What would an "Economic Enlightenment" look like? (Transcript)
Exploring my almost entirely, if not entirely, unoriginal thoughts, on what would an "Economic Enlightenment" or “Economic Age of Reason” might look like. Some issues with what I’ve said here: I think I've made a mistake on searching for the best way for currency to operate, with how I approached grants, didn’t address recycling and environmental health (outside of the climate change hoax and globalist/Khazarian Mafia wickedness it is connected to), and possibly other things, so there will probably be a shorter Part Two at some point. Some of this is US-centric but a lot here isn’t.
I also misspoke when using the term "knowledge relativity", I was talking about relativity around truth appearing in woke ideology, like the idea of Standpoint Theory, and I wasn't claiming that “knowledge relativity”, or the relativity of knowing, was bad, in the sense of thinking in probabilities which is ultimately necessary for critical-thinking.
This video was originally uploaded on Bitchute and YouTube, now exclusive on Rumble and transcripted on Substack.
I believe a lot more about this subject can be learned here: https://mises.org/
Alright so, I've had this idea in my mind for awhile, and I have nowhere good to film. I'm about to piss off some commies while wearing Crocks (just a joke). And basically my idea was for this video was.. what would an “Economic Enlightenment” look like and.. “the Enlightenment”.. happened in the 1600s, 1700s.. according to Wikipedia.. was also called “The Age of Reason”. So I'm going to title this video.. because I think it might be a little bit better of a title.. “What would an Age of Economic Reason Look Like?” (ended up using the term “Economic Enlightenment” instead).. which is not something I think that exists very much, in most places in the world, including America; and America is definitely very, very bad (on good economic policy).. just more displaced from what I believe that vision would be than America has been in a very long time.. if ever, with the Biden Administration.
So.. I wrote myself notes because if I tried to do this off-the-cuff, and remember everything, it's just not going to happen.. it's like a grocery list.. it's like going in the grocery store without a grocery list— I'm not gonna remember everything. So.. I don't have any good place to film so I decided.. why not just film my Crocs in my dirty bathroom. I said I was done making videos and I don't really want to make many more videos (this was before I decided to start a dedicated channel and Substack and only had two other videos: “The Greatest Progressives Don’t Belong” & “How Wokeness is Dumbing Down Humanity”); but.. there's kind of a sense of moral urgency.. with any videos I make.. in the future.. if they happen; and this is one of those videos, I'm just kind of fed up.
Alright, so the first thing (on my notes rather than necessarily the first step) of what would an age of economic reason look like: the pursuit of truth based on the likelihood that all evidence is leading to in mainstream academic and economic thought. Now would an age of economic reason start this way? No, because it would have to be a gradual movement towards that, but for it to be sustained, it would need to infiltrate those areas.. Keynesian economics, pro-debt economics, which probably is broader than Keynesian economics, that would have to go (can exist but not be mainstream). This wokeness or social justice view of things that doesn't allow reason or empiricism, that would have to go (can exist but not be mainstream).
And.. so my belief is that probability— which the way I'm using the word, it's synonymous with likelihood— this underscores all reason. So any time somebody's reasoning for something that's absolutely certain, outside of a meditative experience, within the realm of symbols— for instance language or math—so within the realm of symbols.. whenever they're doing that they're actually within the realm of probability; they can't have, at least, generally speaking, when talking about most things, they they can only have certainty within the realm of probability— not.. absolutely.
And it gets difficult because if we start talking about spiritual, religious, meditative experiences, or if we denote that there is—like Nassim Taleb talks about— there's a realm of faith that can be separate from reason.. like Roger Scruton talks about in his book that I haven't finished yet, but.. I've started to read.. “Soul of the World”.. if there is dimensions beyond space-time then.. you can't use something like.. symbolic language.. like math or language, or symbols in general— because to describe these dimensions outside of space-time totally accurately, necessarily.. you're using something that's constrained within space time (symbols, arguably), so that's a giant mind fuck.
But just to go off on a tangent about that.. so the thing about probability is you need to correct biases, but not in this woke way that doesn't allow a criticism of itself. There's there's an equal allowance of criticism in this bias correction, in this endless bias correction, and the foundation of the bias correction is the likelihood (or probability) of evidence. When you are able to have situations where you have enough evidence the scales on one end, to compared to the other end.
