← The Bitcoin Standard Podcast
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Principles of Economics. My complete guide to Understanding Economics is now available in hardcover, audiobook and ebook from seifeddin.com, amazon, and many more booksellers worldwide. And now I am also teaching a course based on this book on my website seyfeddin.com Principles of Economics will run the whole academic year from September to June and will have a new lecture every two weeks, as well as weekly live online discussion seminars open to learners from all over the world and from all walks of life. Whether you're a student, a professional, or a retiree, you are making economic decisions every day and this course will arm you with the wisdom of centuries of economists to improve your economic decision making. You'll also get a free book of Principles of Economics. If you sign up for the course, go to seifedin.com and sign up now. Hello, welcome to lecture 18, the final lecture of the Principles of Economics online course. This lecture's topic is Civilization. And I think when I finished writing this book, I almost considered perhaps changing the title of the book to something like the Case for Civilization or the Economics of Civilization or the Economics of Human Civilization. Because what I really think this book builds toward and what the work of Mises really builds toward is an understanding of civilization, what the term civilization means. And if you understand economics, if you understand the economic processes that go into making a capitalist society possible, you understand what makes civilization works, and you're able to understand civilization in a very practical and real sense. And I think this is what Mises arrives at in his work. He doesn't emphasize that in the title of his work. And so I thought perhaps it might make sense to try to put this as a title of the book. But then I ended up just deciding to stay with the same title of the book. Point from this introduction is to say that the understanding of civilization is quite central to the ideas of economics, and the understanding of economics is central toward understanding what civilization is. And I begin this chapter with a quote from Mises which says, ultimately the reason civilization exists is because labor performed under the division of labor is more productive than work performed in isolation. That's what it comes down to. And so people can have all kinds of opinions about all kinds of things pertaining to human society and civilization, but ultimately if they work within a division of labor, they are going to be able to be much more productive, and their reason is capable of recognizing this. Reason allows them to recognize and understand this, and it allows them to understand that they're better off joining in the division of labor. And that's really what makes civilization possible ultimately. So what we've discussed throughout this course so far. Is the concept of human action. How the idea that humans act to increase the value and quantity of time they have on Earth. And we discuss the way in which they act. In the most kind of obvious economic acts that people carry out in the second part of the book. The individual acts of taking property, labor, Accumulating capital and technology, energy. All of these aspects of how human beings try to economize. Increase the quantity and value of time they have. And then in the third section of the book, we discussed the acts of economizing that happen within a social context. In which humans act with one another. In order to produce a system, in order to economize, in order to improve the quantity and value of time that they have on Earth. So throughout this entire process, what is guiding all of this is reason. Reason is what is making all of these people take part in the division of labor. In all of these economizing acts. In trade, in the emergence of the monetary economy. All of these things happen because people have reason that recognizes that engaging in those things. Will works better for them for meeting their ends in life. And so actions and institutions that increase productivity. Proliferate at the expense of those that reduce it. And so, as humans use their reason, they lower their time preference. And they cooperate in pursuit of improving their life. They build civilization. That's effectively how civilization comes about. So underpinning civilization is material improvement. The underpinning of civilization is a material improvement. In that civilization is what emerges as we try to economize and make our life better. And there are different ways in which people try to understand civilization. And of course, different civilizations and different people. Will have different subjective opinions. Of what constitutes civilization. But I think one thing that underpins all conceptions of civilization. Must be an increase in material productivity. And I think that comes from the fact that this, whatever it is that you value in human civilization. Is only possible in the context in which people are able to meet their basic needs with a fair amount of security. And have a certain amount of security for the future. And a little, you know, something that diminishes the uncertainty of the future. That they're able to think of the future. And so this kind of material improvement that makes life better. Allows for the emergence of what we call civilization. But also, what I try to argue in this chapter. And what I think Mises emphasizes. Is that what we think of as civilization. Is ultimately the sum of behaviors and institutions. That allow us to engage in the division of labor that allow us to increase our productivity massively by engaging in the division of labor and the capital accumulation and the monetary economy and the extended peaceful market order in which we are able to trade and have enormous increase in productivity. The behaviors that make such a market possible are the behaviors that make civilization possible in a very real sense, as I try to see here. So seeking material improvement is what drove us from barbarism to modern civilization. Because economic logic dictates our actions and so we seek productivity and better standards at every step. So you could say that civilization is the emergent, emergent result of humans seeking to improve their well being. People acting. This is what happens when people act to improve their well being. They interact with one another. And the way that they find that is most conducive toward increasing their well being is peaceful, cooperative, civilized interaction. And the result of that gives us civilization. I think you could say three processes drive human civilization. And I think these are really the three ways in which you have economic growth in economics. Ultimately, three things drive economic growth. Savoring or lowering our time preference so that we delay gratification and consumption today in favor of investing for the future to the division of labor, engaging in an extended market order. So trading more and more trade allows you to produce more because you're able to specialize more and increase your productivity by specializing more. And three, ingenuity and reason or inventions, new technological advancements. Ultimately, those are the three things that drive economic growth. And those are the three things that drive human civilization. This is what allows civilization to emerge. So lowering our time preference gives us saving and capital accumulation. It allows us to build capital and to accumulate capital over time. It allows us to cooperate in pursuit of long term goals. It allows us to develop civilized more like respect for private property because of the long term benefits. We start thinking about the future. We start adopting the kind of behaviors that are conducive for a decent well