So far, just halfway through, this is pure sophistry. Smith was using the primitive man illustratively given the works of Hobbes and Rousseau. However the effects he describes arose between families clans and tribes not individuals, and the division of labor, later under farming. And money evolved under states (greeks) to pay armies. Barter is in the record especially the tax record, from the first cities and the first marriages. Social Debt and Credit first, Barter second, then trade, then markets, then capital markets, then financial markets. Money evolved for the same reason fiat money evolved. To increase the purchasing power of the state, and reduce its cost of inventory. The use of the parable (example) does not invalidate the argument. You’re just uninformed. So every claim in this video is false.
It’s a misrepresentation to cast Sumerian silver as money. It was a standard of weight and measure. The lydians produce money. So what you are claiming is that a pricing system that makes barter commensurable by a standard system of weights and measure, is the same as money and are denying that this is not barter. OMFG. This is clown world. Money stores time. Period. It stores it better than most other mediums. There is nothing difficult to understand. Sigh…. The fact that credit is measured in a commodity or a system of measurement (commensurability) regardless of commodity is just accounting under barter. Silver was important because large scale trade (especially international trade) was often conducted with silver and sometimes with gold. This is embarrassing. OK. That’s enough.
Capitalism: Capitalism consists of insurance of scale contractual relations by the state, and a bias in the production of goods, services, and information, whether private or common, consumptive or capitalizing, to organization the private sector as a means of maximizing experimental exploitation of opportunities given the distribution of sufficient knowledge to exploit those opportunities. The limit of capitalism is the limit of capital formation, investment, and its returns, within the lifecycle of the investors. In other words the state must invest in commons the returns of which cannot be captured by the private sector, within the private sector’s demand for returns, in strategic capital production that is prohibitive because competition with other private sector options (say, battery or screen manufacturing today, or petroleum exploitation,). And of course, for basic research the rewards of which are almost impossible to capture., It’s for this reason that the west uses the military primarily for basic research which the private sector then exploits. Capitalism requires sufficient rule of law (suppression of parasitism) that capital formation is possible so that the returns on capital formation can be provided – to investors as returns, and to consumers as increases in consumption., The question is – what is the limit of material consumption. That’s the problem. That limit is the point at which we both control the reproduction of the unfit, and start experiencing mental decoherence that impacts social, economic, political, and strategic coordination. (Where we are now). Now, conversely, the exploitation of opportunity is related to the opportunities generated by basic research. That’s the fundamental issue. We are NOT doing that. All we are doing is price arbitrage for labor decreasing the price of goods and services, in exchange for consuming emotional, psychological, social, economic, and political capital that we call ‘mindfulness’ that makes our cooperation and trust possible.
Cultures: norms, traditions, institutions always and everywhere must adapt to the available methods of production given geography, resources, competitors, and unfortunately, their demographics – which is the biggest problem and the hardest one to overcome, which is why only East Asians and northern Europeans did so. There is no difference between culture and its organization of people and institutions to produce goods, services, information commons, and yes… leisure.
Sensory World: we can enjoy the fruits of our production only if we produce excesses and limit the unproductive so that we have the opportunity to. Marx starts with the common feminine cognitive bias that there is an ‘us’ – a society. Rather than a group of families, clans, tribes, that have the choice of predation, parasitism, cooperation, of boycott, and where the strong create and maintain states – TOLERATING the undesirables. And it’s undesirables (The Unfit) that Marx is fighting for. He’s fighting against natural selection. He’s fighting against the fundamental reason for western success: preservation of natural selection by preservation of self-determination by universal adversarialism (competition). So the fundamental question is only whether we continue adapting to the laws of the universe, or we regulate our adaptation in favor of greater numbers, or we eliminate our adaptation by relative equality. Everything else in all the political ideologies, philosophies, and ‘sciences’ is just an attempt to choose the velocity of adaptation while maintaining the incentive for cooperation and coherence of the polity. (As such eugenics is necessary)
The Dirty Secret: The dirty secret of the west that the rest of the world – other than east Asia – rebels against is that there is no difference between capitalism and anything else we’ve done throughout our history: maximization of adaptation to the laws of the universe, at the cost of continuing natural selection, by the universal preservation of natural selection by those empirical methods of testing fitness that we call markets.
Mud Pie: perfect example. ( This is why art sucks. 😉 )
The dialectical method = Pilpul (rationalization). The empirical method uses adversarialism and series with three or more states.