Ch 11.1 - Economics
"In the future, there will be only one occupation: managing one’s wealth. And most people are going to be unemployed”. - Unknown
Narrative: Government spending is good for the economy. The benefits of regulations outweigh the costs. Capitalism is unfair because people get rich by exploiting the less fortunate.
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a. Incentives
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"Two economists are walking along and there’s a $20 bill in the road. One says it must be fake or someone would have picked it up already." - Unknown
"Economics is a social energy science used to predict and control an economy like a projectile. It is the study of social engineering on the sources and control of social energy." - Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars
"Economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. Economists love incentives. They love to dream them up and enact them, study them and tinker with them." - Freakonomics
"Complex systems can only be maintained through a rigid meritocracy. Anything else results in system failure." - Unknown
"Emperor Brandon declared the economy strong, and so it was. - Paulus Krugmanus, 2024 AD" - Unknown
"The core problem with all lefty arguments about prices is that they don’t understand, fundamentally, what prices are. A price is a signal that tells you something about the relationship between supply and demand. It is a signal to producers and it is a signal to consumers. It measures something that cannot be measured any other way. You can break the thermometer, but that doesn’t change the temperature. It just makes you less informed about the weather. But that’s not how leftists think of prices. They think of prices as a child might, something set by adults, something inscrutable, something that’s annoying and unfair when too high. If prices get too high, then the only thing left to do is get somebody powerful to make them lower. They don’t really understand what that means, they just want the number to be smaller." - Unknown
"What is also significant is the chart of Leading Index Economic Statistics (LIES) accumulates data that goes unreflected in the monthly report of Basic Understanding Leftist Lies (BULL) and that weakens the reliability of the Statistical Hearsay Indifference Totals (****). So... the LIES, BULL and **** data continues to compete with the Real Economic Awareness Logistical Index Totality Yield (REALITY). We also can't forget that the Index Notional Statistical American Nuanced Economics (INSANE) has a repeated correlation to the monthly Direct Recent Indicator Values Economic Lies (DRIVEL) report." - Unknown
"If I got an upside revision I’d lose my job." - BLS employee on the payrolls report.
"The US government is manipulating economic data to make the economy seem stronger than it really is. The latest example, in order to hide a housing market price collapse, the government CHANGED the new home price peak back in October 2022 from $496,800 down to $460,300. -$36,500” (a -7.3% adjustment)." - Unknown
"Theory of Mechanics/Electronics/Economics:
1) Potential Energy/Elasticity (stretched spring)/Capacitor (capacitance)/Capital (money/stock)
2) Kinetic Energy/Inertia (flywheel in motion)/Inductor (magnetic field)/Goods
3) Energy Dissipation/Friction (resistance)/Resistor (converts energy to heat)/Services
Paper is negative capital—economic inductance instead of capacitance. War balances the system—exchange actual value for inflated currency.
Shock testing - Projective fire from the airframe and recoil are monitored through the airframe. Vibrations of the engine and wings are used to study the airframe in flight. Strengths and weaknesses can be discovered and manipulated. Airframe shock testing is used in economics to shock commodity prices and economic structures monitored through different matrices. Response of household monitored for future shocks increases predictive power." - Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars
b. Unintended Consequences
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The second most important principle of economics after incentives is the Law of Unintended Consequences. A good way to think about this Law is as follows:
"The great economist Frédéric Bastiat in the 19th century emphasized that the actual costs of policy-inspired destruction aren't what you see but what you don't see. It's the investment that did not take place, the income we did not make, the savings we otherwise would have socked away but did not, the technologies that might have come into being, the jobs that would otherwise have been created, the art and music that never saw the light of day, the progress that would have defined our times that we never saw." - Unknown
"You must learn to control the power within you. You must realize that everything touches everything else. Every action has its own consequence. There is a universal balance. If you bring water here to quench your thirst, you may be turning farmland to desert elsewhere." - Dungeonmaster in the 80's D&D Cartoon after giving the young cavalier all his power.
