I started writing Liberty Papers in April 2023 in response to the growing observation that Power (e.g., governments, businesses, international organizations) erodes Liberty over time. I’m pushing back against that by raising awareness of pockets of this erosion where I see it.
NB: As of March, 2024, Liberty Papers is in hibernation while I embark on a software startup. I will occasionally write when the urge to do so becomes irresistable. I anticipate the frequency of my essays to drop to once a month or every other month for the foreseeable future. As such, I plan to keep this substack free indefinitely unless I rededicate myself to writing at a frequency which aims to justify sponsorship from my readers. Thank you for all of you who have followed me on this journey. I hope we see each other again soon, in these pages, or elsewhere ♡
Money, Economics, Finance
At the foundation of peaceful society is a healthy economy. A healthy economy requires a sound currency. Regardless of whether it was Keynes or Lenin who said it, debauch the currency and you will debauch society because currency is a unit of measure. It is a measure of a unit of human time-value. Does your time-value change drastically from day to day or week to week? Does it naturally go down over time or up? Imagine baking a cake every month but the definition of a cup of flour changed with each attempt.
A happy and well-employed person does not rob convenience stores; desperate people with no way out do. A society that maximizes opportunity maximizes peace. I write about money, economics, and finance because those are prerequisites for Liberty.
Discipline
Liberty is not simply Power leaving people alone. Society is a system of agreements. We are trusted by default to adhere to the agreements we enter into, implicitly or explicitly. There is a personal responsibility component to the Liberty equation. I write about discipline and how we as individuals can maximize our personal harmony with a just society. That’s not to say our current society is just. Society is the weighted average of each of us taken as a whole. If we as individuals are not just, society has no hope of being just. Cultivating personal justice is a prerequisite for Liberty and a free society.
History
Without knowing where we’ve been, how can we know where we’re going? I write about history to contextualize the current milieu and map out how Liberty has evolved over time.
Technology
My training is in technology. I’ve spent several decades working in various facets of technology ranging from pure software companies to building very tiny devices to building hyperscale datacenter workloads. I write about some of these things, especially when they overlap with society. I will be ruthless when they are used to impinge upon Liberty.
