The flagship Fantasy Free Economics blog got hacked and will be down for a short time. The light of reality has a lot of opposition. I am used to these things. My experts tell me it will be up again by Wednesday of next week.
Foundations for a Fantasy‑Free View of Life
Natural law begins by understanding and internalizing what we don’t know. We will never know these things, and that fact itself is part of the law we live under.Why are we here? Plain and simple, we just don’t know. Explanations abound. Some are religious, some are scientific, some are poetic. Still, no one knows.
We don’t know the origin of life. Some say God. Some say that life began when dead chemicals miraculously combined in such a way that life generated itself. The theories are many. The facts are few. We just don’t know.
We don’t know what life is. We can describe how to stay alive, how to measure vital signs, how to repair a body. We can write textbooks about biology and medicine. Still, we don’t know what life is. We just don’t know.
We don’t know what death is either. All we really know is that what we call “life” ceases at that point. Since we don’t know what either life or death actually is, we don’t know which is better. It seems like life is better, but that is a feeling, not knowledge.
We all have the will to live. We feel it strongly. We act on it every day. Yet we don’t know its source. We don’t know why we cling to life, only that we do.
We don’t know what consciousness is. Is it something outside of living things that we tap into, or is it contained entirely within the body? We can talk about brains, nerves, and signals, but the simple truth remains:
we just don’t know.
We know that there are no experts on God. We also know there are no experts on there not being a God. On this question, everyone stands on the same ground—no one knows.
Finally, no matter what we are doing or thinking, no matter what kind of expert we are, there is always more that we don’t know than what we do know. That imbalance never goes away. It is built into the human condition.
“To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change…
The principal thing is to understand that there is no safety or security.” — Alan Watts
Natural law starts right here: with the honest admission that our knowledge is small and our ignorance is vast.
Once we stop pretending otherwise, we can begin to see how the world actually works. This is the first step in
a longer journey—one that will take us from the unknowns we must accept to the lies of life we no longer have
to fall for.
Predictability, Natural Law, and the Imaginary Economy
Every so often, a reader offers a thoughtful comment that still manages to miss the point. Not because the person is unintelligent, but because they are reasoning inside an imaginary system — a system built on labels, theories, and institutional storytelling. That is exactly what happened here.READER:
Thanks for breaking that down — it’s a refreshingly blunt way of putting it. I agree that a lot of modern economic theory and forecasting can feel overcomplicated, especially when the core dynamics — debt, taxation limits, and inflation — are actually pretty straightforward.That said, while the logic is simple, the outcomes aren’t always predictable. Global markets, supply shocks, and public reactions can throw a wrench in even the clearest plan. But your point about the incentives and behavioral factors is spot on — it’s a big part of why inflation persists even when it’s painful for ordinary people.
This is a polite, well‑intentioned response. But it rests on a common assumption: that outcomes are unpredictable because the modern economy is too complex. That assumption is the very thing that keeps people confused.
MY ANSWER:
Actually, outcomes are easy to determine. The key is to live in the light of reality. Using quantitative analysis is no way to determine an outcome, although explanations sound incredibly sophisticated. Also, it pays well.As an economist, my work is rooted in natural law. Natural law is never wrong.
Here is an example of an easy‑to‑determine outcome: the U.S. is entering a horrible depression from which there will be no recovery. Why? A genuine recovery cannot be launched without free‑market influences. Over the past four-plus decades, the U.S. has dismantled its free‑market system and replaced it with central planning.
Resources are now allocated according to levels of political power. In a free market, incomes are determined by price. You are describing an imaginary system. I am focusing on what is real. That is based on natural law, and natural law is never wrong.
The reader’s mistake is subtle but important. He assumes unpredictability because he is looking at the economy through the lens of modern economics — a field that treats the world like a giant spreadsheet full of variables, coefficients, and “shocks.”
But natural law does not work that way. Natural law is not a model. It is not a theory. It is not a forecast. It is simply the observation of how human beings behave when they are free, and how they behave when they are controlled.
When someone says outcomes are unpredictable because of “global markets” or “supply shocks,” they are describing a system that exists mostly in academic literature and government press releases. That system is built on:
But the real economy — the one governed by natural law — is far simpler.
