Noah Smith: "Banning data centers would blow up the U.S. economy"

Over the next few years, interested users around the world will get an increasingly complete picture of how Ayn Rand developed as a thinker and writer over time. Facilitating this opportunity is the Ayn Rand Archives’ ongoing effort to digitize, transcribe, and release Ayn Rand’s manuscripts on the public internet.

Ayn Rand’s handwritten material is not easy to read. Much of it is in cursive, a writing style that fewer and fewer people learn how to read. Even for those who can read cursive, her unique penmanship can still be a challenge, as many pages of material in her personal papers were notes or drafts never intended to be legible to anyone other than herself. Therefore, just putting the scans of these pages online would not achieve the Ayn Rand Archives’ goal of making this material globally accessible.

For that, we needed to add something: typed transcripts.

Transcripts, typed copies of the handwritten words on the page, truly unlock Ayn Rand’s archival materials. Our goal is to make these transcripts as accurate as possible to Rand’s original words.

Transcription notation

While there are some limitations on this in any given typed format, our current transcription platform allows us to get very close to the originals using various formatting conventions.

The following examples are taken from this page (shown above), this page, and this page, all part of Rand’s planning material for her first novel, We the Living.

Broadly, we have attempted to match what we see on the handwritten page in the typed version. This includes line and paragraph breaks, check marks or other symbols, a certain amount of left indentation, underlines, and deletions or strikethroughs.

Deletions

For readability, these last are always represented as strikethroughs in the transcript, even if Rand used heavier markings:

Insertions

These later additions made by Rand are presented as smaller, superscripted text in the transcripts:

Uncertain Words

When the handwriting is unclear but a reasonable guess is possible, the platform presents the word in brackets, with both the word and brackets italicized.

Regularization

In some cases, Rand either misspelled a word or name or used a less common spelling of something. These words are regularized in the transcript, meaning that the correct or common spelling is given. These are presented in italicized text with a dashed underline. Hovering over these words reveals the original spelling or phrasing as it appeared in Rand’s handwriting, which allows for improved reading and searching while still providing an accurate representation of the original.

Other regularization used throughout all transcripts (which is not formatted):

• Rand used a version of the plus sign (+) for an “and” symbol; the transcripts regularize this to the ampersand (&) symbol in order to be more machine-readable.

• Quotation marks are in the standard American English convention, with both opening and closing quotation marks appearing at the top of the word (“abc” or ‘abc’); Rand herself switched to this convention later in her life, but in much of her early writing (as seen above) she used the European convention of a lower opening quotation mark that appeared at the bottom of the word.

Nonstandard elements

Some elements of the handwritten text cannot easily be reproduced through formatting within this platform, or are otherwise best handled via transcriber notes, short, written descriptions of something on the original page. These are given as italicized comments within regular brackets:

Searchability

One of the biggest benefits of these transcripts is that they are full-text searchable. Anyone can read through the complete text of this archival material, but that is not necessary to find material of interest. Keyword searches, with or without a wild card (*), are possible.

Searches can be conducted within a particular set of Ayn Rand’s papers, such as just within her We the Living material:

But they can also be conducted on all the publicly available archival materials within our transcription platform:

Within the search results, users can look at “Works” (whole documents) that contain the search keyword, or they can look at individual pages which contain the keyword:

This search will become more powerful as we continue to release more of Rand’s archival material. Thanks to the power of these digital tools, this resource is not limited to a particular physical location of the Archives, but rather is accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

We are deeply grateful to our volunteer transcribers, whose efforts have made this entire project possible.

For any questions about the archival material available through this platform, or for more information about how to become a volunteer transcriber, please contact archives@aynrand.org.

Lookout, Disney. A former employer is ready to tell his stories his way.

Creator Josh Daws is flexing the power of A.I. to create a series of satirical “Mary Sue” shorts. The narrative through line? Young Mary Sue is exactly who she sounds like, but through her adventures she realizes the folly of her woke ways.

