@jb455 I could write a whole book on the many false dichotomies in your post. You keep making all-or-nothing statements and framing my position as government manipulation when you have no idea what my position actually is because you keep filtering and distorting my words through the narrow lens of puritanical libertarian dogma. I know your intentions are good, but it’s frustrating to communicate with people who inject their ideology and unconscious biases into my words.
Dogma and ideology distort the human brain’s ability to perceive and understand the objective meaning of words, symbols, and events. This makes it virtually impossible to communicate with fundamentalists in any domain without writing entire books to systematically deconstruct every brick of dogma until they consciously see how the dogma has divorced them from the reality of the real world.
The real world is messy and subverts libertarianism (and the Austrian School in particular) because the geopolitical and social underpinnings of human civilization have virtually nothing to do with the mechanics of free markets or supply-and-demand. “The market” is just one lens through which to classify and perceive human affairs, but that lens has many shortcomings, especially in the age of A.I. where markets are no longer the dominant explanatory principle for describing the incentives and outcomes of human interaction. This is much deeper than any “ism” or academic theory of free markets, but puritanical libertarians refuse to acknowledge this reality.
The world and the universe of economic ideas is much bigger than libertarianism. Based on all your comments, it appears you do not have real-world experience on Wall Street, in developing country project finance, and many other aspects of our geopolitical system and global economy to see how many (not all) academic libertarian theories breakdown in the real world. That’s not an insult, it’s simply the reality of what everybody already understands after they see the way capitalism works from inside “the sausage factory.”
With the potential of trust-less systems like Cardano, for the first time in human history, humanity has a chance to take a different path. That path is not pure libertarianism and it’s not communism or socialism. It’s not an “ism” at all.
Anyway, at this point, let’s agree to disagree because it would require a whole book to explain why I disagree with all the false dichotomies in your post, but neither of us has time for that.