being in the future. And so the lower our time preference, the more civilized we become and the more our behavior is conducive to civilization because it prioritizes the long term over the short term. We don't pillage things today because we want them, because we understand the value of not engaging in pillaging is that in the long term, you're able to benefit much more from whatever you can get from pillaging today, as we discuss in the earlier chapters of this book on the chapter on trade. And so with the division of labor, we realize how to cooperate and specialize and increase Our productivity. And so our social institutions thrive if they are able to increase our division of labor. The more we are able to have a division of labor, the more productive we are and the more output we can make. And so our social institutions do better if we are able to increase our division of labor. And so we adopt the forms of behavior that drive us toward more and more cooperation with others, so we become peaceful and cooperative with others, rather than being hostile and warlike. And third, ingenuity and reason, these allow us to recognize and develop actions and institutions that are conducive to long term well being and the division of labor. Really, it's the human mind that constantly finds new solutions and new technologies. And these three drivers are in my mind, what continue to make economic growth possible, but also what continue to make human civilization possible. We continue to use our brain and come up with new and more efficient ways of organizing how we interact with one another. So social institutions thrive if they are able to increase the division of labor. Family is a great example. If you think about what makes families such a valuable institution across the world, is that allows us to think about the long term. It lowers our time preference, but making you more concerned about what comes after you. And so because you're concerned about people who are going to outlive you, who are your descendants, who are in a very physical sense, a part of you who's going to stay on in the world after you die, you become more concerned about the future because of their existence. And so family tends to make people more future oriented and effectively more of a lower time preference. And that makes people more cooperative, more likely to engage in cooperative behavior with others, rather than being hostile to others. And so we build things for the long term and we adopt all kinds of these institutions that help us. Now for a quick word from our sponsors. With fiat money constantly debasing, preserving your wealth isn't an option or luxury. It's a financial and moral imperative. If you're familiar with my work, you know the only financial advice I ever give is to buy and hold Bitcoin for the long term. This has never failed anyone. If you want to buy Bitcoin, I strongly recommend using Swan, a group of hardcore bitcoiners laser focused on making Bitcoin easily accessible. While most scramble to react to each new crisis, Swan private clients are already positioned in the only monetary asset with absolute scarcity. Bitcoin. Swan private partners with families and institutions who share a principled conviction in Bitcoin as the foundation for multi generational wealth with concierge service, deep expertise and uncompromising security, the Swann team helps clients exit the crumbling Fiat system and secure their future in sound money. Today, Swann Private serves more than 5,000 high net worth clients who have purchased more than $4.5 billion of Bitcoin and put it into cold storage. If you're ready to move beyond the false promises of Fiat, start your long term Bitcoin strategy@swap swan.com safe S A I F But now finally Daylight have delivered a fantastic full function tablet with a paper like screen that's easy on your eyes and great for outdoor use. I've been using the Daylight computer to write my next book and it is absolutely fantastic and it has led me to invest in this company myself. Check out my interview with Anjan Khatta in episode 24 the Bitcoin standard Podcast is brought to you by Coin Kite. Coinkite are my favorite makers of bitcoin hardware. They produce the legendary open Dime, the first bitcoin bearer asset, as well as the reliable cold card hardware wallet, the excellent stainless steel siege plates for storing your seed phrases and the block thrive in the long term. That helps us cooperate with one another and develop into what we think of as civilization today. So think of languages, religions, traditions, technologies, ideas, physical infrastructures, buildings. All of these things are investment into the future that we think of as what makes our civilization. And they are ways of allowing us to lower our time preference and ways of allowing us to accumulate more capital into of the future and to become more civilized effectively. And these are only possible because of people using their reason, lowering their time preference and engaging in the division of labor. All of the nice things that we have are only possible because of lower time preference, reason and the division of labor. These things allow us to conquer nature, subdue violent animals, increase the quality and quantity of time we have on earth. Effectively. We could think of civilization of the sum of our efforts at economizing and increasing the quantity and quality of time we have on earth. We are in a process of civilization. If each generation lives better than the one before it, decivilization is the opposite of that. And so this is what I would think of as civilization. But of course this is economics. Nothing is free. So what is the cost of civilization? What is really cost cost to have human civilization? Well, the cost is very high. Unfortunately, like everything worth having, it's always going to have a serious cost to it. So the cost of civilization I think you can think of it as social cooperation increases productivity, but it comes at a high Cost. And so what is that cost? Well, the cost of that is that you must curb all of your instincts as a human being being that are not conducive to the division of labor, that are not conducive to the concept of property rights, that are not conducive to the concept of self ownership. And so if you curb all of these instincts within you, you are able to enjoy civilization. And so that is a significant cost because human beings, it's not very easy for us to curb those instincts. We are born as children that are very emotional and we stomp our feet on the ground demanding what we want. And then slowly, over time, we try and develop into people who are able to accept the world and not throw tantrums. And it takes a lot of work and many people don't break out of that. And so it's not, it's not an easy thing to do. But if you're able to do it, the more you're able to do it, the more you're able to engage in civilization, the more you're able to engage in the division of labor, the more you can work with others, buy and sell from others, and live in peace and accumulate capital and benefit in the long term. So this is really what the cost of civilization is. And effectively, the achievements of civilization are truly outstanding because people seek to achieve the benefits of civilization willingly because they want to, because they see the benefits from it. And that's, I think, what's really powerful about this idea and why you still remain optimistic about it no matter what ends up happening. It's that the incentive to join into civilization is very strong. And therefore people work with it and work for it in a really intelligent, reasonable way, and therefore are able to mobilize enormous amounts of resources across the world in order to make it happen. So you can't think of a violent ruler who could possibly motivate people to work in the same way as capitalism