ZarnJD @ZarnstorffJD - Twitter Profile

6 days ago

(1) If you are obsessed with another person's wealth, you are a loser. (2) Do not spend time with people who think like that. Spend time with productive people whose brains never entertain such juvenile thoughts. (3) Instead, you should have a feeling of gratitude for what you do have, which would have astonished literally everyone who ever lived in every other time and place. (4) For one thing, for all the complaints we may have about our food supply, your diet is not limited to bread, porridge, cabbage, onions, and turnips, with very occasional meat. Instead, you have a varied and nourishing diet. You have citrus, too, and scurvy is unknown. You don't worry about seasonal starvation every year, or food spoilage. You can drink clean water instead of ale. You have fresh produce in winter. (5) Likewise, your child's life is not at risk if he breaks his leg or has a tooth abscess. For that matter, you don't have to endure medieval dentistry. (6) Transportation you can forget about. Before the market brought mass production to the population, you walked. You had no maps. Even our poorest people use modes of transportation that would have astonished people in previous ages. (7) You probably like having toilets rather than chamber pots and outhouses, not to mention showers, clean water, soap that doesn't burn, deodorant, and toothpaste. Even the poor have eyeglasses, beds with mattresses, lighting at night, heat at the turn of a dial, and instant communication. (8) You probably prefer not to have a single-room hut made of wattle and daub, with no insulation, no chimney (smoke escaped through a hole in the roof, slowly), an open hearth (which contributed to respiratory problems), a dirt floor, a thatched roof that often leaked and attracted vermin, and a shared sleeping space for everyone, often including livestock. (9) In the old days -- in other words, all of human history -- you would have had at most two outfits, you would have dealt with course wool and linen that were itchy, heavy, and hard to clean: laundry would have been done by hand with lye, which destroyed fabric (and wasn't good for the skin, either). For footwear you may have had wooden clogs but would sometimes have gone barefoot. (10) We can go on and on like this. Yes, of course we want even more wealth for everyone, and yes, we want to repeal everything the government and the Fed (socialists are weirdly quiet about the Fed, which is the actual exploiter they pretend capitalists are) are doing that makes housing and other things more expensive: economist Bryan Caplan says repeal of regulations alone would cut housing prices by half in many places. (11) But for heaven's sake, how deranged and psychotic and ungrateful for our ancestors and their institutions would we have to be when, living in a way that literally every single person (even kings and queens, who had to shit in a pot) who ever lived would have envied and scarcely even believed, we're instead concerned about some people having more? (12) The only thing -- the absolute only thing -- that makes this phenomenon possible, the only thing that allows us to live at this level and even conceive of improving it, is capital accumulation, the very thing "Diana Moreno" works day and night to undermine or destroy. (13) "Diana Moreno" thinks we should liquidate Elon's holdings and send everyone a check for $12. (14) She would look at a pile of seed corn and be furious that the capitalists didn't want to distribute it for consumption purposes. "I could feed lots of people with this seed corn," we can hear "Diana Moreno" saying as she destroys civilization. (15) Richard Tawney's description of Luther is apt here: "Confronted with the complexities of foreign trade and financial organizations, he is like a savage introduced to a dynamo or a steam engine."

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