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CHAPTER 2: FAST FORWARD
I dropped the course on economics because | couldn't see the foundations. Not that
they should be clear from the start. That isn’t how the mind works. We see, do and
understand in that order. The pyramids rose four thousand years before people like
Galileo and Newton found the laws that made them possible. Practice comes first,
and science last. Science is abstraction from the particular to the general. It is fewer
rules predicting more outcomes more exactly. The pyramid builders knew rules for
this kind of stone and that kind of wood or rope. Newton gave rules for mass and
force. Those are not particular things like stone and wood and rope. They are
qualities of all things. Their rules are tougher to get our minds around, but predict
everywhere once we do.
What a book or course should offer from the start, even before the foundations, is an
inkling that it should be worth finishing. We have to sense that we're on to
something. The price of getting there will be the nuisance of abstraction from things
to qualities, and we need to see a reason to pay it. | didn’t in the course on
economics. Now it’s my turn. I’ll try a fast forward through free growth theory and
my other arguments to give an idea where we're headed and why it matters. The
foundations and then the slower tour will follow.
Free Growth
What I call free growth theory will probably count as the chief surprise, at least to
non-economists, because the argument and the supporting evidence call for a major
reversal in tax policy of this and other nations. But it is not original. John Stuart Mill
wrote the same idea in his Principles of Political Economy in 1848. | will quote what
he said in my Chapter 4. Although Principles became a leading textbook for decades,
the paragraph | quote seems to have been overlooked. Economic historians
including Joseph Schumpeter describe him as a champion of growth through belt-
tightening. The paragraph I will quote makes the opposite clear. We now have
means to prove his idea. I will show how to test it, and will show test results in
charts and tables taking up about 20% of this book. They imply that tax laws
Chapter 2: Fast Forward 1/06/16 1
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