Civilizing The Slightly Smarter Apes: An Introduction to 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics F.A. Hayek With Applications To Race, Antisemitism/Israel/Palestine, Vaccinations, COVID19 and More

In August 10, 1915, British physicist Henry Mosely, who would have probably won the Nobel Prize that year, died in perhaps the most disastrous error mankind has thus far made, The First World War (1914–18). Bright and pious German/French/British/Russian… students, fathers, engineers, “great minds” and “experts”, who even shared a common European Christian faith, reverted to their tribal ape-like nature, and for God, honor, flag and country, slaughtered each other leading to about 18 million deaths and millions more left invalid (6.5 million just in France). At 7:30 am July 1st, 1916 the ‘Battle of the Somme’ began. On this single day, just the British alone had about 20,000 fatalities and 35,000 wounded leading to a soldier being killed or wounded on average every second. Why did this happen? And if it was such a big deal at the time, worth sacrificing so much, how come hardly anybody knows anything about it today? 20 years later via WWII the tribalistic slaughter led to over 80 million deaths and what followed was a “Cold War” that brought the slightly smarter apes close to nuclear annihilation several times. Why were our “great leaders” and “intellectuals” utterly powerless to prevent the WWI/II slaughters and were in fact its promoters? How can mankind today build mindbogglingly complex microchips, airplanes, the Internet and so much more, yet still not have figured out something as simple as peace, have the planet littered with nuclear weapons, and always be one spark away from another world-wide tribalistic man-made calamity as the current CovidMania is showing? There is something missing from our understanding of how the world works, something as monumental in importance as Darwin’s theory of evolution, something that our “leading intellectuals” and “experts” have yet to discover and spread accordingly. That “something” has already been discovered and explained by economists of the so-called ‘Austrian School’, but more more specifically, by 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics F.A. Hayek and provides a simple answer to the questions above and is the key to maximizing human prosperity. The following analogy provides the gist or essence of the answer:

Just like the human body/organism and the numerous “systems” that coordinate it like the respiratory/nervous/digestive “systems”, are the result of the actions of some 30 trillion cells but obviously NOT the result of any conscious planning or designing by them, and thanks to the likes of Darwin and a modern understanding of genetics we can understand how natural selection was the inadvertent “designer” of such systems and complex order, the modern global socioeconomic order, or what the great British 19th century thinker Herbert Spencer referred to as “The Social Organism” , is also coordinated by a “system”, by what economists of the so-called ‘Austrian School’ like Ludwig von Mises and his great protégé F.A. Hayek, referred to as “The Market Process”. ‘The Market Process’ and the “parts” it is composed of like money, prices, economic competition, interest rates, and the legal/religious/governmental frameworks that sustain it, “are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design” (Adam Ferguson). The ‘market process’ shares this trait with language which is also a complex mechanism that is the result of human action but was not consciously designed or invented by people/cells. Just like cells are unaware of why they act the way they do and how natural selection evolved things like tumor-suppressing genes so that they don’t replicate wildly by turning cancerous and thus act in a ‘civilized’ manner as parts of the complex cellular ‘division of labor’ that makes up multi-cellular animals, so is mankind unaware of how in the last 50,000 thousand years “processes of selective evolution” have evolved our culture/software to go from animalistic ‘Law of The Jungle’ and things like tribal violence, cannibalism, rape, sex with animals and other practices which are now generally seen as abhorrent, to tolerance and respect for private property which led to the emergence of “the market process” and resulting “Social Organism”/civilization. Unfortunately ‘The law of the jungle’ are things we have been doing for millions of years and are somewhat intuitive, commercial society (Capitalism) and understanding the aforementioned economic concepts which have been around for less than a few thousand is not, so the economically clueless vicious slightly smarter apes constantly turn cancerous via our massive ‘coercive government coordinated’ tribalistic wars/militarism and similarly ‘coercive monopoly-central-planning’/Communism/Socialism which destroys the competitive “market process” and thus our own civilization as the history/emergence/failure of Communism/Socialism has already shown.

Standing on Mises’ shoulders, who provided him with a superb explanation of the workings of the economy and thus all aspects of the market process(money/prices/interest rates/etc.) and much, much, much more, Hayek would go on to explain how culture and ‘the market process’ had co-evolved to transform homo sapiens, from tribes of vicious slightly smarter apes, into today’s massively complex global socioeconomic order/’Social Organism’ thus arguably becoming the first person in the history of mankind to provide a complete evolutionary understanding of how the entire world works. Hayek is still is so far ahead of our time that even today’s leading thinkers, like renowned popular science writer Matt Ridley, by their own admission are ‘still catching up with him’. Ridley humbly acknowledges this in a 2011 speech where he mentions:

“As someone who came to Friedrich von Hayek comparatively late in life, I’m still catching up with him…Indeed, many of the insights I thought I had discovered in my own readings and writings on the frontier of evolutionary biology and economics it turns out Hayek had long before me…It’s Hayek who first puts it all together.” — Matt Ridley

So how did Hayek ‘put it all together’?. How did “processes of selective evolution” reorder vicious tribal slightly smarter apes in a few thousand years to create ‘the market process’ and resulting civilization without people/cells being aware of it? Easy, Hayek realized that “all enduring structures above the level of the simplest atoms, and up to the brain and society” require precise information to sustain/coordinate/expand their order. If one understands how information coordinates the biological and social orders then one understands how the world works. Let’s briefly try to get a feel for how Hayek saw the world and how utterly lost mankind is without Mises/Hayek’s insights.

Thanks to these men’s insights it is easy, albeit a bit uncomfortable to say the least, to realize that mankind is essentially

What follows below is a self-contained hour long introduction to economics, cultural evolution, and some applications related to race relations, antisemitism, Covid19, medicine, and more…

Biological and Social Order

“Enduring structures” like living things and society are self-perpetuating orders that are in continuous cycles of wealth production and consumption. Production involves the transformation or relocation of matter to create wealth, and consumption transforms/relocates wealth/matter in a way that sustains or expands living things/orders and their internal parts/orders.

The Sun sends us photons/energy which the process of photosynthesis is able to store in chemical form. This energy is then used to power the cycles of production and consumption which relocate matter that makes up living things. If there is more production than consumption then the order is profitable and thus has additional wealth with which to sustain itself for longer periods and/or grow. An increase in profit is an increase in order and thus life/biomass. For example, paramecium are single-celled life-forms that produce food/wealth by swimming around and swallowing small bacteria which they then consume by digesting and transforming them into the various nutrients/wealth needed to maintain and expand the paramecium’s internal order and thus life. A more complex multi-cellular animal like a person, is simply a collection of cells (which are themselves orders) which must be productive as a whole in order to produce and then consume the necessary wealth needed to nourish itself and the sub-orders/organs/cells/organelles it is composed of. Today we not only have biological order, we have social order, Spencer’s “Social Organism”, which is rapidly growing and increasing its ‘rate of production’, in other words, the rate at which it transforms the earth’s matter into human usable wealth/order/life/biomass. Every year, increasingly automated building-sized machinery in the mining industries scrape/mine less than 10 cubic miles of matter from the earth’s massive volume of 260 billion cubic miles. This matter is collaboratively reordered by billions of people as trillions of dollars worth of wealth in terms of cars/computers/buildings/food/products/etc. are produced thus increasing the word’s economic pie of wealth and social order. These continuous cycles of production and consumption require precise knowledge/information. By focusing on how information arises, spreads, and guides these cycles of production and consumption which lead to order/life/society we can have a simple yet profound understanding of how the entire world works.

The Creation and Spread of Information via Biological Evolution

“Processes of selective evolution” or ‘natural selection’ in general can be said to have created two mechanisms for creating two types of orders/”enduring structures”, biological and social. The biological order is created via the well-known mechanism of ‘biological evolution’ with genes being like the sentences which store the information necessary to create/coordinate life/order. Mutations cause new genes and thus new information to arise which leads to a different life-form which is then ‘naturally selected’ as it inadvertently competes with others, with the winner reproducing more and thus passing on more copies of the better-adapted/”fitter” genes/information/design to future generations.

More complexity requires more information

The more complex a thing is, the more information is needed to create it and keep it in order. Tiny E. coli bacteria have about 4,000 genes and are relatively simple in structure and function. On the other hand, each human cell has about 25,000 genes thus containing far more information allowing each cell to specialize and take part in a vast “division of labor” by transforming itself into a heart/lung/nerve/etc. cell as a young fetus develops inside the womb. About 500 million years ago, life-forms with brains began to emerge which allowed information to be stored outside of genes. Eventually life-forms evolved that used their brains to be increasingly “social” and cooperate with others to reach even higher levels of relative productivity/fitness/competitiveness which leads us to ourselves, anatomically-modern man (about 50,000 years ago), whose ancestors had spent over 2 million years living in small nomadic tribes of about 15 to 100 people where everyone more or less knew how to do the same things so information was inefficiently repeated across the social order. Just like few genes/information leads to simple bacteria, few brains lead to a simple and relatively unproductive social order. Tribal man had an information storage/sharing problem.

Trade, Money and the Division of Labor and Information

Trade and money led to the “division of labor and information” which allowed the social order to efficiently compartmentalize information in only the brains that needed it and also accumulate a virtually limitless amount of information with which to continuously restructure itself in increasingly more productive/advanced ways. For example, Mark’s brain contains knowledge of how to get coconuts and process them to create pastries. Tom’s brain contains knowledge of how to find the best vines and weave them together to make baskets. Jim’s of where to find rocks which when split can create sharp knives and how to sharpen them. When Mark trades his pastries for Tom’s baskets and Jim’s knives he is a benefactor of all the knowledge needed to creating those items yet he only had to know how to make his pastries. Unlike the tribal social order where knowledge is inefficiently repeated across every brain, trade allows for information to be efficiently stored fewer times freeing up more brains to contain more information. We can envision 1,000 men producing and trading 1,000 different types of items requiring 1,000 times more information which without trade and the ‘division of information’ that it enables would have been impossible to achieve in a tribal society. Also, when Mark trades his pastries for the baskets and knives he can now make less trips to gather coconuts by using the baskets and process them faster by using the knives and thus increase his ‘rate of production’ from 2 to 10 pastries per day. The pastry-making process has become more productive and also more complex because it was enabled by basket and knife making knowledge. We now have a never-ending cycle of increased ‘rate of production’ and complexity -> population growth (more brains) -> increased ‘rate of production’ and complexity -> more brains -> … leading to where we are today with nearly 8 billion people and the inability to fully trace the knowledge that enabled the creation of even a simple pencil. In Hayek’s words:

“the greater density of population, leading to the discovery of opportunities for specialisation, or division of labour, led to yet further increases of population and per capita income that made possible another increase in the population. And so on.”

Without money, if Tom wasn’t interested in Mark’s pastries, Mark would have to waste time/effort/expense/consumption figuring out what Tom wanted(chairs), who made it(Gina), visit her and hope she was interested in his pastries. But what if Gina wasn’t interested in pastries and instead wanted blankets? One gets the point. Thus with direct barter above the ‘cost of transaction’, in other words, the amount of wealth that had to be consumed in order to produce the desired trade/transaction, becomes too high/expensive greatly limiting the benefits of trade(division of labor and information). But with money as ‘the common medium of exchange’ being accepted by everyone(Tom accepts Mark’s money), the ‘cost of transaction’ is greatly reduced and the vital benefits of trade like the division of labor/information can happen. Also, without money, how would a heart surgeon trade his services for toothpicks?

Production and Consumption

Whenever a person works he reorders matter, the trillions of atoms he is made of to produce his labor and whatever wealth it creates thus increasing the economic pie. If you are a freelancer you produce a product/service/wealth and trade it directly with society (customers) for money, and then trade the money back with society for the wealth you consume. If you work for a company, you produce your labor and trade it for money with your “employer” who combines it with the labor of others to produce a product/service/wealth which is then traded with society for the money from which your paycheck comes. Whether you are a freelancer, employee, or company, what is commonly referred to as sales revenue (your paycheck), is an estimate of the total amount of wealth produced. Costs, like employee wages which will be used by them to consume wealth(food,energy,etc.), are an estimate of how much wealth is consumed from the economic pie. And profits, which are the difference between sales revenue (production) and costs (consumption) are an estimate of by how much additional wealth the economic pie has grown. Again, a profitable order is an order (cell/person/company) that produces more than it consumes and is therefore self-sustaining/alive. The global economy or ‘Social Organism’ is really a vast collection of orders/people/companies that are constantly looking to discover the best way to trade with each other, nourishing each other, each trade taking each participant/order from an inferior to a superior state of well-being from its own perspective, otherwise the trade/action would not occur. When Tom trades a dollar for a hamburger he values the hamburger more than the dollar and the restaurant values the dollar more than the hamburger so the action of trading takes place, which like all action which is not coerced, takes each participant from an inferior to superior state of wellbeing.

Lucas, an experienced mechanic in California charges $150 to replace break-pads on most cars and this casually takes him about 2 hours so his ‘rate of production’ is about $150/2 hours = $75/hour. James, a 14 year old who lives near the shop would love to learn how to fix cars and work at Lucas’ shop, unfortunately between learning how to use tools, change the break-pads, watching youtube videos, redoing things because he messed up, it takes him about 30 hours to produce the service/wealth so his rate of production is $150/30hours = $5/hour. Lucas is motivated to trade/pay $4/hour for James’ labor and profit $1/hour. James is happy to be making money and learning so much thus discovering information/experience that can increase his future rate of production. After fixing the breaks in 10 cars, he can now do/produce the average $150 service/wealth in 6 hours thus achieving a $25/hour rate of production. Competition for labor from other shops, as well as James’ desire and ‘freedom to trade’ his labor for as much as possible, motivates Lucas to pay/trade a ‘competitive’ wage for James’ labor so he raises his pay to $22/hour and now profits 3$/hour. The above is a hypothetical because in California it is a criminal act to trade less than $12 per hour for someone’s labor thus making it unprofitable for Lucas to hire/trade-with James when his productivity was only $5/hour. It is also a criminal act to pay for a 14 year old’s labor/production. Minimum wage laws essentially outlaw all production that does not happen at a rate higher than the mandated minimum thus making it impossible for the least skilled members of society like teenagers, the elderly, etc. to even work/produce and gain the experience/skills needed to increase their productivity.

The production of wealth requires the consumption of wealth. For example, if 1,000 men are to spend 2 years producing a skyscraper, they must consume/use the concrete/materials/food/energy/transportation/wealth that they (as well as their dependents/family) need while they produce the skyscraper. In other words, there can be no production if there does not already exist enough saved wealth that can be consumed while production takes place.

Money II

More money does not equal more wealth. Imagine if everyone in the world suddenly had an extra billion dollars. Would this make society wealthier? No. The amount of REAL wealth(goods/services) has not increased by a single toothpick. It would actually lead to less wealth since many people wound stop working/producing seeing their new-found fortune. Would the 1,000 men above be able to produce the skyscraper if instead of having real wealth to use/consume had to consume pieces of paper with dead presidents on them? Of course not.

More money leads to and enables higher prices. For example, if there are 1,000 people in an island (BlueIsle) and each has $100 for a total of $100,000 in the island, can anything sell for $200,000? Of course not, even if they all combined their money such a transaction could not happen because there isn’t enough money, but what if each person had $500 so that there is now a total of $500,000? Then yes obviously, prices could go up to $500,000. So for general prices to go up there HAS to be more money. And who creates the money and is ultimately responsible for a general increase in prices? Generally speaking, today all money is created by governments via their central banks (Federal Reserve in USA) and they are thus responsible for the price increases. Let’s say you print yourself 1,000 trillion dollars and start offering people in the USA’s West coast ridiculous amounts of money for their goods/property/wealth. You buy all the wealth in California, Washington, Oregon, etc. As this is happening Americans are growing richer in terms of money but poorer in terms of what really matters, homes/property/wealth. At some point you make it to Florida, by this time it will be packed with about 300 million Americans and perhaps the 1,000 trillion dollars or more you kept offering people. The price of wealth tends to be the amount of money that is offered in exchange for it given all the other things the money could be traded for. With so much money and so little wealth left, the amount of money per wealth, in other words, the price, of everything would be astronomical and people would be much poorer given that you are the one that possesses most of the wealth in the country. Assuming the total amount of money remains stable, if the economy/wealth is expanding, which can only happen if the rate at which goods/services/wealth is produced is faster than the rate at which it is consumed, we expect general prices to go DOWN because the money will sort of get divided among more goods/wealth so less money per item/wealth means a lower price. This last point is of vital importance, under normal/ideal circumstances, as the economy grows we should expect prices to go down and people’s savings to buy them more in the future. If the amount of wealth remains stable or grows slower than the amount/supply of money, then we have more money per item, thus higher prices.

Let’s go over a final and very important example. Keep your eye on how much wealth is being produced and consumed, and the relationship between the quantity of money, wealth, and thus prices. Let’s say Alan prints himself another $100,000 which is enough to hire half the people in BlueIsle for 3 months while they build him a small castle. Alan thinks this is a great idea, he is paying some people more than what they were making before, there were also a few unemployed or unmotivated-to-work people before but he is offering enough money to get everyone working thus achieving “full-employment”. Prior to trading their labor for Alan’s paper/money, people were producing stuff that they either wanted/needed to consume themselves or could be sold/traded to others who obviously wanted/needed to consume them, they were producing “socially desired” or “order/life creating/sustaining” stuff like oranges/apples/hair-cuts/blankets/baskets/etc. The day half the population begins working on Alan’s castle, the island’s economic pie begins to lose half its “socially desired” stuff/wealth since half the population is no longer creating it, and begins increasing the amount of rocks, ladders, and other things for Alan’s castle. These things, are NOT “socially desired” or “order creating/sustaining” wealth as judged/calculated by the inhabitants. Since the existing $100,000 will be distributed over half as many socially-desired-goods, this would eventually motivate their prices to about double. However, since Alan is further doubling the money supply as he pays people using his newly printed $100,000, on the last days of castle-building, when half the population is still working on his castle and they have also spent most of the new $100,000, prices would have nearly doubled once again making them about 4 times higher than they were before Alan came up with his idea. It should be easy to see that Alan has reordered society in an inferior way. Everyone is “working” and making more money than before, but the unavoidable reality that they are ordered in a less productive way reflects itself in the much higher prices and smaller amount of wealth on average that each can consume. Ideally people now “lose their jobs”, and instead of working on the easily identifiable yet disastrous plan laid out by Alan, for a few days there appears to be “chaos” as people discover superior plans and likely transition to their old trades/jobs thus once again reordering society on a far, far more productive way. However, they are economically ignorant, so they tell Alan “Can you hire us again to make the castle bigger? You pay us more than what we used to make before. You are about to create massive unemployment!!!”. Alan thinks to himself “Gosh! It is a good thing that by creating money I am preventing massive unemployment and chaos. Obviously I must keep providing ‘liquidity’!” So the relative suffering continues even as the local newspaper gives Alan the “Citizen of the Year” award. Carl told Alan that what he was doing was disastrous and told people that Alan should just stop creating money and let everyone lose their jobs. The economically ignorant public labeled him a heartless capitalist and killed him unfortunately. Had Alan been a bad king, who instead of creating money to acquire the necessary wealth to create his castle, simply taxed people at a 50% rate, the people’s living standard would have suffered similarly, but they would have easily understood the fact that their wealth was taken from them for the creation of things they didn’t want or benefit from for a hopefully more obvious massive loss.

The creation of money by governments is just a hidden tax that transfers wealth from savers and society at large to the people who get the newly created money. For example, Let’s say you have saved $1,000 which can buy you 1,000 items at $1/each. The government via the central bank (Federal Reserve in US) and a convoluted process eventually creates billions of dollars which are given to the newly-created Space Force military personnel so they can trade them for the wealth they need to consume/live and because of this money-creation prices go up 5% so each item is now $1.05 and your saved(or future earned) $1,000 can only buy you about 952 instead of 1,000 items. The 48 items/wealth that you (and other taxpayers/workers/producers) can no longer obtain, is the wealth that the Space Force personnel got to consume. Again, money is not the same thing as wealth, when governments create money they are simply creating an additional tax or transfer of wealth from savers and the public at large to those who get the money.

The following graph helps us understand how when the US was still on a gold standard, since gold can’t be increased by adding 0s at the end of bars, this prevented the government from acquiring additional wealth/taxes by just creating the money thus prices had a slight downward trend until 1971 when the USA completely abandoned the gold standard. Up to 1971 the US would give foreign governments an ounce of gold per $35 dollars, but to acquire enough wealth from the public in order to give it to people involved in the Vietnam War, as well as grow a rapidly increasing welfare system, the US was creating more dollars than what it could honestly exchange to gold. French president Charles de Gaulle, who wanted the war to end, knew this money/debt-creation was allowing the US to dishonestly acquire the needed wealth to finance the war so he demanded many dollars to be exchanged into gold. The US had enough for France, but was running very low on gold and knew it could not meet further obligations so it just completely stopped dollar-to-gold convertibility and thus end the gold standard. Had the US government tried to obtain this wealth, not via money-creation/inflation, but by raising taxes directly, chances are Americans would not have gone along. Thus from 1971 onward the US government thanks to Fed(Central Bank) money-creation has been able to additionally tax workers/savers causing prices to rapidly increase instead of going down. If you look very carefully at the graph, you will notice two rapid increases in prices, one occurring during the American Civil War (1861–65) and another during the First World War(1914–1918). During wars, tribalistic politicians/ideologues always resort to the price-increasing money-creation to acquire the wealth needed to feed/clothe/nourish the war effort, because if they had to get the wealth via direct taxation, the public would more easily factor the true costs of the tribalistic warmongering and likely bring an end to such needless slaughters.

The graph above helps us see how thanks to technology/progress even though worker productivity has increased by 246% since 1948, compensation has only increased by 115%. Again, once the economically ignorant technocrats/politicians abandoned the gold standard in 1971 and could easily acquire additional wealth by just creating money (more debt) much of the additional production was taken away from workers via inflation/money-creation. The concept of “No taxation without representation!” is bypassed when ideologues can take all the wealth they want from the public by just creating money. VERY IMPORTANT! This is NOT the result of some ‘malicious plot’ by bureaucrats or government economists, most are clueless and are only focused on spending (acquiring wealth now) to help the government acquire the necessary wealth to carry out the increasing number of things the clueless masses/voters expect from it.

This next graph shows how from early march to mid may 2020, the Federal Reserve has created about 3 trillion dollars which will be given to people and businesses so that they can exchange this money for wealth they can consume, much of this will be unemployment benefits which will motivate many to not even look for work and thus continue to be pure consumers thus overall the 3+ trillion is leading to a rapid shrinking of the economy and accelerating rise in prices(In 2020 real estate went up 15%, lumber 340%...) . Again, this is just a transfer of wealth from workers/producers/seniors/some to others as the economy continues to shrink and prices rise compared to what they would have otherwise been without the money-creation.

The Creation and Spread of Information via Economic Competition

In the ‘Social Organism’/economy superior information arises and spreads thanks to economic competition. Economic competition motivates the social order’s billions of minds to constantly innovate and copy each other’s innovations thus inadvertently cooperate in the generation and spread of superior information and subsequent social order, turning it into a sort of super-computer which coordinates the transformation of matter into socioeconomic order/life. For example, all private sector orders/companies like BMW, Ford, and Toyota are constantly innovating and copying each other’s innovations like power door-locks/windows thus continuously cooperating in the creation and spread of superior information/order. Why do they do this? Because people have the ‘freedom to trade’ their life/order-sustaining wealth with the better informed auto-manufacturers/competitors. This in turn motivates all competitors to learn/copy each other lest they not get enough revenue/wealth with which to pay their employees a competitive wage so they use their ‘freedom to trade’ their labor to join the better-informed and thus more productive/efficient orders/companies. This wonderful automatic mechanism is “turned on” or “emerges” from the simple concept, or better said, tradition of ‘private property’. Private property gives everyone in our role as consumers the ‘freedom to trade’ our life/order-sustaining wealth for what we calculate/think is best. This ‘freedom to trade/choose’ in turn motivates everyone, in our role as producers, to discover how to order ourselves in a manner that produces something society/customers value (our labor, a product/service), which we do by, once again, innovating and/or copying/learning existing ideas/information, in other words, by competing in the economic sense. Most of us simply choose to produce and then trade our labor with a company/order that knows how to further incorporate our labor in a more competitive/profitable way. Via advertising, competitors are motivated to spread the potential usefulness and superiority of their products/ideas as well as the defects/inferiority of their competitors thus accelerating the need to compete/copy/spread superior information. Just like in the Olympics we can discover the best athletes in the world due to global competition, so does having the ‘freedom to trade’ with everyone in the world allows the best ideas to compete/spread globally thus ensuring the best possible global order. As cost-cutting ideas emerge and inevitably spread via competition leading prices to continuously fall, new profitable ideas easily arise and once again spread via competition in an endless cycle of knowledge generation/innovation. For example, computers were once very expensive, but once the price of making them came down enough, people easily realized that every home could have them, which gave birth to our computerized world and the Internet and all the great things that flow from it. The more wealth is produced, the more wealth has to be offered in exchange for labor as companies/orders compete against each other for the labor they need which helps explain why the economic pie grows for everyone. For example, imagine that after a shipwreck you end up in an island where everyone has a machine that can turn dirt into food. Tom wants your labor to build a home, Mark, to build a boat, and Gina to plant a garden. Competition will motivate them to offer you all the food you want and more.

Morals as Superior Information

We should quickly add that morals are ways of acting, they too are knowledge which also emerges and spreads via economic competition to considerable degrees. It is hard-working, tolerant, courteous people who thanks to competition inevitably motivate everyone else to be likewise. As Hayek tells us:

“Competition is, after all, always a process in which a small number makes it necessary for larger numbers to do what they do not like, be it to work harder, to change habits, or to devote a degree of attention, continuous application, or regularity to their work which without competition would not be needed.” (Hayek “Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 3: The Political Order of a Free People” 1981, p. 77)

As millions of Italians, Britons, Germans and others from all over the world came to America, it was ultimately the competition which grows from ‘private property’ and thus individual liberty/freedom which stripped these people of their otherwise nationalistic/ethnocentric/tribalistic identities and evolved what came to be seen as the classic American character/ethos of wanting to be seen as a reputable/honest businessman/professional who treats everyone with respect and wears a business suit as opposed to older religious/ethnocentric dress. So not only does ‘private property’ “turn on” economic competition and other aspects of the market process and resulting social order/civilization, it also evolves our culture/identity to be ideally suited for participation in the ‘Social Organism’.

Prices and the Impossibility of Socialist Central Planning

How much wealth had to be consumed in order to produce a gallon of gasoline that sells in Seattle for $3.50? Or a pound of beef that sells in Alaska for $5.35? We can’t know for sure, however, we can be fairly certain that it was less than the advertised price which on average must include the costs. The price of any item in the world lets us know that there is an order at that particular time and place that is coordinated by information that can produce the item while consuming less than the advertised price. THAT IS AMAZING! This allows wealth to be purchased and combined in a manner that ensures that the combination (like a car) can easily have a price set that properly accounts for the costs/consumption of the whole (car) by just adding the prices of the parts used to produce it (wheels, glass, robotics, labor, etc.), parts which themselves had a price set that included their costs/consumption and so on, each part/input managed/ordered by entrepreneurs/brains/CPUs with highly specialized time-and-place specific information/skill who are always using profit/loss calculation to ensure they are producing more than consuming (being profitable) thus increasing the economic pie/order, leading to never-ending conveyor belts of interlocking cycles of production/consumption, each moving/reordering matter in increasingly valuable ways (mines -> wheels -> vans -> deliveries ->….).

A business like a burger joint in Miami on 1/3/2021 has to discover information like how to acquire factors of production with local prices like labor/supplies/equipment/rent/location, combine/reorder them and set a price per meal that both covers costs/consumption AND lures enough customers thus succeeding in providing a superior/profitable rearrangement of society. This information can ONLY be discovered and acted upon by free individuals/entrepreneurs dispersed throughout society, and certainly NOT bureaucrats hundreds of miles away, thus rendering profitable (pie/life/order-increasing) central economic planning IMPOSSIBLE to achieve. The concept/tradition of ‘private property’ plays a vital role here as well, it is not until resources are privately owned that they are controlled/coordinated by brains/CPUs that are incentivized to discover the best information with which to reorder/coordinate them in the most productive/profitable way possible. With the Internet, pricing information all over the world can help customers find/nourish cheaper/better products/orders/companies and also help producers likewise thus greatly accelerating competitive knowledge/order-spreading but it will NEVER lead to the success of central economy-wide planning because no computers/system can anticipate the firing of trillions of neurons in the brains of entrepreneurs to predict what products/businesses they will create and thus alter society, and similarly, no computers can get in the minds of consumers and predict how they will choose to spend their money/wealth thus once again altering the social order’s numerous cycles of production and consumption. As Mises so eloquently explains:

“The consumers, by their buying or abstention from buying, ultimately determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. They render profitable the affairs of those businessmen who best comply with their wishes and unprofitable the affairs of those who do not produce what they are asking for most urgently. Profits convey control of the factors of production into the hands of those who are employing them for the best possible satisfaction of the most urgent needs of the consumers, and losses withdraw them from the control of the inefficient businessmen. In a market economy not sabotaged by the government the owners of property are mandataries of the consumers as it were. On the market a daily repeated plebiscite determines who should own what and how much. It is the consumers who make some people rich and other people penniless.” (Mises)

Savings and Interest Rates: Giving a Computational Boost to Society

Finance/banking and interest rates are other vital aspects of the ‘Market Process’. Besides the more obvious function of safeguarding savings and pooling the savings/wealth of many people to allow the execution of bigger projects which would have been impossible if entrepreneurs were limited to the few savings/wealth of friends and family, banking/finance and more specifically the phenomenon of ‘interest rates’ also play a nearly miraculous role. If we assume that the general interest rate is at 5%, we can divide minds/CPUs into two categories. 1) Those that have relatively inferior knowledge or business plans that can grow the economic pie by less than 5% and will be motivated to refrain from consumption by lending their savings/money to banks to earn the 5% interest and thus increasing the amount of saved wealth, and 2) those minds that have superior knowledge or business plans which will be motivated to become borrowers/consumers of the previously saved/unconsumed funds/wealth so they can consume it as they execute the business plans they expect to yield a higher than 5% return on investment so that they can pay back the loans with interest and keep the rest as profit. As if by magic, interest rates motivate the accumulation of wealth and its pairing with minds/CPUs that have superior ideas thus giving a tremendous sort of ‘computational boost’ to society. The savings of the much vilified “rich” is the very wealth that private sector workers consume while they go about increasing production by an amount greater than the current interest rate. Taxing “the rich”/middleclass/anyone just removes this wealth and the efficient/productive/profitable/private sector jobs it would otherwise sustain.

When Governments via their central banks just create money to lend it to businesses and “stimulate” the economy, they are doing immense harm because it gives the illusion that there exists enough savings/wealth/bricks to consume while completing, say 12 skyscrapers/projects, when in reality there was only enough wealth/savings/bricks for the completion of 9. Unfortunately only 7 can be completed instead of 9, because much wealth/savings/bricks were misallocated creating the bases/scaffolding for 12 thus 5 skyscrapers/projects had to be abandoned after much wealth was consumed leading to no production thus a relative loss/shrinking of wealth. The new money(loans/‘credit expansion’) coupled with the reality that the needed wealth/goods simply does not exist ultimately causes prices of factors of production(bricks/laborers/wealth) to go up more than expected as entrepreneurs use the new money to compete for the limited existing wealth, causing the original profit/loss calculations and plans to eventually reflect the reality that there just isn’t enough wealth/bricks for all the newly attempted skyscrapers/projects to profitably complete. As Mises explains:

“However conditions may be, it is certain that no manipulations of the banks can provide the economic system with capital goods[wealth/bricks]. What is needed for a sound expansion of production is additional capital goods[wealth], not money or fiduciary media. The boom is built on the sands of banknotes and deposits. It must collapse.” ([brackets] added by me)

Mises sums up everything beautifully when he wrote:

“Credit expansion cannot increase the supply of real goods. It merely brings about a rearrangement. It diverts capital investment away from the course prescribed by the state of economic wealth and market conditions. It causes production to pursue paths which it would not follow unless the economy were to acquire an increase in material goods. As a result, the upswing lacks a solid base. It is not real prosperity. It is illusory prosperity. It did not develop from an increase in economic wealth. Rather, it arose because the credit expansion created the illusion of such an increase. Sooner or later it must become apparent that this economic situation is built on sand.”

