The Finite Pie

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

One of you left a comment, which unfortunately ended up in moderation, so I didn’t even see it until I was rescuing something else. (For obvious reasons for me, less obvious things for her (because she doesn’t post her reasons/life here on the regular) neither my assistant nor I have been QUITE on top of pending and held comments these last few weeks.) Anyway, so I answered him late and it probably fell through the cracks.

His comment was that he often shares my posts, but in a group someone said I had quite the wrong idea about Marxism, because nowhere did Marx say that economics was a finite pie. So, he wanted me to tell him the passage in Marx’s writings that said this. No, he was not an hostile, he’s someone I’ve known forever online.

Did Marx ever say it explicitly? I don’t remember. I used to have eidetic memory, but two concussions did for that. And also I will confess to having studied Marx in three courses in high school, but having hated it so much I probably blotted out a bunch of it, even before the concussions.

I doubt he said it explicitly though, for the simple reason that Marx didn’t say the most outrageous parts of his philosophy outright and explicitly. It was just such a deep assumption of his psyche that it never was questioned by either him or those who follow him.

First of all let’s dispose of the idea that Marx was an economist. That’s a canard when the man understood about as much of economics as I do of advanced physics. (Maybe less.) What he was was a polemicist who leaned heavily on his natural resentment and envy.

And inherent in all his writing was the idea that not just economics, but life in general, was a finite pie, that value was inherent in objects and labor (meaning that each had a value that could be assigned by the person possessing/doing it), and that innovation and value creation was impossible.

How so?

Well, what would be the point of taking the means of production from the evil “capitalists” controlling them (and underpaying the workers) if you could in fact just create different means of production and out-earn the “evil capitalists”? Which is in fact what happened in history and is still happening to a great degree, where the government doesn’t make it impossible?

More importantly, why does he assume that having acquired the means of production, the workers will then continue producing and receiving the like profit only now without an evil capitalist twisting his mustache and stealing the value of their labor?

Yes, the man was an idiot who didn’t understand distribution or commerce. This all came from not understanding relative value as determined by those who buy. As in, if you don’t understand the proverbial transaction (not actually true and far more complex, but let’s imagine it was as reported) of buying the island of Manhattan for a bag of beads was fair on both sides, you don’t understand value or distribution.

To unpack that: Land was valuable for the colonists who came from a place with land rights and settled agriculture. Land meant nothing for roving bands of hunters. (Shush. I told you to go with the cartoon version. I know NE Amerindians were agriculturalists, and also the transaction probably never happened, and they didn’t own that particular island, and– Not the point.) So for them what they were selling was valueless. Meanwhile the colonists also came from an industrial society, where beads could be produced by the bucket load for very little. The natives OTOH came from a society where beads were only manufactured one by one, at great expense, were a symbol of wealth, and often were used as currency.

It would be like aliens who cr*p gold buying your weekly trash from you for a kilo in gold. You were throwing the stuff away, anyway, and for them gold is literally waste, while you can put it in a Swiss bank account and retire in style. Of course, over time, the aliens who cr*p gold will make it valueless, and once your descendants have the drive that makes trash into power to travel the stars, they’ll hate you for selling your potato peelings and used cat litter. But that’s because value is not static, and the economy is not a fixed, limited pie.

Marx failed to get that. He failed to get that value didn’t inhere in objects. He failed to understand that labor didn’t have a fixed value.

Yes, when you’re starting a business, and also in Adam Smith’s formulas, price is raw materials plus labor. BUT that all is subjugated to the reality that you can’t get any of that unless someone is willing to pay you. To which I’d add that the value of both the raw materials, the labor and the finished object very much depends on supply and demand, which depend on … location, location, location.