Natural law says:
None of this is unpredictable. It is as reliable as gravity.
A real recovery requires:
The United States has spent more than forty years dismantling all three. What replaced them? Central planning — not the Soviet kind, but the modern American kind, where political power quietly determines who gets what.
When you allocate resources by political influence instead of price, you guarantee stagnation. When you guarantee stagnation, you guarantee collapse. When collapse comes, you cannot recover without the very forces you dismantled.
That is not a forecast. That is natural law.
The reader is correct about one thing: the imaginary system is unpredictable. But that is because it is imaginary. It is built on abstractions, not on human behavior.
Natural law strips away the abstractions. It looks only at:
When you think in those terms, outcomes are not mysterious. They are obvious.
So yes — I corrected the reader’s reasoning. Not to win an argument, but to bring the conversation back to reality. The economy is not unpredictable. Human nature is not unpredictable. Natural law is not unpredictable.
The only unpredictable thing is how long people will cling to imaginary systems before they finally look at what is right in front of them.
Every now and then, a simple question exposes a much bigger problem. Not a math problem, not a policy problem, but a reality problem. Someone recently asked me:QUESTION:
Do you know Americans paid 90% of the tariffs, not retailers?
That question is not really about tariffs. It is about how we think. Do we define people and institutions by their titles, or by what they actually do? Do we trust labels, or do we watch behavior?
This is where natural law lives: not in what things are called, but in how they function.
MY ANSWER:
I know that, but I am an economist and student of history. The U.S. is a dumbed-down nation. Passive learning gives only superficial knowledge. There is little chance the average citizen even knows what a tariff is. Americans defer to authority. Authority makes use of citizens. People believe what they are told as it comes from the mouth of authority.
I was not trying to impress anyone with what I know about tariffs. I was pointing at something deeper: the habit of deferring to authority instead of thinking in reality. When you live by labels, you are easy to manage. When you live by function, you are much harder to herd.
A “tariff” is just a word. The reality is simple: someone pays. The cost lands on real people in the real world. You do not need a PhD to understand that. You only need to follow the money instead of the slogans.
READER:
I see your point there is definitely a gap between technical knowledge and what most people understand about economic policies like tariffs. It’s true that many Americans may not fully grasp the mechanics or consequences, and that can make it easier for authorities to shape perception.At the same time, I think it’s worth acknowledging that some of this comes from the complexity of modern economics itself. Even highly educated people often misunderstand trade policies, subsidies, or inflation dynamics. So it’s not just deference; the system is genuinely complicated and opaque for the average person. Kindly follow back my friend.
This is a thoughtful response, and it reflects what many bright, sincere people believe: “The system is complicated.” That sounds reasonable. It also happens to be one of the most useful excuses power has ever invented.
Notice the labels in the reader’s comment: “modern economics,” “trade policies,” “subsidies,” “inflation dynamics,” “highly educated people.” These labels sound impressive. They create distance between “experts” and “ordinary people.”
Now look at the function. What do these things actually do?
That is not complicated. The complexity is in the storytelling, not in the reality.
MY ANSWER:
The art of explaining things away is invaluable to anyone who gains his essence by exploiting and controlling the entire population. Modern economics has a dismal track record. Only 25% of modern economic forecasts are even somewhat accurate. Highly educated people you mention can’t tell the difference between what is right and what they want.Economics is not complicated. Anyone who believes it is complicated does not live in the light of reality.
With respect to inflation, who wants to understand? These are the dynamics. All are concerned, right? The nation has unsustainable debt. Taxation is out of the question. The only choice is to bury the debt by means of inflation. The choice is to face a budget crisis or fleece the public. The public is hardwired to trust government, so we have inflation. Those are the root dynamics of inflation in this particular time frame.
Is there anything else I can clear up for you and any other “highly educated” individuals?
When I say economics is not complicated, I am not saying it is easy. I am saying it is simple. There is a difference. Simple means the core logic is straightforward. Hard means you may not like what that logic tells you.
The “highly educated” often confuse wanting something to be true with it actually being true. That is not education. That is wishful thinking with a diploma.
