Lol you’re talking to an economics major.
Discussion
As a former econ major (with a focus on money & banking) myself, I can tell you that you almost certainly can't learn what you need to know from a university (with maybe a couple of rare exceptions). The contradictory Keynesian nonsense taught at universities is sometimes almost worse than total ignorance.
You have to unlearn a lot of what you were taught, which is harder than learning things correctly the first time around.
My brother has been doing a great job of attacking the foundations of Keynesianism with the Bitcoin Audible podcast. See the episodes about hoarding & saving. The key is to understand that savings is the foundation of society - more things must be produced than consumed. And that Say's law is an absolute. Production enables consumption & investment. You can't build a house with trees you intend to cut down in the future. Everything else basically follows from those things.
The Use of Knowledge in Society by Hayek is a good read or a good listen (via Mises.org or bitcoin audible).
To be clear here I majored in economics 15 years ago, with a focus on public property rights and international trade. And the only universal truth in economics is that there is no universal truth in economics. Sure, it’s easy to say that production cures all ails but the secret sauce is in how to incentivize production of the right stuff in the right places. A major role of government in an ideal sense is to cut through local comparative advantages and the misalignment of incentives that inevitably arises in a diffuse structure of governance. I fundamentally believe that there is a role for government, maybe even “big government,” however different it may look from what we see today.
Thanks for the recommendations, will listen. Should have known you were OP’s sibling 😂. So who’s the smartest one?
I think the laws of economics are a certain as just about anything can be.
You don't have to incentivize people to trade & solve problems & to do what serves them, you just have to get out of the way.
Agree. That’s the only thing that has to be done. And maybe removing other (old) obstacles.
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Everything else is a choice and optional to commit to.
Disagree. That doesn’t work because people are inherently selfish. Put too many of them in a room with competing interests and nothing will get done. A decade in corporate leadership roles has taught me this. That’s the entire premise behind representative government.
Building things in a way that best serves the people around me is doing what best serves me. They pay me & are happy returning customers when I serve them appropriately. What is in my self interest doesn't come at the expense of anyone else. Anyone who thinks harming others is in their own self interest is not someone who is being honest about how that impacts their own self image.
If you get things by cheating others then everything you have becomes a reminder of your depravity, rather than your accomplishments. It destroys the ability to feel good about much of anything or to feel able to connect with others.
Freedom of association means we don't all have to be in the same room, people can go wherever they want & they generally have no obligation to deal with anyone they don't want to deal with. Which means that the liars & the cheats tend to get ostracized.
People doing horrible things to others generally don't get very far without a mafia like organization &/or religious structure of some sort to protect them & to force others to support them.
Govt is just that, a religion with songs, symbols, statues, monuments, ritual ceremonies, costumed authorities, sacred halls, sacred texts, robed interpreters of said texts, & violent foreign crusades. And it operates on a mafia business model of charging people for protection from what the govt agents will do to you if you don't pay for protection. Govts even purposely create a dependent class that they can manipulate into violence & riots in order to threaten the middle class who are the real target.
In the same way that burning down churches doesn't destroy false beliefs, it's not possible to destroy govt by attacking it directly. Govts are primarily built on propaganda. So decentralizing communication & ending censorship is also critically important, along with the undermining of economic authority & monetary control, as well as spreading tools that make it cheap & easy for people to physically defend themselves if necessary.
#Nostr, #bitcoin, & #3dprinting are all pieces of a proper productive & freedom oriented revolution whether you like it or not.
Me… obviously