We’re kind of getting a course in this, since some things that were scarce and expensive in Colorado are cheap here, and vice versa. More obviously, as we’ll experience over the next few days, things that are expensive here are cheap in Europe, and vice versa. To wit, in Portugal anything that depends mostly on human labor — most services — is very cheap, while industrial products are more expensive than here and I can’t imagine how they can afford to live with that disparity, which is something I’ll touch on in a minute.

This is because some things — say labor — are more abundant some places than others. As explained above in the parabola of the Manhattan Island purchase.

But if you don’t understand positional value, nor that value is what someone is willing to pay for it, you fall into the error of current Marxists, so that even educated people have rocks in their heads about economics.

Now keep in mind most economics being taught in school are actually Marxism. I read my kids’ books. Under no circumstances should the lesson on hiring people direct you to take into account who “needs it more” unless humans are fungible and all labor is the same, for instance.

And their geography book talked about how Europe and America stole all the raw materials from indigenous people in colonized lands, which is a belly laugh. Look, dudes, dudettes and dudekins, even the potentially more valuable in the west raw materials are still plentiful in Africa and Asia and Latin America. For a stupid but real example: South Africa still — I’m sure — has diamonds rolling around on the ground in ridiculous abundance. It had them when it was first colonized. It had them when it was first-world-wealthy. And it has them now when it is impoverished via Marxian rage, Gramscian variant. All they need is to be picked up to be worthy trade goods…. Or let’s take Venezuela. I remember the relatives who immigrated there talking in awe about the fertility of the ground, where even a backyard garden could produce enough for a family, and did so year around. … it had that when it was the envy of Latin America. It has that now, when people are reduced to eating their zoo animals or starve. Obviously it isn’t the raw materials.

But the idea that once they take your “raw materials” you’re poor forever is pure Marxism. And pure finite pie. (You can’t find new utility in other raw materials. You can’t find/grow more raw materials. You can’t do anything, but starve, because someone bilked you of your all precious “raw materials.”)

Granted, it is the Marxism Gramscian variant, since Marx was more concerned with the early industrial state and its (within the country) inequities. And he was obsessed with the means of production.

If the workers could only control the existing machines, and be paid for their labor enough that no one was stealing for them — i.e. making a profit from investment — there would be pie in the sky by and by.

Note his followers, not as sophisticated, didn’t laser-focus on the “means of production” but on the end product. Communist revolutions often took both, and talked about taking the goods of the rich and “distributing” them.

But both are ULTIMATELY closed pie. If you can (or let’s face it, have to. Those seized means of production, weirdly didn’t last forever) build new machines, seizing the old ones is a bit silly. And if you steal the stuff from the rich and distribute it, yeah, sure, poor people will have more stuff, but there’s scale there and–

Look, people are rich and become rich by being able to save a bit off the extreme needful and accumulate capital to invest.

I know that Marx thought that this was impossible for the working class, and granted for some it was very very difficult, but there was mobility even in the Victorian working class, and it absolutely was possible to save, start your own business and slowly move up.

These things are possible because there is humanity innovation and cunning and wealth is not a finite pie.

And if you — like the guy who protested my reader sharing the post — think I’m making a straw man, and that no one really thinks the economy is a closed pie, and that the result of Marxism being taught everywhere hasn’t put big fat Marxian rats in people’s heads…

There was a tweet this week I won’t link, mostly because I can’t find it in my history (I answered it) meaning it’s buried, where some “artist” was saying that “art” was an essential good and “artists” should demand to be paid high amounts for their labor.

This is pure Marxism. Art is needed, therefore art is essential. Artists labor long and hard at their work. Therefore they “deserve” to be paid a high share of the value going around.

This only makes sense if there is a finite pie and some benevolent and all-knowing entity is assigning shares of it to occupations that are “high value” as determined by the value inhering to the goods, which is of course a fixed portion of that fixed pie.

In fact, that tweet was so wrong it wasn’t even wrong. To be merely wrong, it would need some contact with reality.

Art is more intangible even than normal “production” because what people are willing to pay for it varies so much depending on so many things.

