Ian Ferrin

You do not wash a rented car. The reason is not really indifference but simply that the future condition of the vehicle is someone else’s problem. The residual value does not belong to you, so the cost of care falls entirely on the owner while the benefit of neglect stays with you. When the car is yours, however, the cost of damage is yours as well. The incentive to maintain it appears without instruction. This simple insight is fundamental to the concept of private property. Secure title to land, capital or an enterprise attaches the consequences of use to the person who decides how it is used. The owner who neglects soil, equipment or reputation loses the value he would otherwise capture later. The owner who improves them keeps the gain. That link is what turns self-interest into stewardship. Without it, resources become common pools in which each user has reason to extract more and invest less. The result is not abundance shared equally but depletion borne by everyone. Societies that protect this link have historically produced more of the goods that make ordinary life possible: reliable food, durable buildings, accumulating knowledge and the capital that multiplies labour. Those that weaken it- through insecure tenure, arbitrary seizure or the systematic conversion of private assets into collective claims - observe the opposite pattern. Maintenance declines, investment shortens its horizon, and the stock of productive assets grows more slowly or shrinks. Private property ensures that people bear the results of their own decisions. When that condition is met, it becomes the practical foundation on which wider cooperation and rising living standards can rest.

Biology is not just a Rube Goldberg Turing Machine but so much more, because when you look at what the molecules really are and how they push - why it's electric forces, and the chemical bonds are electronic too, and all these molecules and atoms are bathed in a common sea of electromagnetism that does not just travel fast rather it defines the speed of causality. And that these chemical bonds and molecular rotations all vibrate, DC electric fields wiggling into AC fields, and these AC fields travel as photons and land as phonons heating things up, making and breaking bonds, changing their shape, we feel this as heat, as light, and our bodies are made of towering stacks of electronic bonds each with its own energy level that are so closely spaced as to be continuous, and all these bonds and molecules vibrating and emitting and absorbing constitute a constant exchange of field energy and information with the towering stacks of electronic bonds in our surroundings, like tall ships with endless stories of cannons exchanging electromagnetic broadsides in both directions at once, at all times, along minimal paths in spacetime, at quantized energy levels. And you'd rightly think this is all wondrously mad and fantastical and surely just a mathematical model and I say no - this is sight, this is what it means to see, both literally and figuratively, to know that your experience is constituted by electromagnetic field interaction in its entirety, and these same fields are what planets, stars, everything is made of, and when you open two quarter sized holes in your head and let it all in this is what you *see*. The world as constructed in your mind, the surface of your retina coupled to the surface of the wall, a cloud, a distant galaxy by a field wiggling both ends at once. Now you consider all these things and what energy means, and how it flows through the body and the air and environment as a currency animating dead matter into life, that it comes from the Sun, ultimately, crushing protons into Helium and bathing the solar system in it's electromagnetic field of life giving energy, passed as photons and minted by chloroplasts into sugar, and if you really start to visualize and understand the true nature of what you're in, what the constituent building blocks of everyday experience actually turn out to be in the details, then you know for certain that humans are like children playing on the shore of an ocean so deep and wide as to make our greatest imagination and dreams seem shallow. And that the laws of nature are as much for our discovery as we are to be a discovery of the universe getting to know itself.