Self Interests and Incentives
Taking a wholistic view of your environment, and operating accordingly.
WISDOM FROM THE MOUNTAIN TOP
We are only as good as our incentives.
If our incentive is survival, we will do what must be done to survive.
Sure, we might have well established legal and moral codes that aim to steer us along a particular path, but a starving man is driven by his incentive to survive and he will take whatever path is needed to procure the food required for his survival, no matter what invisible legal or moral boundaries he has drawn within his mental maps of meaning.
Understanding this survival mechanism to do what you need to do, in order to survive, as an “economic investment” of our time helps to clarify what we do with the limited time we are given each day.
We recently wrote about the fiatnam world requiring us to spend most of our time making economic investment decisions for surviving, rather than making ethical or engineering investments for thriving. It’s a great framework for better differentiating your investments from your savings. Here it is if you missed it:
The point is, when our need for money to pay the bills is superordinate to all other factors in our lives, we care not how that money is earned, or what the job entails. And this, combined with historically poor savings vehicles, is the driver of the causal mechanism for the degradation of our modern society.
As our money — as our store of value savings vehicles — are of poorer and poorer quality, our incentive to make money drifts further and further from our moral, ethical, and legal bounds of socially accepted conduct.
From an ethical perspective, we might not be aligned with our job, but ethics get thrown out the window when the need for money to survive sits atop our hierarchy of subjective values.
And there is nothing new to this self interested incentive paradigm of human action. Nor is there anything new to our mental state of mind in this survival mode.
The same forces that struck fear in our lives living in caves tens of thousands of years ago, wondering if we might be eaten alive in the middle of the night by a saber toothed tiger, are the same forces that strike fear in our lives today, living in our plush modern homes with central heating and cooling, wondering if we might lose our jobs in the next great financial crisis.
Although the scenery is significantly different in our modern times, living with more physical creature comforts today than the wealthiest of nobles for the past thousands of years, our mental circumstances are far worse than those nobles.
From a mental health perspective, we are nothing more than cavemen, pawing and scraping out a meager paycheck, working and struggling to survive. Forced into perpetual survival mode because of our poor savings vehicles. When we go to sleep at night in our plush beds, our heads are heavy, worried when the next saber toothed financial crisis will eat us alive.
With poor quality money we are reduced to the mental states of our cavemen ancestors, living in survival mode.
On a fiat standard, we are not thriving, we are surviving. And the saber toothed killers that lurk in the shadows, that drive those financial crises in this modern fiatnam caveman world, are the coercive monopolies within banking, armed with the guns of our friendly governmental overlords, be they republics, democracies, monarchies, authoritarians or totalitarians.
Allow the bankers a monopoly power on printing money and they care not who writes the laws. All human actions are downstream of the dominant monetary system of a given society. We’ve explained this in some detail in this article:
At any given moment the fiat banking overlords can stop the money printers or turn them into overdrive, based upon some arbitrary new set of rules or threats, which further consolidates their power and control at the expense of their customers, all of us poors, in the name of “for our protection”, further causing all of us to work more for worsening services and products, furthering our fall into perpetual survival mode.
If you want to begin to thrive in this modern monetary monopoly, you need to understand the incentives at play, what drives public policy, and how those among us aim to maintain their positions of power and control atop the mountain of this modern caveman jungle we call fiatnam.
DON’T GET EMOTIONAL, GET UNDERSTANDING
An emotional mind is a clouded mind, and a clouded mind hasn’t the vision needed to see itself out of the chaos it is surrounded within.
There is no need to get emotional about the state of affairs we find ourselves in. Nor is there any need to despair. The same rational cold logic that pulled us from our caves to overcome those saber toothed tigers is the same cold rational logic that will help us overcome the saber toothed financial crises the fiatcong bankers and politicians harm us with, even if they may be set in motion under best of intentions.
The system has broken incentives.
With a calm, clear mind, there is a path out of the fiatnam jungles. It is a brightly lit orange path to guide you free and clear of the fiatnam jungles. But to escape, you must see clearly, you must calm your mind, and accept reality for what it is.
Remove the veil from their clever marketing.
What you need to understand is that the organization that prints money from nothing, is printing money to enrich themselves, and that is all there is to it.
Any other ideas you have about why they print money is purely designed by their marketing division to maintain the illusion of their necessity. The money printing cartel is that simple to understand.
