Trade, Exchange, & Investment
There are two general forms of gambling (risk-taking), investment & speculation. Investment is vital for society as a whole. It’s such a powerful driver of wealth creation that the wealth generated in a truly free and civil society easily protects the many failed gamblers. Investment in a Laissez-faire (non-interventionist) free marketplace takes the form of a social experiment wherein one or more voluntary parties use the wealth they’ve gathered (through their own labor or from returns on other investments) to facilitate the development of new creative endeavors in the hope of creating something of great value for all of mankind.
Without a free marketplace, investments are curtailed, people, being self-interested don’t risk their hard to come by wealth investing in things that might be limited by the often arbitrary decisions of those who have the use of coercive power. Hence diversity of investment is diminished in proportion to the arbitrary use of coercive power.
The other kind of gambling is speculation. Speculation isn’t gambling on a creative endeavor. The sole purpose of speculators is to extract a profit at the expense of both investors and other speculators alike and not to reap profit from a creative endeavor. Speculation is a predatory form of gambling that, like theft, demoralizes real investors and thus slows overall economic development. Many speculators would like to convince themselves that they are investors however as they like to feel good when they look in the mirror.
When you buy something, you do so in hopes of some sort of gain or increase in wealth, be it financial, personal, social, etc. But if you are seeking to speculate AND you are following the lead of another you have only a statistically slim chance of long-term success. The reason for this is not so obvious, so I will state it simply: In a zero sum game where the total losses of all losers must balance/equal the total winnings of all winners, if there is to be any significant profit in such endeavors, then there needs to be significantly more losers than winners. Therefore, if you play that game, you are playing radically against the odds.
I think that the vast majority of individuals participating in speculative gambles, have been led down a path. In a free market, there are relatively few speculators as market efficiency doesn’t allow enough margin for them to survive and any opening they discover is quickly closed as there is no regulation to impede market adaptation. Individuals are more wary when they understand that there is no one looking out for their best interest.
Speculation is destructive of the overall fabric of society – a fabric that creates great wealth for all. If you take such a gamble, you are ultimately hurting yourself, your entire community, and civil society as a whole. Successful speculators take their winnings and speculate further, yet at some point, the house of cards comes crashing down when investors wake up and take action, withdrawing their remaining investment capital and the economy completely stagnates.
Children generally learn at an early age that hitting & stealing ends badly for themselves – they are quickly ostracized & ignored by those they’ve harmed.
If there is a pain worse than death, it’s the pain of loneliness.
In a large society, some people have learned ways of hiding their actions from others, using proxies. As such they aren’t directly or immediately ostracized. However, when weeds are sown, there is always a cost that must be paid to remove them and all of us do pay it, as an opportunity to sow wealth producing goods and services is lost. Ultimately, even those speculators who believed they were growing wealthy lose out when they realize no one can afford to trade anything with them any longer.
If you buy any commodity, and then watch/listen to the ‘market-makers’, all the while buying and selling to the tune of what these pundits/puppets/proxies think it’s worth, then you yourself are, functionally, a puppet for those who have the wealth to control these pundits. Stated more simply, you’re making them wealthier at your own expense and hence you too are acting as a proxy.
Unfortunately, the speculators have taken over the system – they are in charge. There are very few legitimate reasons why a company would have a P/E (price to earnings ratio) of more than five. Yet this is the norm today.
Such high P/E ratio’s indicate that we live in a stagnant, cannibalistic economy, not a vibrant, diverse one. After all who, but a speculator or a fool, would invest in a new technology company with a high P/E ratio with only a minuscule chance of making a return on investment in the long run?
Simple rule for legitimate moral investment: Invest in what you love whenever you can; Sell whenever you must, and only when you must.
If you buy something, do so because it is precious to you. Pay no heed to what others think and say. Believe in yourself.
Unfortunately, no matter how moral you are with your investments, the speculators, given the power to coerce people through government laws and hence government guns, would eventually overtake and devour most of everything — at least until people admit the truth to themselves and stand up to them. Firstly however, people must realize that the opposite of a vibrant wealthy civil society of happy people is a decaying impoverished and violent mass of isolated, lonely & terrified people.
How did we get here? It’s all in the rules of the game. Do not for one instance think it is our Nature. We have been adapting our game for a long time now, but we are still very very young. Do not despair, the rules can be changed again if we are ready learn and grow.
Voting
There are two general ways that people allocate resources in an economy – two broad types of economic decisions. One is through commodity exchange – people voluntarily trading & exchanging labor and resources (capitalism). The other way is via the gun. In this second way, capitalism must co-exist as without it, there would be nothing to steal with the gun in the first place — there would not even be a gun. Broadly then the second way is defined by the ‘ocracies: aut-ocracy, arist-ocracy, & dem-ocracy.
