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Michael Matulef
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Know Thyself | Everything Voluntary✌️ | Follow the Tao

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Rational conduct means that man, in face of the fact that he cannot satisfy all his impulses, desires, and appetites, foregoes the satisfaction of those which he considers less urgent. In order not to endanger the working of social cooperation man is forced to abstain from satisfying those desires whose satisfaction would hinder the establishment of societal institutions. There is no doubt that such a renunciation is painful. However, man has made his choice. He has renounced the satisfaction of some desires incompatible with social life and has given priority to the satisfaction of those desires which can be realized only or in a more plentiful way under a system of the division of labor. He has entered upon the way toward civilization, social cooperation, and wealth.

- Mises

Reality can be stressful and can sometimes get very rough. Everyone has an incentive to postpone it. Most of us, however, learn the hard way that postponing reality only makes it far worse than facing it early on.

The fundamental facts that brought about cooperation, society, and civilization and transformed the animal man into a human being are the facts that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than isolated work and that man's reason is capable of recognizing this truth. But for these facts men would have forever remained deadly foes of one another, irreconcilable rivals in their endeavors to secure a portion of the scarce supply of means of sustenance provided by nature. Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies; his craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. No sympathy could possibly develop under such a state of affairs.

- Mises

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

― Ayn Rand

Scaling Bitcoin with Giacomo Zucco, John Carvalho & Matt Corallo

https://fountain.fm/episode/MPiahV4xWWil5fnY1PEA

Principles of Economics Chapter 16: Violence

You're right in the individual sense. You cannot agree to reject violence if someone is directly using coercion against you.

The context the quote is referring to is about deciding on which social systems we choose for organizing society. Do we choose the market order of voluntary exchange, mutual respect, specialization, and the division of labor or the State order of the initiation of violence, coercion, and intervention.

The extent to which groups of individuals, small or large, agree to reject the initiation of violence is the extent to which they can live in a peaceful extended market order and benefit from the division of labor. The extent to which the initiation of violence is accepted by some members of a group is the extent to which conflict emerges and undermines the cooperation necessary for the market order. Aggression being legitimate for one individual or group but not others is not a moral standard that can be consistently applied across society.

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“Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”

―Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn