How MONEY completely ruined your life

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXP7xxae-OQ[/youtube]

Thoughts anyone?

There were some good points that he made in this video.

Like it's as though we are playing a game of monopoly when the players are 1000 moves in. This is true, people are born into certain situations and the market is a game of chance (the family you are born into) and merit.

The other idea, which is a point I love to bring up in Libertarian meetings is this idea that if you can make money by solving people's problems, then you can make even more money by creating problems that don't exist and solving those.

Making a skinny girl think she's too fat to sell a diet pill or something like that. There is tremendous value in contentment and you can make money by selling that to people, to make them realize there are problems they are paying money for that don't actually exist or matter all that much.

For food that is inked, you can make money by buying that good food for a little bit of money and selling it for much less money. Outlet stores already do this. The market rewards people for finding value in things people don't percieve to be valuable. Without the market that food wouldn't have even been there for you witness it being wasted. If you find a use for that food, why not buy it and help the homeless? The market does not dehumanize people, it is what seperates us. Without the market, metals wouldn't be mined, rockets wouldn't exist for us to use to explore space.

All the free market is is a system of voluntary action.

Seems based on the fallacy of the Zero-Sum Model.

Yes good point, I forgot to mention that. That is exactly right. For people who don't know, the Zero-Sum model forgets that when people transact they do so because both sides benefit from the transaction, there is no winner and loser like in a game. So value is created by market interactions there is no pie of limited resources, that pie grows with production.

It is also fair to point out that the Zero-Sum Model applies only to games like Monopoly (where money and property are fixed-amount commodities), but not to games like open-stakes poker (where each player brings as much as they want to the table).

It seems that most folks who favor any "Tax the Rich / Share the Wealth" programs think only in terms of the Zero-Sum Model, and completely disregard that fact that the Real World economy is more of an Open-Stakes system.

If civilization were a zero sum affair most of us would still be living in caves.

The actual amount of wealth in the world is forever increasing and at a greater rate because of technological advance.

ruveyn

Actually, we have more wealth in the world due to Fractional Reserve Banking and Compound Interest. Seriously. Read Modern Money Mechanics. Here's a link to it:

http://lisgi1.engr.ccny.cuny.edu/~makse ... hanics.pdf