THE RATIONAL ARGUMENTATOR |
Fragile Reasoning in Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile: An
Enlightenment Transhumanist Critique |
Never before have I set out
to read a book with such high expectations, only to
encounter such severe disappointment. As an admirer of
Nassim Taleb’s earlier books,
Fooled by Randomness and
The Black Swan, I expected to find
insight and wisdom along similar lines in
Antifragile. While Taleb’s latest book does
contain some valid observations and a few intriguing
general strategies for living, the overwhelming thrust
of the book is one of bitter distaste for modernity
(and, to a significant extent, technological progress),
as well as an abundance of insults for anyone who would
disagree with not just Taleb’s ideas, but with his
personal esthetic preferences. While sensible in the
realms of finance and (mostly) economics, Taleb’s
prescriptions in other fields venture outside of his
realms of mastery and, if embraced, would result in a
relapse of the barbarisms of premodernity. Perhaps as
the outcome of his own phenomenal success, Taleb has become set in his ways and has transitioned from
offering some controversial, revolutionary, and
genuinely insightful ideas to constructing a static,
intolerant, totalistic worldview that rejects deviations
in any field of life – and the persons who so deviate.
I am saddened to write this,
but I am convinced that Nassim Taleb would find me to be
personally repulsive. Not only am I a technology-embracing
transhumanist (a “neomaniac” per Taleb’s vocabulary),
and a person who embraces the “nerdification” of society
– but I am also an explicit representative and promoter
of the legacies of the 18th-century
Enlightenment – and a proud suit-and-tie wearer besides.
Taleb seethes with contempt for the very trappings of
modernity – even for modern formal wear – and repeatedly
asserts that nothing valuable can be gleaned from those
who wear neckties. As in many other areas, his
conclusion-jumping pronouncements exclude the
possibility of the world not fitting into his invented
categories (with their associated normative spin). On
the necktie question, he seems to rule out the very
existence of persons like me, who wear neckties not out
of any compulsion (my office dress code does not require
them), but rather as an esthetic statement arising from
sheer personal choice – including, not infrequently, on
weekends.
After reading
Antifragile, and finding so much of the content in
need of a thorough refutation, I have vacillated between
writing a book review and a more comprehensive treatise.
A short review, I realized, would not do this book
justice – but I also did not wish to run the risk of
writing a refutation as long as the book itself. The
result is this – one of my longest book reviews to date,
but written as concisely as the subject matter allows.
Here, I seek to comment on many of Taleb’s areas of
focus in Antifragile, highlighting both the
book’s strengths and its egregious errors.
Antifragile was one of
the very few books I ever pre-ordered, as Taleb, until
about a month ago, held a place among my most admired
contemporary thinkers – along with such luminaries as
Steven Pinker, Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, Max More,
and Ron Paul. Taleb’s writings on the fragility of the
contemporary financial system were simply brilliant and
highlighted the systemic weaknesses of a “house of cards”
built upon highly sophisticated but over-optimized
models that relied on the unrealistic stability of the
status quo and the absence of extremely disruptive
“black swan” events. I expected that Antifragile
would discuss ways to survive and prosper in a
black-swan-dominated world – a question that has been at
the forefront of my mind since at least 2006, when I
personally observed some “six-sigma” events on the stock
market and – after reducing my losses to manageable
levels – have refused to participate in that particular
economy-wide casino since. While Antifragile
does provide skeletal discussions of some valuable
approaches (such as the “barbell” strategy, on which I
will comment more below), the majority of the book’s
focus is negative: a harsh criticism of the
institutions, ideas, and people whom Taleb
considers insufficiently antifragile or “fragilizing”.
One of Taleb’s favorite terms throughout the book is
“fragilista” – used to describe financial modelers,
politicians, and intellectuals of a rationalist frame of
mind. The term – aside from creating vague and
completely irrelevant associations with left-wing
Nicaraguan terrorists – also poisons the metaphorical
well with regard to the people and approaches criticized
by Taleb.
More generally, the book is
pervaded by an undercurrent of anti-intellectualism,
mocking those who use structured, explicit knowledge to
interpret the world. This is rather odd, because Taleb
himself is clearly an intellectual and a “nerd” of the
sort he derides; his philosophical and historical
allusions – and his expertise in mathematical finance
(despite his criticisms thereof) – give away that fact.
