Many people enjoy looking down upon other people who choose to partake in the Black Friday sales. This is a tragic reflection of supercilious conceit that some who earn more currency have for those who earn less. It is an unnecessary and thoroughly harmful abhorrence of those who seek to enrich their lives through purchasing goods and services in an attempt to improve their lives. Regardless of one’s income level, we all seek to improve our lives through the patronizing of businesses of our choosing. That people of all different earning ranges can advance the quality of their lives in this manner is the wonder that the market economy brings to humanity.
While it may be true that some of this repugnance may stem from the fact that many of those people are on State subsidized welfare programs, this is a thoroughly separate issue as the presence of violently redistributed stolen State funds fundamentally distorts market signals. The fact that entrepreneurs and business owners can be so efficient with their business as to provide such steep discounts is testament to the daily miracles that the market economy showers upon its consumers.
If you truly feel pity for those who earn less, do not display this so shamefully with your condemnation of days during which they can partake in the cornucopia of the market economy. Instead devote your energies to helping them further improve their lot by educating them, donating to them, or by opening a business yourself. Add to the accumulated wealth of the world. It is easy criticize and destroy. It is far more difficult to create and innovate. Pay your respects to the magnificent wealth you have inherited from your forefathers. It was amassed through great toil and industry.
“Why do you talk about philosophy, morality, and economics? They are just theoretical and abstract. Why don’t you talk about reality!? That’s what matters!”
All individuals act based on a particular set of morals and code of ethics. I want to know what your code is. What morals do you hold dear? What principles would you risk life and limb to protect? What are you passionate about? What do you love? If you truly love something you must love it more have than you love yourself. You must be selfless and devoted to the thing you love.
To appeal to people’s actions without attending to their moral compass or code of ethics is endeavoring to move the statue by pushing the shadow. The thoughts that originate in the mind are always the source of action we see in the real world. Thoughts and beliefs are always more powerful and dangerous than any gun, tank, or bomb. It is the human beings that wield such things that bring about consequences in the real world. Human beings powered by erroneous belief system are what pull triggers in unprovoked attack. Human beings hijacked by misguided belief systems are what detonate bombs designed to maim and destroy innocent men, women, and children.
If you truly wish to affect reality thereby improving the world, it is absolutely imperative to discuss philosophy, morality, and economics. More lives can be saved by empowering hearts and minds than by taking away all of the guns from soldiers and law enforcement officers. We differ from the beasts in that we possess the capability of critical analysis and logical deduction. To act without employing this most defining characteristic is to reject that which makes us human beings. Savage beasts act based on primal instinct and emotional ferocity. Civilized human beings act based on sophisticated principles and dignified morality. Celebrate your heritage with enthusiastic vigor!
He that always gives way to others will end in having no principles at all.
The true measure of a civilization is the piecemeal accumulation of wealth that can only occur when peaceful individuals are able to trade and interact unhampered. Currency and money are not wealth. They are the conduits through which true wealth can be accessed and acquired. A pile of gold coins on a desert island is useless because they cannot buy anything of value. When there is nobody to trade with money becomes useless. Their function is apparent only when entrepreneurs create and innovate wondrous things that lift us out of poverty and raise the standard the living of humanity in very real ways. Take away the currency or money and people will use something else to trade in.
In order to destroy wealth one must destroy factories, medical technology, industrial machines, combine harvesters, tractors, excavators, 18 wheeler trucks, trains, cargo ships, cars, computers, smart phones, houses, electricity, indoor plumbing etc. Do that and you will plunge humanity into a most abysmal and wretched dark age that no wanton conquerer in history has been able to achieve. The painful reduction in the standards of living of billions of people will be acutely felt as lifestyles become downgraded to that of the common folk of centuries past.
Technology is a tool that humanity has marvelously wielded to attain unprecedented levels of prosperity and comfort. It is the application of the faculties of logical deduction, critical analysis, creativity, and imagination that has placed human beings far above his animal brethren. The knowledge and wisdom procured by our forefathers is the most valuable treasure we have inherited. May your existence add to the heirloom wealth we pass on to our progeny.
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
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Today is Thanksgiving, a time for giving thanks for what? According to history as taught in our government schooling we must be thankful for inhumane child labor laws, suffocating regulations, a violently redistributionist welfare State, degrading victimless crime laws, thieving taxation, and mendacious political predators. In short we are told we must be thankful we have the State for without its civilizing influence we would become vicious cannibals that would rob and exploit each other given the first opportunity. We are told it is central planning that has lifted humanity out of privation and suffering.
Ironically the true history of Thanksgiving is the complete opposite of this fairy tale narrative.
When the pilgrims first arrived in the new world in the early 1600s they enacted a Socialist Welfare State system under which the fruits of everyone’s labor was to be placed in a communal storage facility and divvied out to those who the authorities deem need them most.
As Karl Marx later famously said it two and half centuries later “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
The economics of why Socialism and central planning fails every time has not changed.
When control of goods is placed in the hands of the very few who have not produced them, given human nature the result is always waste, corruption, inefficiency, and suffering.
The powerful elite who maintain control of the resources benefit greatly as do their family and close friends who are showered with doles.
When one understands that more resources can be acquired by ingratiating themselves to State authorities this, rather than actually producing more goods, will be the preferred mode of action.
When those who labor and toil to produce these goods are forcefully deprived of their industry to be distributed to the sloth and idle, there will be engendered resentment and bitterness.
There is no surer way to destroy the desire to create and produce than to not allow individuals to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Therefore as there were more and more people taking from the communal pot and less and less people producing goods to add, what resulted was starvation and mass die off.
The pilgrims were almost entirely wiped out due to the enactment of Socialist policies and the perversion of natural market incentives.
By 1623 they were reduced from a population of about 500 to just a measly 60 individuals.
This is when the policy shifted form that of Socialism to Free Market Capitalism with a firm focus on property rights. Each remaining family was given a parcel of land to work and the fruits of their labor were left to them.
What resulted was unimaginable abundance and surplus, so much that they were able to sell some of their goods to foreign markets.
This is a testament to the splendor of the market economy when left to function unhindered.
Thanksgiving is a celebration of the bountiful productivity that results when industrious human beings are left to their own devices. This is the finest expression of spontaneous order.
Do not seek to control your neighbor, through obsequiously appealing to the State, for in doing so you become the monster you fear others to be.
On this glorious day let us give thanks to the multitude of unsung heroes who daily participate in the voluntary interactions that comprise the market economy.
Let us give thanks to the intrepid entrepreneurs who risk capital and resources to overcome innumerable State obstacles to serve you with good and services to improve your life.
For without the wealth they have laboriously created over millennia we would not have a civilization to celebrate.
All who choose to interact with their fellow man voluntarily through consensual interaction; I am proud and honored to call my dear friend.
I hope you all have a peaceful and magnificent Thanksgiving! 🙂