And I would also argue— but I'm not going to go into it because I need to flesh the arguments out more— that this probability deduction.. I was using probabilistic thinking but probability deduction is a better term, I think— but this likelihoodness or likelihood, probability deduction, is is innate. So we have this inborn capacity, or it appears that we do, to deduce probability to some degree, but we have to enhance that more in order to get to the more likely, or more probable truths. Otherwise, we get hijacked by less likely or less probable ideas, or sets of ideas— which are ideologies, and when we get hijacked, we more likely or more probably end up with worse outcomes for ourselves and others in life. And that's what's happening right now with wokeness.. which appears to me to generally be a mishmash of radical academic feminism with post-modernism. I've been reading about that. I've almost finished the book “Cynical Theories by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose”, it's difficult to read because it's so.. to paraphrase Stephen Pinker, intellectually vacuous.
But wow, that was a huge tangent, so back to my paper— which I'm having trouble holding my phone, I gotta switch my grip (for recording)— so I believe that this.. deduction of probability— and there you can see my um.. my towel rack fell off the wall and.. I don't even know how to get that shit back on, because it was never connected right in the first place— so I believe this probability or likelihood deduction leads heavily into Austrian/Chicago school economics. And when I talk politics or policy I see that as inseparable from economics. I see economics as inseparable from.. politics. I see them pretty much, as almost as the same thing, and so it's very hard for me.. some people think I'm political, but I feel like I'm economic, economics concerns everyone, and everyone should be concerned about economics, and because economics and politics are so deeply intertwined actually.. everyone should be concerned about politics.
It seems like the vast majority of people in America kind of just.. they just want to live their lives, and that they would like everything to just mostly run smoothly, and in order for that to happen, there has to be an age of economic reason, there has to be a.. shift in mainstream consciousness— let's not even say mainstream thought, let's say mainstream consciousness because.. that covers more ground I think.. with how difficult it is for social movements to manifest without totalitarianism; for them to manifest slowly and messily, but more peacefully, in (a) classical liberal society.. or we could just say liberal society because— and this goes back to me reading Cynical Theories recently— illiberalism goes along with totalitarianism, or at least.. I don't want to say that it's.. it’s only that, but.. it goes along with worse outcomes.
And you can't force changes that are positive, it seems like.. you have to have it the peaceful way.. the maybe the reason for that, is that it turns violent and then you end up with the concept of traumatic reenactment: you just end up with people meeting violence with violence, it just turns into a cycle of hate; and so you're just moving backwards, you're moving socially backwards. And.. wokeness is kind of like, it's kind of like in some sense a cycle of.. partially a cycle of hate and it's getting to the point of violence slowly, to the point of justifying violence (between Antifa protesters and trans surgeries on minors I obviously misspoke here). But.. some people would argue differently that it's already there— it's definitely getting more forceful, and it's totally infiltrated— well not “totally”, I don't want to use that word, but it's heavily infiltrated the current American federal government unfortunately.
Which I don't have much faith in the intelligence level of governments to begin with. And.. if you read The Gulag Archipelago, it certainly won't help with that; which I couldn't make it, I still have to finish that because that book's dark as hell. But I keep going off on tangents here, but I figure that'll probably make the video more interesting too— so Austrian/Chicago school economics— I'm going to go way down to the bottom here (on the paper with notes I am holding in the video), it's basically free market economics, and it's deeply involved with this idea of less government, but not anarchy.. it's what I call the imbalanced balance of the protection of life, property, and liberty, and what do I mean by that? To maximize the standard of living— or you could say quality of life— and that goes along with both minimizing the cost of living, and increasing innovation which increases wealth, and increasing wealth outside of that as well..
So you have a protection of life and property, but you try to figure out through this pursuit of unbiased probability deduction, or less biased probability deduction or likelihood deduction, which is the foundation of all reason, and like I said before where everything is allowed to be under equal scrutiny— it's not like wokeness is, or like some people treat religion, where you're not allowed to criticize it with the weight of all the present evidence.. and I'm not anti-religious or pro-religious I'm just saying.. in some cases.. specifically with the (religious) human rights abuses that becomes a problem.. so you want to get.. more liberty than the protection of life and property (thus the imbalanced balance), I think which goes along with Austin/Chicago school economics— what they point to— because you have.. this higher intelligence (or at least intellectual potential) of the public in comparison to the government, because there's simply more people in the public than the government.
And.. you might say, “Well, you have a bunch of college-educated people they know more than the entirety of the nation.” And when it comes to keeping the nation running that's simply not true. “Intellectuals in Society by Thomas Sowell” is a great book on arguing why that's not true; but a really simple example I can point to which is also from Thomas Sowell, is taking America running the price system where it's the citizens versus when the Soviet Union, when their government tried to do it— which is a small minority of the citizens of the Soviet Union— they tried to handle over 26 million prices according to Thomas Sowell in his book Basic Economics Fifth Edition, and they failed miserably, and it was a nightmare; and then they went further, which is really cool (to connect the dots) if you go and look into The Gulag Archipelago, which I've read a little bit.. they (the Soviet Union) tried to blame it on these rebellious people within the country that didn't exist, these “wreckers”— and they would put in the newspaper it wasn't the government it was these “wreckers.”