Fat Tony of Brooklyn, Taleb’s fictional representative
of the non-intellectual person who relies on “empirical”
heuristics and is able to become rich by occasionally
betting against “suckers,” would not have kept the
company of people like Taleb. No matter how much
rhetorical contempt Taleb shows for those who engage in
abstract reasoning, he cannot escape being one of them –
and no amount of insults directed at his own kind will
get him an iota of respect from those whose character
traits he glorifies.
An antifragile system or
entity, per Taleb’s definition, is one that benefits
from volatility instead of succumbing to it. Beyond mere
robustness, which withstands volatility intact,
antifragility is the derivation of advantage from
volatility. The concept itself is an intriguing one, but
Taleb makes a crucial error in assuming that most
antifragility is normatively preferable. He does make an
exception for “antifragility at others’ expense” – but
only in a limited context. For instance, he is outraged
at career intellectuals who do not have “skin in the
game” and do not suffer for making wrong predictions or
recommendations (more on this later) – but he explicitly
praises the antifragility of biological evolution, a
process that has resulted in the brutal deaths of most
organisms and the extinction of about 99.9% of all
species in history. Even within his premise that
modernity contains “fragilizing” elements, Taleb presupposes that fragility is necessarily undesirable.
Yet a beautiful vase is fragile – as is, for that
matter, an individual organism. Fragility is no
justification for dismissing or opposing an area of
existence that has other intrinsic merits. Perhaps the
proper response to certain kinds of fragility is extra
care in the preservation of the fragile – as shown, for
example, in the raising of children and small animals.
When Taleb argues that
post-Enlightenment civilization is fragile, he may be
partly right – at least in the sense that such
civilization requires the steady, conscious application
of human intellect to maintain. Every generation must
master the scientific, technological, and ethical
accomplishments of the generations before it and amplify
these accomplishments; this is the essence of progress.
This mastery of civilization entails precisely the
“nerdification” (i.e., sophisticated, refined,
self-aware intellectualism) that Taleb scorns in favor
of “empirical” heuristics that may have arisen out of
premodern superstition in as great (or greater) a
proportion as out of practical wisdom passed down
throughout the ages. Steven Pinker, whose magnum
opus
The Better Angels of Our Nature
I would glowingly recommend (and whose work Taleb
has
unfairly maligned, though
Pinker’s response to Taleb is worth reading),
illustrates convincingly that not only peacefulness but
virtually every other characteristic of civilized human
beings has improved dramatically over the past several
centuries – and most remarkably over the past several
decades. Nothing suggests that this improvement is an
inexorable law of history, however; it is possible for
anti-civilizing influences to take hold and for humanity
to degenerate into the barbarism that characterized much
of its past. In that sense, civilization may be
considered fragile – but so eminently worth preserving
and expanding, for it makes possible the good life for
good individuals.
Unfortunately, Taleb has
included himself among the influences that would undo
many of the essential gains that humanity has achieved
since the 18th-century Enlightenment. Taleb
repeatedly references the “wisdom of the ancients” (the
stoic Seneca is his favorite) and conflates the
“natural” (a term from which he excludes human design
and technology) with the desirable. Taleb praises the
heuristics he sees in traditional religious systems
(e.g., elaborate Greek Orthodox fasting rituals) while
completely overlooking the massive horrors many
traditional (i.e., premodern) religious systems
perpetrated when persecuting dissenters, inspiring
bloody wars of conquest, and establishing totalitarian
regimes when combined with secular authority. The
Enlightenment brought about a conscious questioning of
religious (and all authority-based) traditions and
commandments and resulted in the adoption of rigorous
scientific inquiry in the pursuit of discovery and
innovation. Taleb is wary of modern medicine because of
possible “iatrogenic” effects (where the treatment
itself causes most of the harm), and he even questions
the genuineness and desirability of massive
rises in life expectancy during the 20th and
early 21st centuries. While there is some
merit to balancing the anticipated benefits and possible
side effects of medical treatments – and while Taleb may
be right that certain fields may take treatment too far,
especially as regards overprescription of psychotropic
drugs to children – Taleb’s discussion of “iatrogenics”
is mostly anecdotal and reliant on studies from much
earlier periods in medicine (e.g., the death of George
Washington in 1799 and a study on children in 1930). The virtual eradication of smallpox, polio,
tuberculosis, cholera, and the bubonic plague from the
Western world by scientific medicine are utterly ignored
by Taleb – as are the substantial declines in cancer
death rates over the past 50 years, and the
accomplishments of the Green Agricultural Revolution in
averting the starvation of billions, which would have
occurred if only “natural” agricultural techniques
(i.e., techniques employed before some arbitrary
historical cutoff date) had been utilized.