Let us strip the labels off and look at function again:
So the choice is simple: admit the crisis openly, or hide it in rising prices. The political class chooses the path that keeps them in office. That is not a theory. That is function.
This little exchange about tariffs is really a lesson in how to see the world.
You can define people and institutions by what they are called:
Or you can define them by what they actually do:
Natural law does not care about titles. It only cares about cause and effect. When you start thinking that way, the fog lifts. Tariffs, inflation, subsidies, and “complex systems” become very plain.
Many of my readers are sharp, honest people who have been told their whole lives that economics is above their pay grade. That is nonsense. If you can understand a bad deal at a used car lot, you can understand most of what passes for economic policy.
The trick is to stop worshiping labels and start watching function. Ask simple questions:
When you do that, you will find you have the same authority I do. Not because of a title, but because you are standing in reality. That is where all real authority comes from.
So yes, Americans pay the tariffs. They also pay for the stories that are told to make that sound noble, necessary, or too complicated to question. You do not have to accept that. You only have to insist on defining things by how they work, not by what they are called.
If that makes you “unsophisticated,” wear it proudly. Sophistication is often just a fancy word for being easily fooled.
Misunderstandings
In a true free market, the consumer calls the shots. Vendors chase tastes, preferences, and real needs. Collectively, buyers decide what’s produced and sold. That’s how it ought to work.But John Kenneth Galbraith laid it out plain back in his 1958 book The Affluent Society: Producers flipped the script with heavy advertising. They don’t just respond to demand—they manufacture it. Radio, TV, movies, and now the internet poured in, shaping what people think they want. Kids grow up soaking in media, picking up identities, deciding what’s “cool.” Public schools and society pile on, training folks to follow along rather than think independently. It’s easier to let others decide for you—path of least resistance.
For decades, this worked like a charm. Advertising and media trained consumers to buy what was pushed. Living standards climbed steadily—cars, gadgets, homes, all of it. People followed the cues from big media, government, and culture.
Then came the turn. Starting in 2024, prosperity for the average person started slipping. By 2026, the common man is hurting—tighter budgets, higher costs, less optimism. Economic reports show consumer spending growth slowing, sentiment dropping, with real challenges from inflation, labor shifts, and policy uncertainties hitting hard.
Businesses, especially big tech, are scrambling. They got used to consumers lining up for the next shiny thing. Now? Folks are saying “no thanks” to the latest gadgets, subscriptions, and AI-driven offers. Vendors double down on the same old push—more ads, more hype—but it’s not landing like before.
Power has shifted. The economy now favors buyers in a real way. Consumers are tired of being sold the same stuff they’ve outgrown.
Big tech views people as virtual profiles—data points, learned behaviors, artificial identities shaped by years of media and algorithms. They’ve been marketing to these constructed versions of us.
But real stress—economic pain, daily struggles—is waking folks up. People are shedding those shelved, media-made selves and becoming genuine again. Authentic needs, frustrations, and limits are surfacing.
AI is great at targeting virtual people, but it’s hitting a wall with real, suffering humans who want substance over simulation. This could be a tough, maybe even unsolvable, headwind for those riding the AI wave right now.
Simple truth: when consumers stop playing along and start demanding what they truly need, the game changes. We’re seeing that now.
By James Quillian – Economist, Political Analyst, Teacher of Natural Law
I teach natural law from a simple place: we start by admitting what we don’t know.A lot of people speak with great authority. They sound sure. They hold court.
They tell you what life is, what death is, what the universe is doing and why.
Many of them know, deep down, that they don’t actually know. But they talk like they do anyway.
Knowing that we don’t know is a kind of prophylactic. It protects us from being compromised by those who pretend to have all the answers. Once you accept that some things are truly unknown, you stop being easy to herd.
I don’t have special authority. I just live in reality and speak plainly about it.
Anyone who does the same has the same authority I do.
Let’s start with a few questions that no one on earth can answer in any final way.
We can talk around them, build theories, write books, and hold conferences.
But at the end of the day, they remain open.
These are not small questions. They sit underneath everything else.
