George Mason University Admissions Essay
*ESSAY OPTION 1:
*Our experience of the universe, our planet Earth, and the history of humankind continues to present unanswered questions and unresolved problems. If you were to choose one question or problem to investigate during your undergraduate years at Mason, what would it be?
*Please include: Why are you interested in the topic? What research do you wish to conduct during your studies concerning this? What do you hope to gain from your inquiry?
Right now is an interesting time to be alive. Just as recently as a couple hundred years ago, living standards were not even close to what they are today. For thousands of years, humankind has been barely surviving poverty, starvation, and war. However, today we are on the brink of something amazing. We are living in a time when a person who has a car that is faster and more affordable than a medieval king’s horse is considered poor. We are living in a time when poor people can afford to be as fat as a medieval king instead of starving like a medieval peasant. We are living in the most peaceful times ever, where there is less death from war and less crime than ever before. These miracles are possible because of liberal democracy and free-markets, and it is easy for people to take these luxuries for granted; especially during the current dispute between capitalism and socialism.
But soon, this dispute will be over. The greatest problem ever solved by humankind will fully unlock the human potential. The question is: How can we abolish government and still have a civilized society? Anarcho-capitalists (those who believe in total free-market capitalism) are correct that government is an inherent evil and that free-markets are the most efficient way to manage resources. However, since government and crime do exist, there needs to be a way to deal with them. America’s founding fathers were geniuses in their ideas of balancing power. They recognized government is a necessary evil, but that by balancing power, we could minimize tyranny and crime.
I believe that with the aid of technology, it is possible to further perfect our founders’ vision of balancing power and fully unlock humankind’s potential. The ideas I would like to research and pursue at George Mason University are these: If individual power is strengthened at a higher ratio than the power of factions, will that create a sort of “mutually assured destruction,” that will ensure factions can no longer violate individual rights? How will this more-balanced power affect the nature of government? Will it decentralize government causing there to be thousands of smaller governments? Will government evolve from deriving legitimacy from implied consent based on living within a geographic territory and evolve toward deriving legitimacy from explicit consent based on online contracts with each citizen? And how can the advancement of technology and international trade contribute to this vision?
I would rather attend George Mason University than any other school. I have been a huge fan of the content I have read that comes out of the Mercatus Center and I would like to be involved. My hope is that George Mason University will give me the tools required to pursue these ideas, which I believe will cause an exponentially greater explosion in prosperity than even the industrial revolution.
*I was accepted into their Honors College but was unable to attend due to physical limitations.