Take my occupation. I’m told it is art. I wrote for free for over a decade. Not because I thought my stories weren’t worth anything, but because no one else thought they were worth anything. As judged by speedy rejection letters.

Did the stories have inherent value? I don’t know. Do you? Was the value the printing paper plus the electricity the computer used plus what I would like to be paid an hour? Wait a minute, I need to stop laughing. Okay, no. As judged by the fact that when I started selling my “value” was 1/10th of a cent a word. Later upgraded to 1/4 of a cent a word, until I was selling for 6c a word, and now when I can make thousands from a short story.

What changed?

Weirdly some of the stories I sold for 6c a word had been rejected by magazines that paid 1/10th of a cent a word. The fools! Not. You see the value had changed. Young Sarah Hoyt sending out 4 new stories a month, had no name or recognition, and no fan base who would buy a magazine or antho because her name is on the cover. She was, therefore, objectively worth less, regardless of the fact the material she produced was not only “As good” but objectively the precise same. (I have no trunk stories left, except three that I deemed too stupid to circulate. Oh, and two I’ve genuinely lost. I think they disappeared in one fo the computer crashes.)

If at the beginning of my career I had sent out a note saying “This is my short story, and you can buy it for the $3k I know it’s worth” (what I can get from a long short story indie. Keep in mind I still sell them for less to anthologies. It’s just I can reprint them later and average that over five or six years. I’ve also made more from a story first year out, but those are outliers.) I’d never have sold to trad pub. And it’s not because the publishers were “exploiting” my “labor.”

And then there is the tweet one of you (Thank you Ian!) called to my attention this morning. It is a thing of beauty and it perfectly exemplifies the “closed pie” mentality in people educated in Marxian pseudo economics which always transmit a heavy dose of his inherent envy and malice like a viral infection. The link to its being shared is here.

Again, it is so profoundly wrong, it’s not even wrong. To be wrong, it would need a much higher share of contact with reality.

The wrongness starts with his not appreciating that the “immense wealth” of America is not by and large at this moment in the hands of young working people. In fact, our working people are having problems finding A job, let alone one that keeps body and soul together. (This is largely due to too much socialism sewage in the wine barrel.) Then there is the fact that American wealth is not a thing lying on the ground, inhering to the soil, and just existing, waiting for envious Europeans to come steal it.

The idea of finite pie is baked in into his idea that if Europeans could somehow storm America and take our “immense wealth” they’d be equally wealthy, in “fairness” forever. And the brilliant idea that distribution should be “fair” by which I think we’re supposed to understand “equal.”

It makes no sense whatsoever, unless wealth is a) static. So if you steal your “fair share” it is forever fixed. b) finite. Because once you redistribute it, it stays the same forever.

Another “fixed pie” idea involved in that tweet and which is also pure Marxism is the idea that if one region is rich, it causes others to be poor. In this poor sob’s head, he’s being paid less and barely able to afford to live BECAUSE American “corporations” are so rich.

Of course, this also assumes corporations are sort of alien entities, roaming the world, vacuuming up “wealth” which they presumably store in money bins, into which they go for a swim on the regular.

No, think about it. It has to be, because he’s raging at the billions the corporations “have.” Seemingly without realizing corporations are by and large a way to organize to do business. (My corporation, for instance, is right now extending its little bowl and saying if all corporations have billions, it would like its share, please. Heck, it would be quite happy with millions. And considering how bad this year has been because the loooooong book ate my brain, thousands would be kind of nice. (And why have a corporation: If something happens to me it makes it trivially easy for my heirs to continue the business.))

