Good essay on what it means and doesn’t mean
TLDR: political marketplace is the best example of market failure
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I’m going to assume that wasn’t Friedman’s reaction to yesterday’s X article on “Militia.Money For Economists” featuring not only Milton Friedman but a good deal of what his article talks about.
He’s got the right idea about replacing votes as the abstract unit of force with money but I don’t see what he’s done to get to the root of the problem with money. In the final analysis, money is a force for obligate specialization hence an abstraction of group force. You can’t can get around that with something like collectibles (gold, shells, bitcoin, etc.) to avoid fiat money’s ability to mobilize group defense of property rights within a private monetary (hence property rights) regime.
As WD Hamilton laments in “Innate Social Aptitudes of Man: An Approach from Evolutionary Genetics”:
One hears that game theorists, trying to persuade people to play even two-person games like “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” often encounter exasperated remarks like: “There ought to be a law against such games!” Some of the main points of this paper can be summarized as an answer to this comment: that often, in real life, there is a law, and we can see why, and that sadly we also see the protean nature of this Dilemma, which, when suppressed at one level, gathers its strength at another.
Jefferson’s analogous lament was the forcible domestication of the tribes is made necessary by the true “mother of our invention”: civil society’s eusocial specialization, hence war-making requirement for high population densities. No amount of “non-aggression axiom” covert moralizing can get around this.
The only thing that I can see getting around it is seducing technological civilization into abandoning the biosphere with O’Neill’s answer to the question:
“Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?”
Perhaps when techciv gets used to the idea that making war on lifelessness in space can actually provide eusocialists everything they want from “civilization as we know it”, people will calm down enough to understand that individual male intrasexual selection is the best we can do to address the laments of both Hamilton (WD that is) and Jefferson.
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