And I've kind of been waiting for Biden to try to do something like that. But I suppose I was thinking about it, and I think the Biden Administration has— well the entire world has done that— with blaming covid for.. the economic problems the government caused. And.. the idea of free market economics, Austrian/Chicago school economics, that people with more choice run society better, and they innovate better, they solve social issues faster— or sometimes faster but ultimately better— it's better in the long term, in a utilitarian sense.. in a sense for the most people as possible. So they run things better, and then so the disagreement with that, especially from the left-leaning end is runaway capitalism, laissez-faire capitalism, that's going to cause some problems; it caused problems in the past. That's one of the reasons that the FDA was invented. And the FDA could use reform, it's not perfect, but neither is people just getting a killed on mass from products on the grocery store shelves because there's insufficient regulation. So it's a balancing act and I don't want to try to say it's not.
But Milton Friedman had a suggestion that I think’s worth looking into, probabilistically, to try to look into it without bias, and that's having accessible tort law but also not having to be bound by it— by a tort law meaning like lawsuits— where it's highly accessible to citizens, but it's also highly fair, and trying to get that system figured out that's really the big issue here, for an “Age of Economic Reason”, for an “Economic Enlightenment”, because that is how you replace nanny state law; that's how you give people freedom, and the extra sense of responsibility that comes with freedom, and the building of character that comes with that extra freedom and responsibility.. which translates to society at large (beyond the individual), which changes society for the better. With nanny state law, it's kind of similar to welfare, where we could say targeted welfare, or unequal.. maybe the best way to put it is unequal welfare, or favoritistic (not a real word, should have said favoritist, but helps denote potential for change like my using the word probabilistic instead of probable) welfare, which seems to have negative effects on people's overall perception of themselves and their agency and.. it does help people, but it also seems to hurt society a great deal.
And I have an answer to this, though I think it might be better to implement in a debt-free nation. And so my answer is called Pro-Wealth U.B.I., and the idea is it's a percentage rate that every adult citizen gets in place of all other forms of welfare, and any kind of grants they get are no longer selective, they're no longer favoritistic policy (essentially the only grant is the Pro-Wealth UBI payment). Cronyism.. people tend to think it's like rich people getting goodies from the government— I don't like that term because of that thought— I prefer “favoritist policy” to “cronyism” (or “crony policy) though I consider both to be forms of intermediate socialism; it's basically just “socialism light”, and that's where America is right now. It's socialism light and it's slowly trying to inch towards the real thing, and just cause economic mayhem, because everybody's heads in the clouds, and they aren't they aren't thinking with equal scrutiny; they aren't trying to look at all the available evidence, and think with equal scrutiny, because sometimes that hurts emotionally, because there's a lot of tragedy and poetic darkness in reality; and to get the good outcomes you have to look at things for what they are. Otherwise, you end up with wokeness, where you just see the social problems, but you spin in circles and go nowhere with those problems.
And you can see these politicians, they're just making everything worse, because they can only see what the social problems are. They can't fix them (for those who actually want to) because they won't look into the darkness, in the sense of looking at all valuable evidence, and having equality of scrutiny— equality of criticism— which is important when you have an ideology that's mainstream, like wokeness, or like pro-debt economics, and then you look around you year after year— or in the case of pro-debt economics— decade after decade, America is not getting better.. so when are you going to wake up to the fact that, maybe this ideology you hold so dear is the reason for that.
So.. “Pro-Wealth UBI”: it's a flat rate percentage rate for all adult citizens to the degree we can get it to them— there are homeless people (who can potentially be difficult to reach)— but.. I believe charity rises with more prosperity; and you shrink unnecessary inflation, regulation, taxation, and expansion in government, you get more prosperity, then you get likely, more charity. Not to mention before I go (back) to Pro-Wealth UBI, (if) you get rid of the minimum wage— Thomas Sowell has talked about this.. Walter E. Williams (has also)— (if) you get rid of the minimum wage, people who can't get disability, teenagers struggling to get a job, or younger people struggling to get a job, (and) homeless, they're all these people who for some reason they're like zero (wage/income), are very close to zero (wage/income), there’s this possibility that all these simpler jobs open up in the economy where there is no minimum wage.
And what that means is prosperity rises, especially if you're not taxing the crap out of these low wages, (or better yet) they're not taxing them at all, prosperity rises for all these people who were making less; and so their standard of living gets better.. at least theoretically; and I mean they get really easy jobs, you could have like some sort of thing where there's vetted homeless people watching people's porches for porch thieves so their packages (are) getting to them.. that's one idea I thought, but you don't know.. even just gig jobs, there could be a ton of just gig jobs for all these people that would otherwise not be making as much money.