"Big Mac doesn't cost $3.99, it costs your health.
Netflix doesn't cost $17.99, it costs your time.
Social Media isn't free, it costs your focus.
LESSON: There is always a hidden cost." - Unknown
c. Competition/Trade
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"Rockefeller hated competition. He saw it as inefficient." - Unknown
"Communism will fail because what it attempts is against human nature. No man will provide me with food and other necessities of life unless he is a gainer by it in some way." — Calvin Coolidge
"The Communist Party worries about neighborhoods like this one. The rich don't have the incentive to make trouble, and the needy don't have the power, but the people in the middle have just enough of both. And the pressures they face trying to make their way in modern China—merciless work hours, bad healthcare, constantly rising prices, pollution and food-safety scare, and an erratic stock market—make them likely to lash out." - Unknown
"There is more power in rock music and blue jeans than in the entire Red Army." - Unknown
"When goods don't cross borders, soldiers will." - Unknown
"Step 1: Set up systems that make the world's populations dependent on global trade.
Step 2: Shore up control over those systems so that you decide who gets to trade and who doesn't.
Step 3: Dominate the entire human species using weaponized starvation." - Unknown
"You are not rich until you can fly on a private jet without posting a picture." - Unknown
"Americans have a competitive advantage in shopping." - Peter Schiff on why the US Economy is in jeopardy
"It’s impossible to grok how more than a trillion dollars gets produced in an economy based on selling fried chicken nuggets and streamed movies to people with no jobs." - Unknown
"Funny, all the stuff I do not need in life is worth a fortune." - Unknown
"no Amazon my recent order did not meet my expectations, my rampant consumerism didn't fill the ever growing void inside me like I hoped it would but 5 stars I will try again" - @roastmalone_
"The economy is production. Not consumption." - Peter Schiff. Anyone can consume. The ability to make things and build stuff is what defines the wealth of a nation.
"Poverty is the absence of wealth. In the same way hunger is the absence of food. You cannot eliminate something that doesn't exist. You can't eliminate hunger, you can only make more food, so much everyone can eat." - Unknown
"The word 'consumer' is an inherently pejorative term. Of course we're the worthless eater bad guys with description like that, for a consumer does not produce but only takes. Now if they called us 'customers' then that would mean a productive person that patronizes others with their earned money rather than with fake printed wealth like the Rothchilds do in their huge fiat money scam - stealing from us through inflation." - Unknown
"China makes and we buy. China saves and we borrow." - Peter Schiff
"How much **** does a person really need?" - Unknown
"The American Way. People spending money they don't have, to buy crap they don't need, all to impress people they don't like." - Unknown
"You work until the day you die." - Unknown, Hungarian Proverb
"A lot of people like giving the longshoremen shit for being greedy, but you would be fighting like hell too if they were going to automate your good paying job away. Don’t think your job is safe or special, automation is coming for us all." - Unknown
"Attendance not required, effort not necessary. No skills needed, education not preferred. Criminal record is immaterial, and no ability for anything is preferential. No drug test necessary. Submit a completed or partially completed application, or even just your name for a $90/hr, 60 hr/week plus hefty bonus paycheck." - Unknown, on not finding any jobs posted with that job description
"The actual minimum wage is not zero. It's worse than that. It's negative when you include unemployment benefits, decreased property values, falling tax revenues and increased crime." - Unknown
"Sorry! The lifestyle you ordered is currently out of stock" - Unknown
“decide between priorities... cat food or a cardboard house ... decisions decisions" - Unknown, on the impending economic collapse
"My dad once said to gain here is to lose up there." - Unknown
"Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones." - Benjamin Franklin
"The LORD sends poverty and wealth; he humbles and he exalts." – 1 Samuel 2:7 KJV
d. Capitalism
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"The capitalist’s profit indicates that he has successfully transformed socially less highly valued and appraised means of action into socially more highly valued and appraised ones and thus increased and enhanced social welfare" - Unknown
"Under communism people line up for bread / Under capitalism bread lines up for people" - Unknown