Episode 1: Mary Sue Doesn’t Need Training pic.twitter.com/MnIzGgVy4u

— Josh Daws (@JoshDaws) July 14, 2026

It’s a thread that Hollywood, Inc. would never consider, let alone turn into a series of animated shorts. Daws has a point to make with the growing saga.

Two, actually.

He hopes to burst the woke bubble through storytelling, using fanciful settings to share his worldview. And he’s flexing the power of obtainable A.I. software to challenge the entertainment status quo.

Daws’ latest installment of “The Adventures of Mary Sue” showcases his growing confidence with the medium.

Episode 4: Mary Sue Thinks the Villain Is Misunderstood

Produced by @capcutapp using Seedance 2.5 https://t.co/XWfMsvcSrW pic.twitter.com/5EJFer82UF

— Josh Daws (@JoshDaws) August 25, 2026

Mary Sue and friends confront an evil sorceress who has an ace up her wicked sleeve. Call it Moral Relativism.

Daws’ quest is far from perfect. A Hollywood version of this short would feature more animated expressions, better music and other flourishes that come with boundless resources.

He’s still scaring all of the right people.

Then, again, the rise of A.I. should scare everyone, even those who never watched the “Terminator” series. Jobs will be lost and never come back. Relationships may be threatened on many levels.

Teens will be seduced by A.I. chatbots, confiding in them rather than parents or loved ones. And Hollywood will never be the same once A.I. is embraced on a studio level.

Many artists, and more than a few writers, will watch their livelihoods get gobbled up by the technology.

That seems inevitable and horrifying. And the genie is out of the bottle with no plan to go back in.

Earlier this month, a Chinese A.I. film turned a massive profit despite its clumsy appearance.

JUST IN: Homemade Chinese animated film “Niu Lai” surpasses $4 million at the box office on a reported budget of $200. pic.twitter.com/VFgVcOFDOb

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) August 20, 2026

Niu Lai was released on August 5 in a limited number of Chinese theaters, receiving approval from the Communist Party censorship offices presumably due to its lack of political or otherwise objectionable content. It made $995 at the box office on its first day – already representing a profit for the low-budget film – but did not truly take off until its few viewers began sharing footage of the film on Chinese regime-controlled social media. The poorly shaped characters, highly pixelated scenery, and the slightly disturbing quality of the characters’ eyes became viral hits, fueling demand nationwide for more movie theaters to carry it.

This is only the beginning.

Daws has a modest X following – just shy of 40K followers. His latest “Mary Sue” clip generated 200K views on his main post in just one day, but subsequent shares likely magnified its reach significantly.

The positive side to A.I.’s stunning rise? Storytellers who might never have had the resources or connections to share their imaginations will be able to do just that.

Daws is just one example.

More will follow. Some will be crude and infantile, much like the aforementioned Chinese film. Others will prove far more sophisticated and challenging. Audiences will have to sort out the difference.

Hollywood studios will have to improve their output to compete with the latter.

A hopeful part of this evolution? Stories that would never get a fair hearing in any studio, large or small, will suddenly get the chance to flower.

Would a Disney or Universal attempt a story like “The Adventures of Mary Sue?” Not a chance.

The post Why ‘Mary Sue’ Short Should Scare Hollywood Silly appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

The Republican Party of the future is not going to be the party of Milton Friedman. We're going to enjoy spitting on his grave, metaphorically speaking. -- J.D. Vance

The Committee to Unleash Prosperity -- which is what we need for every man a king -- to come true has done the dirty work for anyone who might be wondering who this Huey Long dude -- who's suddenly all over the place -- is.

After all, J.D. Vance, Trump's de facto successor in the Republican Party, just publicly held him to higher esteem (to put it mildly) than Milton Friedman as indicated by the quote above.

The Committee includes a photo linking to video and transcript of Louisiana's autocratic former governor and senator laying out his socialistic Share Our Wealth plan, with an excerpt beneath.

Here's a sample:

I propose a limitation on how big a fortune can get and a limitation on how little a fortune can get ...

