This week, I wanted to recommend Samir Varma's latest essay. It represents something increasingly rare in modern political debates: testimony from someone who has actually lived inside the alternative system.
Much of our political discourse consists of competing theories about how societies should work. Varma writes from experience instead. Having grown up in India during the final decades of the License Raj, he watched firsthand what happens when political systems place themselves between individuals and their ability to build, trade, compete, and adapt.
His conclusion is straightforward: prosperity arrived when institutions stopped obstructing the ingenuity that was already there. The essay is also a reminder that political systems often overestimate their ability to create prosperity and underestimate their ability to impede it.
That observation connects directly with something fundamental. Human ingenuity is the ultimate source of prosperity. The role of institutions is not to direct it but to create an environment in which it can operate with few constraints.
Markets, entrepreneurship, and competition then perform another essential function. They provide feedback. Entrepreneurs test ideas against reality. Investors allocate capital toward solutions and away from mistakes. Businesses survive or disappear based on whether they create value for others.
Unlike politics, which can postpone accountability for surprisingly long periods of time, markets eventually force a reckoning with reality.
Which leads to perhaps the most important lesson in the essay: arithmetic always wins. Incentives are real. Trade-offs are unavoidable. Economic laws can be ignored politically for a period of time but they cannot be suspended indefinitely.
The essay is here:
Thank you very much to our sponsors:
Foundation: Secure your digital life—from passwords, 2FA, files and Bitcoin with Passport Prime, an all-in-one personal security platform. Visit them at https://foundation.xyz/
River Financial: If not cold storage for your Bitcoin, I’d highly recommend River for buying and holding- River is engineered to protect your Bitcoin over the long run. Use this link for discounts: https://river.com/signup?r=T7GGAF7G