politics

Bitcoin

Illusion of Freedom

"When governments intervene in markets, they repeat the mistakes the countries of Eastern Europe made in the latter half of the 20th century. High taxes on competing goods is a form of indirect subsidy too. It's impossible to calculate the total damages taxation and inflation have done to society. 

But think of it this way: If you're in a so-called laissez-faire country, your total taxes might look something like this:
25% income tax, 25% social-security contributions, and other taxes your employer pays. Even before we start adding hidden costs, that's about 50%.

Add a VAT adjusted for certain goods with extra taxes, like fuel for your car... That's an additional 25% of whatever you had left. So, in total, 62.5%. Make that 65% to compensate for every other tax we didn't include. Now add a best-case scenario of 5% inflation rate.

Congratulations, you live in a "free country", and you're 70% a slave."

Book: https://21million.konsensus.network/

People love to complain about capitalism, but if we had actual free markets without constant government intervention we would have widespread prosperity that you can't even imagine.

I want privacy and the freedom to do what I want, when I want, and where I want as long as I am harming no one. Why is that so much to ask? $ANON

I strongly disagree with this. This assumes we wouldn't have bad actors in the market. Bad actors are the reason we need government intervention.

Political activist. Founder of mydemocracy.app and /advocacy. Host of the /politics channel. RCs may or may not = endorsements.

You can't eliminate all bad actors, there are plenty of bad actors now they just lobby government to craft regulations that protect them. Bad actors in government protect bad actors in the markets. In a market without a giant government intervening to protect bad actors, market forces would naturally be a check on bad actors, where currently they aren't allowed to be. It's like disrupting a body's immune system. Nobody is claiming a purely free market would be a perfect system, but it would be a better system than what we have now.

I agree that bad actors also have an upper hand currently and believe we need significant reform. I struggle agreeing that a purely free market would end up being better than what we have now. Especially, if we are able to reduce the corporate capture of the regulatory process. 

There needs to be a balance between reducing barriers while also including basic protections.