There may be some merit to
Taleb’s advice of avoiding medical treatment for minor
conditions (where the iatrogenic effects of treatment
allegedly predominate) and letting the body heal itself,
while being willing to undertake radical treatments for
extreme, life-threatening conditions. However, context
in medical care matters too greatly to make sweeping
generalizations. A fairly small skin lesion, which does
not interfere with day-to-day functioning, may, after
all, be the beginning of a deadly cancer, for which no
self-healing mechanism exists. In medicine especially,
the “empirical” heuristics championed by Taleb must give
way to careful and systematic scientific study. After
all, most premodern cultures relied on “traditional”
heuristics for millennia, with disastrous results; such
reliance can be called folk medicine. One only
needs to consider the “traditional” Eastern “remedies”
based on the superstition that one will become like the
creature one eats – or “traditional” Western Medieval
bleeding and surgical practices – to realize how much
progress modern scientific medicine has actually made.
|
“Taleb has managed to
gratuitously insult practically everybody who might have
been sympathetic to his previously articulated views –
including the libertarians, transhumanists, and
rationalist natural-law thinkers who would have found
much to agree with in Fooled by Randomness and
The Black Swan.” |
While a reader of Fooled
by Randomness and The Black Swan might
have inferred libertarian and individualist tendencies
in Taleb’s writing, Antifragile, unfortunately,
sets the record straight: Taleb opposes “too much”
individual flourishing and freedom. He reserves his
bitterest venom for transhumanism, which is the logical
outcome of a libertarian society in which technological
progress is given free rein. Taleb’s reverence for
“nature” and “the ancients” trumps his skepticism of
centralized regimentation – as his ideas on life
extension and freedom of speech illustrate. He writes, “I
felt some deep disgust – as would any ancient – at the
efforts of ‘singularity’ thinkers (such as Ray Kurzweil)
who believe in humans’ potential to live forever. Note
that if I had to find the anti-me, the person with
diametrically opposite ideas and lifestyle on the planet,
it would be that Ray Kurzweil fellow. It is not just
neomania. While I propose removing offensive elements
from people’s diets (and lives), he works by adding,
popping close to two hundred pills daily. Beyond that,
these attempts at immortality leave me with deep moral
revulsion.” Taleb says little of substance to
support this “deep moral revulsion” – beyond repeating
the same tired, hackneyed old arguments about “making
room for others” by dying – as if the life of the
individual had no inherent value and could be
justifiably expended for an alleged greater good. Taleb
does not address Kurzweil’s arguments about the
exponential progress of computing and other
technologies, and the logical extrapolation of such
progress within the coming decades. In short, he says
nothing about why he would consider Kurzweil to be
mistaken, or what about Kurzweil’s lifestyle and
ambitions he considers destructive. Taleb’s rudely
expressed opposition to transhumanism seems to be
primarily driven by emotional revulsion or, to be more
charitable, a conflict of values. Additionally, Taleb
does not seem to understand the movement that he
criticizes. He assumes that extended longevity would be
accompanied by extended frailty and senescence, whereas
true radical life extension would only be possible if
biological youth could be prolonged through periodic
rejuvenation of the organism. Moreover, Taleb is, at
heart, a collectivist who embraces the sacrifice of the
individual to the tribe. He writes, “I am not here
to live forever, as a sick animal. Recall that the
antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of
its components – and I am part of that larger population
called humans. I am here to die a heroic death for the
sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and
prepare them for life and provide for them), or
eventually, books – my information, that is, my genes,
the antifragile in me, should be the ones seeking
immortality, not me.”
