A crime, by definition, requires a victim. Someone whose rights were violated by force or fraud. No victim, no crime.

When the state arrests you for what you do with your own body, your own property, or your own choices between consenting adults, it is not protecting anyone. It is initiating force against a person who harmed no one.

Think about what that means.

The government is not punishing a violator. The government IS the violator.

Laws against drug use, prostitution between adults, gambling, or raw milk sales do not protect individual rights. They override them. The state substitutes its judgment for yours, on matters that begin and end within your own life.

You are treated as a criminal not because you hurt someone, but because someone in power disapproves of your choices.

The usual defense is "society is harmed." But society is not a person. You cannot violate the rights of an abstraction. Every so-called crime against society is, on inspection, either a crime against a specific individual (in which case prosecute that) or a crime against no one (in which case there is no case).

Victimless crime laws also produce predictable outcomes. They clog courts with non-violent offenders. They fund black markets by making legitimate supply illegal. They give enforcement agencies power over behavior that is, fundamentally, none of their business.

A government with the authority to punish you for choices that harm only yourself has no principled limit. Today it is drugs. Tomorrow it is your diet, your speech, your associations.

The question is not whether you approve of the behavior. The question is whether you own yourself. If you do, the state has no authority over choices that injure no one else. If you do not, then you are not a citizen. You are a ward.

Why are caste and religion still set as mandatory fields in Nepal government portals and apps? What's more, when they are drop-down menu, there is no option to select "none".

This forces every citizen to self-categorize by idnetity markers the state has no right to demand.

• Nepal's constitution (2015) explicitly prohibits discrimination on grounds of caste, ethnicity, and religion. The forms say otehrwise.
• Making caste a mandatory field is the state perpetuating the very hierarchy Nepal claims to be dismantling.
• If you are an atheist, agnostic, or someone who rejects caste affiliation, the system has no sapce for you. You pick a box or the form doesn't submit.
• This is compelled categorization. Every devleoper, product manager, and bureaucrat who builds these forms without raising the question is complicit.
• The fix requires no new technology. Make both fields optional, add "prefer not to say" and "none" to every dropdown, and stop treating citizen as some type of "collective identity" as a required input for government forms.

Why are caste and religion still set as mandatory fields in Nepal government portals and apps? What's more, when they are drop-down menu, there is no option to select "none".

This forces every citizen to self-categorize by idnetity markers the state has no right to demand.

• Nepal's constitution (2015) explicitly prohibits discrimination on grounds of caste, ethnicity, and religion. The forms say otehrwise.

• Making caste a mandatory field is the state perpetuating the very hierarchy Nepal claims to be dismantling.

• If you are an atheist, agnostic, or someone who rejects caste affiliation, the system has no sapce for you. You pick a box or the form doesn't submit.

• This is compelled categorization. Every devleoper, product manager, and bureaucrat who builds these forms without raising the question is complicit.

• The fix requires no new technology. Make both fields optional, add "prefer not to say" and "none" to every drpodown, and stop treating citizen identity as a required input for government services.

Based on the conversation around this topic in Nepal, it sounds like everyone thinks the reason we don't have ability to short-sell in NEPSE because we are lacking in fintech infrastructure.

How can that be the case when short selling predates electricity, the steam engine, and even the United States?

Nepalese firms are not 416 years behind rest of the world in fintech infrastructure.

The first company to be shorted was the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the most powerful corporation on Earth at the time.

That was Amsterdam in 1609. And for context, Amsterdam Stock Exchanges was started in 1602.

The Story: Le Maire and the Groote Compagnie sold VOC shares they did not own, at a price agreed today, with delivery set for a future date.

When the price fell, they would buy the shares cheaply, deliver them, and keep the difference.

These were forward contracts, negotiated individually, written by hand, and settled in person.

Two parties, a price, a date, and a signature on paper.

Le Maire drove VOC shares from a 212% premium in 1607 down to 126% in short time.

That is an 86-point move, executed entirely with handwritten contracts and human messengers.

1773 ma London Stock Exchange.

1792 ma New York Stock exchange ma a client called their broker and placed a sell order on shares they did not own, the broker wrote the oder on a paper ticket, sent it to the floor via pneumatic tube, the floor broker located a lender verbally, and executed the sale by open outcry.

Every confirmation landed on carbon-copy paper slips, often in triplicate.

Millions of shares traded daily this way, through telphone lines, pneumatic tubes, and enormous volumes of paper.

Short selling ran through four centuries before a single computer touched a trade.

What happens when you don't allow shorting

A study covering 30 exchanges found that banning short selling had, at best, left stock prices unaffected.

Not allowing shorting doesn't stop drop in share prices.
(similar findings for circuit breakers but you can find research about that yourself)

They found that more likely, not allowing shorting contributed to further declines, while bid-ask spreads increased significantly across every market where bans were imposed.

A wider spread means you pay more when you buy and receive less when you sell.

The ban rasies your transaction costs.

A separate study of the 2008 crisis found that the ban reduced trading volume, destroyed order book liquidity on both the buy and the sell side equally, and left markets substantially less efficient throughout the ban period.

