### Trump's Corporate Tax Cuts

In a recent podcast Dana Loesch radio opened with the question "what is a Conservative?" The question was responded to by people, largely struggling to article the essential core of Conservatism.

A Conservative, as I see it, is someone who believes in each individuals inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In terms of policy that translates to upholding variety and freedom of choice, the provision of fair incentive and reward for skill and hard work, the maintenance of effective barriers against excessive powers of the state and a belief in the wide spread distribution of individual private property.

Think about that "excessive powers of the state". Soon to circulate in congress is a budget plan to reduce the higher end bracket of corporate taxes from 35 per cent to 20 per cent. That won't just boost the American economy, its productivity, investment and growth but raise commerce and trade to the benefit of every American citizen.

When the state claims more than a third of what a business earns its inevitable that cost will be passed onto employees, suppliers and most of all, customers. When shareholders don't see enough of a return on their stock, they invest elsewhere. That's the essential problem most democrats and socialists miss; there's no such thing as a "tax businesses pay", businesses no more pay a levy, than cars pay a tax disc or TV sets pay for their licence. These prices fall on people, not corporations and its either through exorbitant pricing, dampened wages or staff being laid off to maintain the same after-tax income.

Moreover, when tax rates are relaxed investment increases and, small and medium sized businesses have more of an opportunity to start up. Both of these in effect raise employment and productivity, which makes tariffs on Chinese steal (which is always a bad idea) rather unnecessary. What's even more remarkable is that tax revenues themselves, the amount collected through tax increases. As data from HMRC (UK) has shown.
There's no sense in raising a tax if the affect is to lose money. As the center of almost a quarter of the world's economic activity, what's good for America is good for the rest of the world. This is within all of our interest, because strong, prosperous neighbors make good customers.

1. To clarify; I'm not supporting the budget, just the tax cuts.

### Set Theory

This post is a very brief introduction to some of the basic concepts of set theory. Set theory is a branch of mathematical-logic, that has wide applications across disciplines. Its not just used in the obvious way of studying the foundations of mathematics by mathematicians but also in physics, social science, and even by philosophers as a theory of semantics for predicate logic (although you can do propositional logic without set theory).

A set is a collection of elements, or members; the notation for a set is specified by listing its components. So the set of even numbers can be represented a
$E: \left \{ 2,4,6,8 ... \right \}$$E: \left \{ x: x > 0 \wedge even\right \}$ Either of these notations is valid. Further, elements of a set can only be in that set, once. So   $E: \left \{ 2,2,2,4,4,6,8 ... \right \} = E: \left \{ 2,4,6,8 ... \right \}$ The notation used to indicate that something is an element of a set, is using the Greek symbol "epsilon". That is: $4 \epsilon S$…

### William Lane Craig and the Hartle-Hawking No Boundary Proposal

Classical standard hot Big Bang cosmology represents the universe as beginning from a singular dense point, with no prior description or explanation of classical spacetime. Quantum cosmology is different in that it replaces the initial singularity with a description in accord with some law the "quantum mechanical wave function of the universe", different approaches to quantum cosmology differ in their appeal either to describe the origin of the material content of the universe e.g., Tyron 1973, Linde 1983a, Krauss 2012 or the origin of spacetime itself e.g., Vilenkin 1982, Linde 1983b, Hartle-Hawking 1983, Vilenkin 1984.

These last few proposals by Vilenkin, Hartle-Hawking and others are solutions to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation and exist in a category of proposals called "quantum gravity cosmologies" which make cosmic applications of an approach to quantum gravity called "closed dynamic triangulation" or CDT (also known as Euclidean quantum gravity). I&#…

### Can inflation be eternal into the past?

Back in 2003 a paper appeared on the arXiv titled "Inflationary spacetimes are not past complete" that was published by Arvind Borde, Alan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin which has had considerable amounts of attention online. The theorem is rather uninteresting but simple and doesn't require a very complicated understanding of math. So I thought I'd explain the result here.

It's purpose is to demonstrate that inflationary models are geodesically incomplete into the past which they take as "synonymous to a beginning" but Vilenkin stresses that the theorem can be extended to non inflationary models so long as the condition of the theorem that the average rate of expansion is never below zero is met. These models too then are incomplete into the past. Consider the metric for an FRW universe with an exponential expansion

Where the scale factor is

Since the eternal inflation model is a "steady state cosmology" the mass density and the Hubble paramet…