Replying to Avatar Lyn Alden

Free enterprise is the default state of affairs. It's a complex and ever-ongoing negotiation of prices between retailers, product producers, commodity producers, employees, and so forth. It is a constantly-adjusting control system sorting toward Truth.

Authoritarian governments and the masses that support them can impede upon prices and thus rekt the ability for natural pricing to occur, which disrupts all trade and makes everything more inefficient and more expensive.

Notably, the handful of countries that have made social democracy work, all preserved the metric of "ease of doing business." In other words, if you examine Scandinavian countries, they do have high taxes and high support for society. That's how these relatively small and homogenous societies have chosen to govern themselves, and they consistently score among the highest global levels of happiness. But in terms of "ease of doing business," they still score very high. They tax and spend, but they don't interference with business operations to generate new value. They tax and redistribute the engines of growth, but they don't impede the engines of growth.

That's the key thing, in terms of variables not to mess with. Don't interfere with the flow of pricing, domestically or globally, which is ultimately just information. Maintain the ease of doing business, let pricing set supply/demand balances, and then sort out what sort of social contract exists independently of those foundational wealth-building engines.

nostr:note170zgh0rm63mcwu9mnws37xk86xrjjxwnt077aytj0nqkzsqm956sf4qqce

This is why I think there's a valid argument for UBI in the short term while we downsize the role of government in our lives. Let the free market do its thing, and if we need social support to get us through the transition to a less government dependent society, a UBI would be the most economic approach, letting individuals decide where best to put their capital.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

If we build sovereign wealth funds based on #Bitcoin, which is the only asset that stands a chance to appreciate faster than the U.S. government’s accumulating debt and interest, only then does UBI make sense to me. How else could a government possibly ever bankroll it?