Why? The Purpose of the Universe by Philip Goff

I think there's a fair amount of all-or-nothing thinking here. The government distorts economic calculation and results in different people being downwardly or upwardly adjusted in their wealth. There's something quite twisted about using the fact that a downwardly adjusted person receives some minor remuneration to argue that's a just state of affairs. Even human traffickers feed and put a roof over the heads of their human livestock; that takes time and energy. So an enslaved person receives the labor and energy of others and, by Goff's logic, has no moral protest when their own labors and energies are used elsewhere against their consent. Goff is charitable enough to say there may be a pragmatic, economic reason for protest though.

I liked @Ryan's criticisms about how there's a schizoidal, systematizing streak to the writing which for example somehow transforms my giving him eggs in exchange for some of his bacon as a "tainted" act. From whose mouths are we, greedy Kulaks, stealing food?

Jesus said "those who go lead into captivity go into captivity"; according to Goff it seems those who get led into captivity also lead others into captivity. :rolleyes: I can think of a few family systems structured after this principle, and none you would want to be raised in.
 
I just finished reading the ninth part of the article, in Ark's blog. Like Laura, there is a lot of economics that escapes my understanding. But I don't know why the moral issue regarding property rights reminded me of the difference in treatment between Spaniards and Anglo-Saxons.

It's just a comment I want to make but maybe it will shed some light on the matter, something to think about.

It turns out that the writer Marcelo Gullo, a Hispanist, in his travels to write his books came in contact with none other than the descendant of Geronimo. Now I can't find the specific video where he mentions it, but I remember well that in his conversation with Alfonso Borrego (great grandson of the Apache chief Geronimo) Alfonso commented that the Spaniards did indeed recognize the lands of the Indians and gave them the property titles! And in another video talk, Gullo mentions how the Anglo-Saxons/English have built today's world on utilitarianism as opposed to the Spanish idea of goodness, truth and beauty.

At that time, the difference in the scale of values and morals was already beginning to be seen. The comparison serves in this case to know what path the world has taken and where it is leading us.-
 
Gaby said:
Part 8 is up:

Why? The Purpose of the Universe - Part Eight​

ark-jadczyk.blogspot.com

Why? The Purpose of the Universe - Part Eight

Arkadiusz Jadczyk
ark-jadczyk.blogspot.com ark-jadczyk.blogspot.com

:thup:
Click to expand...
An excellent article. Thanks for the quote!

And I can also affirm to you, as knowing someone who is in the business of running psilocybin retreats and another friend who also uses it, his assumption that people become globalist WEF clones after taking it is brutally false! :)

The other things that guy was saying economically also showed a crap understanding of how the world actually works. Typical bs who does not really understand the first thing about economics.

First. Does he actually realize, how the "wealth distribution" statistics are determined? In the US they send random surveys to people, to so few people I would dare to guess you have probably never met a person who have filled one out. Do you think anyone with the name Rockefeller would even take the time to fill it out or even be sent it in the first place? Your most prosperous people, that are on the top end of the distribution are literally the least likely to fill it out.

Does anyone think the Forbes list of the most wealthy people in the US is accurate? Anyone want to guess with the Rothschild or Rockfeller families are ACTUALLY worth?

Here is how things work in the real world. About the same time that the whole progressive income tax thing started to be rolled out, some governments rolled out things known as private interest foundations or their equivalents. Liechtenstein was one of the first (1926) but is no longer the best (Cook Islands IMO). But basically the largest families in Europe at the time could put their money into the foundation and have it grow at a 0% or low tax rate while paying NO inheritance taxes to the subsequent generations. Thus you avoid the "89%" tax rates he references (one of many ways of doing so).

Another biproduct of these legal structures is that NO ONE owns them. A foundation or asset protection trust is A CORPORATION WITH NO OWNERS only BENEFICIAL INTERESTS. That is how they avoid all forms of income taxation, at least until you have taxable distributions (and if they are non-monetary distributions, like the ability to live in a mansion or drive a corporate car...hard to tax). So it is quite conceivable that even if you look past the issue of the flawed survey that does not capture the wealthiest outliers, it is still possible that if everyone filled out the survey correctly it would be wrong in reality. I.e. the Rothchilds might be worth $10 billion on paper, or whatever the number is, but the foundations they have beneficial interests AND CONTROL in could be worth $10 trillion or more. I have no idea. No one does except those in the inner most circles of that family.

