Rumi, FLOW, and Love

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."

--Rumi

Because of the importance of economic understanding for creating healthy political institutions, sometimes we do not speak often enough about "the other half" of FLOW, so to speak: Love.

I think that everyone who is interested in public policy and political philosophy has had their minds and spirits formed in an atomsphere of conflict - after all, politics is war by other means.

One of our goals is to, as much as possible, eliminate politics and thereby reduce public conflict. Too much time, too many resources, and too much good will is destroyed in political battles in proportion to the good that results (little to none, most of the time).

For me, avoiding politics means encouraging voluntary solutions to problems. There should rarely be talk of coercing others through laws at all. If we see a way in which the world needs to be made better, if we see something that is wrong with the world, then we should either create it ourselves, encourage others to create it, or propose specific changes to the rule frameworks (such as ways to internalize externalities, or to eliminate the government education monopoly) that will allow us to create it ourselves.

Criticize by creating. Create as an act of love.