does because of the incentive issue. But more importantly than the incentive issue, of course, is the issue of calculation. And so ultimately, this is a very, very important point that people don't get. The only way that the capitalist system functions is because people are free to own the fruits of their labor, people are free to own property. Because of that, people are able to perform economic calculation. And so if you had a situation where somebody was a slave owner and they tried to recreate what a capitalist economy produces, even if they manage to motivate their slaves very well, they are unable to recreate it because those slaves are unable to. To have economic calculation. They're unable to have economic calculation because they don't own their own resources. And so, therefore, you are unable to benefit from the magical power of economic calculation, from your ability to figure out what is best for you to do with your productive capital. And so therefore, really, the only way that we're able to have this kind of productive economy is through a system of private property, a system of individual freedom to own property and to produce whatever you want from it. And so the output of a modern society is not something that can be produced by one controlling mind. It requires billions of people worldwide to voluntarily work in a free market, using prices to calculate the cost and benefits of alternative options and to decide which is the most productive and profitable. It's not possible to recreate that without prices and private property. There's no use planting the tree of civilized behavior if its fruits are constantly up for grabs. The prohibition of murder, assault and theft forms the basis of all human societies and is a main tenet of religious and political institutions. This is why all across societies, all over the world, you have these ideas very prevalent and very normalized. Don't steal, don't kill, don't take other people's stuff. And the reason for that is that this is the only way that we are able to have a civilized society. You need to have people own their things. You don't just let people keep their stuff because you're being nice to to them. You let people keep their stuff. Because if you take other people's stuff, they start taking other people's stuff. Other people take your stuff. You are back in the jungle. You can't have private property. You are unable to build a civilized society. And you're unable to have any kind of market economy. And therefore, you're unable to have economic calculation. You're unable to allocate capital rationally and productively. And therefore, you're unable to benefit from this division of labor. You're unable to benefit from modern civilization effectively. And when you think of it this way, a lot of the traditional customs around the world begin to make sense. Things that might not initially make sense to you in the way in which they're structured. When you think about them more closely, you'll see that there's probably a very good case for why they happen the way that they do. And that has something to do with the fact that they help people get along with each other and therefore help people engage in the division of labor. And so the people who carry along these customs are able to benefit at the expense, well, not necessarily at the expense, but they're able to increase their productivity a lot more than the people who do not engage in them. And so these things end up having a survival in the long term, the benefits, the people who use it. And so you can see why things like honesty, conscientiousness, trustworthiness, these things would be developed in these societies that become civilized and why they would be extolled and deemed good in most cultures all over the world in some form or the other, or maybe all cultures, because they allow strangers to work with one another, they allow strangers to interact with one another, and they allow, allow people to deal with one another without having to be engaged in some kind of very close knit relationship. And you can see why people, you can also see, you can understand why there is so much emphasis on sexual restraint across the world, historically and traditionally, because it allows for the family and protects the family, and the family then allows for long term thinking and more investment in the future and therefore more civilized behavior in the interest of the that. So it's, it takes a lot of time for us as human beings to subdue those interests and instincts that we have and instead defer to our reason in anticipation of future gains. The ability to, to get over your immediate animalistic impulse and think, no, let me do what is good for me for the long run is not something very easy. And it takes growth and maturity to go through it as human beings. And it is something that's very important simply because civilization would simply not exist without it. We would not have civilization if we didn't have this. So the question then is, well, why civilization? Why is civilization interesting or important? Why should somebody care about getting into civilization? Well, Mises brings up the very simple argument for civilization on the basis of biological biology, which is that ultimately, as a biological being, as a, as a biological being, our only or our most important assessment of anything is in its ability to allow us to survive. So if you think about whether something is good or bad for us, that can just best be assessed as biological beings in thinking about whether it helps us survive or not, and looking at capitalists civilization, the answer is a resounding yes. Being able to trade with others, being able to engage in the division of labor, allows you to live longer and healthier and happier and safer on average. And so great quote from Mises. Here now for a quick word from our sponsors. The Bitcoin Standard Podcast is brought to you by the safehouse.com my independent publisher and bookshop selling the best Bitcoin books and High Quality Cloth Hardcovers built to last for generations Most books these days are pretty fiat. They're flimsy and they fall apart quickly and I did not want that for my books. So I set up the Safe House especially to provide you with beautiful, long lasting classic cloth hardcovers you can proudly pass down for generations. You can get copies of my three books, the Bitcoin Standard, the Fiat Standard, and Principles of Economics. And you can also get copies of Lyn Alden's Broken Money, Parker Lewis Gradually Then Suddenly, and Matthew Lishiak's Fiat Food, to which I contributed a few chapters. We now offer bulk discounts so you can buy books for yourself and for the friends and family you'd like to learn about bitcoin. Buy any two books for $50, any five books or more for $20 per book and for more than 50 books it's only $15 per book. Go to the safehouse.com, the S A I F house.com where you can get all of these books in high quality cloth hardcovers delivery delivered worldwide and get 10% off for paying with Bitcoin. This podcast is also brought to you by the Bitcoin Way, your professional Bitcoin IT team offering you personalized, secure and comprehensive solutions for every step along your Bitcoin journey. The Bitcoin Way offer live concierge service to guide you with your Bitcoin cold storage, running, your node, privacy, best practices, inheritance planning, corporate strategy and and multisig solutions. They don't touch your coins. They guide you through the process of acquiring your coins and securing them. If you'd like to make your setup safer and more reliable, book a consult with them and see what they have to suggest. If you want to give someone the gift of Bitcoin, get them this professional service that will ensure they start off knowing exactly how to manage their coins and not lose them. Go to thebitcoinway.com and