merchants and innocence

The process of marketing penalizes naivete. In other words, wishful thinking does not work well when your actions are subject to the kind of multi-lateral vote-with-your-wallet judgement present in a bazaar-like environment.

For example making something that is neighbourhood-friendly and expecting everyone to buy just because of that, even though it is expensive. Or Ford refusing to fancy-painting his cars because colour is not important. But this is extremely different from most of the moral fables about The Will of the Market®, which tend to equate business dynamics with a special kind of complete automatic fairness and dependability.

today’s predicament

The world is a mess. To say that something has to be done is naive and misleading. And still we should think about this predicament, we should be interested in it.

Everything is always falling. The world has always been failing. The nations are always dying and the empires are always ending. If you care to think for an instant that (and how) our society is but a flicker of self-righteousness amidst the flow of history, it’ll give you a new perspective — maybe even new ideas. The risk is you’ll also see that there are paths still open, there are ways we still have to go, and then… Will you be confused?

rent-seeking and creativity

Rent-seeking means that instead of creating economic value to exchange for your wants and needs you dupe the rest of society into transferring money to your bank account. It would be a kind of bureaucratic robbery, and it is essentially a form of free-riding.

One example would be for you, instead of being a fscking good designer, to find a way to pass a law whereby only people that went to design-school can be designers. There goes competition. For that matter you could say it is only people that went to the same design school you did, or only people who wear the same haircut as you do.

Now it seems ludicrous to demand someone to spend 4 years in college to use photoshop (and that is someone who did go to design school talking). But does it sound ludicrous to demand a Doctor to go to Medical Schools? Where lies the difference?

money as batteries

I find it almost impossible to discuss anything social (as in, anything that goes an inch beyond personalistic issues) with almost everyone because almost everyone holds an assumption that i think is not only wrong, but moronic wrong. So wrong it is stupid. The assumption is that money is the source of all things.

You can phrase it anyway you like, it still goes totally against any primary grade knowledge of economics. Money is a symbol. It is useless by definition, as in if it had a use the swings in that use would render it a bad means for exchange. So money is exchange, but it is also exchange in time, something you want to trade for something else at some other time. So, to be precise, money is savings.

Again, all of the above is the most basic economics. There’s nothing complicated or advanced there, simply because i know almost no economy at all. But the above leads to the obvious conclusion that money is not a source of anything, it is only a form of storage.

A descriptive metaphor would be: Money is like batteries, but the electric charge must come from somewhere else.