So the nation gets out of debt, stays debt free (in an Economic Enlightenment), unless at war— historically speaking, it's a good thing to go into debt when you're in a serious war, because you need all the resources you can get; or maybe in the case of facing a significant chance of an extinction event, because that's the equivalent of war with nature, pretty much.. a world war with nature. And that could definitely happen in the future. And the fact that our politicians don't talk about that is just because their capacity to think in the long term is too limited (or they are evil), and we don't know how much time we actually have in that regard. I mean we probably have a ton of time, but it's still kind of dumb— or maybe I should probably use the word ignorant, trying not to be polemic. It's kind of ignorant to me to ignore the chance for extinction events.
So (there should be) extreme equal liberty under the law: equality of punishment and equality of opportunity. You can't have equality of outcome because, many people talked about this, it gets rid of equality of opportunity.
Alright.. man, I'm not used to talking this much, fuck. So.. (back to) Pro-Wealth UBI, basically my idea here is, we use probability or likelihood deduction, and we make sure that we have a flat rate percentage for all adult citizens, and we make sure that this doesn't.. (train horns play in the background of my video) wow, damn trains.. so we make sure it's statistically, we look at this, based on probability/likelihood deduction in the pursuit of that with as least bias as possible. And to make sure that it's doing very little to hurt the incentive for wealth creation and for the wealthy to stay in the nation (thus it lives up to its name as Pro Wealth UBI). And so that's the key alongside UBI replacing all other forms of welfare, and so that's my version of UBI.. sorry it took me so long to spew out. That's what I call “Pro-Wealth UBI”.
So here's another thing, and here's the big problem with libertarianism, and why I’ve become on the fence with it— even though I feel it's mostly good. But, it struggles in both domestic defense with its murky open borders views.. or borders views, immigration views; and it struggles in foreign defense with its seeming ignorance of the complexity of geopolitics or geopolitical history. It's just geopolitics is complex and chaotic, and.. if you're gonna look at history with this capacity for equal scrutiny, but ultimately where your likelihood of truth is based on the pursuit of.. as unbiased as possible view of where all the evidence suggests— when you when you look at history that way— I think that you need sufficient defense as a nation, or even before that as a tribe; so (there should be) small government, you know, in that sense: no inflation, reasonable regulation, reasonable taxation, and reasonable size of government— not an excessive expansion; but you still have sufficient defense, both domestic and foreign.. and so that's where I think that Republicans beat Libertarians, and where it would just be better for Libertarians to— I don't think it'll happen— but to just get rid of the party and merge with Republicans. At least I'm skeptical that would happen in my lifetime.
Oh, and so the other reason for this sufficient defense is, it could help to a degree with extinction events, stopping them, because the kind of military arms race, it seems historically embedded in us, but it could end up being— hopefully not in the long term— nations against nations, which could cause a genocidal hell, but nations against nature, saving us from an even worse genocidal hell: an extinction event of some sort.
So along with this idea of no “favoritist” policy, I'm really for a flat income tax with no loopholes— flat percentage income tax— and so my views, the more rich you are, they hurt you a little more than everyone else.. but the goal here is that you're rich enough in this nation, that it doesn't hurt you so much that you give a damn. And that's really important. And the goal is to really use reason, and use this pursuit of less bias and understanding of things like logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and anything like that.. that has the majority of evidence behind it to assume its likelihood, that it is a bias outside of any kind of cultural relativist crap; because the thing about that, whether it's wokeness or some other form of cultural relativism, some kind of nihilism, or just a kind of knowledge relativism (in the sense that it pulls human beings away from critical/probabilistic thinking and subsequently the scientific-method), ultimately there's probability in the world, and— not always (is the following the case)— but it's going to affect your survival the survival of your loved ones (depending on your ability to understand what is most likely).
So you have this veneer of safety and civilization, but bad things happen all the time. And (your likelihood/probability awareness is) not just survivability, but just bad outcomes (come from having less of it). If you want more good outcomes you have to be willing to entertain this view of reality based on likelihood and the pursuit of eliminating biases with an openness to equality of skepticism. Now I guess I'll close with: when I was using this term equality with skepticism, that can be construed as cultural relativism, and that's not what I mean by that term. But what I'm trying to get at more is the capacity within you to attack ideologies that you might hold more dear— or that might be literally ideas or sets of ideas aka ideologies, (which) might literally be part of your own identity. And by doing this (attacking or flawmanning), you can quite possibly increase good outcomes in your life far more than what you would attacking ideologies that you believe in less, or don't believe— that aren't so close to who you feel you are.