This money-creation by governments and their central banks is what causes the ‘Booms and Busts’ in economies. It may seem hard to believe, but John Maynard Keynes, the economist whose theories underpin mainstream economics believed that creating savings by adding money to banks(inflation) “are just as genuine as any other savings” like those created by first producing REAL WEALTH and then consuming less thus saving/leaving REAL WEALTH. Keynes also believed that “…activity of one kind or another is the only possible means of making the wheels of economic progress and of the production of wealth go round again” which is absurd because “activity” has to be coordinated in a manner that leads to more production than consumption otherwise you are just shrinking the economic pie, and the “discovery” of how to achieve this can only be done by the competitive/free private sector. This also helps us easily understand how War and military spending is horrendous for society as you have millions of people consuming useful wealth like food/housing/energy as they produce pushups, tanks, bullets which are then used to destroy more wealth/life leading to an obvious shrinking of wealth/life/order even though they are all “working” and thus engaged in “activity of one kind or another”.

It is useful to envision the socioeconomic order as it really exists as if looked at from high above. Envision people coming together/apart as companies/orders emerge and dissolve in ever-changing conditions. Superior information arising and rippling/restructuring the social order thanks to competition. As orders get more productive they lure other people to ‘trade-with’/’join-them’ by offering more money/wealth for their labor relative to other companies/orders, eventually causing the least productive orders to sort of dissolve as their ‘factors of production’ like labor, buildings, etc. are bid away to be parts of more productive plans/orders. A sort of swarm intelligence emerges as the all-pervasive public quickly nourishes the growth and spread or superior orders/companies/information, inadvertently expanding the worldwide “division of labor and information” as entire neighborhoods/cities morph themselves in specialized ways as complementary pieces of information/orders segregate themselves in distinct geographical locations like the software industry in Silicon Valley, California and manufacturing in Guangdong, southern China. As Mises reminds us “The division of labour is a fundamental principle of all forms of life.” The division of labor is a pattern/way which natural selection rediscovers to enable smaller units/orders to efficiently compartmentalize labor/information as they contribute-to (and are nourished-by) a larger organism they become parts of(Organelles -> Cells -> Organs -> Humans -> Social Organism). Mises again:

“It is by virtue of the division of labor that man is distinguished from the animals. It is the division of labor that has made feeble man, far inferior to most animals in physical strength, the lord of the earth and the creator of the marvels of technology.”

Government/’Public Sector’ is an Inefficient Monopoly

Since it is through freedom and resulting ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ that we both, free people from coercion/tyranny/slavery, and also discover the best information with which to act and reorder mankind, the role of governments should be to set the framework/laws that maximize such freedom/‘competitive knowledge discovery’ and NOT to attempt to manage/order society because governmental/‘public sector’ bureaucracies, being COERCIVE MONOPOLIES which get their life/order-sustaining wealth through taxes/compulsion are immune to the competitive-information-spreading incentives/pressures which motivate/force private sector orders to keep up with the competition in terms of hustle, and the copying and innovation of ideas. Government action is monopolistic/competition-less action which is always bound to be inferior to private/competitive action. Hayek:

“The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.”

Central/government plans can’t work if people are free to not go along with them, or use property as they wish instead of by the central planers/government — so they inevitably require compulsion/tyranny. For example, it is a criminal act in Communist countries like North Korea to start a business, in other words, to attempt a superior restructuring of society because it interferes with the plans of “the experts” who run the government. It is also a criminal act everywhere to not pay taxes that sustain public sector bureaucracies like “public education” so there is little incentive or wealth to sustain other, more desirable/superior competitors/ideas. For example, the NYC public(monopolistic) school bureaucracy consumes about $29,000 per year to “educate” a K-12 student. Refusing to pay a single dollar that goes to this bureaucracy is a criminal act. Taxes and all transfers of wealth from the private sector to the government, besides being an obvious burden to the people that had to sacrifice a part of their lives to earn such wealth and now have less wealth to trade for the things they want, simply destroy the more productive private sector jobs the taxed-away spending would have sustained and replaces such productive/efficient and pie-increasing jobs for inefficient government ones or worse like militarism/wars. The former Soviet Union had plenty of highly educated scientists/’experts’ whose plans required the coercion of millions, but they were thoroughly crushed by free Americans and their ‘competitive knowledge discovery’. Socialist regimes and government in general also face an “incentive problem.” In free societies, or the private sector, each person/cell is incentivized to be as productive and careful as possible and keep inefficiencies/risks to a minimum since he owns/keeps the additional wealth or losses in terms of unprofitable ideas or law suits. On the other hand, the government employee or bureaucrat gets the same pay (ability to then consume) whether his department did a good job (produced a lot) or not, and is also not risking his own wealth since that comes from the taxpayers. The image below is another one of our most powerful memes for explaining the difference between competitive/private/free orders(South Korea) and monopolistic/government/coerced orders (North Korea). Again, keep your eye on how information arises/spreads via competition and continuously restructures the social order.

Regulatory Paralysis

Unlike information that arises in the private/competitive sector and is constantly being replaced by superior information due to economic competition, a government regulation is competition-less/monopoly information that is forced upon the entire social order from the top-down via the law. In the free/private/competitive sector information moves from the bottom (individual minds/entrepreneurs/innovators) to the top/others/influences as it is ‘tested’/refined/preferred/adapted by the comparisons to other information by billions of minds thus ensuring superior information spreads. This is bypassed by top-down regulation and all government/monopoly action which ultimately comes at the expense of wiser private action. The more the government regulates, the more it paralyzes competitive knowledge discovery. As government regulations have increased in the health care sector, turning it into a sort of island of paralyzed top-down competition-less/socialist central planning, so have costs. These increased costs have led the sector to grow from consuming just 4% of the American economic pie in 1960 to over 20% in 2021. The image below helps explain the regulatory paralysis/bureaucratization of the entire medical sector which is responsible for the skyrocketing costs/consumption.

In graph below one can see how the more regulated a sector is (Hospital Services) the more expensive/consumptive it becomes.

What a person must learn in order to legally offer medical advice via licensing of doctors, where he must learn it via licensing of medical schools, what chemical compounds can be legally consumed, how to test drugs, how the medical insurance industry should work, and countless other gigantic bodies of knowledge/information are dictated by monopolistic competition-less bureaucracies like the American Medical Association (AMA), the Food And Drug Administration (FDA) and numerous others thus paralyzing freedom’s ‘competitive knowledge discovery’. By comparison, the Information Technology sector has very few government regulations so competition motivates the creation and spread of superior information across the entire planet at breakneck speeds and is obviously transforming our world right before our eyes. Just like relatively poor people can afford amazing Smartphones and all the wonders of the Internet, if the medical sector, or better yet, the entire world-wide economy was as deregulated and thus as competitive/innovative as the Software/IT sector, the rate of innovation and prosperity would skyrocket making superior healthcare and perhaps even beat dying of old age, easily affordable even by the relatively poorer. But we all know human flight is impossible.

‘Between Instinct and Reason’ : An Introduction to Hayek’s Cultural Evolution

Having discussed several aspects of the ‘market process’ like profit/loss calculation, economic competition and interest rate coordination we can attempt to discuss how this wonderful system has arisen as “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”. In other words, how did “processes of selective evolution” NOT “smart economists” design the amazing “market process” and resulting ‘Social Organism’. Similarly, how did we go from slightly smarter dangerous apes, to “civilized ones”.

Hayek answered this monumentally important question via an evolutionary/competitive process that goes more or less as follows. If we envision mankind about 100,000 years ago, we would see a sort of petri-dish of competing cultures(languages/concepts/rules/laws) that are being ‘naturally selected’ based on their ability to grow the groups that contain them relative to other groups. Customs/concepts/rules/etc. that inadvertently cause their respective social orders to grow whether it’d be via conquest, successful defense, migration into, imitation, etc., will expand their order AND the very customs/concepts/rules/ideologies/etc. which helped them thrive. Every rule/law has an effect in the productivity/growth/survival of a social order. Given that a society/tribe is likely to have dozens of such rules it is impossible to know the exact impact of any one of them when considering the overall competitiveness of a society/order. For simplicity’s sake let us focus on just one rule, what is the optimal punishment for theft? In the tribal past a stereotypical tribe might believe in some animal-spirit-god. The very existence/discussion of the concept among members of the tribe, coupled with inevitable dreams which would make such concepts seem real and shared among the tribe, would be enough to greatly solidify such mythology/religion. The shaman sacrifices the virgin and it happened to rain the next day thus making the “science” certain/settled. If the rains didn’t come, perhaps she had to be sacrificed facing another direction. What matters is how certain ideas make enough sense to create the ‘echo chamber’ that leads to them being carried out and propagated. Let’s assume that in culture/tribe ‘A’ when a man steals he is killed which might deter many thefts but decreases the number of people in the group and all the productivity that this person might contribute in the future. In tribe ‘B’ they cut off a hand, and in tribe ‘C’ 10 lashes. Let’s assume that tribe A’s custom/rule of killing the thief actually proved to lead to a “fitter” social order. Perhaps it turns out that cutting off the hand led to an unproductive person that became a big drain on rest of tribe and a weak/useless fighter when it came to offense/defense so it was better if he was dead, and that lashes proved to not be enough of a deterrent which led to many thefts and retaliatory violence which turned out to be more costly than losing a member of the tribe. For simplicity’s sake let us assume that this was by far the most important custom/rule affecting the growth/fitness of the social order, and that because of this, tribe/culture ‘A’ eventually displaced the others so that its kill-thieves rule/custom survived while the other punishments disappeared. The kill-thieves rule, is the result of human action, yet not the result of conscious human planning or design with the reasoned or conscious goal of having a more competitive/fit social order. The real designing of this rule or cultural element was made, not by innate instinct or human reason, but by ‘natural selection’/competition/’group selection’/’cultural evolution’.

This concept of ‘cultural evolution’/’group selection’ allowed Hayek to identify a sort of ‘third dimension’/source/mechanism for discovering/spreading knowledge which was neither instinctual (tied to our genetics/biology), nor the result of our conscious reason. As Hayek liked to refer to it, it was a mechanism for creating/spreading information which laid “between instinct and reason” and is the largely unknown/understood source of knowledge that played the vital role in the evolution of the market process and related social institutions. Omnipresence, the ability to be everywhere at all times is another concept that would provide a great benefit to religions that used it to describe their God. Without God’s omnipresence you could get away with breaking the rules that give society order and only have to face the consequences brought upon by fellow men. But if God is everywhere, watching your every move, you will be much more likely to follow those rules that give your society a productive social order. A similar case can be made for the concepts of “sin” and “evil”. Did clever men “conspire” to create our religions to control us? Of course not. Like the ‘market process’, they too “are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”. It could be said that an omnipresent god is one of those culturally evolved/designed concepts that is far more important than anything our “reason” has ever invented, as Hayek writes:

“…we may owe to these religions the preservation — admittedly for false reasons — of practices that were more important in enabling man to survive in large numbers than most of what has been accomplished through reason”(Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit”)

These concepts/rules helped enforce constraints on what for brevity’s sake we’ll refer to as our evolved tribalistic(‘small group’)/primate-like nature/instincts/’law of the jungle’, which for millions of years were shaped by things like tribal violence, cannibalism, rape and other practices which are now generally seen as abhorrent and whose relatively recent suppression via culture/religion/law enabled the emergence of ‘private property’/trade/commerce/’Social Organism’/civilization. Growing up is about programming/molding our flexible brains into learning all of these rules and thus rewiring them to be as happy as possible even though many of these restrictions go counter to our ‘uncivilized instincts’. Just like natural selection modified solitary cells to have tumor suppressing genes to control rapid cell division/proliferation (cancer) in order to cooperate in a multi-cellular organism, so has cultural evolution likewise molded homo sapiens to suppress “uncivilized” animalistic barbaric tendencies. Hayek writes:

“…man’s instincts…were not made for the kinds of surroundings, and for the numbers, in which he now lives. They were adapted to life in the small roving bands or troops in which the human race and its immediate ancestors evolved during the few million years while the biological constitution of homo sapiens was being formed.” (Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit”)

Obviously the molding/brainwashing fails quite often when we engage in rape/torture/militarism/war/“sin” and more. One can easily speculate about how the simplicity and pro-private-property character of Judaism’s Ten Commandments (‘Thou shalt not steal/murder/’commit adultery’/ ‘covet(neighbor’s…)) and monotheism helped it be more ‘viral’ and thus be ‘naturally selected’ over other beliefs/religions that might have been more complex/confusing/contradictory and also be less respectful of private property thus inadvertently foregoing the emergence of the market process and corresponding ‘Social Organism’/Civilization.

Due to numerous evolutionary pressures involved (megafauna extinction/etc.), agricultural/grain/bread-based society, although inferior and suddenly out of synch with our evolved big-game-hunter carnivorous biology in terms of nutrition at the individual level, was more conducive to trade, the resulting division of labor/information/competition, and thus a large more productive/powerful social order at the group level. Nomadic tribes can’t carry around large buildings/granaries, increasingly-complex tools/weapons/etc. Instead of sharing things which was vital for our tribal/communist intuitive existence, privatization became more important/productive/selected. The privatization of land/resources/others(slavery)/women/children and accompanying/enforcing myths/taboos/religions began to be naturally selected for. Our very concept of the “self” became more individualistic and less tied to a tribal/communal identity. We went from animalistic promiscuity/gang-bangs(women can have multiple orgasms and enjoy sex for longer uninterrupted periods than men due to sex with multiple males for millions of years), to a stricter and more privatized family structure with the necessary taboos/myths/software needed to enforce them (“…you shall eat bread…” Genesis 3:19, Ten Commandments…). Pre-agricultural man didn’t even have a word or linguistic construct for a biological father, this cultural concept/language arose due to the natural selection of agricultural and pastoral societies which benefitted from such privatization over the tribalisitc/hunter-gatherer/communal groups that didn’t. Egyptian civilization, although populated by relatively malnourished agrarian people, had an advanced division of labor/commerce, could feed/equip large armies and thus ultimately became one of modernity’s cultural great-grandparents.

Rules relating to sex are crucial given the biological importance and potential turmoil relating to it. For example, at some point we developed strong taboos/punishments for sex with animals. For example, the Hebrew Bible mentions:

“Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death.” Exodus 22:18

“And thou shalt not lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith; neither shall any woman stand before a beast, to lie down thereto; it is perversion.” Lev. 18:23

For the Hittites we have:

“If a man has sexual relations with a cow, it is an unpermitted sexual pairing; he will be put to death”

However,

“If a man has sexual relations with either a horse or a mule it is not an offense”

Some form of marriage custom has evolved to help deal with sexual issues and currently the ‘one man’/‘one woman’ rule has been the winning/selected strategy for many cultures, but it is impossible to predict that this arrangement is the best thing for mankind going forward. We certainly know that biologically we are polyamorous and much more like our primate cousins the chimpanzees and bonobos. Fake boobs, genetic engineering coming down the line, birth control, women’s freedom and who-knows-what-else-the-future-holds makes predicting what might emerge impossible. Some people mistakenly believe that if certain traditions or social norms “break down” society will suffer greatly, but this will likely not be the case if people understand basic economics. Theoretically and in all likelihood we can go back to having sex with animals and other practices today most consider barbaric(not that I’m encouraging this), what we can’t do is abandon/forget/abolish private property and resulting economic freedom. Here we see some of the roots of the modern political Left(Darwinian/irreligious) / Right (religious/tradition) divide. For example, to various degrees “the Left” tolerates/encourages the human animal in his natural state and thus attacks the culturally evolved gender roles, increasingly allows sexual activity by youth at whatever age may arise naturally, and is far more tolerant of things like prostitution, while “the Right” finds such things as sick perversions and recipes for socioeconomic decline.