When the ban was lifed, every one of those effects reversed.

The reason is straightforward.

Short sellesr profit from finding assets trading above what the fundamentals support.

They have a direct financial incentive to locate what is overpriced.

When they leave the marekt, that search stops, bad news stays hidden longer, and prices remain inflated past the point where they should have corrected.

Research from the 2020 COVID bans in six European countries confirmed the same pattern.

Banned stocks showed lower liqudity, higher volatility, and higher transaction costs than stocks where short selling remained permitted.

>A study of 30 countries. Two separate crisis periods. One consistent result: the lack of short-selling makes things worse for the exact people advocates of banning shorting claim to protect.

What this means for NEPSE participants

Short selling has existed since before the markets had buildings to operate in.

It suvived every panic and crash across four centuries because it performs a function no other participant performs.

It tells the market what is overpriced.

When that singal goes away, you do not get a calmer market.

You get a less accurate one.

Prices take lnoger to reflect reality, liquidity thins, and your costs rise.

The traders who profit from short selling are not your adversaries.

They are the reson prices reflect something close to the truth.

The freedom lives one floor deeper: the choice to focus your consciousness or not.

You first chose to think, to bring your mind into contact with reality, values, and consequences.

The prior act, the focusing of awareness, is the one with genuine agnecy.

Behavioral choices (do something or don't, indulge or restrain) are all downstream of the primary choice.

They're real choices, made posisble by whether you activated reason first.

An unfocused mind doesn't distinguish between compassion and malice.

The mind drifts toward whichever stimulos is loudest in a given moment.

Your "dynamic interplay" framing is accurate, but the precision is worth adding.

The interplay is between focused reason and raw impulse, not between two types of externol input.

You have to initiate that process.

Wisdom, then, is not a third opition alongside compassion and malice.

Wisdom is what accumulates when you repeatedly choose to focus rather than drift, across many situations, over time.

Speculation is the mind's wager on its own reasoning, the act of committing present resources to a value not yet existing in the world.

Every object you touch, every comfort you enjoy, every idea you hold arrived here as someone's private bet agaisnt the world as the world then was.

The Wright Brothers did not find flight by accident.

They were bicycle mechanics who reached a conclusion: if air had consistant physical properties, controlled flight was a problem of engineering, not of miracle.

That reasoning was their bet, and the bet required staking their savings, their time, and their reputations on their own judgment before anyone else confirmed the judgment was sound.

Thomas Edison tested more than six thousand different substences as filament materials before arriving at carbonized bamboo, because he held the conviction a sustained electrical glow in a vacuum was achievable and refused to stop until his reasoning proved correct.

These men were not gamblers.

A gambler releis on chance and probability.

A true speculator reasons to a conclusion and commits to the conclusion in action.

The author who writes a first novel specualtes her arrangement of words will compel enough minds to justify the years committed to the work.

The publisher who accepts the manuscript speculates the author's judgment was right, staking money, time, and professional reputation on an evaluation of a work the market has not yet weighed.

Between author and publisher, two independant minds wagered their resources on a value not yet existing in the world, and the result was the book you hold or will someday hold in your hands.

Every novel ever to have moved you required this double speculation.

The architect who designs a building speculates a particular arrangemnt of materials will serve specific human purposes.

The farmer who plants a new crop speculates the yield will justify the season.

The surgeon who adopts a new procedure speculates with her reputaiton.

None of these people are gambling.

Each has reasoned to a posible outcome, committed to pursuit, and accepted full responsibility for being wrong if her reasoning was flawed.

This acceptance of responsibility is what separates productive speculation from evasion.

Now ask yourself what a culture produces when this process stops, when the institutions of a society begin systematically rewarding conformitty and punishing the exercise of independent judgment.

The Soviet Union provides the most clinical answer available.

A state that centrally plans economic production eliminates speculative judgment at the level of the individual prodcuer.

The planner decides what value will exist, not the person with the knowledge and the motivation to produce the value.

Stagnatin follows: a civilization's worth of human minds reduced to executing instructions, their capacity for speculative judgment permanently suppressed.

A culture need not choose political coercion to produce the same result.

When fear of failure becomes the organising principle of a culture, when institutions prefer the safer answer to the true one, and when being wrong carries penalites severe enough to deter the attempt at being right, speculation dies voluntarily.

Peter Thiel observed this pattern in the modern age: societies have chosen safety and regulation over the potential rewards of genuine innovation.

The pharmaceutical indusrty reduced its productive speculation as regulatory burdens made speculative bets on new compounds too expensive to sustain.

The result is fewer new drugs, developed at greater expense, over longer periods.

Computing power, which doubled approximately every two years for decades, has begun to plateu as the investment required to sustain the pace approaches physical and financial limits.

These are failures of nerve, not of nature.

The withdrawal of human minds from speculative commitment prduces exactly the kind of world in which less is new, less is real, and the minds most capable of making things real quietly stop the attempt.

George Westinghouse gives you the investor's version of this lesson.

When Nikola Tesla presented the architecture of his alternating current system (a vision Tesla claimed to have formed before a single componenet of the system existed in material form), Westinghouse evaluated the reasoning and bet on the man.