Okay so this is my second day of filming, because I want to squeeze some more stuff in. I'm a little congested because I had a bunch of stuff I shouldn't have right before trying to film this, so bear with me. I think I got myself ready to film so I'm going to try to get through this in one go.
So the first thing I want to say is that in an “Age of Economic Reason”, grants are favoritist or crony policy— or crony capitalist policy— so they wouldn't exist. But on the way to that non-existence, it's more responsible to use Thomas Sowell’s arguments in the book Intellectuals and Society, which go along with Austrian/Chicago/free-market economics, and turn them (grants) into UBI-like stimulus payments that are equal (in their amount) among adult citizens (rather than having any other form of grant or public welfare); and the reason for that— it's annoying having congestion— so the reason for that is that the more money people have, that money acts like a vote in the economy, and with favoritist or crony policy— even if it's something like a bridge card (using this term as a synonym for food stamps)— that money wasn't earned through a product or service, and so it's a vote towards food companies that makes the market more unequal.
Now some people are are going to get mad at me for attacking welfare, but like I've said before, I support UBI in place of existing welfare programs. So I'm not totally anti-welfare, but some people are, and I want to address that too— so I'll address that in a bit. So any kind of grant is disrupting the market— disrupting market competition, and market competition is a very important principle in Austrian/Chicago/free-market economics— which maybe we could say is a broader term for those two (the term free-market economics)— (grants disrupt markets) because the more market competition there is in the long-term, generally speaking, the better the standard of living or quality of life gets.. and it raises innovation through this survival pressure where the businesses are the ones trying to survive; so it's animal kingdom-like but not in such a brutal fashion. And because there's an equal playing field in the market, the government's not screwing around with unnecessary regulations that could be handled by lawsuits and by public consensus— which.. I'll repeat that again later, because I have notes on that on my (white)board— I'm losing my train of thought.
So market competition (generally) causes more innovation inside businesses and outside businesses; so more innovation for the people that are working in the businesses— better conditions I should say, not just better production, but better conditions; and better conditions, generally speaking, both inside (the business) and for consumers. Prices drop as a result of competition because if there's more people competing that's one of the ways that they can draw on consumers if they can afford price drops to beat their competitors; and if they want, you know, the best workers, (Thomas) Sowell has talked about in a healthy economy, there's a perpetual labor shortage, and we can also say that that can happen in an unhealthy economy. One of the ways that businesses can attract workers is through making working conditions better; like better benefits or pay, better work-life balance, and they get the pressure on them, to do this, with the fairer the market is, through preferably no inflation, (and) rational regulation, taxation, and government size, so there isn't a bunch of unneeded expansion or unneeded large size in government.
This is why it's so important to have a level playing field in the market, and to not move so much towards nanny state law, and bigger government, because these favoritist policies pop up; whether it's something for the lobbyist, for the super rich, which we associate with (with the term) cronyism, or if it's something like bridge cards (food stamps) or social security— which.. I want to touch on that really quick.. Joe Jorgensen who is running for president the last (US) election as of filming this video, she believed that we needed to get rid of it (social security), but obviously there's a lot of baby boomers depending on it for retirement; so there had to be an intellectual way of doing that, to appease everyone. And so she came up with this opt-out system, so that we can move towards more economic reason in the economy, but these people still have access to this program they paid into, in order to retire. Which it is essentially.. it's an unsustainable program.. it's a government Ponzi scheme. And a lot of Boomers don't like hearing that, but I mean, I agree they paid into it, and they should have it, for them to be able to retire, I think that's fair. And I think that they should be pissed off if something like that were to disappear; but at the same time.. it needs to be opt out, because it is unsustainable ultimately, at least that's that's how I view it.
Earlier in the video, towards the end of my original footage, when I was talking about equal scrutiny, as there is a lack of it, for example in big government economics, and Keynesian economics.. we all know that debt is bad on the individual level, or the level of the family, but somehow, it's just totally okay if it scales up to government (wrong). Government can take as much— can print as much money as it wants— and there's no consequences, and that's total BS. I said.. to get away from this you should get away from ideology that's close to you that you believe in; and I forgot that there's also ideology that.. it's only close to you in the sense that you fear criticizing it. And so you should also have the capacity for skepticism towards ideology that you are afraid to question or criticize, also.