He also doesn’t understand the notional “billions” these corporations have are often in property assets that are in use to produce whatever the profit is the corporation actually pays salaries (and taxes) from. Say a company owns a big Manhattan office. This might be headed to a worth of some beads in another 100 years, but for now at least it’s likely to have a notional (theoretical until they find someone to pay it) value of billions. Then there is the billions invested in research/paying scientists salaries/paying employee salaries/creating new product/marketing new product. etc. etc. ad nauseum. Point being that none of, or a very small portion of a corporations worth is in fixed wealth waiting to to be seized, be it by envious Europeans or our ludicrous governing Junta, which was indoctrinated the same way as the above twit.

Also not mentioned is that the money corporations have is often actually owned by small investors who own part shares of the company. Some young people who are making about as much as the creature above, and from their spare $600 manage to squeeze a couple hundred a month to invest, with the idea that when they’re older and unable to work, they will collect the increased amount of their investment. I know several young people squeezing just such investments by incredible amounts of self-discipline. If you seize the “billions” you are in fact taking their few thousands and rendering them paupers.

So, ultimately what does this person envision, if Europe took everything from America? That Europe would now be rich, and Americans would be poor scrabbling in the dirt?

All supposing we can prevent the Junta from stomping harder on our necks, I can tell you with absolute certainty what the result would be. Within 10 years, Europeans would be scrabbling to survive while America would have “immense wealth” they wished they could come over and steal.

The real difference is in America having a Constitution that — however barely respected now — prevents their ruling class from stomping around stealing everything from the productive people. And (again much curtailed by people who think that socialism is workable) leaving people able to invent, invest and create.

Meanwhile, if the “poors” (I can’t tell you how much I hate that term) of Europe want to make a difference in their livelihood and lifestyle, the easiest method with the biggest result would be to get rid of VAT.

And then, one by one, start cutting off their unproductive, redistributive departments and institutions. Hey, it seems to work for Argentina, despite its having “lost” all its all precious “raw materials.”

Perhaps giving up some of the inefficient and costly “services” like “national health” which are mostly the means of producing ineffective service while enriching bureaucrats might help?

Nah. Never mind. Of course, Marx was right, and if they just seize American wealth, they’ll now be much wealthier forever and ever.

In another world. In which humans aren’t humans, and nothing works as it does here.

Now, excuse me, I have a — metaphorical — pie to bake, so I can acquire the raw materials (in my case? mostly books. And piece of mind) to make many many more pies.

224 thoughts on “The Finite Pie”

  1. Imagine someone coming along in 1890 (a few years before radioactivity was discovered) and offering to exchange uranium (and other radioactive materials) for gold at a 1:1 ratio by weight.

    That would have seemed like swapping rocks (that looked like any other stone) for gold, a no-brainer

    But look at all the science that could not have happened without radioactives. It would not just be nuclear power that would not have happened, we would not have xray systems (and that would have a knock-on effect that a lot of seemingly purely mechanical things could not be reliably built because the quality of the welds could not be checked)

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Heck. I’m so old I remember when sand, AKA silicon wasn’t worth anything. You can’t grow crops in it. It doesn’t hold water. Completely worthless.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Honestly most sand is still worth bupkus. It is primarily silicon dixide (essentially quartz) it often has too much other stuff (usually Iron Oxides) wreck its value for glass or pother uses. Not sure what you start with for high purity silicon looking around low grade (99.999) stuff runs about $2200/KG. Gold for comparison at similar purity is ~$85,000/Kg. I think the stuff for modern chips has at least 5 9’s after the decimal.

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        1. Speaking of which….. I had never heard of this one, but….

          https://www.nysun.com/article/global-economy-depends-small-town-north-carolina-because-helene-no-one-reach-it-now

          The tiny town is the only place on the planet with the high-quality quartz essential to semiconductor production.

          The quartz found in this part of North Carolina is used in crucibles to melt down polysilicon to make the base of semiconductors. Spruce Pine quartz is key to the process because it can withstand the heat needed to melt the polysilicon and has a molecular structure that will not adversely react with it.

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    2. They would think it a good deal until they died, because the uranium grew fascinating, but not much more valuable, until much later.