We are now in a position to understand the following Hayek quotes:

“The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the “wrong” beliefs.”

“Culture is neither natural nor artificial, neither genetically transmitted nor rationally designed. It is a tradition of learnt rules of conduct which have never been ‘invented’ and whose functions the acting individuals usually do not understand” (Hayek “Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 3: The Political Order of a Free People” 1981, p. 155)

“To understand our civilisation, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection — the comparative increase of population and wealth — of those groups that happened to follow them. The unwitting, reluctant, even painful adoption of these practices kept these groups together, increased their access to valuable information of all sorts, and enabled them to be ‘fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it’ (Genesis 1:28). This process is perhaps the least appreciated facet of human evolution.” (Hayek, “The Fatal Conceit” p. 6)

“We have never designed our economic system. We were not intelligent enough for that. We have stumbled into it and it has carried us to unforeseen heights and given rise to ambitions which may yet lead us to destroy it.” (Hayek F. A., 1981, p. 164)

With respect to private property and mankind’s general ignorance of the vital role that it plays:

“…I am quite convinced nobody invented it for a known purpose, and to me the proof of this is that even now hardly anybody yet understands what the advantages of private property and the market society are.” (Hayek essay “Individual and Collective Aims” published in “On Toleration” ISBN 0–19–827529–3)

Our evolving cultural brainwashing had to tame the feeling of envy and jealousy which obviously plays such an ardent factor in fueling the economically ignorant anti-Capitalist mentality. Hayek:

“Envy and ignorance lead people to regard possessing more than one needs for current consumption as a matter for censure rather than merit. Yet the idea that such capital must be accumulated ‘at the expense of others’ is a throwback to economic views that, however obvious they may seem to some, are actually groundless, and make an accurate understanding of economic development impossible” (Hayek F. A., 1989, p. 124)

“Man has been civilized very much against his wishes. It was the price he had to pay for being able to raise a larger number of children. We especially dislike the economic disciplines… The indispensable rules of the free society require from us much that is unpleasant, such as suffering competition from others, seeing others being richer than ourselves, etc., etc.” (Hayek “Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 3: The Political Order of a Free People” 1981, p. 168)

At the most fundamental of levels, there is matter in the universe, and natural selection selecting for order which includes “systems” like biological evolution and ‘the market process’ which create such orders (biological, social).

We must stress the fact that the cultural evolutionary process which has created ‘the market process’ is much, much faster than the slow genetic biological evolution thus rendering slight genetic differences between races/populations largely irrelevant. As Hayek tells us:

“With respect to what we mean by cultural evolution in a narrower sense, that is, the fast and accelerating development of civilization…Since it differs from genetic evolution by relying on the transmission of acquired properties, it is very fast, and once it dominates, it swamps genetic evolution” (Hayek “Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 3: The Political Order of a Free People” 1981, p. 156)

Also:

“…biological evolution would have been far too slow to alter or replace man’s innate responses in the course of the ten or twenty thousand years during which civilisation has developed…. Thus it hardly seems possible that civilisation and culture are genetically determined and transmitted. They have to be learnt by all alike through tradition.” (Hayek’s ‘The Fatal Conceit’ page 16)

As numerous great free-market thinkers like Mises, Robert Higgs, and Ralph Raico just to name a few have shown, during the last couple thousand years different groups of people in widely dispersed locations like, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, traded the sort of title for most socioeconomically advanced places in the planet.

With respect to the momentary lead in terms of civilization that China had, and the real reason why whites/Europeans had a recent relative lead, Hayek writes:

“…the history of China provides many instances of government attempts to enforce so perfect an order that innovation became impossible. This country, technologically and scientifically developed so far ahead of Europe that, to give only one illustration, it had ten oil wells operating on one stretch of the river Po already in the twelfth century, certainly owed its later stagnation, but not its early progress, to the manipulatory power of its governments. What led the greatly advanced civilisation of China to fall behind Europe was its government’s clamping down so tightly as to leave no room for new developments, while, as remarked in the last chapter, Europe probably owes its extraordinary expansion in the Middle Ages to its political anarchy” (Hayek’s ‘The Fatal Conceit’ page 44)

The “political anarchy” just means that there was no central authority preventing/monopolizing legal/religious/moral/ethical knowledge and thus preventing the superior knowledge-discovery that cultural evolution/competition brings about. Not only does government stamp out competition which is the main selective/competitive process that helps us discover what is best in terms of how to go about providing goods and services but also what rules/laws, judicial/penal/transportation systems and more are best. As Hayek tells us “…selection by evolution is prevented by government monopolies that make competitive experimentation impossible.” (Hayek F. A., 1989, p. 103)

The cultural evolutionary/competitive process that has shaped religions and more recently secular governments which provide such governmental functions has been happening blindly, and has been largely tied to the religious myths we inevitably see as absolutes, which explains why the legal/penal systems are still draped in religious-like mysticism. Think of priestly judges and their costumes/robes, temple-like court buildings/etc., but once we understand the competitive process we can use it to our advantage. Imagine if people could own large chunks of land and have more sovereignty or freedom as to what laws/rules people should abide by in them. Today the knowledge of how to plan a city, what laws/rules we should follow, what should be the repercussions of breaking such rules/laws, how to design a transportation/legal/penal system and so much more comes about the bureaucratic-monopolized-politicized process that shapes the inefficient public sector. By allowing people the freedom to create such cities we introduce competition in these areas which will discover superior laws/rules/contracts, ways to build transportation systems, ways to deal with people who break the rules and so on. If people wanted to move to such cities they would just sign a contract saying that they would abide by its rules, which is no different than what we do today when we move to a new country/state, which is just agreeing to abide by certain rules. This is similar to choosing product A over product B. In this case people are selecting one set of laws/rules over the other, nourishing a better social order/information while starving an inferior one. They vote for a better system with their feet.

It should be easy to see that the explosion in relative human prosperity and technology mankind has stumbled upon during the last few thousand years has little to do with biological differences and much more to do with the emergence of ‘the market process’ and expansion of the global ‘division of labor and information’/free-trade/competition/Capitalism, etc.

The Wisdom of ‘Naturally Selected’ Traditions vs. The Reason of Slightly Smarter Apes : Freedom and Capitalism vs. ‘Central Planning by Expert Apes’ and Socialism

By the late 1800s, especially after Darwin, the slightly smarter apes had realized that their moral values and laws had been grounded on religious myths, so they began replacing the evolved wisdom/information/laws espoused by religious mythology (private property and family) which had tamed/brainwashed the savages into civilization, by the “reason” of “expert/scientist” apes. Not having the slightest clue what ‘the market process’ is and how civilization and the bewildering complexity of modern cities “emerges” from ‘private property’/freedom since this amazing mechanisms/order had been designed, not by clever men, but by an evolutionary process we didn’t even really understand at the time, they understandably fell for all the usual anti-Capitalist and central planning fallacies. They saw economic freedom as a recipe for chaos, exploitation and ‘social injustice’, believed that a competitionless coercive tax-funded monopoly of “experts”/ideologues/“great leaders” could better order society, and saw religion and its traditions of private property and family as something backward and a tool of the growing business/Capitalist/”Bourgeoisie” class. Just like complex environmental factors create selective pressures that favor the spread of certain genes, the environment was ripe for the emergence of a new religion/mythology, Socialism/Communism/‘Coercive Competition-immune Central Planning by Experts’/Statism. Eventually some slightly smarter ape would describe these increasingly popular fallacies/myths in a manner that was bound to go viral and that is what happened with Karl Marx and his bite-sized ‘Communist Manifesto’:

“the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property”….”Abolition of the family!”

The slightly smarter apes via Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution in Russia (1918) and other apes throughout the world (Mao/China, Castro/Cuba, Pol Pot/Cambodia, etc.) with the utmost arrogance and cruelty went wild using their “reason”/“the science” and instincts to destroy everything the much smarter ‘cultural evolution’ had created and thus their own socioeconomic order.

Hayek summarizes:

“Among the founders of religions over the last two thousand years, many opposed property and the family. But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family(and also anti-religion), is not promising. For it is, I believe, itself a religion which had its time, and which is now declining rapidly. In communist and socialist countries we are watching how the natural selection of religious beliefs disposes of the maladapted” (Hayek F. A., 1989, p. 137)

Lenin, as well as most people, believed that “the key feature is people, the proper choice of people”, and if we could just have the right apes/experts/’Great Leaders’ with the right values/ideas government/central management would work. But Lenin was wrong of course, it is not so much the individual cells/people that matter, it is the system, it is freedom and its emergent ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ and socioeconomic order spreading mechanisms. It makes perfect sense how a bunch of economically clueless apes would go wild looking for and pledging support to the ape they feel has the right personal qualities (courage, honesty, intelligence, toughness, etc.) and coercing everyone to go along with the “master plans” while being totally ignorant of the need to discover the time-and-place information and incentives that can actually order mankind profitably (again, a manner/cycle in which more order/wealth is produced than consumed). The public not only believes that we need a benevolent dictator; the system naturally selects him for us. A confident fool will sway more minds than a doubtful and considerate genius. It is the man who thoroughly believes that he has the right “master plan” and great group of friends, that carries himself with the needed confidence to sway and inspire the public. As Bertrand Russell put it “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

It is important that we see Communism/’Central Planning’ and Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution and other Socialist/Communist uprisings which dominated the 20th century, as well as all of our socioeconomic problems since they are all caused or greatly exacerbated by competitionless-coercive-central-planning, as an almost inevitable spread of viral self-reinforcing ‘echo chambers’ of economic fallacies and inadvertently disastrous ‘incentive structures’ that were just bound to finally spark in truly sustainable reactions as the social order got more complex and thus more fertile for economic fallacies. A young idealistic Russian could worry about how to make a good living in the always-uncertain and competitive private sector, or by joining Lenin and his Socialist Bolsheviks(government) he could become a hero to mankind by just forcing farmers/‘private sector’/others to give up (share) their grain/wealth to feed a bureaucracy/monopoly of “experts” who would plan a superior order. Sign me up! We must focus on how the ideas create intellectual ‘echo chambers’ and ‘incentive structures’ that lead the slightly smarter apes into either carnage or civilization. Mises:

“It is ideas that group men into fighting factions, that press the weapons into their hands, and that determine against whom and for whom the weapons shall be used. It is they alone, and not arms, that, in the last analysis, turn the scales.”

The young idealistic Russian would also be implementing the plans of a great intellectual like Karl Marx, or so the slightly smarter apes would think as they self-destroyed. There is hardly anything truly insightful or intellectual about Karl Marx’s writings. His ideas/myths/fallacies simply became popular because they superficially made sense to and appealed to the egalitarian/tribalistic/instincts/jealousies and economic ignorance of the apes. And a similar thing could be said about John Maynard Keynes. Henry Hazlitt briefly summarizes, “John Maynard Keynes was, basically, an inflationist.”…“In other words, the Keynesian solution to every slow-down in business or rise in unemployment was still another dose of inflation.” And Hayek on Keynes: “There were of course extraordinary gaps in his knowledge. His knowledge was aesthetically guided, with the result that he was completely ignorant of nineteenth-century economic history…if you take his time of study, I don’t think he spent more than a year learning economics…” Both of these ideologues just became popular because the rate at which their disastrous myths spread was faster than the proper arguments against them. Without sound economic arguments which were also brief enough to be somewhat viral much of mankind was doomed. The religious traditions of looking at the world’s problems as the result of “good”/moral vs. “evil”/immoral did not work against the atheistic Socialists/Communists who thanks to scientific progress/Darwin could easily discard deity-based arguments, in other words, mankind was stuck in what Mises referred to as “the moral sphere”. Although within the context of economics, the following quote from Mises applies to all of mankind’s problems. In just two consecutive paragraphs Mises does away with the “they are evil” fallacy, and the “they are mad” fallacy:

“The problems involved are purely intellectual and must be dealt with as such. It is disastrous to shift them to the moral sphere and to dispose of supporters of opposite ideologies by calling them villains. It is vain to insist that what we are aiming at is good and what our adversaries want is bad. The question to be solved is precisely what is to be considered as good and what as bad. The rigid dogmatism peculiar to religious groups and to Marxism results only in irreconcilable conflict. It condemns beforehand all dissenters as evildoers, it calls into question their good faith, it asks them to surrender unconditionally. No social cooperation is possible where such an attitude prevails.

No better is the propensity, very popular nowadays, to brand supporters of other ideologies as lunatics. Psychiatrists are vague in drawing a line between sanity and insanity. It would be preposterous for laymen to interfere with this fundamental issue of psychiatry. However, it is clear that if the mere fact that a man shares erroneous views and acts according to his errors qualifies him as mentally disabled, it would be very hard to discover an individual to which the epithet sane or normal could be attributed. Then we are bound to call the past generations lunatic because their ideas about the problems of the natural sciences and concomitantly their techniques differed from ours. Coming generations will call us lunatics for the same reason. Man is liable to error. If to err were the characteristic feature of mental disability, then everybody should be called mentally disabled.”” (Mises’ “Human Action”)

Socialism/Communism/Nazism/’viral economic fallacies’ did not spread and destroy much of the 20th century because of a few bad apples or tyrants; it first spread through the minds of well-meaning citizens and intellectuals which then gave the future leaders the moral and intellectual justification for their actions. Hayek writes:

“It is necessary to realize that the sources of many of the most harmful agents in this world are often not evil men but high-minded idealists, and that in particular the foundations of totalitarian barbarism have been laid by honourable and well-meaning scholars who never recognized the offspring they produced.” (Hayek F. A., 1973, p. 70)

“Most people are still unwilling to face the most alarming lesson of modern history: that the greatest crimes of our time have been committed by governments that had the enthusiastic support of millions of people who were guided by moral impulses. It is simply not true that Hitler or Mussolini, Lenin or Stalin, appealed only to the worst instincts of their people: they also appealed to some of the feelings which also dominate contemporary democracies.” (Hayek F. A., 1976, p. 134)

We should also highlight the fact that the apes ultimately stumble upon the realization that in order to carry out their wonderful central plans, they must either coerce the public directly via edicts/taxes/regulations, or even better, simply control the ability to create money. It becomes a lot easier to create an ‘incentive structure’ where most people go along with your wonderful ideas when you can create the money and assure the public that you can provide the money/wealth they need. The money=wealth fallacy/myth easily causes the slightly smarter apes to self-destroy as 1) It allows transfers of wealth from the productive/innovative private sector to the centrally-planned inefficiently ordered bureaucracies which will consume more than they produce thus destroying social order 2) It easily motivates the apes to peacefully fool themselves and even clamor for such an ultimately disastrous rearrangement and kill the critics(remember Carl). The apes go from fear and uncertainty to the comfort of working towards the ‘master plan’ by the ‘trusted expert apes’ and see how they are getting the money they foolishly equate with wealth. We can easily see the inadvertent evolution of this process today where what increasingly matters to politicians/ideologues/masses is who will appoint or control the technocrats who run the ‘central banks’/’Federal Reserve’ and will thus be able to keep creating money/”stimulus” to seemingly accomplish anything like having entire populations not work/produce and stay home consuming while CovidMania subsides, the Green New Deal, free education and healthcare, ‘racial/gender equality’. Visit gatesnotes.com for an up-to-date list of all potential ‘social problems’ and how the 3 pounds of flesh in Bill Gates’ head has a master plan that can fix them all, or we die. This is essentially what the latest monkey-economics Modern Monetary Theory is all about. It is just continuous money-creation/taxation by central bank ideologues/technocrats to enable central planning by “expert apes”. Regarding this disastrous myth of using money-creation/”inflationism” to manage society, something that the slightly smarter apes understandably repeatedly fall for, Hayek writes:

“I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments.”

