My name is Michael Miller, and my laissez-faire activism and my study of philosophy go back nearly 30 years. I discovered philosophy through Atlas Shrugged, and discovered Atlas through the recommendation of a colleague on my first job after graduating as an engineer in 1967. I was chortling about a news report of an industrialist who sold his factory equipment piecemeal across the continent rather than give in to union extortion. My colleague said that if I liked that, I'd love Atlas Shrugged. Boy, was he right! 

My first political activism was as a member of Boycott Alberta Medicare in 1969. We lost. My next campaign began in 1973, when the Canadian government set out to plunder Canadian oilmen in a particularly blatant and vicious manner. Some friends and I sent copies of Atlas Shrugged to oilmen, with passages flagged relating to looting and the sanction of the victim. My God, how the money rolled in! Our little group became the Association to Defend Property Rights (ADPR), which endured for nearly ten years. ADPR distributed thousands of copies of Atlas, and I edited its newsletter for a number of years. 

I have been learning philosophy full-time since 1968, with a little time out for activism and a little more for paid employment. I spent the first 15 years or so as an eager student of my greatest heroes: Ayn Rand and Aristotle. I've since created some new ideas of my own, but I continue to learn from my heroes, and I remain their devoted fan. I am deeply convinced that knowledge builds on knowledge, and I hope to add a few enduring bricks to the foundations they laid. I've collected links to my philosophical essays here, and I briefly describe their highlights in the following paragraphs. 

My deepest work so far is epistemological: a new concept of focus. I arrived at it inductively after being pointed in the right direction by Ayn Rand's concept of volition as the choice between awareness and non-awareness. Knowledge is power, and my concept of focus led me to devise a simple trick which can be used with ease and profit by children and greybeard scholars alike. The least merit of my trick is that it immunizes you against all the worst errors in the history of philosophy. A much greater merit of my trick is that it leads you inexorably toward genuine, rational optimism. I call the trick focusing on existence.

My deepest previous work was a theory of time which integrates clues and hints from many sources, and is thoroughly in the spirit of my heroes. From the same approach, I got a theory of space. These theories are wonderfully compatible with classical physics, but not with Einsteinian physics; so I'm at odds with yet another orthodoxy.) 

My theory of time was not an end in itself; it was a necessary foundation to my work in ethics on leisure. As far as I've been able to discover, Aristotle is the only philosopher who said anything at all about leisure, and he declared leisure to be "the first principle of all action." I'm not so stinting in my praise. 

Leisure--your time, the time of your life--is the primary moral value. Your leisure is your life, regarded as a series of definite units. Thus, everything you know about life you can carry over to leisure. In formal syllogisms: Leisure is life; life is X: therefore leisure is X. Leisure is a first means and an end-in-itself. Leisure is the universal means and the last end. Leisure is the inescapable currency of man's moral life. Leisure is man's chief good. (If this tempts you to label me the Lazy Philosopher, I'll wear the tag with pride!) Leisure is the first full-fledged chief good to have been proposed since antiquity; one of the few positive chief goods ever proposed; the first ever quantitative chief good; and best of all, the true chief good. I'm delighted to have this discovery in my portfolio, but it's a tough act to follow! 

Why have I published these ideas? Because I seek your help. And you can help! Even if you're not prepared to undertake philosophical reseaches, you can pass my ideas to others through your quackgrass activism. Eventually they'll reach someone who will use them to advance the work, to create new ideas for the new renaissance. There may be a future Aristotle or Bacon or Rand in the line of descent from your actions; you could not wish for a better legacy! 

Money is very helpful! Money is tangible leisure; it can hire help on almost any scale, from any profession. Ideas spread surely by informal quackgrass activism, but they can grow explosively when they find paying supporters. Paying supporters set up a feedback process: supporters pay money, which hires promotion, which recruits more supporters and more money. Will enough supporters pay me enough money, often enough, to create a movement? Will they even pay me a living? I don't know; I've never done this before. The real question is: what will you do? 

If you'd prefer to send a paper cheque, make it payable to Michael Miller and send it to: 

Ste. #601, 105-150 Crowfoot Cr. NW
Calgary, AB T3G 3T2
Canada