Intro

In modern times, when people think of 'politics' or 'government' they typically do so in terms of 'conservative' or 'liberal' (or your country's equivalent), with an almost religious zeal for their chosen political party. Children are trained to do this in public school, where they learn how the local government is intended to work and what 'issues' are supposedly important to the major political parties.

However, in times past the very concept of 'government' has been challenged and redefined repeatedly, even showing cycles of development and collapse that are still apparent today. For example, around the time when the United States was founded there was an increasing political movement in Europe away from the 'traditional' monarchies and towards republics and democratic republics, which heavily influenced the nation's constitution. Even then democracies and republics were nothing new; both date back to the Greeks and Romans who developed them more than 700 years earlier, displacing the monarchies of their time. On the other hand, the concepts of 'personal freedom' and 'laissez-faire' were decidedly new, and perhaps an evolutionary step forward towards sustainable government.

Nonetheless, while science has since prompted us to investigate virtually every aspect of the natural world, in the long history of human civilization seemingly very few people have bothered to give serious consideration to fundamental questions about how we govern ourselves. Questions such as "what is a government?" and "do we actually need a government at all, and if so why?", and assuming that we do need a government, then there is the question of what it should actually provide, how it should be provided for, and how to prevent it from being misused.

At the same time, 'government' and 'economics' are also closely related. Many governments have been based on economic theories/ideologies (such as communism) with varying degrees of success. Likewise, the success of a nation's economy depends heavily on the laws and tax policies of its government. Voting on government issues without understanding the relationship between government and economics is a bit like reaching into a bag of prescription pills and then taking all the ones that happen to be a certain color you like. The color has nothing to do with whether they might be poisonous or not, but that is essentially what people are placing their faith in.

And, in order to understand the relationship between economics and government you first must understand economics, which leads to still more questions. What is money? What are prices? What is capital? What is interest? What is a stock? How do you know when an economy is 'doing well'? What does it mean for an economy to be 'efficient'? Are there cases where a 'free market' cannot be efficient? What is the difference between a 'free market' and an 'unfree market'?

And finally, putting things together, we can ask whether or not socialism and/or communism could actually work, and justify why or why not. These last questions are some of the most important, if only because most people do not understand the consequences of the answers, leading them to mistakenly claim that socialism and communism have 'never really been tried'.

This blog is dedicated to teaching, rather than preaching economics and politics. Instead of just presenting a political opinion, I intend to cover the fundamentals that govern specific decisions regarding politics and economics, and then present different possible systems, explain how they work, and then compare them to each other and to the more absolute standards of practical consequences to show how they work or don't work in reality. Additionally, along the way I wish to present my own ideas of how the fundamental problems of government can be solved in a formally sound fashion, and how to create a system that avoids the major problems that plague governments today.