start bitcoining more confidently. It has enabled man to hold his own in the struggle against all other living beings, both the big beasts of prey and the even more pernicious microbes. It has multiplied man's means of sustenance. It has made the average man taller, more agile and more versatile, and has stretched his average length of life. It has given man the uncontested mastery of the earth. It has multiplied population figures and raise the standard of living to a level never dreamed of by the crude cave dwellers of prehistoric ages. I think this is really the argument for capitalism that you just end up living A lot safer, a lot longer, and a much better life. So from that perspective, it seems like it is a, it is a winner. However, remember everything we said in this course, value is something subjective. One of the first things we discussed in this course was the idea that value is subjective. And so what if somebody doesn't value a long and easy life? You may like that, you may like civilized life, but maybe others don't. What do they prefer? Brutal, short, fast living, high time preference? Life? Yes, I think there's, there's an argument there. Ultimately, if people have subjective preferences, then who am I to tell them that they should die? Value civilization. So another argument here for civilization is an argument comes from natural rights. The civilization is just what happens when people respect each other's natural rights. And if you believe in natural rights, then you believe in civilization. Well, the question here then, okay, but what if somebody does not believe in natural rights? So a lot of people come from a religious perspective and believe in natural rights, but some people just don't believe in it and don't believe that the people are born with rights. And so therefore how do you convince people like that of the value of civilization? Does that mean that civilization is doomed? Because we're never going to be able to convince people of these things? Well, I like to present another different argument for civilization, which is an argument for human action. And this is something that you get from the work of Mises or from the work of Hoppe or Rothbard. And the idea here is that you don't have to look at what people say, you look at what people do. And the vast majority of human beings, they choose to live in civilization, even though the vast majority of Earth is uncivilized wilderness. So there's nobody stopping you from going out into the absolute wilderness and completely forsaking civilization. Not dealing with anybody, not buying anything, not selling anything. You don't have to have any of the material, material things that the world has. And you can get out into extremely isolated places and just survive there. But surprisingly large number of people don't do that. The vast majority of human beings choose to continue to live in civilization or at least in contact with civilization, effectively trading with civilization so effectively in civilization, let's face it. And even when somebody leaves civilization, he still needs it and still steals from it. So we've got this example that I mentioned in the book of this guy who disappeared 25 years ago into the jungle. But the way he managed to disappear is that he keeps showing up near civilized places and stealing things and then Disappearing back into the jungle. So it's a lot easier to steal from civilized people than to go out and hunt in the jungle. And I think this is a really, really, really powerful indicator of the reality of the division of labor. Because even though this guy doesn't want to to, he pretends to not want to be part of civilization, part of the division of labor, he survives by stealing food from people who are. A lot of people think it's okay to aggress against others, but they still engage in civilization and depend on it. And I think this is really the key argument to understand here that it doesn't really matter what kind of noises people make when they make intellectual noises to justify this. The critics of civilization on capitalism, cooperation, all rely on them for the vast majority of their needs. So people can talk about how they don't believe in the division of labor or capitalism or any of that, but they'll talk about it on their phone, or on their laptop, or on their TV or on their newspaper. All of these things would simply not be possible without the capitalist division of labor, without modern civilization. They rely on all these electronic machines that simply could not exist. If we didn't have a global market of 8 billion people around the world producing and calculating in the capital goods that go into making this technology. It just can't be built without cooperation. There is no way in which we can have this advanced technology where we have microchips being manufactured with raw ingredients from all over the world and being shipped all over the world in all kinds of different machines. This can only happen because of the enormous productivity we have, because of the fact that we have a global division of labor. If any one tiny little, say 50 million$50 million people country in the world tried to do this on their own, they would not be able to. No single country can probably pull this off. I think probably even China would not be able to pull it off. Ultimately they need to be able to produce and consume from a global market in order to pull the this off. And if they tried to do it on individually, they would have to do it at a much, much higher cost. So even though people may have a lot of arguments about why it's okay to violate other people's property rights, they still rely on the fruits of property rights based civilization in order to make those arguments. Governments or individual criminals who do justify their violence and aggression still rely on the fruits of the division of labor in order to do that. They still justify it using media that are part of the division of labor. They still use Guns and technologies that have been built thanks to the division of labor, thanks to global markets. And so that's why I like to say, as I say in the book, relieved of the hypocrisy democracy of using the fruits of civilization to fight civilization. The strongest and most belligerent uncivilized human, like the strongest, most belligerent animal, stands no chance against any adult or child capable of pulling the trigger of a gun produced by capitalist civilization. I think this is what it ultimately comes down to. If you are able to join into capitalist civilization, you are able to to tap into a lot higher productivity than if you don't. And so even though some people justify aggression in some of their actions, so the thief will say in this situation it was okay for me to rob this person because he's a bad person and anyways I deserve the money more than him and government loyalists might say in this case, it's okay for us to take money from people because we're using it for good or whatever. But ultimately you're only able to make these exceptions in these one particular case because you have access to property rights based civilization everywhere else that allows you to have your guns and all of the modern technology and all the benefits of the division of labor. Because if you were to consistently apply your principles of aggression across everything, well then you can't buy guns, you can't buy laptops. You have to make your own and you have to try and steal your own, only instead of just making them or not trade with others and you can't do it. You won't be able to build any kind of serious technology on your own without relying on others. You have to benefit from the division of labor. And that's why ultimately I think that really the argument for civilization is in the actions of people, not in words. All civilization critics rely on civilization