So I also wanted to make a quick note that I.. I'm bad at using synonymous terms (meant to say phrases rather than terms) as opposed to synonyms. And there's some strengths to teaching with synonyms with different words that mean the same thing that sometimes one word will click better with people than another, so there's some strength to that. But it can also turn into.. people struggle to decipher what I'm saying more, and that kind of turn into what is called the equivocation fallacies, which is something I've learned from John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series on YouTube. So this was kind of a more unscripted video.. I just wanted to try to get all the ideas out.. so that I could actually make it.. get it out there. So if it's a little messy, it's not perfect, if terms aren't perfectly defined, I apologize for that. I hope that it'll be comprehensible— I would say that I could try to answer questions in comment sections.. but with YouTube, the comment section is so heavily censored, and bizarrely censored, that.. I don't know if your comment will show up.. if my comment will show up.. that's just how YouTube has become now. But I'm going to put this on Bitchute too, even though I'm rarely on there, but I will put it on there (it’s now exclusively on Rumble and Substack). So, yeah.. I'm too busy thinking about things like this to clean my bathroom (bad joke), but.. maybe I can get that done this week.
So the other thing I got on this side of the paper (of my notes), we need to go back to the gold standard; we don't need a central bank in an age of economic reason, and let me see what I got on here (on my notes).. I'm going to talk about that on my whiteboard, about what why that reason is. But I had the note there so.. I guess.. we’ll go back to that in a sec..
So the “no welfare people”.. they believe there shouldn't be any welfare, not even UBI. We have a longer history with hunter-gather tribes than we do with civilization, a much longer history, from what I understand; and we could argue that public charity is kind of a part of that, maybe. But I think that anecdotally it's observable that there's many people, probably more so left-leaning, that, in any given nation, are going to be pro-some-kind-of-welfare, some kind of safety net.. that's kind of part of belonging to that nation, part of.. social belonging, that maybe goes back to sharing between people who know each other and hunter-gatherer tribes. It's kind of an evo-psych/evolutionary psychology thing. So maybe if the economy is way, way better— (where) prosperity is way, way better for the average person as a result of that, because of less inflation, regulation, taxation, and expansion or size in the government.. you would have so much charity and so much wealth, and lax enough rules that you wouldn't really need these (welfare) programs. And.. I mean that's definitely possible, but we just don't know.
And I think even if that's possible.. having what I call the Pro-Wealth UBI, which if we look at statistics and see that it doesn't hurt wealth creation, or drive the wealthy out of the nation (out of frustration), that could be a good stepping stone towards a society without any welfare, in the very, very long term future: where it would be mostly agreed upon by people due to so much prosperity.
But I think if that society's possible.. we should think about it in baby steps, because getting to a point where (rational) UBI overtakes all other forms of welfare might not happen in our lifetimes. So.. I want to address people that are.. when I talk about minimum wage— getting rid of it— the good that it can do.. they're going to say, “Well there's a lot of people that can't afford the cost of living and that's why minimum wage laws exist.” But I want to run this by you, which is that minimum wage laws are demanded, because government intervention (crony/favoritist capitalism) causes higher costs of living.
So the taxation that's unneeded, unneeded regulation which goes along with what's favoritist policy— another example of this is people with kids getting tax breaks that single people don't— or married people.. I should say, I'm not sure if it's a single people with kids also.. but it's favoritist policy— but that's just one example. People.. they like to have these extra.. these regulations that are working for them, or this money that's working for them, when the law is working for them and then they get mad when it's not (and the favoritism is working for someone else). And the only and best solution for this, is the equal playing field, where the only time anyone gets screwed, is (by fair market competition or) when the rich are getting taxed more from let's say this flat percentage income tax, or from UBI as equally divided out, and it's not so much that they care to leave the country or that.. the vast majority of them statistically feels it’s a burden. So yeah.. minimum wage.. the demand for it.. it's demanding more government because of (the economic problems created by) more government; so it's actually insane.
So.. I'm not sure if I just mentioned that earlier.. (that) favoritist policy, like unequal welfare payments, whether they would be in UBI or not in UBI, for adult citizens, disrupts market competition. And this lowers innovation inside and outside the companies, or it can lower that innovation— (for companies) that survive, which lowers standards of living. So, there's a great example— it's not my example— of the department of motor vehicles and how terrible the service is there, and it's (generally) because they have no market competition. So the service is terrible compared to if you walk into a small bank; there's banks everywhere vying for your business, so the service is much better. You get somebody who's more likely to smile at you, and try to get you in and out. The Department of Motor Vehicles, you take a number, you sit, it can be a while.. government services aren't that great; this is another reason why our school choice is so important.. because you can throw all the money you want at public schools, it doesn't increase market competition, so it doesn't increase innovation.
These regulations also get in the way.. they (generally) make the schools worse. All these regulations, they drive up prices in industries, like for example in America: babysitting, funeral homes, and the whole medical industry. The regulations in the medical industry are pretty much the major problem (with it), and.. nobody seems to see it.. none of the politicians.. they don't seem to want to tackle it. So I think I've explained market-competition fairly well, now, which I didn't do before; and that goes along with free-market economics.
