Taking the Long View
One thing that helps me, and can be theraputic, is to take what I call a “4th person view”. There’s first person, which is to view the world from your position, the second person, which is to view the world from your contemporarie’s position, and the third person, the view of an uninvolved contemporary observer.
Mario is a third person game. Because there’s mario - the first person, the goomba - the second person, and you play as an observer controlling mario - the third person. A first person game is where you see the game from the point of view of the character you’re controlling.
The fourth person, and I’m not sure if this is even a recognized term, is to view the events of the day through the broad arc of history. It’s like a third person through time. The fourth person sees a flower bloom like one of those videos where they take a frame of a flower every hour.
This fourth person has been around the world to see cro-magnon, neanderthal, and sapien, and the out of africa explosion. He would see man coming out of tribal communism into the more abstract market societies. There would be periods of evolution toward markets and periods of “devolution” back to tribes.
Anyone in one of these devolutionary periods would think that it was either the end of the world or a glorious new collective era. And the reverse is true. In ancient times, the tribal communists would say that society is going to hell for being so decadent during evolutionary periods.
Now during evolutionary periods the tribal communists wretch at the growth of “capitalism”. And they speak of “capitalism” as though it was some prescribed system to be decided upon and imposed. And just so you know, islamic economics is very anti-free market, which makes sense because it’s primitive.
What should be apparent is just how few marches and protests free-marketers have in comparison to the various collectivists grasping for “rights”. That’s why these “tea parties” are so odd, because for the first time groups of people who support in general more free markets are massing and protesting. Unfortunately racial nationalists who want to segregate are attracted to free market views, and thus the tea parties are more racist than the general population. And I have a post on that about why that shouldn’t matter to just about anyone.
Also in the US, much of the support of free markets is not principled, I assert most isn’t, but is just tradition based on the myth that the US constitution limits the power of the state. It’s just conserving the old mythology, it is “conservatism”. Though blindly following quasi-free market views is better than thinking for oneself most of the time. As I said before, the notion that people are generally able to think about economic issues is clearly false, and is a founding assumption of democracy.
But these marches will fail, because that is never how markets win. Markets do not come to dominate through elections, markets emerge. When people merely interact with each other, they exchange and trade, and form prices in terms of other goods, no central planner decides upon these things. If there were a referendum on such things, the great masses might have never allowed it and we’d still be in tribal communism.
There was a great hustle and bustle about a revolution in the Soviet Union, but that failed. Why? Was there some even greater free market opposition? Well one could say the USSR had to compete militarily with the US, but that notion can’t explain the pattern of the USSR’s collapse. There was no major free market political party in Russia, but the markets emerged because market come from human behavior. Not enough roofing nails? People will work to make roofing nails in exchange for other things.
Even when there is majority support in outlawing the market, like outlawing certain substances or prostitution, markets emerge. It’s almost like a physical law, like magnets. You can outlaw and attempt to force them, but “market forces” will attract demand and supply.
It will take longer for the US to fail than the USSR, and like the USSR it won’t come from some great revolution or revelation. The state programs in the US are our “soviet union”. In the USSR it was about ~95% state (yes there were some markets allowed), in the US it’s about ~46% state. The problem is that in the US the state can continue to fail and continue to leech off of the productive market, in the USSR when the state failed, it FAILED and that was it.
That’s why fascism, interventionism, third-way socialism, or whatever you want to call it will take much longer to die than straight-up communism, but it will eventually fail, according to “market forces”, like physical law, in somebody’s lifetime.
Mario is a third person game. Because there’s mario - the first person, the goomba - the second person, and you play as an observer controlling mario - the third person. A first person game is where you see the game from the point of view of the character you’re controlling.
The fourth person, and I’m not sure if this is even a recognized term, is to view the events of the day through the broad arc of history. It’s like a third person through time. The fourth person sees a flower bloom like one of those videos where they take a frame of a flower every hour.
This fourth person has been around the world to see cro-magnon, neanderthal, and sapien, and the out of africa explosion. He would see man coming out of tribal communism into the more abstract market societies. There would be periods of evolution toward markets and periods of “devolution” back to tribes.
Anyone in one of these devolutionary periods would think that it was either the end of the world or a glorious new collective era. And the reverse is true. In ancient times, the tribal communists would say that society is going to hell for being so decadent during evolutionary periods.
Now during evolutionary periods the tribal communists wretch at the growth of “capitalism”. And they speak of “capitalism” as though it was some prescribed system to be decided upon and imposed. And just so you know, islamic economics is very anti-free market, which makes sense because it’s primitive.
What should be apparent is just how few marches and protests free-marketers have in comparison to the various collectivists grasping for “rights”. That’s why these “tea parties” are so odd, because for the first time groups of people who support in general more free markets are massing and protesting. Unfortunately racial nationalists who want to segregate are attracted to free market views, and thus the tea parties are more racist than the general population. And I have a post on that about why that shouldn’t matter to just about anyone.
Also in the US, much of the support of free markets is not principled, I assert most isn’t, but is just tradition based on the myth that the US constitution limits the power of the state. It’s just conserving the old mythology, it is “conservatism”. Though blindly following quasi-free market views is better than thinking for oneself most of the time. As I said before, the notion that people are generally able to think about economic issues is clearly false, and is a founding assumption of democracy.
But these marches will fail, because that is never how markets win. Markets do not come to dominate through elections, markets emerge. When people merely interact with each other, they exchange and trade, and form prices in terms of other goods, no central planner decides upon these things. If there were a referendum on such things, the great masses might have never allowed it and we’d still be in tribal communism.
There was a great hustle and bustle about a revolution in the Soviet Union, but that failed. Why? Was there some even greater free market opposition? Well one could say the USSR had to compete militarily with the US, but that notion can’t explain the pattern of the USSR’s collapse. There was no major free market political party in Russia, but the markets emerged because market come from human behavior. Not enough roofing nails? People will work to make roofing nails in exchange for other things.
Even when there is majority support in outlawing the market, like outlawing certain substances or prostitution, markets emerge. It’s almost like a physical law, like magnets. You can outlaw and attempt to force them, but “market forces” will attract demand and supply.
It will take longer for the US to fail than the USSR, and like the USSR it won’t come from some great revolution or revelation. The state programs in the US are our “soviet union”. In the USSR it was about ~95% state (yes there were some markets allowed), in the US it’s about ~46% state. The problem is that in the US the state can continue to fail and continue to leech off of the productive market, in the USSR when the state failed, it FAILED and that was it.
That’s why fascism, interventionism, third-way socialism, or whatever you want to call it will take much longer to die than straight-up communism, but it will eventually fail, according to “market forces”, like physical law, in somebody’s lifetime.
15年前