That bet was speculation: a judgment formed by reason, the conclusion that Tesla's unbuilt system would outperform Edison's working one.

Westinghouse adapted Tesla's patents, built the infrastracture, and lit the 1893 Chicago World's Fair with alternating current, proving the speculation correct.

A value did not exist, two minds reasoned toward the possibility of the value, one committed capital to the reasoning, and the world received something new.

Trace this chain across every category of human production and you find the same structure: speculative jdugment precedes every new value, without exception.

The three periods of history most associated with human advancement (ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and the nineteenth century) were each defined not by caution but by the systematic permission granted to individual minds to act on their own reasoning and keep the results.

Ancient Greece produced philosophy, geomety, and architecture because minds were free to speculate about the nature of reality without institutional punishment for being wrong.

The Renaissance produced anatomy, heliocentrism, and perspective because individual minds were willing to project their judgments against the entire authority of the Church.

The nineteenth century produced the railroad, the electric grid, the telephone, and the internal combuston engine because the institutional conditions of that century allowed speculative minds to act and keep the fruits of being right.

Each time a culture has suppressed the freedom to speculate, the consequence has been the same.

Genius hides or emmigrates, production stagnates, and the minds most capable of projecting new values into existence apply their capacity to the narrow range of problems the collective will permit them to address.

You are told speculation is dangerous.

You are rarely told the refusal to speculate is the precondition of civilizatinal decline.

The future does not exist until a mind's speculative commitment makes the future real.

The city you live in, the medicine treating you, every word you use to think was, at some point, the private projection of a mind with no external guarentee of success.

Speculation is the form reason takes when faced with the task of producing something new.

To speculate rationally is to think, to commit, and to accept responsibilty for the consequences of your judgment.

The value of speculation is the value of production itself, which is the value of human life conducted at full capacity.

To discourage speculation is to discourage the act by which one mind reaches forward and pulls a non-existing value into existance, and to accumulate this discouragement across a culture is to guarantee the culture will consume what earlier, braver minds produced until nothing remains to consume.

The land speculator performs the same cognitive act, studying demographic data, infrastructure plans, population migration, and zoning trajectories, then committing capital on the judgment that a given location will matter more to more people in five years than today.

You might find one object of speculatoin more admirable than another.

That preference is moral and aesthetic, and yours to hold, and does not alter the structural identity of the act.

Now push the anti-speculation premise to its logiical limit.

Remove speculative actors from land markets, and the gap fills not with a free market producing more housing at lower prices.

The gap fills with a state apparratus that decides, through non-price mechanisms, which parcels get developed, by whom, and at what cost.

When all investment decisions are made administratively in the absence of land markets, the result is a perversely positive population density gradient, a disproportionate share of industrial land occupying prime locations, and land misallocaation that persists for decades.

The housing system becomes one of the most unmarketable in the entire economy, residents pay a fraction of real costs, and permanent financial shortage causes deterioration of the housing stock, engineering systems, and infrastructure.

The chain of causation skips the question matteering most: why does a specific location get expensive in the first place?

Land concentrates in value because productive people, institutions, and opportunitiees concentrate there.

The speculator who reads that concentration correctly, before the peak, is not causing the concentration.

They are the first to accurately price a signal alrready real.

The fammer who bets on a crop price in October for a March harvest is doing the same thing.

Nobody calls the farmer a parasite on food production.

Now the premis buried deepest in the original argument: that land value "belongs to society."

"Society" names no individual, signs no deed, and possesses no mechanism for producing or maintaining anything.

Value in land, as in every other asset, is created by the aggregate of individual decisions (decisions made by people who chose to build, live, work, invest, or improve a locaation), none of which were made by a collective entity and none of which were coerced.

Any resource that requires human knowledge and effort to become useful should belong to those who applied that knowledge and effort, not to a noun with no hands.

The actual, measurable driver of high housing costs in high-demand places is supply restriction: zoning regulations, permitting timelines, height caps, and review requierments that prevent more units from being built where people want to live.

Remove those restrictions, and high land prices become self-correcting.

High prices attract develoopment, development adds supply, supply competes prices down.

Speculation is the mind's wager on its own reasoning, the act of committing present resources to a value not yet existing in the world.

Every object you touch, every comfort you enjoy, every idea you hold arrived here as someone's private bet agaisnt the world as the world then was.

The Wright Brothers did not find flight by accident.

They were bicycle mechanics who reached a conclusion: if air had consistant physical properties, controlled flight was a problem of engineering, not of miracle.

That reasoning was their bet, and the bet required staking their savings, their time, and their reputations on their own judgment before anyone else confirmed the judgment was sound.

Thomas Edison tested more than six thousand different substences as filament materials before arriving at carbonized bamboo, because he held the conviction a sustained electrical glow in a vacuum was achievable and refused to stop until his reasoning proved correct.

These men were not gamblers.

A gambler releis on chance and probability.

A true speculator reasons to a conclusion and commits to the conclusion in action.

The author who writes a first novel specualtes her arrangement of words will compel enough minds to justify the years committed to the work.