“Inflation is probably the most important single factor in that vicious circle wherein one kind of government action makes more and more government control necessary. For this reason all those who wish to stop the drift toward increasing government control should concentrate their effort on monetary policy.”

Mises:

“Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism.”

Among the numerous things to learn from this and similar disasters is the fact that it is understandably difficult for ideologues like Lenin/Politicians and his governmental structure (‘echo chamber’ of ‘experts’ and ‘incentive structure’ since they are wholly dependent on wealth taken by force/inflation from the masses) to change their minds since not only do they have to 1) admit to error but 2) also realize that they have caused unimaginable suffering, and 3) get private sector jobs where their wealth will truly be representative of how much they produce as judged by what free individuals are willing to trade for it. The ‘echo chambers’ just intensify and get more negligent. The incentives are to look the other way, or place the blame elsewhere. Even though Lenin was becoming aware of the chaos he was causing in Russia, he understandably had incentives to look for other causes, like saboteurs, the rich/’capitalist exploiters’, the religious/church who did not want to relinquish power/authority etc. It was his economic policies that were intensifying the misery, but he would just double-down further intensifying it. A selective process emerges where the more honest and willing to admit error or less willing to coerce others are less likely to join the government or be replaced by more negligent/malicious types so the coercion/negligence/tyranny increases. This should not be seen as some “conspiracy”, it too is “indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”

The Soviet Union’s rule by competition-immune “monopoly of experts/scientists” had disastrous consequences for scientific research as well. The apes understandably went from doing what an ape with a religious costume said, to what one with a lab coat and impressive-looking mathematical models says. We are now fooled into believing that it is “scientists” that make our wonderful innovations and and are the keys to solving our problems, but it is not “scientists” per se, but competition which requires freedom of course, something the Soviet Union lacked leading to massive competition-immune bureaucracies that evolved to fight change/discoveries and warp science/research in political/tribal/ideological ways. A particularly disastrous “scientist”/ape who rose to the upper layers of the “Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union” in the 1930s that everyone should be familiar with was Trofim Lysenko who led a campaign against the growing field of genetics, had many other scientists/critics persecuted/killed and whose competition-immune theories related to farming led to millions of deaths via crop failures both in Russia, and later in China helping lead to the Great Chinese Famine which claimed 15–55 million lives.

The Ideas Applied: Race, Antisemitism and CovidMania

Given mankind’s ignorance of how the socioeconomic order works and has evolved(Mises/Hayek/etc. are still not mainstream), which is something that has potentially little to do with race, it is quite understandable how whites mistakenly thought that civilization had much to do with their race or religion which understandably underpinned the ideologies behind the European/American imperialism of the 1800s and Nazism. Certainly at least some much-hated “racist white men” erroneously believe that civilization and prosperity is somehow tied to their race or religion and understandably these people tend to be more against immigration for example. They are mistaken. Many whites/“Progressives”, with the best of intentions, might be ashamed of the imperialist past of their ancestors or of the racism of their parents/uncles/friends/etc. or their own “shameful” preference for perhaps blue-eyed blondes and erroneously believe that such a past/racism/preference is a significant factor in the relative underachievement/problems of other groups/minorities/blacks. A well-intentioned economically ignorant person can easily find some “racist CEO” who discriminates based on race and “voilà! this racism is the root of the problems!”. It is even more understandable how blacks believe that their relative problems are even more the result of “racism” than economic ignorance even though the “systemic racism” fills stadiums with adoring whites cheering mostly black professional athletes/musicians and more. This understandable error has unfortunately transformed African Americans from clamoring for freedom from bondage/slavery/government, to Socialism/Communism thus slavery to massive central planning bureaucracies that are supposed to “stamp out racism” and inequality and make criminals out of anyone who may discriminate against them. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, virtually all mainstream black leaders were/are economically clueless Socialists/Communists for understandable reasons. The black people who from the bottom of their hearts and deep in their bellies have no fear of what white people prefer and will even encourage the freedom of white nationalists or racists to act as they wish, are those who had the fortune of stumbling upon the econogospel and thus understand that economic freedom, not the preferences of some white people, is the key to prosperity. Perfect examples of this are the famous black economists like Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, and also young popular free-marketeers like musician Eric July.

In numerous inadvertent ways racism towards blacks saved America and perhaps the entire world from Socialism since the more racist attitudes of the past were strongly opposed to Socialism’s sharing of wealth or equality since that implied a massive transfer of wealth from whites to blacks. Europe lacked this additional ideological break against Socialist ideology. But as freedom, working together, great contributions in terms of music and culture and more by African Americans continuously improved race relations, in other words, as America became less racist, the desire to help blacks via Socialism/Welfare/Government as well as by making criminals out of those who discriminate against some blacks for whatever reason intensified/spread leading to where we are today, with a rapidly spreading ‘Democratic Socialism’/Anti-Capitalism with an additional anti-white-male hatred/vilification well summarized by popular congresswoman from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez(AOC), when she mentioned in 1/14/2021:

“The Republican Party…They don’t give a damn about the law. They don’t give a damn about order. They don’t give a damn about safety. They give a damn about white supremacy. They care about preserving the social order and the mythology of whiteness….They lust for power more than they care about democracy”

The masses, their representatives like AOC, and “leading intellectuals” like Critical Race Theory proponent Angela DiAngelo, having 0 clue how the market process works and much less how it has evolved/harmonized our cultures/identities, understandably fall for the usual simplistic “identity”-based and anti-capitalist and thus anti-freedom and pro-coercion fallacies. DiAngelo writes in her best-selling book “White Fragility”:

“…the US economy was based on the abduction and enslavement of African people, the displacement and genocide of indigenous people, and the annexation of Mexican lands”(p. 15–16)

Wrong. Those things certainly occurred, but they were NOT the “base” or most important factors leading to the rising standard of living Americans, and the entire planet, would enjoy as US-made discoveries and innovations spread globally. The US economy was “based” on Capitalism(albeit a very imperfect one of curse), on a relatively strong respect for private property and the emergent ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ and superior social order it leads to, as well as the “identity” of the fellow slightly smarter apes that best reflects the TRUTH, that regarding the things that really matter all human beings are equal slightly smarter apes regardless of the cultural/tribalistic baggage we have inherited from by-gone centuries. This sort of collective sense of guilt is what allows Black Lives Matter rioters to destroy cities virtually unopposed.

Thus Mises:

“History speaks only to those people who know how to interpret it on the ground of correct theories.”

Hayek writes:

“[to men] the market economy is largely incomprehensible…and its results seem to them irrational and immoral. They often see in it merely an arbitrary structure maintained by some sinister power.”

Who is that ‘sinister power’? Each group of economically ignorant slightly smarter apes depending on their history and numerous circumstances mistakenly identifies a different boogeyman. Since the recent and rapid evolution of ‘the market process’ occurred in Europe, understandably so for much of the third world and non-whites, it is “the white man” and his “exploitative Capitalism” and/or “racism”. There is of course, the “evil corporations”, “the rich/CEOs”, “greed”, “sexism”, “minorities”, “immigrants”, “the Freemasons”, “the Rockefellers”, etc. It is as if we are fooled into believing that just because the social order is the result of human action, that our problems are likewise the result of conscious planning or design/plotting by fellow slightly smarter apes. They are not. They are overwhelmingly the result of economic ignorance. Next we deal with one group of people where once again economic ignorance leads to their being mistaken as some “sinister power” with disastrous world-wide consequences. The Jews.

By not seeking converts and thus always remining a minority among the larger Christianity and Islam and easily losing their land from time to time among other factors, Jewish culture/identity was shaped/selected to be more commercial and thus ‘Capitalist’ and eventually hated by the economically ignorant masses/socialists like Hitler obviously. Historian Paul Johnson gives the classic example:

“The Jews reacted by engaging in the one business where Christian laws actually discriminated in their favour, and so became identified with the hated trade of moneylending. Rabbi Joseph Colon, who knew both France and Italy in the second half of the fifteenth century, wrote that the Jews of both countries hardly engaged in any other profession” (Johnson, Paul. (1988). A History of the Jews. , p. 174)

Hitler’s fallacies/ignorance can easily be seen in numerous excerpts like this one from a speech given in Munich on July 28th, 1922:

”The vast process of the industrialization of the peoples meant the confluence of great masses of workmen in the towns…Parallel with this was a gradual ‘moneyfication’ of the whole of the nation’s labor-strength. ‘Share-capital’ was in the ascendant, and thus bit by bit the Stock Exchange came to control the whole national economy. The directors of these institutions were, and are without exception, Jews. I say ‘without exception,’ for the few non-Jews who had a share in them are in the last resort nothing but screens, shop-window Christians, whom one needs in order, for the sake of the masses, to keep up the appearance that these institutions were after all founded as a natural outcome of the needs and the economic life of all peoples alike, and were not, as was the fact, institutions which correspond only with the essential characteristics of the Jewish people and are the outcome of those characteristics.” (Hitler)

Similarly, factors like Socialism/Communism’s atheism which would rid Jews of the religious persecution, its alluring scientific aura, and need for the better educated (which Jews were) to lead the central planning apparatus inadvertently caused Jews to be more attracted to Socialism and thus be leaders in both Socialism and Capitalism. They obviously did not “invent” or “plot” Socialism/Communism/Capitalism like Hitler and naïve thinkers to this day claim. It could be said that Jews were ‘naturally selected’ to be both Socialist AND Capitalist/finance leaders, thus giving the impression that they were its “creators/plotters”. Jewish involvement in such movements was “indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” If “the Jews” were smart enough to “plot” the numerous things the non-Jewish world accuses them of, they would have been smart enough to realize that Socialism/Communism was a disaster for Jew and non-Jew alike and have been telling everyone about fellow Jew Ludwig von Mises. Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, nicely summarizes the recent co-evolution of Jewish culture and Socialism and Capitalism:

“We are what the Ghetto made us. We have attained pre-eminence in finance, because mediaeval conditions drove us to it. The same process is now being repeated. We are again being forced into finance, now it is the stock exchange, by being kept out of other branches of economic activity. Being on the stock exchange, we are consequently exposed afresh to contempt. At the same time we continue to produce an abundance of mediocre intellects who find no outlet, and this endangers our social position as much as does our increasing wealth. Educated Jews without means are now rapidly becoming Socialists. Hence we are certain to suffer very severely in the struggle between classes, because we stand in the most exposed position in the camps of both Socialists and capitalists.”

By the late 1800s, as reason was replacing religious mysticism/squabbles, things were quickly improving for all Europeans and especially Jews. However, as the Church and its monarchical rulers were being replaced by nationalist representative governments, the idea of Jewish Nationalism/Zionism understandably emerged. Since Jews tend to be an extended blood-related family that has been an oftentimes persecuted minority due to religious/tribalistic squabbles of antiquity/etc., the sense of “identity” and ethnocentrism is understandably stronger and has been an important albeit unfortunate factor in both antisemitism and Zionism. Both antisemitism and Zionism are rooted in the same intellectual error, that the slightly smarter apes who “identify as Jews” are so different from the other slightly smarter apes that they must leave the real thousands of towns and Synagogues where for hundreds of years they were an integral part of Western Civilization to create a country based on religious mythology in an area already populated by others who had a different “identity”(Muslims,Christians, and fellow anti-Zionist Jews) and for numerous understandable reasons were adamantly opposed to living under such a theocratic/ethnocentric “Jewish State”. Theodore Herzl highlighted this ideological congruence of both Zionists and antisemites in his foundational book “The Jewish State”(1896) that:

“The anti-semites will be our most steadfast friends.” “The anti-Semitic countries will be our allies” “Great exertions will hardly be necessary to spur on the movement. Anti-Semites provide the requisite impetus. They need only do what they did before, and then they will create a desire to emigrate where it did not previously exist, and strengthen it where it existed before.”

We already mentioned how freedom and the competition that grows from it was shaping the relatively “ethnocentric” identities of all peoples and turning us into worldly citizens. During the early days of Zionism, many Jews were divided into the Zionists and anti-Zionists (“assimilationists”). Chaim Weizmann, the leading Zionist figure after Herzl’s death in 1904, lamented how “assimilated Jews” were “dead against Zionism” and identified Zionism (correctly IMHO) as “a primitive tribalism”:

“For assimilated Jews…They looked upon it…as a primitive tribalism. They felt themselves…called upon to “rescue” Judaism from Zionism…these people are dead against Zionism…Zionism is not meant for those people who have cut themselves adrift from Jewry…”

Of course! That rapidly increasing number of very well educated cosmopolitan “assimilated Jews” spread all over Europe/USA just wanted to be fellow human beings free of ancient tribalisms/mysticisms/identities. Unfortunately, for very understandable reasons/factors/Hitler for which nobody is to blame and are ultimately rooted in economic ignorance and the tribalistic nature of the slightly smarter apes, like a rocket that is just about to reach orbit but runs out of fuel and comes crashing down to earth, tribalism/Zionism would inadvertently pull Jews and all of Western Civilization back to an increasingly ethnocentric identity/worldview with disastrous consequences, such as the Zionists’ understandable need/desire to expel over 700,000 Palestinians and prevent them from returning home in order to create their “Jewish State”/Israel as the result of complex events leading to a sort of civil war in 1947–9. Israel’s main architect and first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion ten years earlier in 1938 mentioned:

“With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]….I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” (Morris, 1999, p. 144)

On Feb 6th, 1948 as Palestinians were being expelled to make way for the Jewish State, Ben Gurion again:

“The war will give us the land. The concepts of “ours” and “not ours” are only concepts for peacetime, and during war they lose their meaning” –Ben-Gurion’s War Diary, Vol. 1, entry dated 6 February 1948. p.211

In another occasion:

“Transfer is what will make possible a comprehensive settlement program. Thankfully, the Arab people have vast empty areas. Jewish power, which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out transfer on a large scale.” (Morris, 2004, p. 48)

The above helps us understand how there could never be a modern democratic country in the Middle East because such a democracy, rightfully reflecting the wishes and sense of justice of the Islamic world/public will always elect a critic of the Zionist error/fallacy (in its current form) and thus be seen as an “antisemite” since so many Jews have tied their own “identity” to a political/historical error. It certainly does NOT help that the Islamic world is full of naïve thinkers who believe the usual jews-are-malicious-plotters tropes which then understandably causes Jews to justify the continuation/expansion of the current brand of Zionism and feel like co-existence would be impossible. Again, it is a mess for which no particular individual or group is to blame. This means that the USA/Israel/Europe (the white non-Muslim world where white Ashkenazi Jews have tremendous support/influence) will continue to have to either support pro-Israeli-status-quo dictators and/or continue military conflict/overthrows (Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.) in the area, at a staggering cost in terms of US massive military yearly consumption(1.2 trillion per year), immense human suffering for the millions of people in the areas who have to either live under the dictatorships or war-torn countries, and what will inevitably be the Final World War.

