World Famous Comic Swallows Orange Pill?!
Unlearning the destructive teachings of our state funded (stolen property funded) "public" education systems.
NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN
A couple weeks ago a … (“X” is a silly rebrand, maybe I’ll warm up to it eventually) … twitter account, that goes by the name of Louis KC with the twitter handle ‘@notlouisck’, launched a tweet about Bitcoin that had a lot of Bitcoin aficionados jumping into the discourse to share their two sats on the question posed.
The excitement of the Bitcoiners was likely in part because it seemed at first glance that the tweet was sent by none other than Louis CK, the enormously popular stand-up comedian who, as some of you may recall, was cancelled back in 2017 (although making a come back in recent years). Prior to his woke cancellation, Louis had famously closed his twitter account of over eight million followers back in 2015, as he explained “it just didn’t make me feel good.” And let’s be honest, that’s understandable given all the doom porn the twitter algos feed us in an attempt to keep us doom scrolling on the platform.
At any rate, seeing the new Louis KC twitter account, which may or may not be from the legend, it certainly got some excitement from the Bitcoiners, hoping to help onboard the comedian into the Bitcoin world and thereby getting his patrons onboarded to Bitcoin that much more quickly, in our “race to avoid the war.”
Regardless of whether the Not-Louis-CK account is in fact Louis CK, the tweet was instructive because it asked a common question that people new to Bitcoin often ask, and it elicited lots of great answers from many well known Bitcoiners. Some of the answers brought about follow-up questions from Louis which generated still more great responses.
One particular thread of comments and follow-ups from the initial question was most interesting because it touched on a common misconception about money and in particular about our governments “emergency spending” of money.
The emergency spending that governments are apt to do is quite possibly the hardest cognitive dissonance for folks to overcome in order to get them on the path to understanding the importance of Bitcoin.
You see, government mid-wits and their counterparts in the mass hysteria media, and in political economics, education, multi-national corporations, and banking, do an excellent job of placating to the Fears Uncertainties and Doubts (“FUD”) of any potential would be bitcoiner. And they do this by beating the drum of “muh emergency” nonsense (not unlike “muh roads” nonsense) which steers the would be bitcoiners along a seemingly safe path away from bitcoin.
The essential premise for both “muh emergency spending” FUD and for “muh roads spending” FUD is that we need a centralized system of elected representatives with the power to allocate some of our collective wealth towards things that we allegedly need, or towards nice things that we might not need but that will allegedly make life better for all of us — and here is the reasoning — because without the centralized system to carry out these functions, the things we allegedly need won’t get funded and the things that will allegedly make life better for all of us also won’t get the necessary funding.
There’s a lot to unpack here. But lets hold off on that. Instead let’s just jump to the conclusion which is that once the world comes to understand that muh emergency spending and muh roads spending by centralized governments causes much more harm than good, we can end this line of FUD and thereby usher in the Bitcoin standard to every individual on the planet.
BITCOIN IS NOTHING NEW
With that spending FUD backdrop let’s get into the Louis CK tweet thread and consider the government spending question that arises, regardless of whether this is actually Louis CK asking the questions. And who knows, it might very well be Mr. CK.
Without further ado then, here is the transcribed tweet thread, beginning with the tweet from Mr. Louis KC that kicked it all off:
OK, you Bitcoin people are relentless. I appreciate the hustle. I’ll bite…
Lets just pretend all currency converted to Bitcoin (nice job). Now, you own 0.5 Bitcoin total and are renting an apartment and getting paid a normal salary of 2 Bitcoin per year.
You would like to buy a house one day but the only houses people are willing to sell are for at least 22 btc. The only way you could buy is if you borrowed Bitcoin from someone and payed Bitcoin interest. You do it at 5% interest.
You also lose your job later and then to keep things afloat, someone offers you a btc credit card at 15% interest. You have no choice.
Question: what makes this different than our current economy?
— Louis KC
3:19PM - Sept 18, 2023
BITCOIN IS SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN
To the question posed by Louis, among many thousands of responses was a simple succinct response from Mike Silagadze ‘@MikeSilagadze’ who explained:
The government doesn’t print Bitcoin and doesn’t inflate away your savings at a rate of 2-20% per year
In other words, Mike was explaining that the difference between the decentralized bitcoin world and the centralized dollar world, is that in the bitcoin world, the government is not able to print more money for itself at will, ad infinitum, and thereby create price inflation from the additional units of money added to the economy.