Every religion, every philosophy, every scientific model is built on top of these
like a house on stilts. The stilts are in the fog.
Once you start looking, you see there are more of these “bedrock unknowns.”
We use the words every day, but we don’t know what they really are.
We can describe, measure, and model many of these things. That’s fine.
But description is not the same as understanding. A clock can tell time without
knowing what time is. A person can repeat a theory without knowing whether it is true.
Natural law, as I teach it, does not start with grand answers.
It starts with honest ignorance. We admit that the deepest parts of reality are
beyond our reach. Then we ask: given that, how should a person live?
When you accept that you don’t know these things, a few good things happen:
My answers are simple because life, at the level we actually live it, is simple.
Make good trades. Keep your dignity. Don’t pretend to know what you don’t know.
Don’t let anyone else pretend for you.
I speak with natural authority because I stand on what is real and admit what is not known. That is not a special talent. You can do the same. Anyone can.
If you live in reality, observe carefully, and refuse to fake knowledge,
you have all the authority you need to run your own life. You don’t need a panel,
a party, or a priesthood to bless your thinking.
Start with this simple move: say, “I don’t know” where you truly don’t know.
From there, you can build a life that is honest, sturdy, and very hard to capture.
James Quillian – Economist, Political Analyst, Teacher of Natural Law
Why Economic Forecasts Hide the Coming Entertainment Collapse
The Blindness of Quantitative AnalysisMainstream economists and government agencies are currently projecting a “Golden Era” for entertainment, claiming the U.S. market will exceed $800 billion by 2028. However, looking at these numbers is like looking at a mirage. Quantitative analysis—the practice of measuring the world solely through spreadsheets—is right only about 25% of the time. Why? Because it ignores the Natural Law of cause and effect.
Forecasts are inherently biased toward the status quo. They assume that because a corporation is large, it is stable. But in the natural world, when a body grows too large for its environment to support, it begins to consume itself. We are seeing this now as the “entertainment giants” use dishonest accounting and predatory consolidation to mask a hollow core.
By James Quillian – Economist, Political Analyst, Teacher of Natural Law
First: Bots are not free. They are cheap for their owners and expensive for everyone else.
Second: The damage bots do is a classic negative externality – the costs are pushed onto society.
Third: Those who could control bots choose not to, because they profit from their lawless existence.
Fourth: The natural-law remedy is simple: tax bots at the points where they touch the system.
Fifth: Even “good” bots create externalities; they should carry their own weight instead of shifting the burden to their victims.
A bot is nothing mystical. It is simply an automated agent that acts in place of a human being. It clicks, it posts, it scrapes, it buys, it sells, it pretends to be a person when it suits its owner’s purpose. The important thing is not the code, but the force behind it: whose will is being projected, and at whose expense.
From the standpoint of natural law, a bot is an extension of the human who deploys it. It is a tool, like a plow or a printing press. But unlike a plow, a bot can be multiplied by the thousands and unleashed across the world at almost no marginal cost. That is where the trouble begins.
In economics, whenever something appears to be free, you can be sure the cost has only been moved, not removed. Bots are a perfect example. The cost of operating a bot is so low that, for practical purposes, it rounds to zero for the operator. But the cost does not disappear. It is pushed outward onto:
These are not imaginary costs. They are real drains on time, money, and social cohesion. That is what economists call a negative externality: a cost created by one party and forced onto others who did not consent and are not compensated.
There are bots that perform useful functions. Search engine crawlers index the web. Monitoring bots watch for outages. Some bots help with accessibility or routine customer service. These are what people like to call “good bots.”
Then there are the “bad bots”: scrapers that steal content, armies of fake accounts that distort public opinion, scalpers that buy up tickets and products, automated fraud systems, and so on. Their purpose is to extract value by deception or force, not by honest trade.
But here is the key point: both kinds of bots impose costs on society. The good ones may be useful, but they still consume bandwidth, processing power, and human attention. They still require defenses, filters, and verification systems. The difference is not that good bots create no externalities, but that their externalities are smaller and sometimes offset by benefits.
Under natural law, the rule is simple: you carry the costs of the forces you unleash. If your tool imposes burdens on others, you are responsible for those burdens. That is the moral foundation for taxing bots.