The biggest disappointment I
experienced when reading Antifragile was the
realization I came to upon reading the above-quoted
passage. This book was never about helping make the
individual antifragile. The preservation of a human
being in a volatile and uncertain world – and the
attempt to equip a human being to flourish in the face
of such volatility and uncertainty – were never Taleb’s
key aims. Taleb’s views on antifragility are, indeed,
not particularly helpful to me in my goal to discover
strategies that would preserve, fortify, and enrich
the individual in an often hostile, and, in many
ways, fundamentally unpredictable world which lacks any
manner of built-in justice outside of what humans,
through their ingenuity and will, can implement. Taleb
would have both of us (and everyone else) be sacrificed
for the sake of an unspecified “collective” – as if some
abstraction, be it “nature”, evolution, or “the whole”,
has value in and of itself, apart from its constituent
individuals. Yet it is precisely this sort of
collectivism that enables inhuman atrocities, from mass
executions of “the other” to suicide bombings for a
“greater cause”. Taleb does not intend to advocate armed
violence, but his rhetoric on heroism, “dying
heroically”, and self-sacrifice eerily resembles the
pronouncements of many a totalitarian regime,
inquisitorial sect, or band of nationalistic or
religious terrorists. The good life – the comfortable
life of peace, productive work, and self-fulfillment –
does not seem to be his objective.
In several sections devoted
to having “doxastic commitment” or “soul in the game”,
Taleb glorifies the idea of leaving no way out in the
event of one’s failure – forgetting that much true
learning is
iterative and often occurs through a trial-and-error
process. If one is not allowed to recover from failure
and change one’s approach (without crippling personal
cost), then this learning will be preempted, and the
individual will be destroyed instead. Taleb glorifies,
for instance, the poet Almutanabbi, who died senselessly
in the attempt to realize the ideals about which he
wrote. But it is far more impressive to live in
furtherance of one’s ideals than to die for them –
particularly since living requires one to reevaluate
one’s views in light of emerging evidence and continual
reflection.
Taleb is no more a friend of
individual liberty than of technological progress. As a
consequence of his view that intellectuals should have
“skin in the game”, he insists that they should
personally suffer the adverse consequences of their
recommendations. Indeed, he would implement his scheme
of penalties to the detriment of legal protections for
freedom of speech. While criticizing the financial
rating agencies’ misclassification of toxic assets as
“AAA” securities, he remarks that “they benefit from
the protection of free speech – the ‘First Amendment’ so
ingrained in American habits. My humble proposal: one
should say whatever he wants, but one’s portfolio needs
to line up with it.” Elsewhere, Taleb proposes that
individuals be held legally liable for the damage that
their predictions and recommendations result in if
followed by others. He ignores that not all individuals
have the assets to even invest in a portfolio. Are the
poor and middle class to be deprived of the ability to
express their opinions or speculate about the economic
future (even if such speculation is without much basis),
simply because they do not have much “skin” to put into
the “game”? Furthermore, establishing any legal
liability for expression of opinion would have a
chilling effect on legitimate and valuable ideas – since
the very threat or prospect of a lawsuit may serve as a
deterrent to publishing or even verbal expression in
front of someone who disagrees. For someone so insistent
on individual moral responsibility, Taleb ignores the
responsibility of the recipient of ideas to actively
judge and interpret them. Just as there exist sleazy
marketers, so there exist peddlers of philosophical
falsehoods, and sometimes those falsehoods result in
personal gains for their advocates. Yet the
responsibility of the sensible, rational individual is
to filter out truth from falsehood using his own mind.
No prohibition, no regime of penalties, no prior
restraint can protect people from themselves. Such
restrictions can only prevent people from cultivating
the habits of autonomous thought which are the surest
safeguards against charlatans and demagogues of every
stripe. Taleb is too concerned about punishing the false
prophets, and insufficiently concerned about elevating
the general level of reasoning and discourse by means of
positive persuasion, dissemination of true information,
and technological innovation that alters people’s
incentives and the balance of power.
Taleb even departs from the
libertarian advocacy of free trade and (genuine)
globalization. While he acknowledges the theoretical
validity of some specialization and the law of
comparative advantage, he sees the global division of
labor as vulnerable to volatility in the system. He
argues that a change in conditions in one part of the
world now has a far greater ability to adversely impact
all other parts of the world – because the division of
labor is so finely tuned. This is a fair argument for
redundancy in economic systems – e.g., having “backup”
institutions which could supply a good or service if the
original supplier is unavailable due to an unexpected
disruption. However, Taleb errs when assuming that
businesses pursuing their rational self-interests under
a truly free arrangement of global commerce would not
already attempt to implement such redundancies.