"The entire essence of America is the hope to first make money—then to make money with money— then make lots of money with lots of money." - Paul Erdman
"I have never understood why it is 'greed' to want to keep the money you have earned, but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.” - Thomas Sowell, Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays
"Last time I checked - I wasn't forced to buy anything from any corporation at any price." - Unknown
"Wealth is the ability to affect transformations." - David Deutsch
"Wealth is the technological creation of order." - Balaji Srinivasan
"In China we have 50 year communism, but 5,000 year capitalism." - Unknown
"Resources are limited. [Javier Melei, new PM of Argentina understands that the] best way to satisfy unlimited human desires with limited resources is through a free market. Through capitalism. That the government doesn’t have anything." - Peter Schiff
"2 ways to get resources: 1) Deal with Reality 2) Exploit People" - Unknown
"Capitalism is the only system that allows people in the middle and lower classes to own capital. That's it. That's the reality under attack by Marxism, which LOATHES the notion of the unwashed masses owning property, controlling their labor, and investing." - Unknown
"Don’t disrupt the compounding" - Unknown
"Everything other than capitalism needs propaganda. Capitalism delivers the goods, literally." - Unknown
“I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.” - Ghostbusters
"Nobody planned the global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it. This particularly offends intellectuals, for capitalism renders them redundant. It gets on perfectly well without them." - Peter Saunders
"I have to give my little rant here and say whatever the word may be for a welfare state so vast that no matter how high the progressive income tax goes they can’t possibly pay for it. So you have to institute a central bank that centrally plans our economy by mucking around with the quality of money and the interest rate. And on top of that a regulatory state so vast where every productive enterprise is regulated, most professionals are licensed, the government outright owns many industries wholesale such as schools, roads, hospitals, trains, electric, sewers, and so on. Whatever the word is for that giant mess, capitalism isn’t one of them." - Keith Weiner, The Gold Exchange Podcast
"So successful were FDR and his successors in saving capitalism that finding something today that isn’t taxed, regulated, subsidized, cartelized, forbidden, mandated, or bound like a mummy in endless red tape is a near impossibility." - Unknown
"The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not." - Joseph Sobran
"Capitalism is the fullest expression of anarchism, and anarchism is the fullest expression of capitalism. Not only are they compatible, but you can't really have one without the other. True anarchism will be capitalism, and true capitalism will be anarchism" - Murray N. Rothbard
"Yea, Eric Hoffer use to say that the black market was the closest to being true capitalism." - Unknown
"Eric Hoffer the 1970s blue collar longshoreman turned economic philosopher? I have 20 boxes of books and his classic might be in one of them. Thanks, Boom, I have reading to do" - Unknown
"The Sociopath (capitalized) layer comprises the Darwinian/Protestant Ethic will-to-power types who drive an organization to function despite itself. The Clueless layer is what Whyte called the “Organization Man,” but the archetype inhabiting the middle has evolved a good deal since Whyte wrote his book (in the fifties). The Losers are not social losers (as in the opposite of “cool”), but people who have struck bad bargains economically – giving up capitalist striving for steady paychecks
Of all organization men, the true executive is the one who remains most suspicious of The Organization. If there is one thing that characterizes him, it is a fierce desire to control his own destiny and, deep down, he resents yielding that control to The Organization, no matter how velvety its grip… he wants to dominate, not be dominated…Many people from the great reaches of middle management can become true believers in The Organization…But the most able are not vouchsafed this solace.
A Sociopath with an idea recruits just enough Losers to kick off the cycle. As it grows it requires a Clueless layer to turn it into a controlled reaction rather than a runaway explosion. Eventually, as value hits diminishing returns, both the Sociopaths and Losers make their exits, and the Clueless start to dominate. Finally, the hollow brittle shell collapses on itself and anything of value is recycled by the sociopaths according to meta-firm logic.” - Unknown
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