Given that a purist "private property rights only" libertarianism inevitably runs into large problems like its inability to fund public goods, any successful pro-freedom program in the 21st century has to be a hybrid containing at least one Big Compromise Idea that solves at least 80% of the problems, so that independent individual initiative can... See more

1) a deep dislike of the "woke" US left, exemplified by the New York Times, 2) a combination of strong discomfort with the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarianism with an understanding of why the CCP often justifiably fears the United States, and3) an appreciation of the love of freedom of the US right (exemplified by Bitcoin maximalists)... See more

A corporation is not a root: if there is a dispute inside a corporation, it ultimately gets resolved by a national court system. Blockchains and network states, on the other hand, are trying to be new roots. 

This style of thinking is foreign to me, but I find it fascinating, and important. Stereotypical "wealthy white liberals" ignore this at their peril: these more "traditional" values are actually quite popular even among some ethnic minorities in the United States, and even more so in places like Africa and India, which is exactly where Balaji is... See more

Germany sponsored Vladimir Lenin, and bankers in New York funded Leon Trotsky to foment the Russian Revolution. Both Wall Street and propagandistic reporting from Americans like John Reed aided Lenin and Trotsky in their revolution. Indeed, Reed was so useful to the Soviets — and so misleading as to the nature of the revolution — that he was buried... See more

I think there is an important idea hidden in [1]: while the "social technology" community has come up with many good ideas around better governance, and many good ideas around better public discussion, there is a missing emphasis on better social technology for sorting . 

One of the curious features of the book that a reader will notice almost immediately is that it sometimes feels like two books in one: sometimes, it's a book about the concept of network states, and at other times it's an exposition of Balaji's grand megapolitical theory.Balaji's grand megapolitical theory is pretty out-there and fun in a bunch of... See more

Balaji's argument in The Network State, as I am interpreting it, is as follows. While we do need political collectives bound not just by economic interest but also by moral force, we don't need to stick with the specific political collectives we have today, which are highly flawed and increasingly unrepresentative of people's values. Rather, we... See more

Team NYT basically runs the US, and its total lack of competence means that the US is collapsing.