…and it’s going to be awesome:
…government-dominated systems are inherently defective. Not because the people who run them aren’t smart and well-intentioned — though they are by no means universally smart and well-intentioned — but because it is the nature of political institutions to be insulated from the information-feedback that characterizes marketplace activity.
Simply put, when Coca-Cola introduces New Coke or McDonald’s introduces the McGratin Croquette (shrimp, mashed potatoes and deep-fried macaroni) and hordes of people don’t show up to buy them, those products go away, and if a company makes enough such unwanted products, it goes away, too. But if you live in The Bronx and your local elementary school is terrible, it does not go bankrupt, and you probably don’t have even 20 other options, though there are 900 kinds of shampoo on the shelves. There are many good ways to invest 12% of your income for retirement, but that’s harder to do when you first have to put 12% into a bad investment, Social Security.
The decline or dismantling of these programs will prevent us from pouring a great deal of good money into bad investments. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and related entitlements make up the largest part of federal spending; combine those with national defense and interest on the debt, and you are talking about nearly the entire federal budget — about 81%, with the rest of it comprising that piddling non-defense discretionary spending that President Obama goes on about.
But where we’re not going to be putting our money is not nearly as important as where we are going to be putting it: into productive enterprises, into the creation of actual goods and services in the real economy.
Here’s the new book
We can accelerate this process by using crypto technology such as Bitcoin and Ripple to weaken the power of governments to print their way out of trouble. The humble Bitcoin, worth only $120 today, may become a thousand times as valuable if it succeeds. An enormously powerful weapon in the hands of those who seek liberty, and there is very little if anything that governments can do about it.
The problem is for those older that have been forced into social security and will never get the value of all the money they put into it.
Social Security is such a bad deal that only a vanishingly small percentage ever got all their their money out. I did a short paper with numbers on how bad it really is for our local 912 project and really steamed a few people that should have figured it out decades ago.