to make their critiques. Nobody is ever forced to stay in civilization and yet all the people who complain about it are unable to separate from it. Now a similar and related argument here comes from Hans Herman Hopper's work and he calls it argumentation ethics, which I think is a very strong argument for property rights and for property rights based civilization. And I think it's a very, very strong argument, which may sound a little bit strange initially, but I think it's, it's, it's really very poignant and it's very important because ultimately it shows the true essence of what it is that we're doing when we're engaging in academic debate. So what Hoppe says is if you are able to engage in arguments if you are trying to prove to people something, whatever that thing is, the fact that you are engaged engaging in this argument. The mere fact that you're making an argument about anything necessarily means that you accept the premise that other people have property over their mind and over their ideas, that people are able to decide what they want to do on this or that thing. So if you're able to accept that, then you are accepting that others have property. And so if you are accepting that others have property over their money mind, then you are effectively committing a performative contradiction. You are contradicting yourself by saying, here, let me con. Let me accepting your property rights and your ability to decide your mind. Let me convince you. In other words, let me respect your property rights by proving to you that I don't respect property rights. The mere act of arguing itself is an acknowledgment of property rights and the moral wars of civilization. You can be against civilization, but you cannot argue against it. If you argue against civilization is engaging in civilization. So arguing against it is incoherent nonsense. In other words, it's okay to be against civilization as long as you really show us that you are not engaging in civilization. Other words, you are a hypocrite. You're just making noises that you don't understand understand. And the way to show us that you're not engaging in civilization is to effectively not engage in civilization at all. And all the actions that constitute what civilization is. And so act out like an animal rather than a civilized human being. And so don't engage in arguments. But that really doesn't leave you with much options beyond slinging your own feces to engage with other people. Because everything else involves, involves civilization. If you're going to be talking to people, you are engaging in language, and that's the product of civilization. If you're going to be trying to argue with being. If you're going to try to argue with people, you are accepting their property over themselves. You're engaging in civilization. If you use a weapon to threaten people, you have had to defer gratification on consumer goods in order to build the weapon. And so that's you in engaging in capitalism. So therefore, really you can't do anything more complex than sling your own thesis, because that's the only weapon that is possible for you without you engaging in any kind of process of capital production. Because this just happens spontaneously. Beyond that, everything else involves a process of production. Even picking up a stone is you spending time picking up the stone before you throw it is you engage engaging in capitalist production because you're dedicating that time on picking up the stone. And that's capitalism. So you can't do that. So it's. It's incoherent nonsense to argue against capitalism and the ideas of argumentation. The, the idea of argumentation itself presupposes an acceptance of property rights, presupposes and acceptance of other people's ideas. And I think this is really so powerful and so useful as a mental framework because a lot of people think of these in. Think of these intellectual ideas in a very childish way, as if it is a bunch of people trying to score points against each other and trying to win rap fights with one another. But ultimately this is not just mental masturbation. This is meaningful. We're not arguing for the sake of arguing, for the sake of showing who's better at arguing. We're arguing in order to try and understand world, the world and understand society and understand how humans can work with each other. And the question of civilization and property rights is not an empty theoretical question. It's not a rhetorical question for us to sit and talk, try out our rhetorical skills in flexing who can make more and better arguments for one or the other. The mere act of engaging in argument is very telling because really, argument is part of the real world. And so to the extent that this is relevant to the real world, we need to understand what the linkage is with the real world. And the linkage is that you're engaging in arguments. That means you've already accepted the premise of civilization. You're engaging in arguments, you're accepting that people have opinions, and you're trying to change those opinions in order to engage in those arguments. You're writing books and you're writing articles, and you're publishing things in journals and newspapers and magazines and books that get distributed all over the world or on the Internet, which is predicted, produced through machines that exist all over the world and are produced all over the world. So you're part of civilization, so you've accepted the premise. So your argument doesn't really matter once you've accepted the premise in the sense of what are we really talking about here? What we really are talking about here is the real world. And for all practical intents and purposes, if you're into this system where you accept the idea of argumentation doesn't matter what you argue against it, the fact that you're arguing against it is essentially just a luxury that you're able to afford. Because you don't use your time wisely. Clearly you accept civilization because you're trying to engage in arguments and therefore you have no case to make about why civilization is bad. You accept it. And I think, you know, a corollary to that more technological and engineering minded corollary to Hopper's argumentation ethics, I would say, is that any arguments against capitalist civilization can only be considered if expressed without resorting to any of the fruits of the division of labor and property rights. No tv, no Internet, no newspaper, none of these things. All of these things require all kinds of capitalist production in order to make them happen. So if you're really going to argue against the things that make those things possible, you can't use those things. And so arguing against property rights essentially is just producing a bunch of noises that don't matter. Either you accept property rights and then you are part of civilized society with your actions, or if you don't accept it, then you can't be part of civilized society. You just become another threat to civilized society. And human beings have been dealing with those threats for centuries and millennia. Savages are not something new to civilization. We've dealt with animals of all kinds, human and non human. Human civilizations always found ways to deal with savages because civilization is far more productive than savages. Capitalist civilization continues to win because its opponents either fling their feces powerlessly at it or engage in it to try to find, fight it effectively, supporting it and pushing it forward. If you want to oppose capitalism, the best and most effective way to do that is to engage in capitalism so that you have the weapons and the tools that you need in order to undermine capitalism. But that just makes capitalism stronger. And that's really the, the flip side of the incoherence of the argumentation ethics, well, of the incoherence of people who argue with, against