Peter Thiel's Rise to Wealth and Libertarian Futurism

"I asked what the poles of the oscillation were. “It’s uh—it’s the, uh—it’s the—it’s um—it’s probably, uh—it’s probably just that it’s not that—well, the pro-seat-belt argument is that it’s safer, and the anti-seat-belt argument is that if you know that it’s not as safe you’ll be a more careful driver.” He made a left turn and fastened his seat belt. “Empirically, it’s actually the safest if you wear a seat belt and are careful at the same time, so I’m not even going to try to debate this point.”"<p>This theoretical-dichotomy-interrupted-by-empirical-reality is the hilariously false core of libertarianism. They're a class of abstract thinkers stuck in an imperfect world where their theories will always be unapologetically shattered by complex and unpredictable realities.

<i>Today, the sci-fi novels of the sixties feel like artifacts from a distant age. “One way you can describe the collapse of the idea of the future is the collapse of science fiction,” Thiel said. “Now it’s either about technology that doesn’t work or about technology that’s used in bad ways. The anthology of the top twenty-five sci-fi stories in 1970 was, like, ‘Me and my friend the robot went for a walk on the moon,’ and in 2008 it was, like, ‘The galaxy is run by a fundamentalist Islamic confederacy, and there are people who are hunting planets and killing them for fun.’"</i><p>You know, I think he's on to something there. Modern sci-fi really doesn't seem to have a whole lot left to say about potential advances in technology, and the tone does seem to have shifted away from the optimism of yesteryear. The best new scifi I've read lately was a post-apocalyptic zombie story trilogy, for crying out loud.

The tone of this article is annoying b/c it assumes that the reader is (or should be) delighted to be a part of some large group of humans who are normal compared to the eccentric person being profiled.

<i>How many digits does the number 125100 have? Two hundred and ten.</i><p>They mean 125^100.<p><a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=125%5E100" rel="nofollow">http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=125%5E100</a>

That article read like The Great Gatsby, I gave up after a few paragraphs. I don't think I'm into idolizing rich people anymore, I probably would have devoured this in high school, though.

The author's follow up to this article a couple weeks later is pretty excellent. By some fluke of timing, the Thiel article was published shortly before a fantastic profile on Occupy Wall St.<p><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2011/11/the-politics-of-dissolution.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2011/11/the-po...</a>

And no girls:<p><a href="http://gawker.com/5231390/facebook-backer-wishes-women-couldnt-vote" rel="nofollow">http://gawker.com/5231390/facebook-backer-wishes-women-could...</a>

I can understand how one might come to be a libertarian: through disillusionment with the government of the day, one comes to believe government itself is the problem rather than its particular form. The problem at the core of libertarianism is the slavish belief that the 'free market' is somehow guaranteed to produce results beneficial to society as a whole, or in the more sociopathic cases (which I suspect are the majority), benefit for themselves at the expense of others in a way that government cannot.<p>This argument neglects the fact that there does not exist any such beast as the 'free market' except in the platonic form - real transcational characteristics of goods and services, as well as the characteristics of the medium of exchange, always lead to a particular form of market emerging. Specifically, because of the fact that capital compounds capital - it is in the very nature of unregulated markets to concentrate resources in the hands of a few.<p>Why should we therefore be satisfied with 'free' markets that lead to enormous concentrations of resources in the hands of small numbers of individuals, far skewed away from the distributions of human ability according to measures of intelligence, aptitude or what have you? A market is a physical system to be engineered to produce the social outcome of most benefit. How you decide what is of 'most benefit' has some contention, but I'm pretty sure concentrating resources created by a majority in the hands of a minority is not it.

Article from 2011. If you are more of a hard facts type of person, Wikipedia has the details:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarium_Capital" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarium_Capital</a>