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CHAPTER 2: FAST FORWARD I dropped the course on economics because | couldn't see the foundations. Not that they should be clear from the start. That isn’t how the mind works. We see, do and understand in that order. The pyramids rose four thousand years before people like Galileo and Newton found the laws that made them possible. Practice comes first, and science last. Science is abstraction from the particular to the general. It is fewer rules predicting more outcomes more exactly. The pyramid builders knew rules for this kind of stone and that kind of wood or rope. Newton gave rules for mass and force. Those are not particular things like stone and wood and rope. They are qualities of all things. Their rules are tougher to get our minds around, but predict everywhere once we do. What a book or course should offer from the start, even before the foundations, is an inkling that it should be worth finishing. We have to sense that we're on to something. The price of getting there will be the nuisance of abstraction from things to qualities, and we need to see a reason to pay it. | didn’t in the course on economics. Now it’s my turn. I’ll try a fast forward through free growth theory and my other arguments to give an idea where we're headed and why it matters. The foundations and then the slower tour will follow. Free Growth What I call free growth theory will probably count as the chief surprise, at least to non-economists, because the argument and the supporting evidence call for a major reversal in tax policy of this and other nations. But it is not original. John Stuart Mill wrote the same idea in his Principles of Political Economy in 1848. | will quote what he said in my Chapter 4. Although Principles became a leading textbook for decades, the paragraph | quote seems to have been overlooked. Economic historians including Joseph Schumpeter describe him as a champion of growth through belt- tightening. The paragraph I will quote makes the opposite clear. We now have means to prove his idea. I will show how to test it, and will show test results in charts and tables taking up about 20% of this book. They imply that tax laws Chapter 2: Fast Forward 1/06/16 1 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010941