civilization from the argumentation ethics perspective, in that if you are arguing against it, you are doing a performative contradiction because you're engaging in civilization to argue against civilization. And then on the flip side, you're also actually making it stronger. Because the fact that you are engaging in civilization and in capitalism, you're using weapons or Chinese, churning out books or doing all of that stuff, means that you are just engaging more and more in capitalist civilization and production and therefore making this a larger part of the human experience and strengthening it. You're paying people to produce the things that you're consuming. So that's why I think in spite of all the hostility from intellectuals and people from all over the world, and hostility of governments and people who benefit from violation of property rights and people who benefit from murder and crime. Civilization continues to advance and I believe we can see that in increased productivity, increased energy consumption, lower energy costs, technological advancement, and perhaps most tellingly in the decline in interest rates. But this advance has likely slowed or stopped in the 20th century. Interest rates were rose in the 20th century after a long, long, long decline. Arguably, it was the destruction of money that destroyed civilization. If we look at the 20th century, if you look at this study from the book called A History of Interest Rates by Homer and Silla, this is an excellent chart that shows the history. If you look here, 3,000 BC interest rates were around 20%. They continued to drop historically, historically until at the turn of the 19th century they were as low as 3%, less than 3%. So 2 point something percent. Then with World War I they started shooting up and then with World War II they shot up even further and they got a really, really, really, really high. And that I think is very interesting because remember what we said about time preference, if you remember your chapter 13, time preference is the determinant of the interest rate. And so the higher the time preference, the higher the interest rate. And so if we see that in the 20th century interest rates went up, that effectively means time preference went up. I think this is a very, very important data point which a lot of people don't talk a lot about because you don't talk much in modern academia and political discourse about bad things, about inflation, inflation, because most people who are in that world get paid from inflation, so they know where their bread is buttered. So from my perspective, though, I think World War I and fiat money derailed human civilization. I really think there's a strong case to be made here. And I make that case in the fiat standard in my second book, which I've also done a course on, which you can also find on my website, save18.com and I also think this book as well makes a similar case. And I think what I'm going to do in the rest of this chapter is apply the analysis of the fiat standard to the topics of Principles of Economics one by one. So going back, moving backward, we're going to see how every single one of the topics that we discuss in Principles of Economics is undermined. When money is undermined, money is turned from gold into fiat or from hard commodity money, freely chosen on the market, sound money to government debt, coercively chosen in through government dictate. And so we see the impact of fiat on every aspect of Human economizing. And we can see how detrimental it has been and how I would say it has been devastating to human civilization. Fiat takes away the incentive to delay gratification and so therefore it reduces the creation of capital. It's the very first starting point. So when you think about the impact of a money that devalues, people don't want to hold on to the money. If people don't hold on to the money, they have less savings. And if people have less savings, then they have less resources with which to invest. So there's less capital being produced. So the capital creation process is destroyed or at least hindered by the destruction of the value of money. And now instead of accumulating capital and accumulating savings, people have to get into debt and become debt slaves. Fiat effectively breaks the contract of gold money. When money is debased, everything is debased. If the idea of money. Of course, all fiat currencies initially used to be gold backed. And so they all were born from a broken contract. Government promised that the paper was redeemable for gold. And then one day it just said, nope, not anymore. So once a contract is broken by the government, everything else breaks. All the notion of justice and all the notion of the entire notion of justice and the entire notion of sanctity, of contract breaks down because the people who are meant to supposedly be the ones enforcing this are breaking it. And so then you see lawlessness seep into every aspect of life because we established at the higher level. And in a contract in which everybody involved is involved, because everybody has got some form of money, some quantity of money, and so everybody's involved in that contract and everybody's seeing that contract getting breaked and everybody's being effectively stolen from. And everybody can see that and everybody can understand what has happened to them. And everybody sees the sanctity of contract get destroyed. So everybody becomes far more likely to engage in similar behavior in breaking their own contract, in lying, in doing all kinds of anti civilizational behaviors. And then of course, the creation of money allows the state to monopolize law and order. And then it can use these to serve itself. And that is I think, what we see in the 20th century. As the state becomes bigger, as the state has more money, it ends up growing its security apparatus more and more. But people get less and less safe, people get into more wars and crime increases and society becomes less and less safe. And I think the fact, the reason for that is as we discussed in the previous couple of chapters 16 and 17, it's because monopoly, there's a monopoly on defense and law and order. These things are hugely inefficient because of the degree of monopolization that exists in these places. And that's enormously helped by the fact that the government has access to a money printer. Now, beyond that, it also creates business cycles which destroys capital, causing hyperinflation or high inflation. It undermines economic calculation as the value of money is not determined freely in the market. And so the entire process of economic calculation is undermined. Chapter 12. So now we see we're walking back through the chapters. We're going through business cycles, which we discussed in chapter 15. We're going 14, which was accumulation of capital and savings and investment. That's also undermined by inflation. Hyperinflation and high inflation destroy that process enormously, significantly. And then before that go. And that's the topic of 13 and 14 going to the previous chapter, chapter 12. If the money is undermined, then economic calculation is undermined and the value of money is now not determined freely in the market. So markets become about monetary policy and not about fundamentals. Now we no longer have a money in the sense of a generalized medium of exchange with high salability across time and space, as was the case with gold before World War I. So now, going further back before economic calculation, we did in chapter 11 and chapter 10, we looked at trade and money. Fiat breaks money as a generalized medium of exchange. We no longer have a general universal money, which is really what money is. It has to be one. Good. Because the whole point is that it solves the problem, problem of coincidence, of wants. We've gone back technologically in the form of money, because