And unless and until you understand this cold hard fact, you will never understand the solution to obsolete their organization, Bitcoin.
Above all else, this is what must be understood if you are to escape fiatnam.
The money printing monopoly will give you every conceivable reason for their existence, except for the only one that actually is true, that their existence is nothing more than a wealth extraction mechanism from everyone else without a money printer. It’s just that simple.
Until you are able to accept this reality, you can’t understand the many other realities of the world, that all other organizations must bow their heads and tow the line to this supreme reality.
Those in positions of power must never speak of this truth, for if they do, they will be cut off from the privileges the money spigot provides. Their funding will cease. Their positions nullified. Their assets liquidated. Their position in the Cantillon hierarchy canceled. Their existence, excommunicated.
If the money printers want to push a diversity narrative, well then you better dress your employees up in rainbow dresses and dance, even if you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 business, because that is what your lord and savior, the money printer, wants to push, to confuse, to humiliate, to distract the public from the actual problem in the world, the inflation and societal degradation that the money printing monopoly conducts because of its existence.
Once you understand this money printing reality of the world, most everything takes on a new light, a true and complete light.
Consider US Senator Elizabeth Warrens recent tweet:
If we tax the rich, we can fund opportunity for all.
On its face, it sounds benign and honorable. Those that have aught to help those that have not. But you must come to understand of the deceit soaked half truth, ignorance, and evil that drips from every word of hers.
First of all, the government funds its operations primarily with money it prints from nothing, through the federal reserve monopoly on money printing. So taxation is not required.
But placing that monumental point of fact off to the side, secondly, most of the money printing inflation, and the direct theft through taxation, goes to fund social security, interest on debt, and the defense budget. In other words most of government funding goes towards the pharmaceutical complex, the banking complex, and the military complex. And all three of these organizations have incentives to see sickness, poverty, and war, maintained, not solved, in order to drive profits to their shareholders. But let’s even put this colossal point off to the side.
Let’s focus on the third piece of the puzzle from Senator Elizabeth Warren, the belief that taking from the rich is somehow constructive for everyone else.
How did the rich get rich? How does any rich person get rich?
Answer: they find problems and solve them for as many people as possible.
So what Elizabeth wants to do is take wealth from the problem solvers of the world, and give that wealth to people that don’t solve problems. Hmmm?
We’ve went into depth before on the goodness of successful capital allocators, the wealthy, in this article, if you want a refresh:
What good could possibly come from this reallocation of wealth.
In other words, if the people in society that solve the problems of society are limited in their ability to solve problems because they have less wealth to do so, and because they have a disincentive to solve problems when they know their governments will take the profits of their problem solving solutions from them, what would happen to society in such a scenario?
Well, it’s rather quite simple.
There would no longer be people solving problems, like for example, the problems of food production and food distribution, or the problems of energy production and energy distribution, or the problems of home production, or of home heating and cooling production and distribution.
In other words, if you want to destroy a society, if you want to keep those without power from attaining power, a powerful step in this direction would be to do exactly as Elizabeth suggests, to “tax the rich.”
IT’S THE MONEY, STUPID
The reality is that Elizabeth Warren is not the problem. Nor is she inherently evil. She simply gets paid, in a round about way, to keep the money printing monopoly going.
All of us, including Liz, are only as good as our incentives.
Her and everyone else is simply ensnared in the same money printing monopoly trap, where the money printing rulers incentivize everything around us.
When our jobs are on the line, when our self interests are on the line, when our children’s next meal is on the line, most every single one of us will rationalize some absurdity about how we are just “speaking our truth” to fiatsplain away the horrors of what we are actually participating in, no matter how destructive to our morals and ethics and souls it might be. If it means keeping food on the table for our families, no matter how misaligned the actions we take are, or how soul crushing our actions truly are, we’ll do what needs to be done for the sake of our own self interests.
Doctors that prescribe deadly pharmaceutical solutions, rather than simple lifestyle changes, are looking out for their families first, they are not going to sacrifice their career, even if they know it is wrong. The fiat incentives are powerful and rule over us all, no matter how well intentioned we are.
Until you understand that the manipulation of the money supply in the market is the primary driver of all the bad decisions in the world you will never find peace.
