Theme: Productivity

Stefan Molyneux vs Vaush Video

(omfg. Molyneux has far too much tolerance for dishonesty)

1) Wealth is the result of increasing productivity in time. Increasing productivity in time is achieved by reducing labor in time, first by a division of labor, second by organization using incentives, third by continuous technological and logical invention, at the cost of driving people to adapt (learn), sorting people by how well they adapt (learn), sorting them how well they discover opportunities for adaptation(invent), and distributing rewards by how often they adapt, how well they adapt, how well they discover opportunities. Evidence is that invention, organization of production, limiting the labor involved in production, such that labor has continuously decreasing value, to the point where we can’t find use of it, and that the only thing that they have of any value is generation of demand that instructs those who are productive what to produce. And the data, everywhere, in every organization, is that power law applies: very few people provide marginal difference in productivity, and a tiny percentage of people provide nearly all of it. Everyone else is rotatable (disposable). This is the fundamental problem of our age: we have made vast population increases possible but it depends on fewer and fewer people, and the numbers of those decreasing are better.

2) The only time we know our inventiveness, adaptation, organization, labor, and resources were not wasted, is when a customer pays for it. In other words, value is created at the time of sale, not at the time of production. Everything else is speculative. So, equality would mean that none of us received any income until the customers had consumed the entirety of whatever was produced so that we knew how much there was to go around.

3) We tend to overrate everything other than the consequences of continuous production of crucible steel, and the harnessing of hydrocarbons, and the multitude of consequences as the tool improvements made possible by hydrocarbons worked through and expanded every chain and network of invention, organization, production, distribution and trade as the primary source of our wealth increase. The fact that this happened in the one society that was organized by contractualism (not socialism, not despotism, not theology) that had a genetic elite, a majority genetic middle class, a mobile labor pool, a navy, and thus a demand for (navy/trade) for the transformation of resources into productive goods (capital, coal, competent labor).

4) People working? People work. Sure. That has no bearing on it whatsoever. People who work for big highly profitable companies at high wages are riding on rents created by others. That’s why we seek those jobs. Greater income, Less responsibility, better working conditions. and largely the privilege of working with a better class of people.

5) I can’t comprehend the morality argument Stephan is making. There is a TRUST argument not a moral one. People act morally to increase trust so that they can take advantage of continuously expanding opportunities, that require longer more complex production cycles in increasingly larger networks of smaller organizations, repeating the division of labor first between people, then between people with organizations, then between organizations, then between networks of organizations, and finally at global scale until the ‘i pencil’ problem is unfathomably complex – so complex that in a catastrophe production may not be possible (ie: Russian loss of welding technology in the 90’s).

6) The industrial revolution followed the agrarian revolution, followed the age of sail revolution, following the muslim blockade, following the conquest of Constantinople and the fall of Byzantium to the turks.

7) The only reason I can (and others) see why Greece did not have the industrial revolution, was alexander’s crossing of the Bosporus, and subjecting Greece to trade rents instead of the host of middle eastern peoples..

8) Almost all labor saving devices HAVE been created in market economies. Hence european plows, well fed commoners, but poor aristocracy in Europe, and wealthy aristocracy and merchants in the middle east, and poor hungry commoners. Trade route capture always benefitted the middle east, fertile crescent food production irrigated acre, and the ease of taxing and controlling river valleys with dense farming vs vast european plains.

9) Saudi Arabia has the resource curse. How would you sell oil without a free market economy? The entire middle east would be africa if it wasn’t for it.

10) the British empire (including the colonies), and at last the germans, took resources, brought them home, transformed them into production goods and resold them to the world. They brought rule of law, science, technology, and dragged the world kicking and screaming out of the dark ages.

Unwind european market economies and unwind the world back to superstition, ignorance, hard labor, poverty, starvation, disease, suffering, early death, and the victimhood of an uncaring nature.

Ok. Made it to 58:00. Can’t tolerate it any longer. Stephen makes his usual mistake of interjecting philosophical/moral secular/theologic reasoning into a purely empirical and operational argument, but this guy V-whatever is intellectually dishonest. Not worth your time Stephen.