A capital levy tax to be levied -- the first one million not to be taxed except as it is now taxed; and the second million to be taxed 1%; the third million 2%; the fourth million 4%; the fifth million 8%; the sixth million 16%; the 7th million 32%; the eighth million 64%; the ninth million 100%. That means that no man with that tax levied against him every year can possess a fortune of more than from 3 to 4 to 5 million dollars to any one man ...

How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what's intended for 9/10ths of the people to eat. The only way you'll ever be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub he ain't got no business with ...

I agree that this sounds like Bernie Sanders, but it's worse. The delivery is slick -- skillfully focusing on envy to help his audience forget that the wealthy earned their money by trade that also improved their customers' fortunes; and imagine that stealing is okay, so long as the victim has more than the thief.

He makes his theft sound noble, and redistribution generous.

This is who Vance admires, and fortunately doesn't have the charisma to match.

I have asked this before and will ask it again of anyone holding out the Republicans as an alternative (let alone a superior one) to the Democrats: What would it take for you to concede that there is no longer a difference?

Vance is as bad on the merits as any Democrat, and worse by virtue of the common, increasingly wrong belief that the Republicans are "better for the economy" than the Democrats -- who are also much worse than they used to be.

-- CAV

Wow. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Capitalism” (Aug 5, 2026) is a doozy. As my friend @NotGovernor pointed out, the Encyclopedia chose as the author of this entry is

a University of Chicago political theorist [Chiara Cordelli] whose published brand is the normative critique of privatization, whose prize-winning book treats outsourcing government functions as a regression to the “state of nature,” whose personal site lists “critiques of capitalism” among her core topics, and whose current book project is explicitly titled toward a “normative critique of capitalism and a defense of financial democracy.”

And it doesn’t even mention Rothbard. WTF.

Related: Kinsella, Slate’s Metcalf on Libertarianism and Nozick.

Grok summary and analysis:

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Capitalism” (Chiara Cordelli, first published August 2026) treats the concept as highly contested. It surveys influential theories (primarily Marx on relentless accumulation via wage labor and commodity production; Weber on the cultural “spirit” of capitalism; Schumpeter on entrepreneurial creative destruction), then organizes normative defenses (welfarist, efficiency/Hayekian knowledge and spontaneous order, freedom-based, Nozickian entitlement, virtue) against a broader range of critiques (functionalist crises, distributive injustice, exploitation, domination, alienation, feminist social-reproduction, racial, and ecological). Common descriptive features include private ownership of productive assets, market allocation, wage labor under contract, and profit orientation, though the entry notes these are not historically unique and often frames capitalism as a broader “institutionalized social order” whose apparent autonomy rests on unpaid household labor, nature, and state institutions. Libertarian material is largely limited to Nozick’s entitlement theory and minimal-state defense; Hayek and Friedman appear mainly under efficiency and freedom headings. Rothbard, Mises, and Hoppe are absent.

Core Confusions and Errors

The entry’s working characterization remains descriptive and sociological rather than grounded in the problem that makes property rules necessary: scarcity and the possibility of interpersonal conflict over rivalrous resources. Property is treated as one institutional feature among others rather than the foundational normative category. Aggression, contract, and the distinction between capitalism and socialism are never cleanly defined in physical, intersubjectively ascertainable terms.

Hoppe’s formulation is clearer and more rigorous. Property arises because goods (including bodies) are scarce; its function is to assign exclusive control so that conflict can be avoided. Aggression is the uninvited physical invasion of another’s property. Contract is a non-aggressive relationship between owners. Socialism is an institutionalized policy of aggression against property (redistribution of titles from user-owners and contractors to non-users and non-contractors). Capitalism is the institutionalized recognition of private property and contractualism—original appropriation by first use plus voluntary title transfer. These definitions appear already in the opening chapters of A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism and are presupposed throughout Kinsella’s Legal Foundations of a Free Society. The SEP entry never adopts or even seriously engages this framework; it therefore cannot distinguish clean capitalism from the heavily interventionist mixed economies that actually exist, nor can it evaluate claims of “exploitation” or “domination” against a consistent physical-invasion standard.