The publisher who accepts the manuscript speculates the author's judgment was right, staking money, time, and professional reputation on an evaluation of a work the market has not yet weighed.

Between author and publisher, two independant minds wagered their resources on a value not yet existing in the world, and the result was the book you hold or will someday hold in your hands.

Every novel ever to have moved you required this double speculation.

The architect who designs a building speculates a particular arrangemnt of materials will serve specific human purposes.

The farmer who plants a new crop speculates the yield will justify the season.

The surgeon who adopts a new procedure speculates with her reputaiton.

None of these people are gambling.

Each has reasoned to a posible outcome, committed to pursuit, and accepted full responsibility for being wrong if her reasoning was flawed.

This acceptance of responsibility is what separates productive speculation from evasion.

Now ask yourself what a culture produces when this process stops, when the institutions of a society begin systematically rewarding conformitty and punishing the exercise of independent judgment.

The Soviet Union provides the most clinical answer available.

A state that centrally plans economic production eliminates speculative judgment at the level of the individual prodcuer.

The planner decides what value will exist, not the person with the knowledge and the motivation to produce the value.

Stagnatin follows: a civilization's worth of human minds reduced to executing instructions, their capacity for speculative judgment permanently suppressed.

A culture need not choose political coercion to produce the same result.

When fear of failure becomes the organising principle of a culture, when institutions prefer the safer answer to the true one, and when being wrong carries penalites severe enough to deter the attempt at being right, speculation dies voluntarily.

Peter Thiel observed this pattern in the modern age: societies have chosen safety and regulation over the potential rewards of genuine innovation.

The pharmaceutical indusrty reduced its productive speculation as regulatory burdens made speculative bets on new compounds too expensive to sustain.

The result is fewer new drugs, developed at greater expense, over longer periods.

Computing power, which doubled approximately every two years for decades, has begun to plateu as the investment required to sustain the pace approaches physical and financial limits.

These are failures of nerve, not of nature.

The withdrawal of human minds from speculative commitment prduces exactly the kind of world in which less is new, less is real, and the minds most capable of making things real quietly stop the attempt.

George Westinghouse gives you the investor's version of this lesson.

When Nikola Tesla presented the architecture of his alternating current system (a vision Tesla claimed to have formed before a single componenet of the system existed in material form), Westinghouse evaluated the reasoning and bet on the man.

That bet was speculation: a judgment formed by reason, the conclusion that Tesla's unbuilt system would outperform Edison's working one.

Westinghouse adapted Tesla's patents, built the infrastracture, and lit the 1893 Chicago World's Fair with alternating current, proving the speculation correct.

A value did not exist, two minds reasoned toward the possibility of the value, one committed capital to the reasoning, and the world received something new.

Trace this chain across every category of human production and you find the same structure: speculative jdugment precedes every new value, without exception.

The three periods of history most associated with human advancement (ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and the nineteenth century) were each defined not by caution but by the systematic permission granted to individual minds to act on their own reasoning and keep the results.

Ancient Greece produced philosophy, geomety, and architecture because minds were free to speculate about the nature of reality without institutional punishment for being wrong.

The Renaissance produced anatomy, heliocentrism, and perspective because individual minds were willing to project their judgments against the entire authority of the Church.

The nineteenth century produced the railroad, the electric grid, the telephone, and the internal combuston engine because the institutional conditions of that century allowed speculative minds to act and keep the fruits of being right.

Each time a culture has suppressed the freedom to speculate, the consequence has been the same.

Genius hides or emmigrates, production stagnates, and the minds most capable of projecting new values into existence apply their capacity to the narrow range of problems the collective will permit them to address.

You are told speculation is dangerous.

You are rarely told the refusal to speculate is the precondition of civilizatinal decline.

The future does not exist until a mind's speculative commitment makes the future real.

The city you live in, the medicine treating you, every word you use to think was, at some point, the private projection of a mind with no external guarentee of success.

Speculation is the form reason takes when faced with the task of producing something new.

To speculate rationally is to think, to commit, and to accept responsibilty for the consequences of your judgment.

The value of speculation is the value of production itself, which is the value of human life conducted at full capacity.

To discourage speculation is to discourage the act by which one mind reaches forward and pulls a non-existing value into existance, and to accumulate this discouragement across a culture is to guarantee the culture will consume what earlier, braver minds produced until nothing remains to consume.

The land speculator performs the same cognitive act, studying demographic data, infrastructure plans, population migration, and zoning trajectories, then committing capital on the judgment that a given location will matter more to more people in five years than today.

You might find one object of speculatoin more admirable than another.

That preference is moral and aesthetic, and yours to hold, and does not alter the structural identity of the act.

Now push the anti-speculation premise to its logiical limit.

Remove speculative actors from land markets, and the gap fills not with a free market producing more housing at lower prices.

The gap fills with a state apparratus that decides, through non-price mechanisms, which parcels get developed, by whom, and at what cost.

When all investment decisions are made administratively in the absence of land markets, the result is a perversely positive population density gradient, a disproportionate share of industrial land occupying prime locations, and land misallocaation that persists for decades.