Supply-chain risk, for instance, is commonly discussed
by representatives of multinational businesses and their
insurers, who have a stake in preventing supply
disruptions. Overreliance on any one economic
partnership may indeed be imprudent – but does Taleb
believe that businessmen with true “skin in the game” –
billions of their own dollars – would be oblivious to
the need for redundancy? Taleb makes no case for why
free trade – in essence, the voluntary exchange of goods
and services among individuals without regard for
national origins or boundaries – would create a systemic
lack of redundancy. A stronger argument could be made
for how the current politicized environment of trade – a
mixture of freedom and elaborate controls achieved by
means of treaties and retaliatory protectionism – would
produce insufficient redundancy and overdependence on
those precious channels of international trade that
remain permitted. But the solution to this problem would
be more options – more channels for foreign
trade – not fewer. Autarky certainly will not do, as it
brings about its own massive vulnerabilities. One only
need consider the consequences of a famine in a region
which is not allowed to import food from abroad. Trade
creates redundancy by allowing access to goods and
services from all over the world, instead of just one
minor segment thereof.
The nonlinear responses to
volatility described in Antifragile are valid
in principle. A system responds in a concave
fashion if the harm to the system from a change in
conditions is more than linear relative to that change
(i.e., an accelerating harm). A system responds in a
convex fashion if it is able to reap benefits from
volatility in a more-than-linear accumulation. Taleb
proposes that it is possible for certain systems to be
concave or convex in both directions – being harmed by
or benefiting from a shift in conditions either way. It
is also possible for systems to be convex over some
regions of inputs, and concave over others – e.g., a
human immune system or a body engaging in exercise.
Taleb does not, however, provide many tools to actually
determine the inflection points within any particular
system. Although he praises “empirical” heuristics for
doing so – especially heuristics passed down through the
ages – he provides absolutely no support to conclude
that those heuristics do not overshoot the desirable
levels of any given characteristics. To use the example
he provides of religious fasting customs, even if one
can be generous and suppose some benefit to the fasting
(of which I am not altogether convinced), what evidence
is there that the specific schedule and duration of
fasts is optimal? Could not scientific investigation
uncover a better way, and explain its workings in a
rational, evidence-based manner, without recourse to
superstition or ancestral hand-waving? Furthermore, Taleb does not consider that the “wisdom of the ancients”
may not have developed through the careful evolutionary
process he describes – but rather comes to us as a
warped reflection of some very recent generation’s
interpretation of ancient practices – which themselves
were altered by numerous political authorities,
ideological movements, and idiosyncratic historical
events in order to fulfill some very context-specific
(and not necessarily virtuous or life-affirming) aim. To
get a sense of how this has happened to distort
prevailing conceptions of the past, one needs only to
consider the early history of Christianity – where
doctrine was often promoted or suppressed based on the
temporal interest of Roman and Byzantine emperors and
their officials – or the extensive revisionism performed
by the 19th-century Romantics with regard to
the Middle Ages. Taleb himself romanticizes antiquity (including
the ancient Middle East), overlooking the incessant wars,
disease, filth, vulgarity, persecution, and ideological
totalism that characterized many pre-Enlightenment
societies (e.g., the totalitarianism of Ancient Sparta
or Calvin’s Geneva – which made even the USSR seem like
a paragon of liberty and progress by comparison).
Taleb’s contempt for wealth,
and praise for attitudes that part with wealth lightly,
betray the fact that he has never been in danger of
losing his material comfort. Growing up in a prosperous
, respected, and intellectual Lebanese family, Taleb
moved to the United States and made a fortune as a
trader, which he later magnified by selling his books.
If he expresses contempt for the material well-being he
sees around him, and a nostalgic longing for an
idealized past, it is because he cannot truly envision
what premodernity was actually like. Perhaps, because he
greatly underrates the transformative effects of
technological progress, Taleb’s image of premodernity is
of a slightly rustic incarnation of our present world –
except one in which people mostly avoid doctors and
editors, walk on rocky landscapes in foot-shaped shoes,
eat “paleo” diets, quote from Seneca’s dialogues, and
occasionally engage in bloody contests over fine points
of poetry, philosophy, and theology – just to show how
much “skin in the game” they have with regard to their
beliefs. Taleb neglects the possibility that only
recently has life become remotely comfortable and quasi-meritocratic,
while premodernity was a mostly uninterrupted stretch of
miseries, cruelties, superstitions, prejudicial hatreds,
and filth (punctuated by a few refined characters like
Aristotle – whom Taleb maligns – and Seneca – people who
were remarkable for their time and are remembered
precisely because they stood out so far above their
contemporaries). A small elite has always been super-wealthy
(by the standards of their time) in every era and in
every society, but it is an all-too-common mistake to
imagine oneself in the position of a historical member
of the elite (e.g., someone who would have read Seneca,
or Seneca himself) rather than a common peasant or slave
– which is the far more probable fate for a randomly
chosen premodern person. The casual dismissal of wealth
as not particularly important would not have been
articulated by people toiling from sunrise to sunset in
order to grow crops for their feudal overlords and be
given a small fraction of the resulting harvest in order
not to starve. Nor is this attitude particularly helpful
to people who might have been interested in cultivating
personal antifragility so as to prevent
themselves from becoming poor.