The price inflation occurs because the new units of money are added to the economy without an equivalent amount of new goods and services added to the economy. The mismatch of more money with the same amount of goods and services, causes the purchasing power of each dollar to fall, so that the total purchasing power of all money outstanding remains equal to what it was before the new money was created, which was equal to the amount of all goods and services available to purchase in the economy. In other words, a dollar buys you less when there are more dollars in circulation.
This is a primary point of Bitcoin that Satoshi indicated in the first block of the bitcoin time chain, from January, 2009 when he proclaimed “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” The difference between the dollar world and the bitcoin world, is that one has a fixed supply of money, and the other does not. It might not seem like a significant difference, and until you spend the time to think through the consequences it’s not.
This is precisely why mid-wits, those that don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, are able to confidently hand wave away the significance of a fixed money supply. The mid-wits simply haven’t done the 10,000 hours of research reading books, articles, whitepapers, twitter threads, listening to countless hours of monetary theory, game theory, economic theory, and discussing and debating with friends and strangers alike on all of these topics for multiple years to understand the consequences of a fixed money supply compared with the consequences of an inflating money supply.
BUT WHO WILL BUILD THE ROADS
Louis quipped back to Mike’s response, seemingly in disagreement with Mike:
Oh so then who pays for disaster relief, military, police, fire, teachers, roads, etc? Does Satoshi run the Fed?
Louis seems to suggest here that if governments can’t print money, they won’t be able to pay for services that people depend on.
What Louis implies is that governments must deficit spend to provide the necessary services to their citizens; that sometimes governments just don’t earn enough through taxation so they need to borrow and increase their balance of debts to make ends meet.
It’s so obvious after you see it. In the same way a family is not going to have a sustainable lifestyle if they max out their credit cards to buy things, and then get more credit cards to pay back the other credit cards — governments cannot have a sustainable existence if they borrow to payback previously borrowed funds.
At some point there is either (A) nobody left to borrow from and the system collapses, or (B) real work is conducted to earn real money in order to pay down the debts.
SO WAIT, YOU MEAN A BUDGET AND SOUND MONEY
At this response, Jesse Myers, also known by the twitter handle ‘@Croesus_BTC’, jumped into the ring from the top rope providing some clarity for Louis with this bombshell:
Simple: the Government does. But in this scenario, they just have to spend within their means for a change.
In other words, Jesse is explaining here that governments simply won’t be able to deficit spend anymore under a bitcoin standard. They will either pay for services with the tax revenues they transparently collect, transparently borrow from citizens willing to lend, or they simply will not have the money to spend anymore.
Under a bitcoin standard, governments won’t be afforded the ability to opaquely monetize their debts through a central bank lender of last resort, thereby flooding the market with an ever increasing money supply, causing harmful inflation to everyone downstream of the money printing.
FUD WARNING
It was at this point that the critical question was asked, and this really is the crux of the thread here, the linchpin where every socialist veers left and eventually drives straight off the cliff along with whomever is foolish enough to follow in their wake of destruction.
A twitter account that goes by TA with the handle ‘@mtaa324’ fired off what he presumably believed to be the coup de grâce to Jesse.
So if the disaster is too big and the govt doesn’t have enough BTC, should we just let people die?
EVERYBODY DIES
To the seemingly certain death blow from TA, a random legend by the name of brrrr with the handle ‘@volkitalki93’, with basically no activity on his twitter account, gallops into the fray, and delivers a most epically thunderous one word response:
Yes
As the kids say these days, there were no lies detected in brrrr’s response.
This is the orange pill, ladies and gentlemen. When you can unequivocally declare loud and proud, without a shadow of any doubt, that, yes, sometimes people die.
You see, we all die sooner or later, the question is how we go about it. This is the single biggest question that everyone needs to wrap their head around in order to get Bitcoin; to unlearn the socialist teachings of our elders, born into a society of deep social confusion, floundering aimlessly in a sea of wealth, unable to see it was built from low time preference capitalistic endeavors, not socialistic high time preference property rights destruction.