This conflict can/should be seen as an opportunity to spread an understanding of free-markets and how freedom can lead to socioeconomic harmony. A simple starting point for a solution can be as follows: A single country/state with a largely NON-Democratic government where everyone has equal rights. Two-state solutions are based on old hatreds/ideologies/ignorance and are insulting to humanity and what we are capable of and should expect for the future. The government should be minimal in the sense that it should be clearly defined in some bare-bones constitution that besides modern/obvious freedoms like freedom of press/speech/etc., the national government should only be involved in protecting such freedoms and private property, and should clearly be forbidden from ever going into education, elderly care, any kind of socialized medicine/anything, etc. This is NOT up to democratic change and is important so that Jews will not fear a larger Muslim population eventually taking their freedoms/wealth, which would definitely be the case if they were forced to pay for massive public sector welfare-state-bureaucracies attempting to provide equal access/funding for education, health services, elderly care, etc. that the economically-ignorant-though-well-intentioned-public always falls for. Jews and Muslims and Christians, etc. will have the freedom to pool their wealth to create their own privately funded educational systems/charities and be free to discriminate if they so wish based on religion, sex, whatever their customs or free individuals agree upon. Palestinians who were expelled during various wars and their descendants will have the right to go back to the lands they were expelled from and a similar effort should be made so that Jews who were expelled from Muslim lands can also reclaim their property. If the lands have since been developed a simple starting solution to the potential conflicts and a way to provide some restitution to the Palestinians and help get this country on a rapid path to amazing prosperity is as follows: Jews keep lands and homes and buildings they currently have developed and are clearly being used for productive purposes. My guess is that this actual amount of land is probably around 35 percent of the land. Then we take the other 65 percent, and using some simple software or other means we distribute it to all Palestinians who were dispossessed thus privatizing most of the country. So far this simple framework accomplishes the following: Jews should be pretty happy, no fear of a demographic majority that can then interfere with your freedom and/or property, no need to pay for the education of non-Jews or other Jews for that matter. The more religious Jews who have a super strong connection to the land can live, travel, buy land everywhere. No draconian uprooting or potentially economically devastating disruptions. Palestinians regain their freedom and land. Since this minimal state will have minimal/no taxes or regulations it will quickly blossom in prosperity. The land will quickly increase in value, providing much deserved compensation for the Palestinians. The entire country will skyrocket in socioeconomic prosperity and serve as an example/beacon of progress. Loudly clamoring for a solution along these lines brings us free-marketeers tremendous advantages. We will be the only ones actually making noise and bringing attention to a rather simple-and-thus-easy-to-spread viral plan. It gives us an opportunity to teach and sort of piggyback basic economics as we explain to people how prosperity will skyrocket helping us in our more ambitious world-wide free-market educational efforts, which is obviously the key to everything. As things are right now, such a solution seems impossible, but with clever marketing we can succeed at spreading the necessary ideas. We simply have no choice, we wither make Misesians of everyone, or we blow ourselves up.

Wherever there is complexity, the slightly smarter apes fool themselves with mythology and resulting competitionless/monopoly/coercive/governments to coordinate the mythical ideas/plans/solutions making them much more difficult/dangerous to change. The complexity of things like the after-life and existing cultural framework leads to religious mythology, the socioeconomic order’s complexity leads to ‘coercive monopoly central planning’, the complexity of history leads to historical myths (“our troops and ‘great leaders’ were always the righteous”, “they/others” are “evil” and commit “atrocities”/etc.), and biochemical complexity leads to medical/scientific myths which we turn to next. Much of mainstream “science” is nearly as mythical, misguided, and intolerant as the famed Spanish Inquisitors were. It is understandable how this can seem somewhat shocking. Can so many well-intentioned and very smart people/scientists/”experts” be so blind to their errors and continue to act in a manner that is doing immense harm? Seems so improbable right? However, consider the following. Today organized religion like the Catholic Church employs thousands of priests/theologians who preach various “spiritual” ideas/myths with various degrees of belief which are actually impossible to prove in a real tangible sense. We would assume that some theologians/priests/nuns really believe some of what the Church preaches, some might have some doubt to various degrees, and we can also expect some to be 100% charlatans who might be atheists and even pedophiles. Many of these people are very bright, highly educated, very well read in history and other subjects and speak many languages yet the incentive and ideological structure still persists and does both much good and bad. We also just discussed how out of the complexity of the socioeconomic order Socialist/Communist mythology arose leading to oppressive/competition-immune/’central planning’ governments all over the world which were/are also populated by smart and caring people who believed the various economic fallacies/myths to various degrees. Again, wherever there is complexity or doubt or lack of certainty (afterlife, complex social order, mind, biochemistry) there is bound to be mythology and a resulting ‘echo chamber’ and incentive structure based on such myths. Let us begin to prepare our minds for this rather difficult-to-swallow and dangerous idea by seeing just how utterly misguided “mainstream science” and the “experts” have been in the recent past.

In 1847 Ignaz Semmelweis realized that by doctors just washing their hands, the mortality rate of mothers giving birth at the time could be reduced drastically (from about 16% to 1%). Regardless of his superb results, the medical establishment of the time, in other words, the “experts” and “great minds”, fought and ridiculed his advise and he died a depressed man. Alfred Wegener was the originator of the theory of continental drift (later renamed/revised as ‘plate tectonics’) by hypothesizing in 1912 that the continents are slowly drifting around the Earth. His ideas were also rejected by the scientific establishment (the “experts”) which even held a special symposium just to criticize them. In 1926 Johannes Fibiger was recognized by the “experts” of the day when he was given the Nobel Price in Medicine for the wonderful discovery that a particular worm was the cause of cancer. The “experts” and Johannes were embarrassingly wrong. In 1935 Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz performed the first lobotomy (removing/slicing parts of brain) and would win the Nobel Prize in 1949. Paul A. Offit writes:

“The New York Times hailed Moniz as “a brave explorer of the human brain.” Over the next three decades more than 40,000 lobotomies were performed across the globe, 20,000 in the United states alone. But lobotomies didn’t cure anything. Rather they caused memory loss, seizures, and occasionally fatal uncontrollable bleeding. By the 1970s lobotomies were relegated to the dusty bin of discarded psychiatric therapies next to whips,chains and snake pits.”

Then there are the countless Communist ideologues/”scientists”/”experts” and today’s mainstream “Keynesian” economists.

Bottom line. As Henry H. Bauer writes:

”If the overwhelming consensus were always right, then combustion would still be regarded as a release of phlogiston, the splitting of atoms would still be regarded as impossible, and so on. Progress means discarding theories formerly held and defended by an overwhelming consensus.”

So how can so many “experts” be so wrong? Few things are as important as our health and our fears of death. When it comes to health and religion there is a sort of tremendous selective pressure that ensures that both doctors and theologians carry themselves with additional certainty. A change in ideas here means the existing religion/doctors were wrong in vitally important things so it makes sense that these two bureaucracies evolve certain incentives which fight change even more. Since religion has historically been the state/government which is not only immune from competition but can also sustain its views via force/threats/inquisitions it becomes even easier to see how such ideas/bureaucracies are more immune to change. Why should we think that today’s “scientists” are somehow immune from similar attitudes of the past and also not currently making monumental errors? A tiny amount of reason and humility is all that is needed to realize that in all likelihood there are many ideas which currently dominate “scientific consensus” which are bound to be wrong, and by simply looking at today’s dissenters we are looking at potential Galileos.

The image above is the latest simulation/guess that some NASA scientists have created of what a cell looks like. The tiniest dots you see are proteins which contain tens or hundreds of thousands of atoms each(protein TRP-cage has 127, Titin has 539,022) linked together in a very precise order leading to structures of very specific shapes which can go from useful to useless or dangerous if just one atom is off or if the resulting structure itself simply bends the wrong way because it collided with a ‘free-radical’ or a heavy/big mercury atom. Imagine a large auto-manufacturing plant that employs 2,000 men operating complex machinery and suddenly having every laborer make a 45 degree turn or do the same with the complex robotics. You’d still have 2,000 men and robotics, but you’d have an unproductive chaos. In many instances just doing this to one machine, or just one little part of one machine, may be enough to wreck the whole factory or assembly line for days/weeks/months/years/ever. Men/machines/things that are part of life don’t just exist, they exist in a very specific/complex ORDER which is maintained by very precise INFORMATION and an existing and precise chain-reaction of events. Everything in the private sector is owned and thus controlled/coordinated by a mind that is interested in reordering it in the most useful/productive/profitable way possible. Something similar has evolved in the biochemical order. Also, imagine if to “study” the factory, first you had to immerse it in water thus killing all the workers and causing electrical malfunctions which stopped the plant leading to various chaotic scenarios. Whenever a “scientist” shows you some fancy “electron microscope” image of what the biochemical world looks like, you are seeing a dead cell that had to be interfered with/prepared in numerous ways making it nearly impossible for us to really predict how the living cell actually worked. These are just some of the numerous complexities to keep in mind when trying to understand the mind-bogglingly complex biochemical order. There are many “carrier proteins” like the famous HDL and LDL whose job is to carefully/safely/orderly/purposely move stuff/cholesterol around. The proteins themselves are manufactured in large mega-molecules called ribosomes which read mRNA to determine the proper sequence of amino acids to stitch together to make the protein. In 2009 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was given to Ramakrishnan, Steitz and Yonath, “for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”. How did they gather the evidence for their guess as to what a ribosome looks like and functions? The Noble Prize website summarizes:

“The story of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry begins in hot springs and in the Dead Sea. Ada Yonath used micro-organisms from these extreme environments to isolate robust ribosomes. Her goal was to make the ribosomes crystallize, like salt in a solution crystallizes when the water evaporates. After many years of trial and error, Ada Yonath managed to generate well organized crystals with millions of ribosomes assembled into regular patterns.

Ada Yonath sent X-rays through ribosome crystals. When the rays hit the crystal’s atoms they are scattered, making millions of dots on a CCD detector. This method is called X-ray crystallography. By analysing the pattern of the dots, researchers can determine the positions of the hundreds of thousands of atoms in the ribosome. However, scientists also needed to know the “phase angle” for each and every dot. This mathematical information is related to the location of the atoms in the crystal. In 1998, Thomas Steitz managed to solve the phase problem and the first crystal structure of the ribosome’s large subunit was published.”

So…Dead crystallized ribosomes, bombarded by X-rays, leaving a shadow, followed by numerous mathematical equations and other layers upon layers of assumptions/hypotheses (guesses), dealing with immense complexity, just to come up with a good enough guess to impress fellow apes of the scientific community and get the Prize. Our ability to biochemically identify one of these proteins/molecules/structures and alter it in a useful/predictable manner that also does not negatively affect other proteins/molecules/processes is currently INEXISTENT. The simple truth is that how the biochemical world functions is still far far far far far too complex for the slightly smarter apes to have the technology/means to interact with in ways that when one properly accounts for all the potential side-effects of our numerous drugs and vaccines clearly proves to be an improvement in the long run for many things we are currently doing. We see this all the time as old drugs/treatments, which were hyped as revolutionary at the time when the scientific community was focused on the drug’s positive effects as they relate to the condition they want to improve, are found to do more harm than good once the complex side-effects are better understood and eventually traced to the drug/intervention. The seemingly positive effects are easy to see when that is what they are focused on and there is tremendous financial incentive for good news, the negative effects are much, much harder to see and there is no money to be made in doing so for the most part, especially if convoluted government regulations make companies immune from or more difficult to sue when things go wrong.

Let us very quickly summarize the source of most disease. A basic understanding of how natural selection builds complexity/order/life is all that is needed. There is no such thing as obese/diabetic/asthmatic/allergic/Alzheimer/autistic/cancer/‘heart disease’/‘dental caries’/etc. animals in the wild. Wild animals in their natural environments, free of pollutants and eating the diets that their complex biochemistry has been naturally selected to process, are fit/orderly and just die of old age/predation. Why are human beings the exception? Why does our biochemical order breakdown leading to obesity and countless diseases en masse? It is quite simple, there are modern environmental pollutants that can obviously wreak havoc in our complex/delicate/evolved biochemistry, AND improper nutrition which does likewise. After spending millions of years mostly eating other mammals that already had the ideal combination of nutrients needed to build a mammal (us), agriculture which could sustain larger populations began to create that biochemical mismatch which greatly intensified as we added copious amounts of sugar and especially totally unnatural/processed/‘factory-made’ seed oils/‘trans fats’ and more franken-foods leading to biochemical mismatch leading to obvious irregularities/chaos/disease.

Mankind is beginning to catch up to men like dentist Weston Price and anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson who in the early 20th century wrote about how cultures that had not adopted the “civilized” Western world’s agriculture/grain-based/sugary/seed-oils/processed diets were relatively healthier. To examine the result of highly complex systems like the economy, you do not have to get lost in little details and hypotheticals, just like the night-time pictures of North/South Korea and a few simple comparisons show which order/system is superior, the same applies to the biochemical order. In his seminal book “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration” Weston Price easily notices how tribal societies that had not adopted the white man’s diets with our sugars/seed-oils/etc. were relatively free/immune of cavities/“affections” and obesity/etc. He summarizes:

“A critical examination of these groups revealed a high immunity to many of our serious affections so long as they were sufficiently isolated from our modern civilization and living in accordance with the nutritional programs which were directed by the accumulated wisdom of the group. In every instance where individuals of the same racial stocks who had lost this isolation and who had adopted the foods and food habits of our modern civilization were examined, there was an early loss of the high immunity characteristics of the isolated group. These studies have included a chemical analysis of foods of the isolated groups and also of the displacing foods of our modern civilization.”

“Much ancient wisdom, however, has been rejected because of prejudice against the wisdom of so-called savages. Some readers may experience this reaction to the primitive wisdom recorded in these chapters….since our orthodox theories have not saved us we may have to readjust them to bring them into harmony with Nature’s laws. Nature must be obeyed, not orthodoxy. Apparently many primitive races have understood her language better than have our modernized groups.”

Stefansson spent years living with Eskimos who hardly ever ate any plants or carbohydrates or modern-factory-made vegetable/seed oils like our pre-modern/agriculture ancestors and were in excellent health, free of cavities or various deficiencies we are supposed to be susceptible to by not eating plants. Stefansson succinctly describes human evolution and how the relatively sudden change to grain-based diets brought about by agriculture is a potential main source of our troubles. We also pay him homage by quoting him at length :

“Practically the whole world is now agricultural in its diet… if the speculative study of our forebears is begun at the stage when they first deserve the name of anthropoid, or Ape-Human, their dietetic history will fall into three main stages — gathering, hunting, and farming. According to the geologists, the gathering stage, or apeman period, lasted several million years. During this time man ate roots and tubers, shoots and succulent leaves, fruits and yams and nuts, worms and snails and rodents, eggs and fledgling birds. This period was long enough for us to become well adapted to digesting and assimilating the diet, to be healthy on it… After the largely vegetarian gathering stage came the hunting stage, during which the ape turned definitely human. This will have lasted between one and three million years. The period was long enough to enable digestion and assimilation to adapt themselves to a largely carnivorous diet…The third or agricultural stage of diet marks a profound change from either of the two previous diets, those of the gathering ape and of the hunting or herding man. For hitherto, as exclusive gatherers in the anthropoid stage and as occasional gatherers in the hunting stage, men cannot have had any high percentage of cereal food. A little gathering of wild rice or wild wheat now and then, by small groups here and there, cannot have given the people of ten or twenty thousand years ago much evolutionary preparation for the drastic change that came in when our recent ancestors, in some such place as Egypt, India or China, discovered that they could support great numbers on small areas by planting crops — which, in practice, were chiefly cereals, at least over great stretches of several continents. Ten or even twenty thousand years is a short spell, in terms of biologic evolution. So the human mechanism for digesting and assimilating must still be much like what it was when agriculture thrust upon the human race a change in diet that was nearly as profound as the one which had been forced on the anthropoid long ago when he faced the choice of hunting or perishing… It is practically the anthropologists alone, the students of pre-history and of modern primitives, who seem aware that broad conditions of health, as influenced by food, were ever fundamentally different from what they now are. For most branches of the sciences which deal with health never have been jolted from a nearly unquestioning acceptance of the predominantly agricultural civilization into which we were born and in which we and our neighbors, and nearly all the people we ever heard of, have lived. On the agricultural diets now taken for granted this nation, like most or all other civilized nations, is having a deal of trouble with malnutrition… Such troubles have been with us since agriculture began.”