A related error is the residual Marxist treatment of wage labor and surplus value. Under a pure title-transfer theory of contract, an employer and employee exchange titles to present money for future labor services (or vice versa). Both parties expect to gain ex ante; no physical invasion occurs. Claims that the employer “extracts surplus” or exercises structural domination either redefine aggression as an invasion of value or psychic integrity (which is indeterminate and non-universalizable) or smuggle in a prior egalitarian distributional premise. Hoppe shows that protecting “value” rather than physical borders makes property rights impossible to ascertain in advance and is performatively self-defeating: any argument that such borders should be value-based already presupposes the physical independence of the arguers. The same holds for late-comer ethics that erase the prior-later distinction: they cannot be practiced without presupposing the very first-use rights they deny.

Nozick is presented as the main libertarian voice. That is incomplete and somewhat distorting. Nozick’s entitlement theory correctly links justice to historical acquisition and transfer and rejects patterned end-state principles, yet it still licenses a minimal state financed by taxation—an institutionalized aggression. Kinsella has long noted that Nozick is methodologically non-committal and far less systematic than Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty or Hoppe’s argumentation ethics; treating him as the representative of the tradition understates the radical private-law alternative.

What Is Missing

The most consequential omission is any serious engagement with the Austrian and radical-libertarian analysis of property, calculation, and ethics.

• Scarcity, conflict, and the natural theory of property. Bodies are the prototype of scarce resources. Self-ownership is the only conflict-avoiding assignment that is objective and intersubjectively verifiable (first occupant). External resources are acquired by the same principle—visible embordering/productive transformation—and thereafter only by voluntary transfer. This is not one optional “defense” among others; it is the only set of norms consistent with the possibility of argumentation itself. Anyone who argues already presupposes exclusive control over his own body and the prior-later distinction; denying these norms while claiming the denial is justified is a performative contradiction (Hoppe’s argumentation ethics, elaborated and defended in Kinsella’s chapters on dialogical arguments and “The Undeniable Morality of Capitalism”).
• Economic calculation and the wealth effects of interference. Private property in the means of production is required for rational economic calculation. Any institutionalized interference reduces the production of wealth relative to the pure private-property order. The entry’s efficiency section cites Hayek on knowledge but does not incorporate the fuller Misesian calculation argument or Hoppe’s demonstration that every form of socialism (Russian-style, social-democratic, conservative, social-engineering) necessarily lowers living standards by raising the cost of production and ownership relative to non-ownership.
• Pure capitalism versus actually existing mixed systems. Most of the phenomena the entry attributes to “capitalism” (chronic fiscal expansion, monetary debasement, regulatory capture, politicized investment, large-scale inequality of political power) are products of institutionalized aggression—i.e., of socialism in Hoppe’s sense. The entry rarely marks this distinction, so critiques of interventionism are misdirected at private property itself.
• Private-law society / anarcho-capitalism. The possibility of a complete private-property order without a territorial monopolist of force is not considered. Hoppe’s private-law society and Kinsella’s elaboration of title-transfer contract, inalienability, and restitutionary punishment supply a coherent alternative that the entry simply omits.

Secondary omissions follow from these. There is no treatment of the title-transfer theory of contract (as opposed to promise-based or “will” theories), of the distinction between possession and ownership, or of the fact that intellectual “property” is not property in scarce resources at all. Feminist and ecological critiques that treat unpaid care work or “nature’s free gifts” as systemic exploitation are never tested against the prior question of who first appropriated or contractually acquired the relevant resources.

Overall Assessment

The entry is a competent survey of recent Anglo-American political philosophy and critical theory. It accurately reports the range of arguments that circulate in those literatures. It is not, however, a philosophically rigorous account of capitalism as a system of property norms. By remaining largely within descriptive and end-state distributive frames, and by giving Nozick pride of place while ignoring the systematic property ethics of Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe, it leaves the most fundamental questions—why property rights are needed, which assignment rule is uniquely justifiable, and what follows once aggression is defined in physical terms—unexamined. The result is a discussion that is both incomplete and, on the central conceptual issues, confused.

