Michael Snoyman's avatar
Michael Snoyman
michael@snoyman.com
npub1uwa9...cjh4
Programmer, economist, author, speaker, weight lifter, Bitcoin enthusiast. Born in 🇺🇸, living in 🇮🇱 עזרי מעם ה' עושה שמים וארץ
The world will continue to be broken until people accept the right of others’ to make different choices.
If one year ago you would have told me "you're going to be a complete believer in Bitcoin, and it's going to change your entire outlook on the world," I would have told you you're crazy. #Bitcoin
With all of the talk around the wildfires, I've been talking about moral hazard a lot recently. I've had a backburner blog post on incentives planned for a few weeks now, so I decided to finally write it! View article →
I like to search for the common denominator underlying seemingly different behavior. Understanding how money printing leads to so many of the ills in society today helped that process a lot. But what underlies the goal of being able to print money? I think that common denominator may be avoiding personal responsibility, which _really_ means avoiding consequences for mistakes. Government-owned money printers are designed to ensure that no matter how much an individual, corporation, or government fucks up, someone can bail them out. (Think: lender of last resort.) Since this is also the core distinction between the overall Left and Right these days, it begins to paint a clear picture of two viewpoints of the world: individualism and responsibility leading to hard money, or collectivism and safety nets leading to fiat. "Too big to fail" was a perfectly apt term to describe the core of their philosophy.
Me to npub1ytxxers306jvc33akk4zpunnazm058sx8sarw3008wpnw2vlzpdsw2qztz: I started season 2 of squid games 12-year-old standing there: did you get to the famous scene where (insert spoiler here) Me: no .... awkward silence... 12-year-old turns beet red
Hard money (and therefore real economics) is all based on competition: providing value for value, with willing exchange. Opponents of this approach believe that competition is wasteful, and that if we simply dictated (through use of force by unaccountable governments mind you) what people should do, the world would be so much better by avoiding that waste. Never mind the fact that the track record of central planning demonstrates it never works, and that competition always makes the world a better place.
If anyone is looking for a great fantasy book series, I can’t recommend Cradle by Will Wight enough.