CONCLUDING; FROM A PARENTS PERSPECTIVE
In the child rearing world, the idea of coddling, or being a helicopter parent, is a well studied phenomenon. The results are glaringly obvious. Children that are unable to fail, that never experience failure, have a much harder time in adulthood dealing with reality, where failure is a normal useful aspect of life that any mature person understands as nothing more than nature telling you to course correct on your next attempt.
Most of the worlds public school systems utilize the same anti-failure model, where getting something wrong is not a useful identification of what not to do, but is instead a shameful act that pushes people to limit their creativity and worse, limits people to doing nothing other than exactly what they are told, and to never question what is being told, for fear of making a fatal mistake and judged “a failure.”
This constant fear of failure from the very youngest of age amongst coddling parents, into adulthood thanks to the industrial worker bee template implemented by public schools the world over, leads to the inevitable — a society of people in constant fear of failure, too scared to ask if what we are doing is the right thing, operating at all levels of government, media, and corporate board rooms.
In this environment of constant fear of failure and fear of asking questions, the culture can’t imagine letting go of the railing. They all keep their finger on the money printing anti-failure device to paper over any sniff of a potential failure in our midst.
I remember learning of the great Roman Empire and wondering, well, if it was so great, why did it fail? The answer is all around us. Western society is in the same position some two thousand years later. It’s the same story over and over.
A story as old as time. The story has four parts and it always goes something like this;
1- low time preferences bloom and new property rights are created for all
2- the new property rights allow everyone to build wealth for themselves
3- the necessity for low time preference vanishes as wealth accumulates
4- the accumulated wealth promotes higher time preference decision making which then erodes individual property rights for all and thereby impoverishes everyone, and the cycle begins anew as low time preference individuals emerge from the depths of their impoverishment looking for novel sly round about ways to establish new property rights that can’t be taken from the high time preference society they are buried under.
IF IT IS NOT OBVIOUS, WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF PART 4 OF OUR STORY.
Great wealth was accumulated during the 18th and 19th centuries thanks to (relatively) strong private property rights in the “developed” world. This wealth removed the necessity for low time preference thinking, which enabled high time preference thinking, like emergency spending throughout the 20th century. The high time preferences of the past are now in the process of impoverishing everyone of the 21st century in the developed world.
However, In the center of the woke political shit storm and mass media hysteria of the 21st century, low time preferences are being rediscovered and new tools like Bitcoin are spreading throughout the hearts of men across the globe like wildfire, enabling property rights for everyone on the planet, which in turn is allowing for a renaissance of wealth accretion to every hard working individual around the globe…
But I digress. Back to muh emergency spending…
The thing about emergency spending that all the mid-wits miss is that if there is actually an emergency, there is no need for money. Money does not fix things. Money does not ship fresh water to people dying of thirst. Money does not ship food to people dying of hunger. Money does not ship clothing and shelter to people dying from the cold or from the heat. It is people that do the shipping. It is people that collect and distribute the food and water and clothing and shelter. If there is a real emergency, people will take action. And if the people don’t take action, then it wasn’t an emergency.
If a person breaks into your home in the middle of the night, are you going to ask him to wait for the cops to show up, or are you going to take action. Are you going to wait for someone to hand you some money before you take action, or are you simply going to react. If an angry mob of barbarians invaded your town, are you going to demand someone pays you some money before you retaliate, or are you simply going to respond.
The idea that we need to debase the monetary system for an emergency, is the stupidest most mid-wit logic ever conceived. Don’t be stupid. Break free from this mid-wit high time preference thinking. And help others break free from it. The sooner we get the mid-wits to take some personal responsibility and spend the time to think more about the topic of high time preference money printing, the sooner we can stop impoverishing ourselves with these dumbass socialist idiotic takes and spread the abundance generating technology of Bitcoin.
Do better. Unlearn the destructive teachings of our stolen property funded public education systems.
And if you happen to see Louis out on the streets, remind him that one bitcoin will always equal one bitcoin. And tell him that money doesn’t solve emergencies, people solve emergencies.
Cheers!
Your analysis is good, up to a point, but misses the ultimate truth. Everything you described as what we ought to do, low time preference, moral living is exactly what God has told man how to live a good and righteous life. It is the "invisible hand" Adam Smith wrote about. It is God's way. If you want to learn more about it, just read, and understand, the Bible.