Oddbean

lol except that it isn’t and purely depends on perspective. One side would say it’s the corrupt billionaires because they are the ones corrupting the govt. the other side would say that the problem with the govt is that it is ALWAYS corrupted, so having it big and powerful is just creating incentives to *create* corrupt billionaires. In the market people actually have to appeal to voluntary customers. In govt they get stolen funds and contracts from the money printers. In other words they cannot be separated from each other. It’s a virtuous (or malicious?) feedback loop.

Governance is not a simple idea, so there are no simple answers. Yes, taking the meme literally is not the best way to understand the realities of our situation. Taxes are an inevitable part of cooperative society. You could try to exist outside of this, but now you also need a military, trade agreements, internal governance... and you've arrived back at cooperative society. It seems impossible to avoid "taxes", so a better angle would have an opinion on how they would work better. You also need some way to deciding how to run this cooperative agreement, which brings you into theory of government and basis of power. It's easiest to say that one dollar is one vote, but people with fewer dollars won't want to participate in that system. So you set up democracy so they feel like equals. They're not, but it's better than pointing out who's actually responsible for the state of the world. Soon they realize that democracy is a facade and dollars are power, so they try to redistribute the wealth in order to stabilize the social fabric. The wealthy don't want their wealth dissipated, and they push back by convincing voters that this thing they will benefit from isn't in their interest. You can see how this is going to vacillate. Which is how you arrive at the traditional strategy of old money: staying humble and stacking sats.

Because free markets don't allow for corporations, nevermind ones that have control and special licenses, monopolies, import/export contracts, defense contracts, regulatory and environmental permits, etc...

We’ve been great. Spent the weekend in the mountains with one of my best friends and his relatively new wife, and just bonded with them and had a grand old time. Now heading back city-ways to resume the mining of fiat 😁