Until you understand the radical and raw truth, that the modern monetary system, that the money in your bank account, that the money associated with your debit and credit cards, is simply nothing more than a closed sourced ledger, updated automatically at the speed of light through a closed sourced text message computer system, without the need for any human involvement whatsoever, you will not find peace on this Earth.
Until you understand that monopolized money printing is not only unnecessary, but is the primary root cause of essentially all of your economic troubles in this world, you will never find peace in this life.
Only if and until you accept the fact, accept the reality, that the monopoly on money printing, led by the federal reserve system, its banking shareholders, its affiliate organizations in every other country, including the bank of international settlement, the world bank, and the international monetary fund, are nothing more than a destructive parasite feeding off your labor for their profits, and running the grandest marketing psyop the world has ever known, you cannot possibly find peace, nor the solution…
Bitcoin.
Because unless and until you see through the marketing, you will never see the self interested incentives driving their work.
And as we’ve maintained from the beginning, most every economist, politician, and banker would surely help a stranger in need should the circumstance arise, but that doesn’t negate the fact that you cannot convince a man of something his livelihood requires that he not understand. Like how their money printing is actually harming, not helping society.
Cash incentives rule everything around us.
It is high time we build a new cash system, with better incentives.
A BETTER FORM OF CASH
Satoshi called it an electronic cash, because cash is something you can self custody.
That dollar bill or euro or yen or peso in your pocket is cash, and it’s yours. It is a “bearer” instrument. Meaning that when you hand that cash to someone else, in a peer to peer transaction, the settlement is final in the very act of the exchange.
There is no need for a third party to get involved, there is no need for a bank in that transaction.
Natalie Smolenski recently gave a brilliant talk on this peer to peer concept, which we transcribed in this article:
Banks are disincentivized to favor cash. It ruins a big part of their business model. Cash is the last thing in the world a bank would want the world to have access to. What is more, should an electronic cash, an electronic bearer instrument come to fruition, such a thing would be the very downfall of a core pillar of the banking system.
To the extent the banking system does or did provide a service other than the destruction of society, it did serve as a trusted intermediary, to track through its ledger the transfer of gold. But once the electronic age came into existence, once ledgers could be updated automatically, the need for a person based transactional banking system became obsolete.
If only us peasants had governments that actually cared about us. If only our governments weren’t funded by the money printing banking system monopoly. Our governments could have easily taken over the electronic banking ledgers, and maintained one ledger for everyone, allowing the free flow of automated electronic transactions to fly at the speed of light.
But that is not what happened.
Instead, at the turn of the 20th century, the bankers lobbied whomever they needed to remain as their incentives would obviously drive them to do, as rational human beings, to keep their businesses as viable going concerns, to maintain their power and control. And that monopolized system that the bankers skim the cream from through money printing remains in place to this day. Not through some inherent evils or ignorance, but simply through their own desire to keep their businesses afloat.
Unfortunately for the bankers, bitcoin has birthed itself into their world, and us peasants that have a keen nose for bullshit, that have seen through the bankers marketing facade, and understand precisely what is taking place have already shifted all of our wealth into the superior technology, in anticipation of the inevitable outcome.
Bitcoin has brought forth the promise of an automated electronic cash transaction mechanism that began some hundred and twenty years ago with the advent of the telegraph and intercontinental telegraphy, as we’ve explained in detail with this article:
For all of those that are willing to see the realities of the world today, and the cold incentives and self interests that drive us, they can also see the bounty and beauty of the promise that the monetary monopoly bank slaying technology of bitcoin will bring about. A world where politicians can be better politicians constrained by what their citizens actually want, and where bankers can be better bankers, when they actually hold reserves of their own, real money, that they risk on bright eyed entrepreneurs, looking to bring their visions of the future into the present.
We’ve written at length on this topic, on the goodness that bitcoin brings forth, and this article is a good place to start:
In our deep past, some of us rose up and conquered the saber tooths of that era. And in so doing we rose the living standards of everyone around us. In our present times, some of us have risen up once again, taking the reigns of our future into our own hands, placing our wealth and our vision of the future into bitcoin, and in so doing we will raise the living standards of everyone around us. Not because we can but because we are compelled to do so.
We will slay the saber toothed banking monopoly, not because we can, but because we must. We choose not to survive, but to thrive.
In this life and beyond.
Cheers!