Writing
Essays and analysis on economics, praxeology, and applied technology — reasoned from first principles.
How the Austrians Won the Arguments, but the Keynesians Won the War
The economists who understood the limits of government power lost the political battle to those who promised to overcome them. But perhaps Keynes was never the real winner.
For two centuries economists explained why money cannot create real wealth and why no central authority can know what prices know. They won the arguments and lost the institutions. Tracing Smith and Ricardo through Mises, Hayek, Keynes, Friedman, Sowell and Buchanan, this essay argues the decisive factor was never the economics — it was the political demand for monetary power, which predated Keynes and outlived his own warnings about it.
ReadWhen Everything Is Illegal, Nothing Feels Criminal
Australia’s illicit tobacco boom, the Austrian school of economics, and the unintended consequences of government intervention.
Australia has nearly tripled the price of legal tobacco and produced a thriving criminal industry rather than the intended public health outcome. Projected excise receipts for 2026–27 were revised down from $14.7 billion to $3.6 billion, and more than 200 firebombings have followed. The illicit market is not flourishing in spite of the intervention, but in significant part because of it.
ReadAI Integration Is Not Enough
Most firms are bolting AI onto software designed around the division of human labour. The larger opportunity is to redesign the system itself.
Almost every professional now uses AI, yet most professional work looks much as it did five years ago. The constraint is not model capability — it is that we keep inserting AI into software architected for separate human tasks. Smarter silos are still silos.
ReadScarcity is what breaks the division of labour
Ricardo and Mises showed that specialisation makes everyone capable of becoming richer. Neither guarantees that everyone remains free to produce.
The division of labour is positive-sum: specialisation and trade let a society produce far more than its members could alone. But that logic assumes people remain free to act. When scarcity is manufactured through zoning, licensing, tariffs and tax rather than physical limits, the market simply prices the scarcity it has been given — and the economy fills with zero-sum contests over political bottlenecks.
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