It is important to understand that bots can be controlled. Platforms can identify automated traffic. Governments can require registration, licensing, and accountability. The technology to do this already exists. The absence of control is not a technical failure; it is a deliberate choice.
Who benefits from leaving bots largely lawless?
There is also a quieter benefit: fear itself is profitable. If people are frightened by scams, disinformation, and cyber attacks, they become eager customers for security products, verification services, and “trust solutions.” There is great profit in scaring people and then selling them something to ease the fear. A world full of uncontrolled bots is a perfect environment for that business model.
Natural law is not about writing more rules; it is about aligning human behavior with the forces that actually govern outcomes. When a tool creates external costs, the remedy is to bring those costs back to the source. That is what a tax on bots would do.
The question is not whether we can tax bots, but where in the process we place the weight. Bots touch the system at several natural choke points:
The purpose of such taxation is not to create another revenue stream for governments to waste. The purpose is to re-balance the forces: to make it uneconomical to flood the world with low-cost harm while leaving the victims to pay the bill.
Whenever someone’s easy profits are threatened, the word “innovation” is brought out as a shield. The truth is simpler. Honest innovation can bear the cost of its own footprint. If a bot delivers genuine value, it can survive while paying a fair share of the costs it imposes on the shared environment.
What cannot survive under such a regime is the business model of cheap, deniable harm: the model where you can deploy a million fake voices, a million fake clicks, and a million fake trades, and let everyone else pay for the confusion and cleanup.
Most commentary on bots is numerical: how many accounts, how many attacks, how many billions of dollars in losses. I am not interested in chasing those numbers. I am interested in the forces that create them.
The forces at work here are straightforward:
Taxing bots is not about punishing technology. It is about restoring the natural connection between action and consequence. If you unleash a force into the world, you are responsible for the wake it leaves behind.
If bots remain effectively untaxed and unaccountable, the natural outcome is more noise, more fraud, more manipulation, and less trust. Human beings will retreat into smaller circles of confidence, and the common spaces will be left to the machines and those who control them.
If, instead, we recognize bots as carriers of negative externalities and tax them accordingly, several things happen at once. The worst abuses become uneconomical. The platforms that quietly profit from inflated numbers lose their incentive to look the other way. The honest uses of automation remain, but they must carry their own weight.
That is the natural-law position: no one has the right to shift the cost of their tools onto unwilling strangers. Bots are not an exception. They are simply the latest way to test whether we still believe that principle.
American folks are up against some tough times when it comes to their paychecks and way of living. No matter where you stand right now, incomes are set to drop hard—except maybe for those in the trades. Here’s the straight talk on why that’s coming.
Just having a college paper in your hand doesn’t make you truly educated. We’ve fallen behind the rest of the world in real learning and skills. Other places are catching up fast, and we’re not keeping pace. This gap is going to hit our wallets hard.
What Your Gut Already Knows About the Stock Market
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the world through the lens of Natural Law. Usually, when I point out how things really work, people like to call me a “conspiracy theorist.” I prefer the term Conspiracy Observer. See, a “theory” is something you’re trying to prove. An “observation” is just looking at the cockroaches running across the floor when you flip on the light. If you see a law being passed or a market being moved, there’s a group of folks behind it looking out for their own interests. That’s not a theory; that’s just human nature.
To understand where we are today, we only need to ask three simple questions. First, the Will: If a small group of people could control the stock market to keep themselves rich and stay in power, would they? Second, the Means: Do the “1% elites” and the government actually have the power and the tools to do it? Finally, the Reality: If they have the will and they have the means, is it really “crazy” to assume they’re doing it right now?
Back in 1929, as John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Great Crash, the big bankers tried to save the market. One guy from J.P. Morgan walked onto the floor and started buying U.S. Steel at a high price just to show off. It worked for a few hours, but then the market collapsed. Back then, they had the Will, but they didn’t have the Means. They were trying to stop a tidal wave with a bucket. Today, that bucket has been replaced by a high-tech dam.
