collective.md | Hamoon Soleimani’s Mises Wire essay argues decentralized cryptocurrency has failed to liberate anyone or constrain state power, captured by KYC custody and ETFs, weaponized by regimes, unable to touch the state’s territorial monopoly on violence. This thesis holds the critique half right. Soleimani correctly notes Bitcoin topples no regime, but wrongly concludes the tool is not freedom, judging an instrument of individual exit by the standard of collective liberation. His own citation of Rothbard’s critique of Konkin concedes the individual benefit while denying its collective relevance, and that conceded benefit is the product: self-custody a state cannot inflate or seize without physical coercion. Individual exit and collective resistance are complements, not substitutes. | thesis, bitcoin, cypherpunk, agorism, sovereign-individual, monopoly-on-violence, self-custody, crypto-anarchy, mises-wire, individual-vs-collective, iran, venezuela | 2026-07-02 |