Welcome to DeIndoctrination Camp, kids. Here you will learn all the things that Big Brother purposely left out of your public school programming. Let's start the fun with an old cartoon about Truth. Because sometimes the grandparents tell the best stories:
Just ask Tommy, the Neighborhood Lemonade King
Q: What is economics? A: It's the study of how needed materials and energy are
introduced into a biological community and then distributed.
Q: What is Politics? A: It is a ritualized, sublimated form of Warfare. Kinda
like sports, but more lethal.
Q: What is Warfare? A: A means of confiscating necessary resources from a
competitor through the use of coercive violence. When sublimated, the
confiscation is called taxes, and it's legalized theft.
Q: What are the forms of economics? A: For humans, there
really is only one. It is called Capitalism.
Q: What are the forms of Capitalism? A: There are only two. One is Free-Enterprise Capitalism,
which is governed by nature; and the other is State Capitalism, in which the
coercive power of government or artificial force supercede natural controls.
---Free Enterprise Capitalism is a natural system which
provides incentive to individuals to create new sources of wealth, and then
they redistribute it according to merit as they freely choose.
---State Capitalism uses the coercive power of Force to
over-ride the natural forces of Supply & Demand, Competition, and Free
Choice in order to attain more political power for itself. It is less concerned
with the introduction of new wealth, and more concerned with the
re-distribution of existing wealth.
Q: I still don't know what you mean by economics. Can you
elaborate on that? A: Yes. Rocks and stars don't have economics. They're inert.
They don't care. They just are. However, sometimes, with the right forces
acting upon them, their atoms form special complex molecules. These molecules
have a new property: they like to reproduce their structure. We call
self-replicating molecular forms "Life." Because the act of Living is
a Process, and not an inert State, it requires a bit more input that just
sitting around waiting for a supernova to happen.
All materials in the Universe obey the 2nd Law of
Thermodynamics. Life forms, being processes, are like little steam engines.
They require an input of energy in order to exist. They also have an output.
This input/process/output is called Economics.
How 'bout those ants? That ant hill is a marvel of
economics. The worker ants leave their little nest, find complex materials from
the outside environment, bring them back, and create new ants. Same with bees.
To an insect researcher, the mechanisms are complex, but it terms of economics
it is very simple. The little workers must bring back more stored energy in the
form of food than they expend, or the hive or nest will starve and die. This is
the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics: without coal to heat the water in the steam
engine's boiler, the Little Engine that once could now simply wont.
Q: I don't care about ants and trains. What's with human economics?
Humans are different.
A: Yes and no. Humans, like ants, operate with instinct, a
hard-wiring of in-built programming that determines behavior. Unlike ants,
however, humans also make huge use of extra-genetic, or learned information,
which also influences their behavior.
Therefore, humans are easily confused if their add-on
software is corrupted.
Q: Is that why human economists always disagree? A: Yes. Add to that the fact that humans are hard-wired to
disagree with one another, and no wonder humans are less predictable than
insects.
Q: But now I'm confused about human economics. There's
Capitalism, and Communism, and Socialism, and barter, etc. How do I figure all
this stuff out? A: You've been to public schools,
and your extra-genetic information
capability is operating with a bad Operating System, defective Drivers, and
conflicting patches and updates. Fortunately, you still have your hard-wired
instincts. And the freedom to absorb useful information from the outside world.
Q: Duh. A: OK, I'll simplify.
Free-Enterprise Capitalism is when you scrape the
ground with your bare hands and plant vegetables. These are plants. They gather
solar energy from the sun and grow food you can eat. You introduce this food
wealth into the human economy. You eat some of it. You trade the rest to a
friend who knows how to make metal. He trades some of it to a friend who knows
how to find and dig iron ore from the ground. They have another friend who can
machine metal, and he makes an iron plow you can use. You promise to pay him
some vegetables in exchange for the plow. Suddenly, you find you can plant and
harvest huge amounts with greater efficiency. Everybody who works in this chain
of events gets enough to eat. This is called "Free-Enterprise
Capitalism." If someone else makes a better plow, then you change your
plow vendor and buy the better model. If your vegetables taste horrible, and no
one wants them, then you'll have trouble trading them. You'll have to do
something else. Try fruit trees, or just buy lemons and trade lemonade to the
metal worker in exchange for a really good juicer. Or go into politics.
State Capitalism is when nobody "owns" anything, and they "share" everything, including their labor, with the collective state as ordered by the Government. The Government decides where to dig, what to plant, where to distribute it, and it's price, according to the "experts" in the government. The Government provides the tools to the farmer that it determines are the "best" tools, and it tells the tool makers exactly what to make. This Government is very important. Since these government "experts" control all the wealth on behalf of "the people," they have absolute power. And absolute power corrupts. All State Capitalist economic systems, even if established by democratic consent will therefore devolve into a totalitarian and tyranical Monopoly. And the harder-working, more enterprising individuals who see their labor going to slackers and government officials, will shrug with the lack of incentive.
Unless there's a gun at their back, which usually ends up being the case.