I call this the Asset Enhancement Initiative. It’s an unwritten, undocumented, ongoing effort to make sure the market only goes one way: Up. Since about 2006, when the government “revitalized” something called the Plunge Protection Team, the game changed. They stopped using “traditional” tools like just moving interest rates and started using the “no-limit credit card” of national debt to prop everything up.
The HFT Police are a big part of this. We have High-Frequency Trading computers that trade faster than a human can blink. Their job isn’t “investing”—it’s managing the trend. They love it when volume is low because it’s easier to push the price around. They create “traps” for people betting against the market, squeezing them until they’re forced to buy, which just pushes the price higher. This creates an Inverse Relationship where prices go up while volume stays low, allowing the machines to manage the uptrend perfectly.
Then there is the Great Training. You’ve heard the old saying, “Buy the rumor, sell the news”? Well, they’ve trained the public to do the opposite. Now, everyone is conditioned to Buy on the News. Why? Because the elite need Exit Liquidity. They need a crowd of regular folks to jump in and buy so the big guys can sell their shares at the top without crashing the price. They even gave folks stimulus money and $0 commission apps to get them into the casino. It’s hard to complain about a rigged game when your own account is “up,” right?
The government is acting like a family with a credit card they never intend to pay back. They can postpone the Downside for years, but they can’t kill it. Natural Law says that what goes up must come down, and debt eventually demands a reckoning. The downside always reappears the moment Money Becomes Difficult to Borrow. Right now, they are just building the tower higher so the elite can climb out onto the roof before the whole thing implodes. If you look at the facts without the “fantasy” the experts sell you on TV, the system isn’t a mystery. It’s an administered reality. It’s obvious—if you’re willing to look.
A short manifesto for living deliberately
I’ll wave the red flag up front: this isn’t another feel‑good listicle. It’s a plainspoken prescription I learned from watching people who win at life the hard way. Have dignity.
Make good trades. Own your own tools. Say it out loud. Live it.Dignity
Dignity isn’t a trophy you wear. It’s a line you draw in the dirt and refuse to cross. When I say dignity, I mean knowing how low you’re willing to go and making that boundary non‑negotiable. That boundary keeps you honest, keeps you steady, and makes your decisions simple when the wind blows hard.
Walk into a room and you’ll see two kinds of people: the ones who bend to the loudest voice, and the ones who stand straight because they already decided what matters. Dignity is the muscle that lets you stand straight
Monster in the Machine:
We are standing at a precipice. This is our last chance.
Why a World Without Stress Is a World Without Progress
Free markets reduce inequality. AI promises to remove effort. One of these statements is about to ddestroy the other.
The only proven engine for reducing inequalities across history has been free markets. Yet today we stand at the threshold of a technology that could make the very effort required for markets—and for human flourishing—obsolete: artificial intelligence.
February 2026 • Straight talk, no spinThe U.S. government has exactly two ways to pay for what it spends: it can tax you today, or it can borrow and tax you tomorrow.
Politicians almost always choose the second option. Raising taxes is political suicide; borrowing feels free — until the bill comes due.
That bill is the federal debt. Every dollar borrowed today is a promise that someone will pay it back later. That “someone” is you, your kids, and your grandkids.
Last night, while suffering through another soul-crushing “big game,” my brain wandered off and landed on something that’s been bugging me since I was a kid reading comics.
The elite love announcing exactly what they’re going to do to us… years in advance. It’s like their favorite little gotcha. They can’t help themselves. They have to rub our noses in it first.
Remember those old comic books? Every single supercrook would stand on a rooftop, cackling, laying out their entire evil plan in glorious detail. And you’d think, “Why the hell would you tell the hero exactly how you’re going to destroy the world? That’s stupid.”
Look, if you understand even the basics of natural law, the official story collapses in about three seconds. Nature wired every creature on this planet with an instant read on risk and reward. A dog hears gunfire once and bolts for cover. Expose him to it as a puppy and the fear fades, but the wiring is still there. Humans? We’ve spent centuries training ourselves to ignore that wiring and believe whatever the guy in the suit tells us. But the wiring never fully dies.
That’s why the Epstein “suicide” narrative is dead on arrival for anyone who still has a pulse.