He rightly ridicules/criticizes the dental establishment/experts of his day (1946) and even more so ours:

“A clean tooth never decays. Brush your teeth after every meal, and visit your dentist twice a year. These slogans carry the faith of our people. It is said and believed that we have the best dentists in the world, that we have more tooth brushes, and use them more, than any other people. Many agencies, from kindergarten to university, from town council to and through the governments of city, state, and nation, strive for the spread of dental knowledge and the enforcement of its discipline… During the same time the ether was filled and the magazine pages were crowded with advertising which told that mouth chemistry is altered by a paste, a powder, or a gargle so as to prevent decay; that a special kind of toothbrush reaches all the crevices; that a particular brand of fruit, milk, or bread is rich in elements for tooth health. There were toothbrush drills in the schools. Mothers throughout the land were scolding, coaxing, and bribing to get children to use the preparations, eat the foods, and follow the rules that were said to guarantee perfect oral hygiene. There was endless repetition of the slogan: A clean tooth never decays. Meantime there appeared a statement from Dr. Adelbert Fernald, Curator of the Museum of the Dental School, Harvard University, that he had been collecting mouth casts of living North Americans of all racial derivations from blond to black, from the most northerly Eskimos through Canada and the States south to Yucatan. The best teeth and the healthiest mouths were found among people who never drank milk since they ceased to be suckling babes and who never in their lives tasted or tested any of the other things which we usually recommend for sound teeth. These people, Eskimos not as yet influenced by white men, never used tooth paste, tooth powder, toothbrushes, mouth wash, or gargle. They never took any pains to cleanse their teeth or mouths. They did not visit their dentists twice a year or even once in a lifetime. Their food was exclusively meat. Meat, be it noted, is not mentioned as good for the teeth in the advertisement sponsored by the Commissioner of Health of the City of New York. Teeth superior on the average to those of the presidents of our largest tooth paste companies are found in the world today, and have existed during past ages, among people who violate every precept of current dentifrice advertising.” (“Not by Bread Alone” by Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1946))

But there was just no-way that the arrogant “white man” slightly smarter apes could swallow the fact that these seemingly backward people, following inherited traditions that had been crafted by trial/error/evolution, could be wiser than their “science” and medicines/toxins. Again, just like organized religion is not necessarily motivated to constantly discuss its myths/ideas with Richard Dawkins, neither is the “scientific” medical community motivated to look at the aforementioned since most of its source of funding/prestige would disappear if most of our diseases could be greatly reduced by just eating better. Yet, again, this civilization-wide error is not a “conspiracy”/”hoax” it is “indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”. It is a massive error that is to a significant degree sustained by, what else, the competition-less knowledge and wealth monopolies we refer to as governments.

As our ability to understand biochemistry increased, we kept focusing on how particular compounds/medicines could affect the proximate symptoms of various diseases. Successes there and continued technological breakthroughs regarding our ability to understand such complex biochemistry just led to drugs/poisons which got a little better at treating the symptoms. I mentioned ‘poisons’ because that is exactly what drugs are, they are poisons which at certain doses superficially improve or block some symptoms we focus on, but given the mindbogglingly complex biochemistry of the human body, they inevitably cause imbalances/chaos in other areas which go largely unnoticed. Eat all the meat you want and your body will properly make the most of it because that is what our biochemistry has been ideally evolved to process, swallow the bottle of pills and the reality that they are poisons will quickly manifest itself. Consider the following, the US General Accounting Office published a study which found that “…of the 198 drugs approved by the FDA between 1976 and 1985… 102 (or 51.1%) had serious post-approval risks” (risks=heart/kidney/liver failure, birth defects/etc.) This should not be seen as an attack on the pharmaceutical industry, we just want to appreciate the immense complexity and still relative backwardness of our ability to properly understand and much less interfere with the biochemical world. Remember, it wasn’t until 2009 that we even got a good enough guess of what a ribosome looks like, so it should be unsurprising that the better we understand the biochemical world, the better we realize that we had been doing much harm.

If a cure/improvement/information involves not doing anything or there is less money to be made in it, less money exists to advertise it and spread such information. But if the remedy/information does involve big profits, then there is money/wealth to motivate the spread of this cure/way, so the “invasive” remedy/information is sort of “naturally selected”. And, once gain, if the money/wealth comes from a competitionless-monopolistic government institution then the potential fallacies are even harder to change. So the ‘incentive structure’ that evolves is one that fools the slightly smarter apes into long-term and hard-to-notice/change disasters. The politicians and masses only see the alleged benefits of a government/coercive/competitionless intervention into the socioeconomic order/economy/’complex phenomena’, while being unaware of the fact that usually the cost will be greater than the perceived benefit. Something similar happens here. This has little to do with some “conspiracy” by the doctors or pharmaceutical industry to keep people away from superior ideas(although this certainly happens and is also a factor to various degrees), this is just the way things have inadvertently evolved to various degrees and is also “indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”. Again, we must always be focused on the root cause of our problems. It is the economic ignorance of the masses/experts which calls for the creation of the paralyzing/competitionless/inefficient bureaucracies which get more incompetent/malicious/neglective with time, which then leads to some truly corrupt/incompetent/negligent/clueless apes/Lysenkos/Faucis. This is a monumentally important fact!!!! Again!!! Just like in the Catholic Church one can find pedophile priests who don’t believe in God or at least many of the ‘myths’ the Church preaches, especially today when we have so much science/genetics/etc. to at least cause doubt in some of the myths, it would be a monumental mistake to point to those examples and then label organized religion as some “conspiracy” of liars. If the incentive and ideological structure that maintains organized religion and its much-easier-to-criticize myths can still be so prevalent, we should expect the same pattern repeating itself in areas involving far more difficult to understand complexity (biochemical order/medicine, “theoretical” physics, the brain/psychiatry, ‘climate change’, history, economy, etc.) The same applies to all of our bureaucracies.

“Scientists”/people (slightly smarter apes) looking for glory and overlooking information that contradicts their life’s work or affects their finances is very much a part of human nature. Consider the following, one study of scientific misconduct estimates that about 2% “of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once –a serious form of misconduct by any standard– and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices…Considering that these surveys ask sensitive questions and have other limitations, it appears likely that this is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct.” There are about 1 million doctors in the USA and 7 million scientists and engineers for a total of 8 million. 2% is a whopping 160,000 scientists/docs who are out there maliciously or extremely negligently looking to exaggerate, lie, etc. to get government grants/influence/fame and so on. So year after year 160,000 potential charlatans and/or exaggerators (see wikipedia “List of scientific misconduct incidents”) are out there recognizing and affiliating with other fraudsters to various degrees, statistically guaranteeing that eventually somebody/group is going to hit it big and potentially mislead a large portion of the scientific community and/or pharmaceutical companies. AGAIN!!! This is NOT the result of some “sinister plot”, this is just what sort of “evolves” out of numerous complex factors: the complexity of the subject, incentives, good intentions sucking wealth from the competitive private sector to fund competitionless bureucracies, fraud, negligence, etc. In the private sector bad/inferior ideas(myths) which includes corporate nepotism, racism, ass-kissing, negligence, fraud, etc, eventually lead to relatively higher prices than competitors and eventual loss of revenue and bankruptcy/dissolution because customers are always using their ‘freedom to trade’ their wealth to discover/nourish/expand better products/ideas, but when bad ideas create an ideological and incentive structure within government, either via regulations and/or taxation or inflation to nourish the minds that spread them, then the ideas/myths and ‘echo chambers’ are ‘naturally selected’ or refined, not in a manner that best ‘keeps up with the competition’ at creating real wealth/value as ideally determined by billions of brains via competition, but in a manner that gets better at getting more government funds. To a significant degree this is what happens with the rise/spread of Socialism/Communism where you have more people getting their livelihood from government/coercion/others, which spreads more of the ideology/myth, causing more people to join the government and easily getting the means/wealth to spread the ideology and so on at the expense of the free-marketeers who have less and less wealth to spread their views. Again, it is important to focus not so much on the particular apes, but on how the ideas inadvertently create the ‘echo chambers’ and ‘incentive structures’ which spread them. The scientists/ideologues get more funds to hire like-minded people and neglect/ignore the critics, the misguided hypotheticals simply become more elaborate or convincing to politicians or other scientists who, out of a complex mixture of negligence/ignorance/‘financial incentives’/fraud, go along with the less-than-ideal information. Again, this is NOT the result of some “conspiracy”, like Communism/Socialism/Zionism/Religion, complexity/incentives/etc. spread leading minds to connect and act in unison (like Communism or antisemitism) making it seem like it is a conspiracy when it is “indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”.

Things got really bad in the big cities of the 1800s like London where humans were not only living in unnaturally crammed, filthy/unsanitary conditions (horse/human shit/pee in streets) eating little food of relatively low nutritional value (vegetables/bread compared to meat/organs) which had to be imported from outside the city without refrigeration, but also surrounded by toxic chemicals arising from the emerging industrial/scientific revolution like arsenic, lead, mercury, and countless others which we now know are highly toxic. The combination of these two factors led to the explosion in the dreaded diseases of the day like Scarlet Fever, Rheumatic Fever, Typhus, Cholera, Yellow Fever, Whooping Cough (Pertussis), Polio and many others. As to be expected and eventually happened, as the clever apes began to understand and appreciate the importance of sanitation (remember, the monopoly “experts” ridiculed Semmelweis), as their understanding of biochemistry increased and they began to understand how vitamin/mineral deficiencies could affect health and susceptibility to disease(lack of vitamin B1/beriberi, B12/anaemia,C/scurvy,D/rickets), as they restricted the use of dangerous chemicals, as it became cheaper and cheaper to live in a more nutritious and sanitary world, in other words, as the proper biochemical order was restored the diseases/disorders went away on their own. A society-wide breakdown in biochemistry and increase of filth and disease-causing conditions led to the diseases/disorder, and as the proper biochemical order was restored, the imbalances/diseases began to go away. As this improvement and disappearance of disease due to nutrition/environment was happening, the idea/concept of vaccines emerged and the mythology that the vaccines were the best way to deal with the various illnesses began to grow. The diseases were going away thanks to ‘the market process’ you could say, but the apes gave credit to the vaccines/’virgin sacrifices’ and their emerging great “scientists”/priests/planners. It was an understandable error/myth arising out of biochemical complexity. Graphs below show how diseases for which we vaccinate were going away on their own.

Diseases disappearing on their own without vax (Scarlet), or clearly going away by the time vax came.

Same with CovidVaccines, deployed as seasonal disease went away naturally.

Again, wherever there is complexity the apes can easily fool themselves with mythology. Just like with drugs that are found to be disastrous and recalled one can find improvement in a few areas one is looking at, vaccines likewise made enough of a seeming improvement in some markers to fool the apes, especially those who had a financial incentive to keep spreading the mythology. And yet again, once the vaccine ‘echo chamber’ got an ‘incentive structure’ tied to government and thus the ability for the ideas to spread via force and all the benefits that come from government instead of competition, it just kept growing in countless ways reaching religious-like aura we have today. The relative inefficacy and harm of vaccination, especially the US schedule, is in all likelihood one of the numerous areas where mainstream “experts” are essentially as wrong as they were when they vilified Semmelweis. And much of the increasingly important debates around the CovidVaccine and vaccination in general is simply a reflection of this fact. The apes are essentially going through the growing pains of overcoming a certain mythology. Let’s look deeper.

If it wasn’t until 2009 that the slightly smarter apes congratulated each other over what they think a ribosome looks like and how it functions, they have NO FUCKING CLUE what the near-term, much less long-term, and even less what the combined long-term effects, of routinely injecting children with numerous substances that make up vaccines like live viruses, foreign proteins, toxic chemical ‘adjuvants’, antibiotics, detergents, acid and alkaline buffers, a variety of animal cells, and foreign DNA and proteins and more. The “science” is definitely “settled” when it comes to the fact that as the number of vaccines given to kids has skyrocketing since the 1980s so have various illnesses and disabilities.

The “American Academy of Pediatrics” website mentions:

In the first six months of life, the total amount of aluminum contained in all routinely recommended vaccines is about 4 milligrams (mg). This is about one-half the amount of aluminum received from breast milk and less than one-tenth the amount of aluminum received from regular infant formula during the first six months of life. In over 70 years of use, aluminum salts have proven to be safe and effective.

This means that through various injections an infant has 89,280,948,851,000,741,289 atoms of aluminum (a known neurotoxin) injected directly into the bloodstream during the first 6 months of life. If he were to drink these 4 mg, a highly evolved digestive system would keep most of them out since there are currently no known needs for aluminum in the body, and should it need to enter the bloodstream it would do so in the manner 4 billion+ years of natural selection have crafted, perhaps bound to some carrier molecule/protein in a manner that keeps/sustains the delicate ORDER that life is all about. But this filtering/ordering process is bypassed leading to a molecular chaos/disorder/damage. It is absurd to compare the direct injection of trillions upon trillions of atoms to the careful filtering/ordering that digestion would provide. And 70 years ago, in 1951 we didn’t even know what DNA looked like!

Now, correlation does not equal causation obviously, but given the immense complexity of the subject we highlight what should be obvious to every “civilized ape”, we need ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ which requires the utmost freedom, especially the freedom to NOT vaccinate at all and thus choose the immune system that natural selection has crafted for over billions of years and the apes hardly understand, over what some arrogant apes are coercing upon each other. As everyone these days knows or intuitively senses, Amazon.com and its reviews and best-sellers lists have evolved to be superior sources of information given the real competition among authors/ideas compared to the competition-less monopoly AMA/CDC/etc. If you visit amazon.com and do a search for “vaccines” by far the best-selling and best reviewed books will be highly critical of vaccines to various degrees. For example “The Vaccine-Friendly Plan” by Paul Thomas MD and Jennifer Margulis PhD suggest less vaccines and not giving out so many at once. This already implies that our priesthood/monopoly of “experts” may be giving wrong advise so this is sacrilege as it is. It has over 2000 nearly-all-5-star reviews. Paul also published research showing that from amongst the thousands of children his practice saw those who were unvaccinated were the healthiest. And soon after had his medical license suspended. Journalist Jeremy Hammond has a superb article about Paul’s ordeal and much that is related. “Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies: 400 Important Scientific Papers Summarized for Parents and Researchers” by Neil Z. Miller (over 1000 reviews, solid 5 star average), as the title implies, it succinctly summarizes 400 scientific papers from mainstream established sources documenting vaccine-related harms. It is also an eye-soar to the priesthood/establishment since it is often the #1 best-seller in “Health Policy” category. “Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History” by Suzanne Humphries MD and Roman Bystrianyk provides a wonderful history of the evolution of the vaccination mythology and its proponent’s battles to coerce people(Roman created a superb 2 hour video here, Suzanne has many excellent presentations (smallpox,polio)). Are these authors and the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of parents and curious educated people who actually bother to read technical books on amazon, and totally dominate in terms of sales and passionate and well-written reviews part of some conspiracy of charlatans? Or again, is this simply a sign that mankind is in the middle of overcoming a myth in this particular area arising out of biochemical complexity? Given the immense complexity are the vaccine-critics simply wrong/misguided instead of quacks? How do we “discover” this? Via freedom and its ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ of course.

We should stress that in each of these complex fields like religion, nutrition, disease, economics, history we get mythological structures which should NOT be confused with purposeful/coordinated “conspiracies”. When one looks at the leading voices in the low-carb/keto(and more recently carnivore) community, essentially people who have major disagreements with mainstream science when it comes to nutrition/diseases in this example. People like Dr. Timothy Noakes, who had to defend his low-carb views against the existing medical bureaucracy in a manner akin to Galileo defending himself vs. the Church in a medical licensing trial, Dr. Jason Fung whose books “The Obesity Code” and “The Diabetes Code” have dominated Amazon.com bestsellers lists for years and are helping thousands lose weight and easily reverse type 2 diabetes by simply fasting and thus cutting out sugar and carbohydrates and other potential troublemakers… and many many other doctors… they once believed the “mythology” that diseases like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, obesity and many others were primarily due to genetics, eating too much, perhaps not enough exercise, etc. (other causes except for diet/environment). They were not part of some “conspiracy” or maliciously/negligently avoiding superior information. They simply believed the current myths and were parts of the ‘echo chamber’ that sustains them. Dr. Noakes mentions how he was one of the respectable doctors who without much thought dismissed people like the famed low-carb proponent Dr. Robert Atkins as some contrarian/scammer, yet when other doctors he greatly respected defended Dr. Atkins he finally decided to read Atkins’ classic book “Dr. Atkin’s New Diet Revolution”. Dr. Noakes mentions:

“You must understand for 33 years I’ve been saying that you must eat a high carbohydrate diet and Atkins was the devil, I mean literally, that’s what we thought of him….I went down to the bookshop, bought the book, brought it back and two hours later I was stunned, and I realized that I’d been wrong and that I’d been wrong for 33 years…During this period I’ve gone through a lot of trauma…I “came out” and said I am now a low-carbs-no-grain person and immediately lost all my funding, my research funding. The medical research council took their money away from me”

Like that rare priest who might suddenly understand evolution and genetics and perhaps admit to losing faith and feel as though he had been espousing erroneous views/advice Noakes made a similar change. It is important to note that Noakes was part of the existing ‘echo chamber’ that would vilify/dismiss Dr. Atkins, and that once he changed his views, he would also become an outcast to the existing bureaucracy/Church/myths. When Dr. Noakes was ignoring/vilifying Atkins, was he a “bad guy” who was part of some “conspiracy”?, Of course not. There ARE charlatans and people who are willfully negligent to various degrees if it helps them make money, and this is obviously the case in every field, ESPECIALLY WITHIN THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY and competitionless governments!. Nearly the entire field of Bariatric surgery where people’s stomachs are surgically shrunk can be seen as pure negligence by doctors since most people can easily be trained/taught how to simply fast as Dr. Fung’s books have done for many. Yet such a relatively barbaric, dangerous, and expensive practice continues. I doubt the doctors who perform such surgeries are giving away copies of Fung’s books.