The housing system becomes one of the most unmarketable in the entire economy, residents pay a fraction of real costs, and permanent financial shortage causes deterioration of the housing stock, engineering systems, and infrastructure.

The chain of causation skips the question matteering most: why does a specific location get expensive in the first place?

Land concentrates in value because productive people, institutions, and opportunitiees concentrate there.

The speculator who reads that concentration correctly, before the peak, is not causing the concentration.

They are the first to accurately price a signal alrready real.

The fammer who bets on a crop price in October for a March harvest is doing the same thing.

Nobody calls the farmer a parasite on food production.

Now the premis buried deepest in the original argument: that land value "belongs to society."

"Society" names no individual, signs no deed, and possesses no mechanism for producing or maintaining anything.

Value in land, as in every other asset, is created by the aggregate of individual decisions (decisions made by people who chose to build, live, work, invest, or improve a locaation), none of which were made by a collective entity and none of which were coerced.

Any resource that requires human knowledge and effort to become useful should belong to those who applied that knowledge and effort, not to a noun with no hands.

The actual, measurable driver of high housing costs in high-demand places is supply restriction: zoning regulations, permitting timelines, height caps, and review requierments that prevent more units from being built where people want to live.

Remove those restrictions, and high land prices become self-correcting.

High prices attract develoopment, development adds supply, supply competes prices down.

A land valeu tax does not touch those restrictions.

The tax changes who captures the rent without ever producing the thing people need, which is more housing.

Consider how many goods are genuinely finite: a gifted architect's judgment, a particular waterfront location, a rare mineral deposit extracted through effort.

We don't label those retuns "rents to be recouped" because finiteness and collective entitlement are separate questions.

The distinction between "produced" and "unproduced" value is worth taking seriously.

But showing land value grows "socially" doesn't yet tell us who owns the incremet by right, before the full argument is made.

The right to hold property without actively developing the land is part of what ownership means.

Calling non-use "exclusoin of society" smuggles in an unexamined premise: society held a prior claim the owner is now denying.

What specific principle places land under a collective prior claim, distinct from other finite goods?

Sixit Bhatta built Tootle, Nepal's first ride-sharing app. His company collapsed under competitor pressure. His partners got unhappy about how the brand got used afterward.

In January 2024, the police arrested him.

The arresting officer himself said on record: "It looks like a dispute between partners."

Bhatta got out by paying 65 lakh rupees and writing an apology letter. No trial. No verdict. Just a man paying to leave a cell over a logo dispute.

Nepal's trademark law makes infringement a criminal offence, with imprisonment up to two years. The 2074 Criminal Code adds more criminal liability on top. So when two business partners disagree over who owns a brand, either of them can walk into a police station and have the other person arrested.

Not sued. Arrested.

There's a version of this that makes sense. Selling fake goods to consumers who think they're buying the real thing is fraud, and fraud belongs in criminal court. But two founders fighting over a logo is a property dispute. The remedy is compensation through civil court, not handcuffs.

The cheque bounce law is the same problem. Nepal eliminated the civil option entirely in 2025. A missed payment now goes straight to an FIR, criminal investigation, state prosecution. The same pipeline as robbery.

2024 human rights report documented an 8 percent violation of the 24-hour detention rule across over a thousand cases. Police arrest first. The 25-day remand window is where the case gets built.

The practical result is that whoever files the FIR first wins the first round, regardless of who is right. The arrest itself becomes the weapon.

The defense of this system is that civil courts are slow and hard to enforce. That's true. But the answer to weak civil enforcement is fixing civil enforcement, not letting people weaponize criminal law to settle commercial scores.

Bhatta paid 65 lakh and wrote an apology over a logo.

A system that can't tell a business dispute from a crime will make criminals out of everyone who builds something.

Sixit Bhatta built Tootle, Nepal's first ride-sharing app. His company collapsed under competitor pressure. His partners got unhappy about how the brand got used afterward.

In January 2024, the police arrested him.

The arresting officer himself said on record: "It looks like a dispute between partners."

Bhatta got out by paying 65 lakh rupees and writing an apology letter. No trial. No verdict. Just a man paying to leave a cell over a logo dispute.

Nepal's trademark law makes infringement a criminal offence, with imprisonment up to two years. The 2074 Criminal Code adds more criminal liability on top. So when two business partners disagree over who owns a brand, either of them can walk into a police station and have the other person arrested.

Not sued. Arrested.

There's a version of this that makes sense. Selling fake goods to consumers who think they're buying the real thing is fraud, and fraud belongs in criminal court. But two founders fighting over a logo is a property dispute. The remedy is compensation through civil court, not handcuffs.

The cheque bounce law is the same problem. Nepal eliminated the civil option entirely in 2025. A missed payment now goes straight to an FIR, criminal investigation, state prosecution. The same pipeline as robbery.

2024 human rights report documented an 8 percent violation of the 24-hour detention rule across over a thousand cases. Police arrest first. The 25-day remand window is where the case gets built.

The practical result is that whoever files the FIR first wins the first round, regardless of who is right. The arrest itself becomes the weapon.

