Based Holiday Special
Happy Holidays
Welcome to the (late but who cares) Christmas episode of weekly freedom news, where Santa treks to private seafaring communities and delivers hard money to good ol' sovereign individuals.
Happy holidays! We hope you’ve enjoyed our reporting this year and will be with us in 2025.
In the next year, one of us will be traveling to Roatán, Honduras, to see Próspera ZEDE up close, get to know the people who live there, and to attend Vitalia Forever in the pop-up city Vitalia. Based Brief and the development of Based.guide has been a side project for the last couple of months, but starting in the next year, we will devote more time to bring you the skinny on what is going on in the world of network states.
⚡Top of the Agenda
For the holiday edition, no top stories. Just some interesting things we found this week online to end the year. Some more news than others.
The Sovereign Child
If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, you’ll likely agree that (respect for) property rights, privacy, consent, and the growth of wealth are good things for a society.
So why not for kids? Why do they get their phone taken away, their room intruded, forced to eat certain things at certain times, and otherwise told to do things “because I said so”?
Doctor and daddy Aaron Stupple, his wife and now five children, became infatuated with the Taking Children Seriously movement, which he found through his, and our, appreciation of the works of David Deutsch, who is a co-founder of the philosophy.
“Taking Children Seriously is a new view of children—a non-paternalistic view: like other groups of human beings, children are people, not pets, prisoners or property. Full people whose lives are their own, not a different kind of person who can be coerced, enslaved or discriminated against. Full, equal humans, not inferior.”
In chapters such as “Eating What They Want”, he explains how he brings up his children rule-free, with sometimes—at least to me—comical outcomes:
“The truth is that there is a lot of time to wait and see if a pattern of eating is causing a problem. My five-year-old son has been eating ice cream almost exclusively for the past few months, and, if anything, he’s on the thin side. Before ice cream, his staple was Oreo cookies, but he seems to have grown tired of them.”
The goal is to have his children figure out life for themselves. In his chapter on sleeping:
“Like eating, sleeping needs to be figured out, and kids need to become attuned to the signals coming from their bodies so that they can make the appropriate trade-offs between staying awake and getting rest.”
He takes a similar view on video games, and everything else really. He may explain to his children that a certain behavior isn’t in their favor, but wouldn’t ban it outright.
I spoke to Aaron briefly last year at Rat Fest 2023 (a meet-up for critical rationalists). He expressed that he was having such a good time raising his children in this way, that he was planning to have more of them. Some others at the table wondered whether his style may perhaps be too permissive. He countered that he was himself amazed by the maturity his children showed in interactions with their parents and siblings.
The economist Bryan Caplan, who wrote a book called “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids”, takes a somewhat comparable view to parenting (they don’t need nearly as much “molding” as you might think), but clearly has his own reservations as his blurb for Aaron’s book included the proviso “I doubt it will work for every family”.
I don’t know whether it would! I hope it could work for many. I am very keen to read Aaron’s story in the next year, and compare it to Caplan’s approach. (Caplan on his part does think some rules are necessary, and the short-term wishes of children are to be ignored for the greater good of their lives.)
Incidentally, the book is almost the antithesis to some of Vivek Ramaswamy’s remarks regarding the latest controversy around visas for Indians:
“More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”"“
I’m glad my parents just let me play World of Warcraft into the depths of the night. Those are some of the fondest memories of my life, and I wouldn’t trade it for any career advance or drum-solo abilities. If I had to do it all again, I’d play even more.
The Sovereign Child was published by Conjecture Institute, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to spreading the philosophy of Karl Popper and David Deutsch. This book is only the first of several that Conjecture Institute plans to support and publish. All donations to Conjecture Institute will go towards funding Fellows and projects inline with Conjecture Institute's mission. Contact the president of Conjecture Institute, Logan Chipkin, at chipkin.logan@gmail.com for further details.
One Hundred Economists Against Milei
108 economists signed a warning against “The Dangers of Javier Milei's Economic Program in Argentina”. They’re essentially saying that free markets are bad.
Last episode we did a little progress report on Milei, where we concluded that he had improved matters on inflation, poverty figures, de-regulation, government spending, being liked by people, but not growth. (And the retirees are still worse off, too.)
Now it turns out that call was premature, as “GDP rebounded 3.9% on a seasonally adjusted quarter on quarter basis in the third quarter, contrasting the 1.7% contraction seen in the second quarter and marking the best result since Q4 2020.”
Looks pretty cool doesn’t it:
FUN FACT
There is a book from 1931 called “One Hundred Authors Against Einstein”.
"... Einstein apparently was not overly concerned with this kind of criticism. He has been quoted saying, “It would not have required one hundred authors to prove me wrong; one would have been enough.”" --Manfred Kuntz
From marginal revolution
Make Europe Great Again
We’ve reported some on Europe and the European Union lagging behind on innovation. At this point it’s hardly news to anyone, as even the European leaders themselves agree.
Now instead of complaining about it, or leaving to another place, we could also do something about it.
Indie hacker and resident of Portugal Pieter Levels, also known as levels.io, says “real men stay and save their land”, and that leaving is “cuck mindset”.
What is he doing about it, then?
He founded European Accelerationism movement. The website features some ideas, such as:
Reduce regulatory burden for startups in Europe.
Make skilled immigration easier
He’s been on the phone with Mario Draghi to give his recommendations for a report that Draghi wrote on European competitiveness.
The website includes a link to an idea board.
As a Dutch citizen and resident am excited about this and hope it gets somewhere.
Based Beff Jezos wants a second amendment on AI
Let the people use AI.
New Hampshire no longer wants the taxpayer to fund Gender Queer:
And this lady worries that Elon & Vivek may have the best intentions with DOGE., but can’t get much done, because the problem isn’t that government agencies don’t know what’s wrong, but that they don’t make any real changes.
“I have spent fifteen years studying roughly the same problem DOGE is now attacking (framed differently, but even I have framed it differently over the years.) But a wish for someone like me to be in charge misunderstands the nature of the problem. Diagnosis we have. The power to change we do not.”
Cya in 2025
Events
Vitalia Forever, Vitalia City, Próspera ZEDE, Honduras: January 6th - March 3rd, 2025.
Edge Esmeralda 2025, Healdsburg, CA, USA: April 24th - June 21st, 2025
See based.guide’s event page for all events.