In truth there is never an autocracy for long. In order to keep internal peace amongst their ranks, thieves & bullies form a truce – an aristocracy and collectively work to keep any and all competition in check.
The few people who have sought to parasitise, bully & steal, who have learned to use proxies to hide themselves also learned that, in the same way, an open aristocracy makes them targets, hence around the globe these people have adopted democracy as their proxy tool-of-choice.
People are deceived
Just as with those who buy a commodity and then watch the market-makers for clues as to when to sell and then buy again, those who allow themselves to be constrained by a system of rules that negate real choice or who follow polls to decide how to cast their vote, are allowing themselves to be directed by proxies for the dark desires and dreams of thieves and bullies.
However even if the democratic game was fair and people did not follow intermediate proxies (elected political representatives) they’d still be following (or fleeing from) the politicians and the bureaucrats who are functioning as proxies for the majority and who, in turn, will usurp the power of all minorities and take it for themselves.
Most individuals, working for themselves realize that their long term survival is best achieved through cooperative trade and investment. Hence, most individuals seek out creative, just, and moral means for building wealth. Through reason we are able to work out universally preferable behaviors (moral behaviors), preferable as they bring the greatest sustainable and long term social and economic benefit. These beneficial behaviors taken together are the "Natural Law". If you’d like a more detailed explanation on the subject of Natural Law and Natural Human Rights, I’ve written on it here: Natural Law & Rights. H
Unfortunately, there are many people who have been damaged from an early age and who are conflicted about Natural Law. On the one hand they may see the logic of it, but on the other hand they were abused by someone (often a parent) who had absolute power over them. For these individuals, the ends appears to justify the means; might appears to make right. When these disturbed (sociopathic) individuals gain power, they use it to seek a sort of revenge against the world for the suffering they’ve endured. Just as they experienced their parents abusing them and even using them for their own ends, now they do the same to those they rule over. They ignore Natural Law. Tragically, as these abused children grow up physically, they do not mature intellectually. Their hearts full of fear, they gravitate to positions of power and any means to quell their fears is seized upon and used.
Inevitably they find their way into governments wherein there is no competition and hence no fear of being bullied. The drive for more centralization amongst these people seems driven by this constant demand to stifle competition, cement their power, and quell their fear.
Politicians are to the public sector what speculators are to the private sector, with one key difference, the speculator is gambling with their own wealth or the voluntarily given wealth of another. The politician passes off their failures as being job creating successes, the real cost of which is put onto society as a whole – another burden put upon real investors.
At the other end of the vote is a gun, which is unattached from a moral hand, and therefore, an initiation of violence against innocent people is inevitable.
Given that, there can be only one honorable way to vote. NO. Humans have a voice and such is the origin of ‘the vote’. Silence is NOT consent – so why do democracies around the world either coerce people to vote (through fines and threats) or (and more commonly) why do they not count those who do not vote, as ‘NO’ votes?
The dirty secret of democracies around the globe is this: if they counted those who effectively said ‘NO’, by not casting their vote – then there would be no democracy at all. There would only be local competing small bottom-up meritocratic governments based around specific enterprises and local environmental factors. These would be highly co-operative and competitive organizations as they’d need to be in order to survive – meaning people would move somewhere else if they didn’t like what the locals were doing – ostracization at work.
Like many and like myself, you may have been told early in life that ‘might makes right’. The truth is that might makes whatever might chooses to make, and this is very seldom what is right. In fact the ultimate ‘right way’ cannot be known by man. If it could, then that person, that being, would be a god and we would all be worshiping at it’s feet – right now – because of the happiness and wealth it would be give to us.
It truly is a wonderful fantasy and it’s easy to see how people fall into it – we are raised by our mother and father whom, while as children, we see as infallible – they are as gods to us, their ways mysterious and their ability to provide for our needs divine. When we transition to adulthood, it is a great burden to take on that mantle. So, when given a choice, many simply do not. Instead they embrace someone or something else as god. But they are deceived, for that someone else, that so-called god, is but another proxy for mentally disturbed, sociopathic children in grown-up bodies.
I, for one, will not live for a person who wears a crown of gold, nor a crown of thorns. I will not live for a proxy nor those the proxy serves.
I live for myself and those I love. I have a belief in my own self worth and that is how I honor those I love. This is the source of human integrity and dignity.
Hold my hand, share in a civil society of mutual respect and dignity. Value yourself and your life and the lives of those you love. Do not cave in to dark dreams and desires of proxies and their masters. Their dreams and desires cannot be your dreams and desires and in the end shall only become nightmares for all of us.
How true that no one but ourselves is looking out for our best interests. We should never forget that! It’s why I manage my own investments. Also true that you can’t trust history. There is so much out there about what the stock markets is going to do based on past history. But that is not a good way to make future decisions!