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    3. If they weren’t aware of certain precautions around handling uranium, they’d be in for a nasty surprise when they stacked up more than a few pounds of the stuff. :-o

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      1. unenriched uranium is not going to do anything other than possibly be a few degrees warmer than expected if it’s piled up.

        It’s only after it’s extracted from the ore and then further enriched that it becomes significantly dangerous in the short and medium term.

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          1. If for no other reason than it’s a heavy metal and fairly toxic if ingested / inhaled. Plutonium is supposed to be about as deadly as fentanyl, for the same reason.

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  3. Pizza for supper tonight.
    cognitive dissonance is strong in the leftoids. “WE don’t think it’s a set pie …” “Fine go start your own better place and put me outa biz” . . . “We can’t start our own better place because you took EVERYTHING!!!1!111!!!”

    Liked by 2 people

    2. “Well, if you workers want to own the means of production, you can just build your own factory, buy your own machines, own it all in common, and go into business for yourselves. Nobody’s stopping you.”

      “Oh, you want to take over MY factory, that I built? GFY!”

      Liked by 2 people

  5. One author (nameless because I can’t remember the name) wanted to be paid by publishers for all the research they did to write the books.

    Of course, the publishers would have to be repaid by sales of the books but what would be sales-price of the books required to “pay the publishers back”?

    Of course, in the Real World there are limits on how much the average person is willing to pay for a book even one that the person knows that they’ll enjoy.

    And then there’s the problem of how much are we willing to pay for a book from an unknown author?

    Side note, when I see these Kindle eBooks priced at $50 or more, I wonder how many sales those authors get. [Twisted Grin]

    Liked by 1 person

    1. when I see these Kindle eBooks priced at $50 or more, I wonder how many sales those authors get.

      Also the price of some used books. I have a friend who published a shortish sci-fi book many years ago, it didn’t do particularly well, and she has many boxes of books that the publisher sent to her. But the used copies are selling for several hundred dollars each. (it’s not that great a book)

      How much of used book/kindle book/art sales are just money laundering?

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Word is, from people who know the business, that the world of high-dollar art is almost entirely money a money laundering operation. (In that context, Hunter Biden as an artist makes perfect sense.)

        Liked by 2 people

        2. Oxford University Press flat out told one author that they keep their prices high to preserve the cachet of being Oxford University Press. My thought was “They’ve been around Elsevier too long.” And Springer.

          One academic book I looked at was over $600 for the e-book. No. Inter-Library Loan here I come. Some ebooks are priced higher than the print. No.

          Liked by 2 people

          3. Um. They DO know that Bittorrent exists, right? Because at that price, lots of people who are mostly law-abiding would say “(Expletive) it, I’m hoisting the black flag.” And all it takes is one person figuring out how to defeat the DRM (not hard, even if you have to take screenshots and retype everything, at that price someone’s going to be motivated enough) and then the file’s out there and you’re not going to manage to get all the copies suppressed, and suddenly the people who are angry enough at you to hoist the black flag… can actually get the file.

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            1. Speaking of inflated prices for academic/professional works… Anyone else here old enough to remember VisiCalc? CP/M based, IIRC; about $400 back around 1980 or so. That one got pirated real quick, mostly be people just curious to see how it worked; they didn’t cost the company anything, since they wouldn’t have paid list and they didn’t “steal” sales fromanyone. The professionals who had an actual use for it (maybe 10% of the copies floating around) generally paid the going rate. Did I have a copy I played with on my Apple II+? Ain’t saying, but the first versions of d-Base II and later, Excel, were far better. And a helluva lot cheaper. And I did buy them, because I had a use for them.

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              1. Anyone in college at the time. There is a reason why there is a Microsoft Student version for Word/Excel, and packaged products.

                Apple stuff, there was always the lab version, that was “shared”. Microsoft DOS versions at worst, one copy was purchased with everyone who needed it sharing the cost.

                Did I participate? