Re: Capitalism and immorality

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They are no-win situations for competition. You are a loser in those situations. Just face it. In competition, someone has to win and someone has to lose. In a competitive world, in order for someone to live, someone else has to die.

This is completely false for the free market. A trade in the free market is always a win-win. It is the definition of the free market. If a trade is not win-win, it will not be completed.

You sound like those creationists that try to disprove evolution by quoting the Second Law of Thermodynamics about Entropy. What they overlook is that these laws only occur in a closed Universe of experimental conditions. You think that a Free Market exists everywhere and exerts itself like natural law. That is not science. Your hypothesis is easily falsified under conditions of monopoly. You are simply Begging the Question.

You think that a free market can not exist. Fair enough. I happen to think that it can exist. The monopolies, in my world view, are always conducted by violence, directly or by proxy. You could read Henry Ford about monopolies, and what would happen if you tried to get a monopoly in the free market, by underselling your competition until they are gone, then raise prices. It is not possible. All monopolies are kept by violence, that is, by government.

Good companies can have a high market share, but only in a limited part of the market, and if they have, it is by merit.

What we want are not different. I just realized long ago that you cannot get from point A to point B using an abstract reification such as money. It is a low tech invention. Sure Bitcoin creates an abstraction that mechanizes the functions of money that was once done by people, but it is still merely a practical technology. It doesn't do anything except transmit a very limited form of information. Electronic money has gone from the telegraph age to the telephone age. When smart contracts are possible and autonomous agents are able to transact indepently and intelligently, then we may see something that bridges what you believe and I believe. What you call the Free Market, I call Love, and money doesn't bring that.

I agree, it is about information. In theory, you could have a great ledger where every service or good is noted when it is added, and everything you consume is subtracted, for every person. But, in practise this would not work, because someone, who is not you, helpfully will set a value for each thing different from your values. We also need the market to signal to you as a consumer, and you as a producer, what to produce and what to consume, how much you want to produce, consume, save as money or invest. Money is perfect for that. It does not add real value, in fact it consumes a small amount of value, but essentially, it is there as a catalyzer, and you can take it out of the wealth equation when it has done its job.

Yeah see, finance isn't science. Aggregating resources are part of the scientific method, but how you aggregate them is not. Using terms like producer and consumer, marketing and investing, these are all technician terms that only useful within arbitrary sociological conditions. Science is useful in every sociological condition. Therefore your business terminology is meaningless to me. We cannot have a discussion because we cannot find common ground since I don't accept your paradigm where Bitcoin is concerned. From Bitcoin will emerge a whole new system of resource allocation. You may call it "free market" if you want, but the goal of acquiring unnecessary monies will one day be as quaint as sun worship.

I think I was rather clear. Money is only the catalyst, or moisture to the machinery. It has no real value. That means also that the goal of acquiring money does not exhaust resources in any way. It is a question of having the opportunity to consume later, leaving everyone else to consume or invest now. This has always been the case with money. Bitcoin is just a better form of money.

It is not science in the sense that it can be measured exactly and retested. That is for the econometrists, which are wrong. Some of them, you could call econosadists (war is prosperity). Economy is science in the sense that there are some axioms, then conclusions that logically build on those axioms.

Economics is a science that have axioms predicated on established social norms. I personally favor behavior sciences because they study animal behavior and extrapolate primate behavior to sociological scales. In the interest of furthering science, I prefer the disciplines with the greater latitudes. Economics is still going through the "new schools of thought" stage that was popular with psychology even through the 1990s. Now neuroscience is taking behavior sciences to higher levels. Behavior science has become empirical.

But really, it's much simpler than that. Treat others like they are your family and don't profiteer. Animals don't use money. Humans don't need money either. It's a choice. We need science and technology to promote progress. We can do it together by aggregating resources smartly. Unfortunately, most of us aren't smart enough to agree upon the best use of resources. We need tools that will assure us that our needs are met and that we have fulfilling lives. That takes a great deal of patience and care. Most humans are incapable of that. Perhaps intelligent machines will take care of our needs and allow us to provide adequate resources to build a Type 1 civilization one day.