now we don't have a money like we did at the end of the 19th century of one golden money that was used all over the world. Now we have an endless number of assets and monies that are competing. We have all these fiat currencies. We have bonds, we have gold, we have real estate, we have art, we have stocks. A lot of things are being used as money because they are used as a store of value into the future future, because fiat does not work as a store of value. So it's destroyed economic calculation, has created business cycles. It's created massive destructions in markets, and it's also destroyed money and it hampers global trade going back to chapter 10, because global trade now is entirely hostage to foreign exchange, currency fluctuations and export and import becomes a primarily a business of hedging against in foreign exchange rather than production and trade. It also undermines Technological progress and energy consumption. If you move back before chapter 10, before we discuss trade, thinking about the topics of energy, I discussed this in the fiat standard in a lot of detail. Inflation devalues the central savings and earnings of citizens, taking away them from them the ability to spend on modern energy sources. It also allows their government to spend limitlessly on propaganda to try to distract citizens from their declining living standards by blaming it on a slew of ridiculous bogeymen. And so we see this idea that all these ideas about how people need to reduce their consumption of fuels are based on science that's financed by inflation. So on the one hand, you're being robbed and not being able to afford the inflation, not being able to afford the fuels because of inflation. And then the inflation is financing scientists who are concluding that, oh no, you know what, actually you're better off getting robbed. It's better that you get robbed because you shouldn't be using those things because those things are bad for the weather. The bad fuels are going to ruin the weather. And so we're witnessing a complete destruction of, of energy consumption and also a complete destruction of technological. Well, not a complete destruction, but we're seeing the undermining of energy production and the undermining of technological progress because scientific research has become science controlled by government. And so to a very heavily, very heavy extent, it's being used to promote inflation and popularize inflation. And it's becoming more and more insane because if you look at a lot of what is being taught at universities today, it is insane. And I discussed this in more detail in the fiat standard. Economics is an example, nutrition is an example, and all kinds of other pseudosciences are example. Climate is another example, and who knows what else. The more you dig into it, the more you find there is nonsense. And so you see this also being reflected in, in all these subsidies that are going to all these unworkable energy sources because they're cheaper, because they don't involve constantly buying fuel and so experiencing inflation. So you see this focus on going toward wind and solar because even though they're not reliable, but at least the fuel is free. So at least doesn't hurt as much with the inflation. The, in the, the investment in these technologies happens early on. And so therefore that leads to the them paying off profitably over time, relatively because of the fact that there is no consumption as the, of fuel, as the price rises. So whereas with regular fuels, reliable fuels, you need to constantly consume fuel so as inflation hits, price goes up, the cost goes up. So there's a focus to try and get you to use the things that are not reliable because they don't involve buying fuels. And so we see universities become essentially propaganda for inflation. We've got economics, nutrition, and climate as examples. We see the breakdown of famine and crime as a product of capital consumption. I think all of that is related. We see science being undermined. We see crime undermining the entire premise of property rights. We've spoken about how capital accumulation is being undermined, and we're seeing everything fall apart. The ability to keep the fruits of your labors being undermined. So chapter four, the ability to maintain property is undermined. Chapter five, the ability to hold capital is undermined, as we said, chapter six. And everything is destroyed because of, or undermined because of fiat money. And yet the sustainability and continuation of civilization arise from the superior organizational efficiency of capitalist economic calculation, the enormous benefits of voluntary specialization, and the incessant creativity of humans. Those are the things that are driving civilization. It's not because it wins arguments in universities. It's because people want to eat and they want to stay warm in the winter, and they want to survive and they want their kids to survive. And so they buckle up and do what capitalism requires. They work, they produce, and they earn the things that they want, and they engage in peaceful trade with others to acquire the things that they need. Without capitalist civilization, you have no prices, no calculation, no access to global division of labor. You have major problems. So therefore, the reason capitalism continues to survive is because people who use it have a superpower effectively because they're able to engage into the division of labor. So you can think of the capitalist free market economy as a very powerful machine, because in many ways it is. All the privately owned machines and capital deployed in the process of production are acting together in one economic system. The extended order of the free market economy, the ability to deploy billions of machines worldwide in production processes, all interrelated and interdependent, allows us to achieve much higher levels of productivity than any alternative. And that's why people who join capitalism benefit enormously. Think about this enormous machine capitalism. Think about it. All of these capital machines all over the world, they're all privately owned and they're all capital. They're all out there in the market, and they're all functioning in this economic system that is built on prices and private property. So if you accept private property, you can join this party, you can use this giant machine, and it can produce all the things that you want at a much, much, much lower cost than trying to Produce those things without it. So plug into that machine, because you will benefit enormously. And people keep plugging into that machine because it benefits them enormously. It means that they can put a roof over their head. It means they can put food on their table. It means that the quality of their life improves and the likelihood of their survival improves. So the idea then is that capitalism can beat its external enemies because is much stronger than them. But with fiat, we've got a different prospect here, because our enemy when it comes to fiat is internal, and it is effectively parasitic on capitalism because it controls the monetary system, which makes global capitalism possible. Remember, global capitalism, the global division of labor is only possible because of monetary economic, because of money, because we have a monetary order that allows economic calculation and that requires a global money. And that money is currently monopolized by the government of the United States of America effectively and their central bank. And so that monopoly is able to take a lot of the wealth that capitalism generates to finance itself and to finance institutions that are against capitalism. And this is a very big problem, because the better society does, the more successful capitalism is, the more prosperous people are, the more wealth is available for the parasites who run the monetary system