But to REALLY WEALTHY PEOPLE they understand it is not what you OWN but WHAT YOU CONTROL. I.e. look at the Bill Gates Foundation, a cheap and less effective US version of what European families had access to awhile ago (and some US families prior to legal changes; but most newly wealthy did not have the foresight to plan accordingly anyway).

So when you factor in "corporate welfare" that exists with larger government structures, along with the idea to compound wealth with preferential access to some high return vehicles most people don't get access to (like private placements for wealthy "accredited investors" with a minimum net worth of $1 million or "hot IPOS" guaranteed to make money day 1) compounded at close to ZERO PERCENT tax over 100 years or so while the rest of society is paying taxes...I would not be shocked if the factored in all this "non owned wealth" (lets not forget the Vatican either, no telling how much they have laundered secretly over the centuries away from prying eyes)...makes the distribution at the top even worse versus 100 years ago.

But it could go either way on sheer percentage. More importantly, let's address how the middle class developed, or how it might have caught up in income percentage despite the best efforts of the elite in rigging the system in their favor...

Three factors that sort of came in sequential order over time: (1) a rapidly declining cost of energy that powered (2) rapidly advancing technology that led to (3) massive productivity gains over time. Why do you think the elite want to tax the crap out of energy in the name of carbon taxes?

Middle class to me is defined by a standard of living...where you basically are ABOVE subsistence, you are not living from paycheck to paycheck, and can spend both time on leisure and have extra money to save and generate excessive wealth (which a lot of the middle class does through simply paying down a mortgage on a house, also enabled by new financial systems). For instance, societies in the past spent a lot of money on food and risked starvation - then oil based fertilizers (yes I know, not my favorite form of farming...but it did make food cheap...too cheap), tractors, etc. the price of food is so low now that governments hand out subsidies to keep prices artificially low (at least until money printing and stupid policies undid a lot of that...). Hedonic adjustments in inflation numbers that reflect the impact of technology are often panned by some economists, but you cannot deny the underlying effect is real and needs to be taken into account. Some kiddie toys probably today have more computing power than a $2000+ computer from the 80s.

Also when technology advances much of the time it creates wealth for large segments of society before a grand consolidation is forced by the elites, so they can force everyone out of markets to jack up prices (for example, look at what happened with drug distributors in the 90s-00s) or lower quality (Hollywood anyone?). But this process is so dynamic in a functioning economy it is really hard to keep entrepreneurs down for long. I would argue it has never been easier in history for a normal person to make a lot of money. I would also argue due to corporatism and consolidation, it is possibly the worst time to be an employee until you have a secure position - if that even exists - except perhaps at a big megacorp that is "too big to fail."

To me, it seems that technology has been so good it has overcome a LOT of negative externalities caused by stupid policies like high marginal income tax rates and corporate tax rates that can be gamed by smart accountants (for instance merging with a crap company to get access to their tax loss carry fowards, diversifying to tax havens, or inversions), while tariffs that traditionally funded the US government and protected workers in the country are reduced to almost nothing. Yes tariffs cause negative externalities, but all taxes do, and it is one of the more efficient for the health of a nation's economy relative to bad ones like income taxes that disincentivize productivity and are easy to avoid. Remember, US industrialization in the 1800s was only made possible by high tariff policies advocated by Hamilton (who was also still a bad actor in history creating the first national bank etc., but give credit where due...); unfortunately those same policies and the way they were managed, also likely resulted in the Civil War since southern states were significantly disadvantaged by those tariffs.

And why does the middle class feel like it is losing now? - the elite are doing everything they can to reverse this trend so they do not lose power. So they print money, largely benefiting themselves and the wealthy who get first access to the money in preferential loans and stock offerings, creating inflation that kills middle America, killing their disposable income. They force "pandemic lockdowns" that destroy 46% of small businesses in San Francisco but send tech stocks to all time highs. They now want to do the same with "climate lockdowns." Jacking up the price of energy specifically. They also create an artificially small overton window to kill their competition for some PC bs - so they can identify who is not "with their plan" and they can force them off advertising platforms at the slightest offense.

Centralized planning does not work that well, at least for the masses... The Soviet Union figured that out the hard way, and China figured it out early enough to reverse course to some extent (not to mention being aided by the US politicians that built China up). The United States and Europe forgot the lesson from the post war period in the US and Japan.
 
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