The most useful personal
advice in Antifragile concerns the so-called
“barbell strategy” for minimizing the downside of
volatility while benefiting from the upside. The
strategy involves putting most of one’s resources into
an ultra-safe, ultra-conservative course of action,
while devoting the rest to a diversified speculation,
but in such a manner that the entire speculative amount
can be lost without significant harm. An example of this
approach would be keeping 90% of one’s money as cash or
gold, and investing the remaining 10% into five
different startup companies; each startup firm could
fail – and many do – but it is also possible for a
startup company to succeed tremendously and bring orders
of magnitude of profit. If all the startup firms fail,
then one has had a 10% loss – but this does not have to
be ruinous if one is not hyper-leveraged. Taleb is also
correct about the highly fragilizing effects of debt and
recommends avoidance of indebtedness where possible.
This is sound advice, greatly needed in a country where
everything from everyday consumption to the purchase of
big-ticket items to intangible “investments” such as
formal education is often purchased on credit. Debt
introduces fragility by amplifying the financial pain of
volatility. A marginal drop in income could be endured
by a debt-free person with savings, but would result in
a leveraged person losing everything. Taleb’s advice
here may not always be perfectly realizable – as not
every person can afford to invest any percentage of his
assets with the ability to continue living well if those
assets were lost. Furthermore, mortgage debt is
extremely difficult to avoid for a person without
sizable initial wealth; other debt, however, is
generally avoidable.
While Antifragile
has some virtues, Taleb should not have dismissed or
derided his editors. If carefully confined to the realms
of finance and economics, Antifragile might
have been an illuminating and positive book on net. As
matters stand, however, Taleb has managed to
gratuitously insult practically everybody who might have
been sympathetic to his previously articulated views –
including the libertarians, transhumanists, and
rationalist natural-law thinkers who would have found
much to agree with in Fooled by Randomness and
The Black Swan. Taleb even classifies Friedrich
Hayek among the rationalists whom he dismisses: “We
may be drawn to think that Friedrich Hayek would be in
that antifragile, antirationalist category. […] But
Hayek missed the notion of optionality as a substitute
for the social planner. In a way, he believed in
intelligence, but as a distributed or collective
intelligence – not in optionality as a replacement for
intelligence. […] Finally, John Gray, the contemporary
political philosopher and essayist who stands against
human hubris and has been fighting the prevailing ideas
that the Enlightenment is a panacea – treating a certain
category of thinkers as Enlightenment fundamentalists.
[…] Gray worked in an office next to Hayek and told me
that Hayek was quite a dull fellow, lacking playfulness
– hence optionality.” And there was the gratuitous
insult again. Very well. We Enlightenment rationalists
and technoprogressives will be happy to accept Hayek as
one of us – along with Socrates, Aristotle, and Ayn Rand
(for whose fan Taleb should not be mistaken, as he tells
us in a footnote). Taleb can have Seneca, Almutanabbi,
John Gray, and Fat Tony. We remain in good company
without them.
|
|
From the same author |
▪
Liberty Through Long Life
(no
310 – April 15, 2013)
▪
Open Badges and Proficiency-Based Education: A Path
to a New Age of Enlightenment
(no
309 – March 15, 2013)
▪
The Modularization of Activity
(no
308 – February 15, 2013)
▪
Review of Gary Wolfram’s A Capitalist Manifesto
(no
307 – January 15, 2013)
▪
Why Republicans Deserved a Crushing Defeat in the
2012 Presidential Election
(no
305 – November 15, 2012)
▪
More...
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First written appearance of the
word 'liberty,' circa 2300 B.C. |
Le Québécois Libre
Promoting individual liberty, free markets and voluntary
cooperation since 1998.
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