effectively, and governments around the world to finance themselves at the expense of everybody else. And so this is not an easy problem to solve. For all of its problems, the fiat monetary system is still superior to autarky and isolation from the world. So violent monopoly over the money supply allows central governments to commandeer a large portion of the gains of capitalist free markets, thus benefiting from its superior productive capacity, using its gains to tighten its control on all facets of economic life, and ultimately strangling the capitalist civilization on which it depends. And that's what governments are effectively doing. So the entire process of civilization is based on the systematic application of reason to human action. And the more monetary central planning becomes a problem for civilization, the more the market provides incentives for solutions for this problem. Innovation happens because of economic calculation. The more of a problem the money is, the more of an incentive for a solution we have. And that, I think, is what capitalism is really doing, Even though this is a very sly enemy that is internal, because you can't have a global monetary system without the money. As I was saying earlier, if you want to not use the money, then you are outside of the global division of labor, because there are no other alternatives, or at least there weren't until recently. And so this kind of enemy continues to survive because you need to feed that enemy in order to access the global Division of labor because it has control over the monetary system. But technology is the sum of tools that humanity has devised to control the problems facing civilization. The human mind remains the last bastion of freedom. And the most advanced technology free humans can produce is software. It's really the human mind that continues to find solutions. And the most a powerful technology the human mind has come up with is software. Because it really increases productivity the most. I mean, software is just a bunch of code characters, numbers and letters and characters, and it's information. But when applied in the right place, at the right time, in the right machine, it can cause enormous amounts of machines to perform enormous amounts of work and create enormous amount of economic value for their owners. And that's what software does. It allows an enormous increase in productivity. And you see this everywhere as software. People like to say software is eating the world. Every industry is becoming more and more efficient through the introduction of software. And you can think of it as like a second, second industrial revolution. We had the first industrial revolution, which was the, in the utilization of machines everywhere. And the machines came into everything. And so we started producing everything using machines. So everything became a lot more productive and a lot more efficient. And now everything's being produced with digital technology controlled by software, which also increases the efficiency of those machines because rather than operating them manually, now they're operating based on precise software instructions. So information in the form of letters and numbers, when conveyed in the correct way, can cause many machines but worldwide to perform large amounts of work and thus create economic value for their owners. Software is eating the world and increasing efficiency and will likely enter the world of money. And the software alternative to fiat central banking is Bitcoin. And that is the topic of my first book, the Bitcoin standard. Bitcoin is a decentralized peer to peer payment network that uses its own native token whose supply is capped. First, Bitcoin. Two amazing things about Bitcoin. Number one is the Bitcoin offers the only working alternative to central banking for the transfer of money across international borders. And secondly, Bitcoin supply is strictly capped, meaning there is no way to devalue the existing supply to the benefit of any entity. So by offering anyone in the world the ability to save in a form of money that cannot be debased, Bitcoin can stop the constant process of rising time preference. By giving everyone the ability to to send and receive money internationally without resorting to their monopoly central bank, Bitcoin allows everyone to partake in the global division of labor. It is precisely the central planning of These two markets, money and international transfers, that lies at the heart of the problem of global capitalism. The historical importance of Bitcoin is that it is a technological solution to the problem of central banking, offering a technologically and infinitely more compelling alternative that obsoletes central banking. In the same way, human reason moved us from using slaves to horses, to cars, to the to sophisticated supersonic jets and moved us from using human messengers to carrier pigeons, to paper mail, to email, to video calls. It is now moving us away from relying on monopoly central banks to reliable open source software. I think this is just an issue of technological progression. As I describe in the Bitcoin standard, the current parasitic government banking monopoly is just another in the long line of challenges human reason has faced. And Bitcoin may prove to be the device our reason concocts for conquering it. With transparent rules available for anyone in the world to audit, and with a system built entirely on verification rather than authority, Bitcoin gives the entire world a monetary market commodity that works without needing coercive political authority. It allows us to make peaceful non aggression the basis of human economic interaction, bringing the productivity of the market system to the monetary realm, reversing the violent high time preference statist fiat detour of the last century. If it can unleash human civilization from the clasp of the state's fiat clause, Bitcoin will be remembered as our age's most significant civilizational achievement. I thought ending the book with Bitcoin would be appropriate because I really believe the historic importance of Bitcoin is that it saves human civilization. I know this sounds hyperbolic, but I think the more you look into it, the less hyperbolic it sounds because. And think about everything that, that we've led up to this chat, that we've read in this chapter, in this book that led up to this chapter, it was all a discussion of all of these manners of organizing of humans acting in order to improve our life. And now if. And all of it rests on the monetary system. All of it rests on economic calculation, which is dependent on money. And so if you corrupt the money, you corrupt economic calculation, you corrupt everything. And that's just the latest problem that humanity has faced. But looking at all of the problems that humanity has faced, from hunting the rabbits, to building the boats, going from people catching fish with our hands to having these enormous trawlers that make fish available all over the world for anyone at a relatively very cheap costs. Historically, thinking of all the obstacles that were overcome to arrive at this point up until today suggests that this is just another problem that humanity finds an answer for. And I really believe bitcoin is that answer. I really believe bitcoin is going to allow us to have a monetary system outside of the control of a monopoly system outside of government monopoly. Therefore, we're going to have a free market in money, and we're going to be able to recover all the issues, to recover all the damage that fiat money has done to humanity. Thank you so much for watching and listening to these lectures and for joining this course. I really appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed the book. And please stay tuned to my website. There will be more courses in the future. Thank you very much.