The defense of this system is that civil courts are slow and hard to enforce. That's true. But the answer to weak civil enforcement is fixing civil enforcement, not letting people weaponize criminal law to settle commercial scores.

Bhatta paid 65 lakh and wrote an apology over a logo.

A system that can't tell a business dispute from a crime will make criminals out of everyone who builds something.

Currently it looks like most online prop firms profit most when traders fail.

The industry runs on challenge fees, not on funded traders producing returns.

The misalignment is the core problem.

A firm structured to donate 90% of failed challenge fees to charity (and refund 100% for passed challenges) eliminates its own incentive to design unfair rules.

The point of 90% is that there are expenses that prop firm bares for each challenge. So, the failed challenge fees go towards that expense and rest goes to charity of trader's choice. We can have list of around 200 charity so the money goes to cause that trader agrees with.

The firm suddenly has one revenue source: a percentage of trader profits.

At a 60/40 split in the trader's favor, the numbers work, because the firm earns nothing unless traders earn.

This is the purest form of value exchange: each party benefits only when the other succeeds.

The trader brings skill. The firm brings capital. Neither profits at the other's expense.

Currently, challenge fees fund prop firm operations regardless of trader outcomes.

The structure rewards failure, not performance.

A charity-linked model forces the firm to select for skill, support real development, and design challenges that identify genuine ability (not manufacture failure).

The 90% charity donation also makes failed fees feel less extractive to traders.

You still lost the challenge, but your fee funded something you chose to fund.

The refund for passing creates a clean signal: the firm trusts you enough to return your money and back you with real capital.

At 60% profit split, traders earn less than the standard 80-90% offered elsewhere.

But the trade-off is structural integrity: no firm in this model profits from your failure.

The business model works if the firm finds enough skilled traders who produce consistent returns.

Proper selection pressure benefits everyone.

Please give feedback on desirably, viability and feasibility of starting such prop firm.

I have only met one Georgist in my life and he said it's better to have no taxes but if there were to be taxes then let's do georgist way.

Property rights rest on one foundational claim: you own what you produce.

The claim carires consequences most people who invoke it never follow honestly to the end.

Follow the claim through, and you arrive at a question worth sitting with.

Who prodused the earth?

Not you. Not your government. Not the developer who bought the lot, not the speculator who held the land for thirty years while the city grew around the land.

The ground existed before any person arrived, its mineral deposits formed over millions of years without a single human decision.

Yet someone holds legal tiitle to the ground.

Someone collects rent from others who need access to finite, unproduced earth.

Whether property rights matter is not the question here (they do, and any system eroding them collapses productive incentive alongside).

The quesiton is narrower: what grounds original ownership of something nobody created?

The answer most people give is first possession: you were there first, you staked a claim, you built a fence, you registered a title.

First possesion solves coordination problems and creates stability.

But first possession is a workable social convention, not a fully formed moral derivation.

The distinction is worth examinng.

Consider what you own when you improve a piece of land.

You own the bilding, the drainage system, the cleared earth, every improvement your labor and capital created.

What you did not create is the ground rent.

Ground rent is the rental value of the raw location, stripped of every improvement you added.

Ground rent arrives largely from the surronding community.

A plot near a functioning port is worth more than a plot in a desert, not because the port-plot owner did anything different, but because thousands of productive people built the infrastructure, the workforce, the commerce making the location valuable.

The value arrived without your effrot.

You hold legal title to value others generated.

Others pay to acces the location.

This is where the argument for taxing the unimproved value of finite resources moves from slogan toward derivation.

The derivation follows from the same labor-grounded premis justifying private ownership of improvements.

Advocates of such taxation do face a genuine difficulty here, though.

Establishing the principle and identifying the mechaniism are two separate tasks.

A state assessment. A bureaacratic valuation. An annual levy administered by a government with a documented tendency to expand the definition of "unimproved value" until the definition swallows improvements too.

The principle holds more weight than critics acknowledge.

The mechaniism deserves more skepticism than advocates typically offer.

No political institution has reliably distinquished what the community created (location value) from what you created (improvements).

Tax histroy makes the pattern worth noting.

A second consideration: the argument treats "the community" as a coherent entity generating land value and deserving a return.

"The community" does not sign contrakts.

"The community" does not hold property, does not deliberate, and does not bear losses when government mismanages in its name.

What hapens in practice: a government collects the tax in the community's name and spends proceeds according to whoever controls the government.

The principle of returning unearned value to those who generated the value deserves a cleaner mechaniism than taxation alone typically provides.

This is the divide between a reasoned principle and a praagmatic slogan.

A reasoned principle specifies who owns what and why.

A slogan says "this is good policy" and stpos.

The taxation of finite, unimproved resources has a reasoned principle behind the taxation: ownership requires productive genesis, and no person produced the land.

The slogan version skips the derivation and jumps to redistriibution, using "society created the value" as a blank check for state control of natural resources.

Both thoughts are worth holding at once.

The philosophical foundation is more rigorous than critiics admit.

The policy mechanism is more fraught than advocates acknowledge.

