How to transform yourself and others from being an uncivilized slightly smarter ape to a civilized one

In our post-Darwin world it is easy to classify human beings as slightly smarter apes. Apes whose ability to reason and control their animalistic instincts has allowed for the emergence of what we call civilization. I’d like to propose a further classification, one between the civilized and uncivilized ones. The civilized slightly smarter apes understand what civilization is and how vital is the respect for private property and the freedom of all human beings to live their lives as they wish with minimal coercion, while the uncivilized ones don’t and constantly fall for the idea of using government coercion to take property/wealth from people and regulate/run their lives in countless ways which eventually destroys civilization. So without further ado. Let us briefly discuss the vital link between private property and civilization.

Private property means that matter is under the exclusive control/ownership of a single person/mind/CPU. Each person is motivated to discover the best information with which to transform or reorder their private property in a way that increases its value or utility. Most of us transform our bodies in a manner that maximizes the value/utility of the labor we produce and then trade with other people/companies. Some transform bread and beef to increase their value as hamburgers which are then traded with others, etc. From our freedom to use/transform our private property emerges the ‘freedom to trade’ it with anyone in the entire planet which inadvertently transforms mankind into a global supercomputer where people/companies are motivated to innovate and learn from each other(competitors) thus inadvertently cooperate to discover and spread superior information and subsequent order. It is our freedom as consumers to trade our life/order-sustaining wealth for the best cars, and as producers to go into the auto-manufacturing business, which motivates existing auto manufacturers(competitors) to innovate/compete/copy/learn to produce the best cars. 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 relative 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. Morals are knowledge which also emerges and spreads via economic competition. It is hard-working, tolerant, courteous people who thanks to competition inevitably motivate everyone else to be likewise.

Thus private property and emerging ‘competitive knowledge discovery’, as opposed to leading to chaos, 1) is what enables and motivates the discovery and spread of superior information which continuously increases the rate at which mankind reorders a tiny fraction of the earth’s massive volume of 260 billion cubic miles into the wealth that easily feeds/clothes/expands nearly 8 billion people, 2) civilizes us 3) protects us from being coerced into doing things we don’t want to do, or losing the wealth we have traded a part of our very lives to create or acquire, and 4) is also vital for discovering THE TRUTH!

Understanding the above it should be easy to see that the role of governments and coercion should be minimized 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 private sector entities to keep up with the competition in terms of information and hustle. Central 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 plans — so they inevitably require compulsion/tyranny. For example, it is a criminal act in Communist countries like North Korea and the former Soviet Union 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. 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 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 is incentivized to be as productive as possible and keep inefficiencies to a minimum since he owns/keeps the additional wealth or losses. 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.

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So, moral of the story. Make sure you are a civilized slightly smarter ape and help others be civilized too.

Mises:

“Economics must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices and must not be left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything. It is the pith of civilization and of man’s human existence…All present-day political issues concern problems commonly called economic. All arguments advanced in contemporary discussion of social and public affairs deal with fundamental matters of…economics. Everybody’s mind is preoccupied with economic doctrines…Everybody thinks of economics whether he is aware of it or not. In joining a political party and in casting his ballot, the citizen implicitly takes a stand upon essential economic theories…As conditions are today, nothing can be more important to every intelligent man than economics. His own fate and that of his progeny is at stake…all reasonable men are called upon to familiarize themselves with the teachings of economics. This is, in our age, the primary civic duty. Whether we like it or not, it is a fact that economics cannot remain an esoteric branch of knowledge accessible only to small groups of scholars and specialists. Economics deals with society’s fundamental problems; it concerns everyone and belongs to all. It is the main and proper study of every citizen.”