Noakes might have equated Atkins with one of those medical charlatans. The popular and somewhat nebulous term ‘Cognitive Dissonance’ is at play here and plays an important role in the creation of the ‘echo chambers’ that unites groups. People just have various understandable reasons which have little to do with pure malice or fraud for neglecting ideas. Sometimes we neglect ideas because we already think we are doing things based on the best available information. Who has the time to properly consider every possible criticism? And then of course there is a bias that motivates us to overlook/ignore ideas that can greatly invalidate our views, sense of purpose, harm our finances, and when these factors are sort of layered on top of others the resulting ideological differences can lead to dangerous extremes/fallacies/excomunications/burnings. This might lead many mainstream scientists (like Noakes had done) to mistakenly attack or neglect revolutionary/corageous scientists (Atkins) on the one hand, and it could also lead to having people or revolutionary scientists label mainstream science as some “conspiracy” that purposely fights change, when that too would be a mischaracterization. And hopefully one gets the point. Regarding economics, former Federal Reserve economist Danielle DiMartino Booth describes in her book “Fed Up: An Insider’s Take on Why the Federal Reserve is Bad for America”, how utterly clueless, incompetent, politicized, and disastrous the Federal Reserve and our mainstream economics establishment are. The important point here is that Danielle was herself a product of our mainstream economics establishment/myths. She studied in our “great universities”/temples and one could say she grew up with “faith” in the mathematical models/courses/theories(mythologies) she studied in college, but eventually realized that much of what she had learned was wrong similarly to how perhaps some theologian comes to abandon some previously held beliefs/myths. As with Noakes and Danielle, Dr. Suzanne Humphries was once a believer in the mainstream views/myths that the current ways we use vaccines are “safe and effective”. She often recalls how she got interested in the subject after having patients whose severe kidney problems occurred after vaccination. She was rightly concerned when she learned that patients in the hospital she worked would get vaccinated with little regard for their medical condition, she mentions:

“the policy was… to offer every patient that was conscious no matter what their disease these vaccines …I think that should stand out to everybody as problematic. Would you want to give a flu shot and a Pneumococcal vaccine to a man that has cancer and is on chemotherapy that moment?…I saw vaccines given to people who are having heart attacks while they were having the heart attacks, while they had active sepsis, while they had new onset kidney problems, and numerous other ailments that there was no scientific literature to support vaccinating. But the ethos was “vaccines are safe and effective and they need to be given””

Once again it is monumentally important that we see our problems as rooted in economic ignorance, human tribalism/nature, and resulting mythology, NOT ill intent or “conspiracy” even if it is easy to find malicious people in the evolving structures. If I resist arrest and get killed should police try to apprehend me because I refuse to pay taxes to fund a coercive-competitionless-disastrous public school system, or pay someone less than the minimum wage, this will not be the result of a conspiracy of malicious public school teachers/administrators/politicians/etc. This should be obvious and applies to all complex areas where potential myths and resulting socioeconomic structures arise. As Mises showed us, the communist/socialist that feels justified in killing/coercing someone who does not want to “share” in order for the “great plans” by the “Great leaders/experts” is neither “evil”/”immoral” or stupid/dumb, they are just understandably/dangerously misguided.

One of the main reasons why the potential myths and resulting monopolistic/ideological bureaucracies can last so long is because, let us re-quote Hayek, people “often see in it merely an arbitrary structure maintained by some sinister power.” Take the pharmaceutical industry and vaccination as an example. Many people who are critical of vaccination to various degrees, the much-vilified “anti-vaxxers”, will make the error of believing that ‘Big Pharma’ as they like to call it, is the result of some malicious/evil people wanting to get rich at the expense of others. Most doctors/experts blindly/religiously pushing vaccination as one of “the greatest medical achievements of modern civilization” will see the anti-vaxxers as wrong/malicious/nutty(the very religious ones) because they know deep down inside that they are pushing the vaccines out of what they considers to be good science and not some malicious profiteering at the expense of the health of others. If every time a doctor stumbles upon someone questioning the efficacy and safety of the USA vaccine schedule he sees some very religious person accusing him and the medical industry of malice, it is totally understandable how the vaccine-freedom/anti-vaxx movement is seen as dangerous/irresponsible naïve people. Again, this erroneous pattern repeats in other complex fields. In economics you have naïve thinkers believing the Federal Reserve and government is run by some secret cabal of “elites”(Jews, Rockwefellers,/etc.) when it is actually run by totally clueless apes.

We turn to CovidMania with its draconian lockdowns and coerced vaccinations which is just the latest bout of tribalistic self-destruction by hordes of economically ignorant slightly smarter apes just like WWI and Communism were. It is that simple. Just like the night-time North/South Korea image/comparison could easily show that freedom/capitalism is superior to Socialism yet Socialist ideology persists because it just makes sense to the understandably economically ignorant apes, the comparisons between no-lockdown countries like Sweden vs. lockdown England/others easily shows lockdowns and vaccines were counterproductive. But just like with WWI and Communism, the ignorance and tribalism leading to coercive/monopoly/competition-immune ‘central planning’ as well as ‘perverse incentives’, motivate the hordes of government-funded scientists/bureaucrats/employees/ideologues/masses to go along with pro-lockdown-vaccine-myths since their paychecks/wealth was not affected (gov. employees) and in many cases grew(pharmaceutical industry/etc.), and of course, underneath it all the economically ignorant masses and their leaders/intellectuals understandably fool themselves into central planning.

CovidMania can be seen as a repeat of the 1976 Swine Flu scare(well summarized here), which was similarly botched science leading to scaremongering and wannabe-hero political apes and a petri-dish of incompetent bureaucrats/scientists and profit-seeking players ultimately needlessly vaccinating millions with an un-tested leading to severe injuries and death for thousands. President Gerald Ford at the time mentioned a horrendous error/lie:

“This virus was the cause of of a pandemic in 1918 and 1919 that resulted in half a million deaths in the United States as well as 20 million deaths around the world”

This seemingly ridiculous monkey disaster was caused by 1976-technology identifying one death allegedly/theoretically due to the virus. As it became increasingly apparent that the vaccines were causing Guillain-Barré Syndrome which can cause paralysis and death the vaccination program was stopped. The apes with electron microscopes did nothing. The killer swine flu was soon forgotten. The free-market worked better in those days, many lawsuits against the players/‘vaccine industry’/companies responsible were brought which then caused the industry to lobby government and eventually in 1986 the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) was passed which removed liability from vaccine manufacturers which allowed vaccine-mythology to expand unchecked by market forces/risks/etc. We should quickly note that learning from history is also ‘not in our genes’, it is another cultural innovation which has arisen in the last few centuries and only a tiny percentage of the population really appreciates. Had most adults been fully aware of the Swine flu debacle they would have been far more careful/astute and not gone along with the litany of errors leading to CovidMania. But again, we are killer apes.

Anthony Fauci did not recognize or try to engage the thousands of leading scientist who signed the Great Barrington Declaration(GBD) who criticized the CovidMania lockdowns. In good tribal/political ape manner, just like Communist ideologues (as well as Church when it had all the power) tend to do, Fauci simply called the declaration and its advise as “ridiculous”, “total nonsense” and “very dangerous”, saying that it would lead to a large number of avoidable deaths. Dismissing so many world-renowned scientists in such a manner without curious and welcoming dialog, is really all one needs to know in order to realize that Fauci has Lysenko/Lenin/Stalin-like ‘cognitive dissonance’. Communists(atheist/scientist/’central planners’), in their self-reinforcing “echo chamber” would simply see Capitalists/free-marketeers as callous people who wanted to “exploit” the masses and so on, “unscientific religious people” who blindly followed supposedly antiquated religious concepts(‘God-given rights’) which benefitted the “selfish greedy capitalists”, etc. and we similarly see mainstream press and “scientists” smear the GBD as some “right-wing” ideological political creation when they correctly notice that like most free-market organizations the American Institute for Economic Research which put together the GBD is overwhelmingly led by religious individuals. So the pattern repeats. If the defense of freedom is in any way associated with ‘God-given rights’ or gets into as Mises referred to “the moral sphere”, the scientists/experts/planners understandably dismiss it as “unscientific”/”ideological”/”right-wing” even if the criticisms are 100% ‘science based’ or correct. Fauci/Gates/‘central planners’ can easily point to many naïve overtly religious thinkers who mistakenly believe Fauci/Gates/‘Big Pharma’ are parts of some malicious conspiracy to enrich themselves and then dismiss/neglect all criticism.

As the medical/pharmaceutical monopoly Soviet Union-like ‘echo chamber’ and ‘perverse incentive’ structure materializes, there is a competitive/selective process that selects for the most negligent apes who are more and more likely to dismiss dissent and push the government to suppress competing/critical opinions. A good and early example of this was the banning by Youtube of a video that in just a few days had reached over 5 million views by Doctors Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi of Bakersfield California where they explained the relative harmlessness of the CV compared to what Fauci/CDC/WHO were preaching. In an interview about the matter, Youtube CEO Susan Wojciki, mentioned that they took the video down because “Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy”. Economic ignorance, ignorance of how superior information can only be discovered by competition and thus freedom, always leads to a ‘central plan’ that eventually necessitates coercion and the suppression and eventual vilification of dissenting views(right-winger, ‘science denier’). It is no longer freedom and competition what determines the truth/information, it is the monopoly/competition-immune ideologues/priests at the WHO/CDC/‘Church of Scientism’. This is not the result of some malice by Susan, she is simply the particular slightly smarter ape that inevitably rises to her position just like Goebbels inevitably emerged to fill a similar role in Nazi Germany. Again, the Nazis, in their aforementioned economic ignorance, could easily notice the over-representation of Jews in Capitalism/finance as well as Communism, and also easily find some hyper-religious Jew say bad things about non-Jews, to create the ‘echo chamber’ and ‘incentive structures’ that led to their anti-semitism. Yet again, for perhaps the 20th time, it is important that we see people like Fauci/Gates/Lenin and the hordes of “experts”/politicians/masses going along with all of this coercive/paralyzing ‘central planning’, not as malicious, but likewise as slightly smarter apes whose economic ignorance and incentives leads them, often times with the best of intentions, to inevitable central-planning-coercive self-destruction. Mises and Hayek had a profound understanding of the very emergence of such personalities/ideologues:

“The outstanding fact about the contemporary ideological situation is that the most popular political doctrines aim at totalitarianism, the thorough abolition of the individual’s freedom to choose and to act. No less remarkable is the fact that the most bigoted advocates of such a system of conformity call themselves scientists, logicians, and philosophers.” (Mises)

And Hayek:

“The movement for planning owes its present strength largely to the fact that, while planning is in the main still an ambition, it unites almost all the single-minded idealists, all the men and women who have devoted their lives to a single task. The hopes they place in planning, however, are the result not of a comprehensive view of society but rather of a very limited view and often the result of a great exaggeration of the importance of the ends they place foremost. This is not to underrate the great pragmatic value of this type of men in a free society like ours, which makes them the subject of just admiration[Gate’s success in software]. But it would make the very men who are most anxious to plan society the most dangerous if they were allowed to do so — and the most intolerant of the planning of others. From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.”

The need to discover/understand complex information, whether it is man-made environmental/climate impact, biochemistry/medicine, and optimally coordinate the actions of 8 billion human beings can only be done by ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ which requires freedom! NOT the coercive monopolies of apes we constantly fall for which then lead to run-away government/coercive growths and eventual socioeconomic collapses/tyrannies.

Now Is The Time to Go Over The Parapet and Join Mises in his ‘Intellectual Battle’

Perhaps better than any other thinker in the history of mankind Mises showed us how the Matrix/economy works and rightly placed a tremendous focus on economic education. And Hayek helped us go one step further in understanding the root causes of such ignorance by explaining how we are tribalistic dangerous slightly smarter apes whose culture/software has been adapted by ‘cultural evolution’ to create ‘the market process’ that gives us life. If one looks at homo sapiens during the last 100,000 years it is easy to see that civilization has been a sort of cultural mutation, an anomaly (although one that was likely bound to happen), and due to our economic ignorance and tribalism, we are constantly reverting to our intuitive barbarism via coercive central planning and inevitable political infighting. We are already miraculously fortunate that Mises/Hayek/friends managed to save Western Civilization in the 1920s-1940s. For example, Mises nearly singlehandedly put a stop to Soviet Union Communist expansion in Europe by persuading Austrian politicians to not join it. He writes in his memoirs:

“The most important task I undertook…was the forestalling of a Bolshevik takeover. The fact that events did not lead to such a regime in Vienna was my success and mine alone.”

Mises also provided the clear writing and explanations that became the foundation of future freemarketeers like Hayek/others. Hayek’s classic book “The Road to Serfdom”(1944), but perhaps just as importantly, the brilliantly written ‘condensed’ version(only 30ish pages…free) which “Reader’s Digest” magazine placed in millions of US homes in 1945, would play a vital role in educating future freemarketeers like future British PM Margaret Thatcher, and 3-time presidential candidate Dr. Ron Paul who writes:

“My introduction to Austrian economics came when I was studying medicine at Duke University and came across a copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. After devouring this, I was determined to read whatever I could find on what I thought was this new school of economic thought — especially the works of Mises”(Ron Paul’s “Mises and Austrian Economics: A Personal View)

When one looks at the biographies of fellow freemarketeers it is easy to notice how prior to stumbling upon the proper understanding of economics most were essentially “wild” humans, tribalistic simple-minded Socialists/Communists to various degrees. This just makes sense, our nature is that of the ‘Law of the Jungle’, how freedom leads to order instead of chaos is definitely not ‘in our genes’. The jealousy, vilification, tribalism, the fact that we are surrounded by economic ignorance, the CovidMania lockdowns and spectacular rise in medical central planning and seeming socioeconomic self-destruction. It all seems so obvious when we stand on Mises/Hayek/friends’ shoulders. Without these men’s ideas we are essentially flying blind. It is by understanding basic economics and respecting ‘private property’/freedom that we really understand how civilization works and thus become civilized apes. Mises writes:

“Liberalism is rationalistic. It maintains that it is possible to convince the immense majority that peaceful cooperation within the framework of society better serves their rightly understood interests than mutual battling and social disintegration. It has full confidence in man’s reason. It may be that this optimism is unfounded and that the liberals have erred. But then there is no hope left for mankind’s future.”

In other words, we have to believe that we can educate “the immense majority” even if it proves to be futile, otherwise “there is no hope left for mankind’s future”.

If we are to quickly save mankind and reach the prosperity we are truly capable of, those of us who’ve had the miraculous fortune of stumbling upon Mises/Hayek/friends must succeed at spreading their ideas to fellow slightly smarter apes before it is too late. We must find/join people who are thoroughly convinced that such quick prosperity can be achieved and thus become beacons of hope and economic education. It seems like all we have to do is redouble our efforts at becoming “secondhand dealers” of their ideas and right this minute go over the parapet and join Mises in his “intellectual battle”:

“Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.”