The productive question is not "is taxing finite resources fair?" but "what do I own, and why?"

If your answer requires claiming ownership over something you did not cretae, did not find through productive effort, and whose value arrived entirely from others' actions, then first possession alone carries a burden of justification worth examining.

In a world without any government (actual anarchy) every individual must personally secure themselves, their property, their contracts. The farmer guarding his field with a rifle cannot also master crop rotation. The merchant cannot both run a trade route and maintain an army to protect it. The engineer cannot design a bridge while also hunting down whoever stole his tools last Tuesday. Every waking hour of productive capacity gets consumed by the raw problem of physical survival and self-defense.

This is the actual cost of anarchy: it destroys specialization, and specialization is the engine of all human prosperity.

A government, properly defined and properly limited, solves exactly this problem. It creates a monopoly on retaliatory force (courts to adjudicate disputes, police to protect individual rights, military to defend against external aggression) and in doing so, it frees every individual to do what they are actually good at. The doctor treats patients instead of sharpening a sword. The programmer writes code instead of guarding his laptop. The factory owner invests in machinery instead of hiring personal militias. This is the foundational bargain of civilization: individuals delegate the defensive use of force to a specialized institution, and in exchange they receive the security to be fully productive.

What that means is: The government's legitimate function is entirely exhausted by the protection of individual rights. It is the night watchman. It holds the shield. It does not hold the plow.

Nepal ko case ma, we seem to like to avoid discussing deeper meaning of the terms we use. Alchi lagera ko ki meaning sanga darr lagera ho?

That matters because Words Matter.

A word carries a concept, and a concept carries a consequence. Strip a word of its meaning, and you strip people of the ability to think clearly about what they are choosing.

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What "Liberal" Originally Meant

The Latin root "liber" means free.

Liberalism, in its original form, meant one precise thing: the protection of individual rights against the force of the state.

Freedom, at its core, means freedom from compulsion, from the uninvited use of force against your body, your property, and your choices.

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What Democratic Socialism Actually Demands

Democratic socialism calls for collective ownership of the means of production, directed by state power, distributed through democratic vote.

The moment a government seizes productive property, or directs how private property gets used, physical force enters the equation.

A vote does not erase the force.

The ballot box is not a moral override for property rights.

If fifty-one people vote to take what belongs to forty-nine, the forty-nine are still robbed.

The number of people who approve a violation does not change the nature of the violation.

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Where the Self-Contradiction Lives

This is where the label breaks down.

Democratic socialists claim to stand for freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience.

Freedom is not divisible into a spiritual half and an economic half.

The person who cannot own the products of labor cannot think freely for long, because economic control is control of the means of survival.

Whoever controls the means of your survival controls you.

A right to free speech means nothing when the state manages the means of publication and distribution.

Milton Friedman argued this point directly: a socialist society and a free society cannot coexist as one system. Coercion and self-direction are mutually exclusive.

The original liberals knew this. They knew political freedom and economic freedom stand or fall as one.

Democratic socialism dismantles this understanding by design.

The movement uses the democratic process (a mechanism originally built to restrain the state) as the vehicle for expanding state power over the economy.

You cannot use tools built to protect individual rights to destroy individual rights and call the result freedom.

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The Inflation of "Rights"

Rights are not entitlements handed down by a government.

Rights are conditions of existence required by the nature of a rational, living being, anchored in what a person needs to act, to produce, and to survive.

You have the right to act, to think, to produce, and to keep what you produce.

You do not have a "right" to the labor, property, or time of another person.

Democratic socialists inflate the concept of rights past all recognition.

They speak of the "right to healthcare," the "right to housing," the "right to a job."

Every one of those "rights" requires someone else to provide a service or surrender a resource, by force if necessary.

A right built on forcing another person is not a right. Such a claim is a claim on another person's life.

A system built on such premises is a system of legalized seizure, regardless of the name the system carries.

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What the Word "Democratic" Does

The prefix "democratic" does real rhetorical work.

The prefix suggests legitimacy without earning any.

Legitimacy, in a free society, means the protection of individual rights, not the count of people who voted for their violation.

The law's original purpose is to protect the individual from the majority when the majority seeks to override rights.

Democratic socialism inverts this entirely.

The vote becomes the mechanism of forced redistribution.

The state becomes the owner of what you produce and the director of how you live.

When a state occupies both of those roles, calling the program "liberal" is not merely inaccurate.

The name is a concealment of actual content.

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Call Things by Their Actual Names

Socialism means collective ownership of the means of production, enforced by state power.

Liberalism, the genuine article, means the protection of individual rights from all coercion, including coercion by popular vote.

The two are not compatible.

One defends freedom from the state's reach, and the other proposes to extend the state's reach into every corner of economic life.

Calling democratic socialism a form of liberalism does not make the claim true.

Precision in language is not a small concern.

Precision in language is how free people defend what freedom means.

Further Reading on what liberalism means: https://www.reddit.com/r/NepalLiberal/comments/1sjjlg7/what_do_we_mean_by_liberalism/

The mind is man's only tool of survival, the faculty by which he identifies reality, forms principles, and acts on knowledge, and education exists to develop this faculty to its full capacity.

