Oddbean

💯 First we need to define what a free market means. John Locke laid the foundation in 1690 in his Two Treatises of Government, by deducing that every person is born free, own themselves and the fruits of their labor. This effectively renders slavery impossible - when we agree that in order to protect our own property rights, we also cannot own another person and the fruits of their labor. Following first principles, we can then deduce from Locke's groundwork that coercion is wrong, theft is a crime and that abuse and exploitation are abominable, since every person owns themselves and must be engaged with informed consent. A few principles that would characterize a genuine free market: 1. No central banks 2. No government moneyprinting 3. Competition in money 4. Full property rights for all 5. Free speech 6. No AML/KYC regulations A free market is the emergent process of adult free agency and voluntary exchange where the use of force and coercion is absent. A free market is a process of decentralized decisionmaking, where free agents interact and must convince one another toward interactions that leave both parties better off. As Aristotle noted, a trade will only occur when both parties are in agreement. We can deduce from this that if there is no consent there is no free market. Back to John Locke, who laid the philosophical foundation for the anti-slavery movement in 1690. Since you own yourself, your mind, body and the fruits of your labor, you must also own the monetary reward for your work. If you own the income from your work, then you must be free to spend and transact as you deem fit, without needing a permission. I.e. - a free market. A third party permission can be withdrawn and render your money unusable, which is why it is incompatible with the principle of owning the fruits of your labor. We can deduce from this that AML regulations are, ipso facto, an abolition of property rights. For a free market to work there must be competition in money, so that individuals can choose the form of money and that their income cannot be stolen via moneyprinting/inflation. As we have already established, theft is a violation of property rights which leaves us with the conclusion that moneyprinting is incompatible with a free market. Since owning yourself also means the liberty to express yourself - without harming the individual rights of others - speech must be free. Boundaries to free speech involve for example incitement toward physically harming other individuals, i.e. abolishing their individual rights. A free market also depends on free speech since consumers must be able to boycot bad products and services as well as report and warn the public of incompetence, lacking service or quality, harmful practices, poor management and mistreatment of staff. Only via free communication can a market be free and individual decisionmaking can be informed by facts of reality and the ethical judgement of individuals voting with their wallets and feet. Without free speech there can be no error-correction. From a programming perspective this is a deep can of worms: when errors compound without fixing, a complex code will inevitably spiral out of hand. Not only does this lead to harmful outcomes but it also leads to completely unpredictable results that will undermine any attempt to objectively analyze data and draw informed conclusions. As the effects of un-fixed errors snowball, a system becomes increasingly unstable and destructive, ripe for the risks of a deepening dictatorship. Overview of the logical outcomes of central planning, central banks and moneyprinting: 1. Governments + central banks create money from nothing. 2. The newly created money enters the economy via government spending, as well as from fractional reserve lending, and flow into real estate, assets, commodities, etc causing bubbles exploited by insiders and cantillionaires. 3. Price inflation, costs of living and house prices continuously go up as a result of moneyprintin, taxes, regulatioms and subsidies, while government debt increase. 4. Workers need higher wages due to the increasing costs of living. 5. Small businesses can't afford to pay higher wages plus increased costs of rent and must either close down, sell their business or move further away from city centers, thus losing revenue and allowing large corporations to eat up their market share. 6. Large corporations are incentivized to merge with government and acclimatize their protocols toward government ideology in order to access subsidies, tax reductions and to escape costly regulations. The more the regulations, the more government and corporations can be expected to become entangled and merged. This is how the process of corporatism is worsened, year by year. 7. The government uses major corporations for surveillance and ideological indoctrination against its employees and may pressure corporations to demand unsolicited medical treatment and/or injections for its staff. We saw this during Covid when, in many workplaces, an experimental mRNA was announced to be required in order to keep your job. This was an effect of government regulations and threats of costs and fines imposed for non-compliance. As the free market competition is strangled by the government rigging the markets, employees have increasing difficulties finding jobs that don't involve government surveillance, ideological conformity and mandatory medical procedures. 8. Workers are replaced by robots as inflation escalates and the costs of living drive up wages, while companies are incentivized to invest in machinery and robots rather than costly human staff. Unions threatening with strikes makes unionized employees less reliable and more risky for production and expanded regulations impose additonal costs for workers. The government can basically increase costly regulations to infinity in order to corporatise the market and centrally plan it via regulatory nudges. 9. As workers are replaced by robots, large segments of the population become dependent on government tax money redistribution + moneyprinting. We can expect that the conditions involved for receiving a UBI check will involve unpaid labor and/or compliance with government ideology. As a result of ideological obedience, error-correction is undermined and without critical voices opposing the regulations the complex fabric of societal code spirals downward toward unrestricted central planning. This is the 1984 dystopia we want to avoid, plagued by central planning tools such as CBDCs, carbon allowances, ESG, DEI, energy rationing, censorship, surveillance and social credit scores. Bitcoin is necessary to empower individual liberties, property rights, competition, free speech and enable the process of free markets and decentralized decisionmaking (individual sovereign judgement) to restore liberties and counteract the increasing centralization of power. Bitcoin is anti-1984 technology.