I want to talk about equality of outcome, which is what the woke people want, and it's essentially the justification for favoritist policy (in their ideology), which attacks equality of opportunity in the market, which attacks the standard of living long-term. And so Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams, they're both black economists, (and) free-market economists, they're talking about this.. how affirmative action would cause minorities to get sent to colleges where they would inevitably fail, because those colleges were not the right fit for them. And that's not just minorities, that's a lot of people. Certain colleges are more intense than other colleges, and sometimes not going to one of the best colleges is how people succeed in life. Sometimes going to some place like MIT or Harvard is actually going to cause somebody to fail in college, so that's just one example (of the failure of politically pursuing equality of outcome) that the political left really doesn't like.
Alright, so I want to get through my whiteboard stuff here, it's really sloppy (handwriting).. so I wanted to talk about how, when you get rid of nanny state law— I already talked about how lawsuits being accessible and fair.. that's really important. But another thing that's really important is negative word of mouth, how that will prevent consumers and employers helping companies survive that are bad or cause human rights abuses; and this protects human rights without this need for nanny state law, for excess government intervention. So going along with this idea of the imbalanced balance of the protection of life, property, and liberty, you want a sufficient but basic protection of life and property— you want.. sufficient defense, but you have to be careful; like for instance, there's a lot of controversy around a motorcycle helmet laws, and the statistics are pretty clear, that without a helmet your chances of bad things happening, including death, get much higher.
But.. the police.. we don't need to be making their jobs harder, we don't need to be making them adult babysitters; they need to be going after crimes with victims, so that their time is spent as best as possible, because they have limited time and attention to give in their job— and if we make their job more stressful.. it might dissuade people from wanting to even become cops; and if we don't have enough cops, then we can't protect the market, and we can't protect life and property. If we can't protect life and property, and equal liberty, to some extent, society falls apart. And when you have extreme equal liberty protected, on top of a balance of sufficient protection of life and property— as far as how it's protected through the government.. but then as I've talked about before, it's also protected through the public, through mechanisms like negative word of mouth and through lawsuits or private settlements— then you have an age of economic reason I would argue.
So.. I was going to talk about the gold standard earlier.. why we need to go back to it. So this is just my understanding, I'm not an economist— with some colleges maybe that's a good thing, that I don't know what they know. But gold has a long-standing and present demand, combined with sufficient scarcity.. to make the gold standard cause global policing of any nation's particular political spending with the gold standard, which was what was happening with the United States as I understand it, when they still were on the gold standard— through the other nations choosing whether or not to invest in their currency, that's on the gold standard, and how much they choose to invest; which affects its foreign exchange value, affecting its value not only in that market, but also to buy products and services in other countries. So the politicians in America would think twice before driving up these crazy deficits because it would hurt the dollar in the long term.. because other countries would say, “Well.. do they have enough gold to back these dollars that they're printing.. Can we actually get our gold that they claim that they have, for the amount of money that they're printing?” And so it was a mechanism that seemed to work.
And is there any kryptonite to the gold standard? I think there is, that we’ll need a replacement for it, if space mining causes us to have a giant surplus of gold in the future. And who knows if that'll be.. how distant in the future that'll be, I don't know. But I mean that is a possibility.
So I had over here (on my whiteboard): favoritist policy, or crony policy, crony capitalist policy.. monopolizes our time and attention.. I would argue. And how it does this, is that it gives special favors, to individuals or businesses through the government; it's essentially.. it's “legal plunder benefits” through law or money. And profit is supposed to come through serving others, through a product or service. Profit is not supposed to come unequally through the government; it can't do that without causing disruptions in the freedom of the market; and these can cause things that that weren't innovative.. as innovative.. to monopolize our time and attention; so our time and attention is monopolized by less innovative things, as a result of favoritist policy, if that makes sense. So that's reducing our individual and collective intelligence, and subsequently innovation, and subsequently prosperity or wealth.
And that could branch out in so many different ways. The Pell Grant seems to be causing colleges to be structured poorly, and be full of woke radical academics taking over everything, and brainwashing young people; and (there’s) the ridiculous prices in colleges that have manifested from this free money that was not earned through an equal playing field, through providing the best products or services. That's just one example how colleges aren't turning out the level of innovation that they could be.