 

“At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage” (Random House Canada, 2024) caught my eye because I was hoping to gain insight into how to have rational conversations with people who disagree. Instead of such advice, the book’s underlying theme is a defense of wealth re-distribution (for which I use the shorthand ‘the welfare state’). Carol Off, the author and long-time journalist with the Canadian public broadcaster, laments in six dedicated chapters how key words characterizing the welfare state have been hijacked and distorted by the extreme right and now threaten it and liberal democracy in general.

The author’s chosen key words are freedom, truth, democracy, woke, choice, and taxes. The last one Off considers the most important, because taxes make a civilized society – by which she means the welfare state – possible. Her paraphrased quote from the U.S. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the early 20^th century: “Taxes are the price we pay for civilization,” prompted my post. I wanted to challenge the premise that the tax-funded welfare state is the ideal civilized society.  The focus here, therefore, is on the chapter about taxes.

Off sets up her defense of the welfare state with a false alternative: either we have a welfare state or a libertarian anarchy (which she equates with capitalism). She argues that the welfare state is ideal as the only social system that can achieve equality of outcomes for all, with the government collecting taxes from the productive and “redistributing” them to the less productive through various subsidies and programs.

The only alternative to the welfare state funded by taxes, Off suggests is a libertarian anarchy where there is no government and no rule of law, and where everyone must fend for themselves, resorting to vigilante justice for self-defense and to physical coercion to get what one wants. But this alternative between the welfare state and anarchy is false, because the two systems share an essential feature: physical coercion. The welfare state uses coercive taxation to achieve its aims. In anarchy, all forms of physical force and fraud by everyone against all are the rule, which makes it a nightmarish survival-of-the-fittest scenario that we must dismiss as anti-civilization.

But is the tax-funded welfare state an ideal civilized society? I argue ‘no’– because it relies on government coercion and therefore diminishes human welfare.

According to Ayn Rand, a civilized society is one in which physical force is banned from social relationships and can only be used to retaliate against those who initiate it. Why is this principle of non-initiation of physical force so important to human welfare, and what does it imply for organizing society and the role of government?

To maximize welfare, for humans truly to flourish, we must be free: to think and to act accordingly, to acquire knowledge and skills, to create products and services, and to trade with others. Initiating physical force to any degree diminishes freedom and hinders our ability to survive and thrive, to create wealth and sustain prosperity. Taxation in the welfare state is not voluntary. It uses physical force – the government punishes non-compliance by confiscation of property or imprisonment – that restricts individuals’ freedom to create, produce and trade, and reduces prosperity for all.

The alternative social system that bars physical force from social relationships and makes a civilized – truly free –society possible is capitalism (which, despite Off’s beliefs, is not synonymous with anarchy). In capitalism, the government does not create and maintain a welfare state and fund it through taxation. Instead, it has only one but crucial role: protection of individual freedom against physical force. This includes retaliation against initiators of force, through the police, the law courts, and the military.

A capitalist government itself cannot initiate force, including imposing taxes on its citizens. It must fund its operations through voluntary means only (such as lotteries or fees for court protection of contracts). All other services in a civilized society under capitalism, such as education, health care and health insurance, and cultural institutions are privately funded and offered at different price points by private companies in free markets.

A pure capitalist system is obviously not the reality today, but it has been approximated in countries where political and economic freedom are the greatest, such as Ireland, Switzerland and Estonia (and historically, America, based on its founding documents). These countries are characterized by higher economic prosperity, smaller governments (measured by government spending/GDP), lower taxes, a strong rule of law and respect for property rights, and higher life satisfaction than their peer countries in the OECD. They show that it is possible to shrink the welfare state and increase liberty – to move towards a truly civilized society.

Taxes are not the price we pay for civilization. In a civilized society, there would be none. Those doing productive work recognize that government protection of their freedom from coercion is a value that allows them to live in peace and to prosper through voluntary interactions with others – for which they would be willing to pay.

If we want a true civilization, we must advocate for barring physical force from social relationships – for freedom from force.

Photo by Julia Taubitz on Unsplash