Skill-based trcaining answers the question of how, while conceptual education answers the question of why, and only the second allows you to act when the how becomes obsolete.

The difference matters because reality changes, tools change, and entire industries change, but a mind built on principles adapts to any of those shifts without external guidance.

When you memorize a proecedure, you become dependent on the procedure surviving.

When you understand the principle, you own the knowledge regardless of what conditions change around you.

A conceptual thinker builds a framewrok of integrated knowledge, where each new fact connects to what came before, and the framework scales indefinitely.

Procedural learners collect isolated techniques (each one perishable, each one replaceable by a machine or a cheaper worker).

The purpose of education is to equip a person with the cogntive tools to produce, judge, and adapt without needing to be told what to do next.

Deep understanding of principles is the most practical thing you possess, because principle-based knowledge transfers across situations where procedure-based knowledge fails entirely.

A person trained only in execution becomes a componeant of someone else's system.

A person educated in principles becomes the director of their own.

The mind acquires knowledge in levels, moving from the perceptual (what you directly obsserve) to the conceptual (what those observations mean as principles).

Bypassing the conceptual level produces a person who follows instructions with precision but generates none.

Education, when taught properly, trains a person to think, to understnad, to integrate observations into conclusions, and to prove those conclusions against reality.

No original contribution (professional or personal) comes from a person who only learned the steps.

Every breakthorugh comes from the person who understood why the steps work and where those steps fail.

Conceptual education does not compete with competence.

Conceptual education is the soucre of competence, the foundation making acquired skills coherent and extensible rather than brittle.

Train the mind in principles, and you build a person who owns their knowledge, adapts without permission, and produces without being told where to start.

Hami sanai huda dekhi we keep hearing that the obstacle for Nepal's development is political instability. I digged in like scooby doo with some scooby snacks to catch. Here is what I concluded.

An investor's core calculation has very less to do with if government changes with completing term or without completing term.

The invsetor asks one question: if I build something here, will the state treat what I build as mine?

Nepal's FDI record answers this directly.

Nepal's inward FDI avearged 0.2 percent of GDP over the last decade (one of the lowest rates on in the entirity of this planet we call Earth, per the World Bank Systematic Country Diagnostic).

The number held through Nepal's periods of political calm.

After the 2017 and 2019 Invetsment Summits (organized during relative political stability to recruit foreign capital) FDI statistics still remained poor.

Stability was present. Yet, Captial stayed away.

The Huaxin Narayani Cement case shows the mechanism.

A Nepal-China joint venture secured a 50-year land lease with capital commited.

Party factions within the ruling government treated the deal as ideologically suspect, and the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee directed the government to cancel the handover.

The deal died in stability, eliminatd by a legislature executing exactly what the underlying ideology demanded.

Arghakhanchi Cement tells a more routine story.

The company waited over a year for the Industry Minstry to approve reinvesting its own profits.

No reason was offered for the delay.

The ministry simply held the decison.

The pattern across both cases is clear.

These are approvall systems functioning as designed.

The design is the problem.

What both cases share is a system where production requires permission and profit requires political negotation.

Precision on three terms matters here: capitalism, cronyism, and licence-raj.

Capitalsim, properly defined, is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights (including property rights), where all property is privately owned and the government's sole function is to protect those rights from force and fraud.

Under capitalism, the state has one job: protect the individual's right to think, to produce, to trade, and to keep the product of that effort.

This means seperating state and economics in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

Cronyism is not a variant of this.

Under cronyism, business success flows from politcal connections rather than productive achievement, and the state decides who builds, who operates, and who profits.

"Crony capitalism" is a contradiction in terms.

What Nepal's legislature practices is cronyim: the state granting permits, monopolies, and approvals through political relationships rather than legal right.

Licence-raj is the operational architecture of this arrangement.

Under licence-raj, prodcution itself requires prior government permission.

Starting a business, expanding a factory, reinvesting profits, or leasing land all become privileges the state grants rather than rights the individual holds.

The investor's right to produce requiers no such permission under genuine capitalism.

Nepal has neither capitalism nor the intellectual commitment to approach it.

Nepal's government maintians monopolies over electricity transmission and petroleum distribution.

Bonus share reinvestment requires ministry approval.

A 50-year land lease to a joint venture requires parlimantary review.

None of this is instability.

In February 2025, FATF grey-listed Nepal at its Paris plenary (a direct consquence of institutional failure), raising transaction costs with foreign banks and reducing FDI further.

Foreign investors read this framework clearly.

They do not flee political turublence.

They flee intellectual hostility toward private ownership.

The Foreign Investors doesn't need perfect political stability, they need intellectual commitment to capitalism.

TLDR Version:
Foreign capital is spooked not by musical-chair-ness of government. It is spooked by a system where production requires prior state permision, profit requires political negotiation, and property is treated as a privilege the state grants rather than a right the individual holds, making the investor's foundational question (will the state protect what I build as mine?) unanswerable by any framework that separates economic activity from legal right and routes it through political relationship instead.