So to move on.. okay.. so I've been really debating myself about this. Work-life balance law. So before I started filming this portion of the video, I checked, and there are some laws in America.. in states that have these laws— and I'm sure there's laws (like this) in other countries. And this would be a form of government interventionism, which is generally Austrian/Chicago economics— more broadly free market economics— libertarian thought and some Republicans.. they're kind of against this. Normally it's.. normally like I said (with government interventionism as a generalization), it's not a good thing. And so I don't know how this could negatively affect industries.. here's my idea: You can only work 8 hours in 24 hours, and you have to have two days off back-to-back— as far as voluntary working goes... or I mean involuntary working I'm sorry— so involuntary working you can only do 8 hours in 24 hours, and you have to have two days off back-to-back, if you want them, within a week. So you don't get hit with more than 40 hours involuntarily in a week.
Now there's some jobs where it's like, “Okay, so this guy's in the middle of a blizzard or something.. working on.. a power outage; and he's just up to 40 hours or he’s at his 8 hours, and he just wants to go home; and the government could allow for that (to the detriment of people who want electricity).. here’s an example of how this could go horribly wrong. But here's the other thing, this is not favoritist policy.. it could be implemented across the board, and maybe there would be some really big problems with it, if it was done broadly like that; but then it wouldn't be favoritist policy— it would be like UBI for all adult citizens in a sense. And then the other argument for it is that you have limited time, while you're alive, you could be dead tomorrow.. and even if it hurts profits, or GDP, or whatever, it's like one more dollar over limited life— the Harvard Grant study goes into, that was this very long study done.. goes into how success and longevity of life has to do with the warmth and depth of relationships. And if you're just being forced to work longer then you might not be building as much warmth or depth in relationships outside of people at work.
Here's another problem with it.. so the people in the Austrian/Chicago economics camp might say, or I might steelman myself, play devil's advocate and say, “Well, if we had this kind of age of economic reason, we wouldn't have these issues, where.. there would be lots more jobs open, there would be lots more market-competition. So there would be more of a gig economy, there would be more jobs with really humane work-life balance.. that have death awareness, and actually treat their employees more like they're human beings.” And like maybe.. there should only be so many hours, and the next dollar is not worth so many hours if the person doesn't voluntarily want it. And and so they could they could argue that; but we're not there, we’re in a shitshow economy which I would call “crony (fascist) capitalism” or “intermediate socialism” where it just seems like there's so much government interventionism, that's wrecking everything.
And this (work-life balance policy) is government interventionism that's a little different, because it's for everyone, it's for free time, and you have limited time. You can always make more money, and use that to get things, and try to move up; but you have to go into pretty extreme debt with college, and go into the right career, to maybe get a work week with pay that you can live off of— as far as America goes— and to actually have like a humane.. work-life balance, where you're actually not just being treated like you couldn't die tomorrow. So I am gonna say I am on the fence with this (work-life balance policy), because ultimately I want to go where the evidence points me.. but it seems like it a good idea; because capitalism too unrestrained does become predatory, and I don't know if even really extreme market-competition could fix this or not.
This is something I've seen firsthand. You see it, you read about it, you read about people on strikes and stuff. So it's something I wish that more politicians would experiment with.. at least so we can kind of study it and see what happens. But I feel like maybe it could be better than worse in the long-term, because it's giving people a sense of free time; and they're not stuck in a market where they either: have to take these jobs where (they have no free-time or) they have lots of free time, but they just cannot live off the wages because the government intervention has screwed the wages so badly— and that goes along with the Federal Reserve just printing out money.. because they don't seem to understand that debt.. just as it's bad for the individual or the family, it's bad for the government.. they can't wrap their heads around that (at the time of making this video I didn’t realize some of them are simply anti-American globalist criminals)— they've gone too far into this kind of economic sophistry or (poorly) intellectualizing of this belief that inflation is good— and the vast majority of people in any government where that happens, they're the ones paying for it the most.
So.. I talk so much that I lose my train of thought but this is just the last thing I wanted to talk about. It's something to think about, work-life balance law. So these are just some of my thoughts.. by no means exhaustive or perfect, on this topic, of what an “Economic Enlightenment” or “Age of Economic Reason” would look like. And I've been thinking about this for a long time, reading and listening, and trying to figure out what good economics looks like; and realizing that I might as well just categorize it in my mind as being synonymous with politics, which makes me look like an extremely political person— but it's actually my whole motivation for that is not some kind of desire to belong, some kind of like tribalism, in that way.. my whole motivation is that I wanted to go to college (in the past) and it was just too much money; and I thought I'd rather just stay out of debt. So.. it's the same as a normal American, maybe a normal person, I'm only interested in this stuff for the same reason as everyone else; but they haven't realized that they need to care about this stuff when they go and vote (or if they run for office), because if they don't they might vote for a less likely person (and people) to make their lives better (or be a less utilitarian politician); so that's all I have to say on that subject. Thanks for watching (and reading). Thanks for your time and attention.
Video: https://rumble.com/vw1wvp-what-would-an-economic-enlightenment-look-like.html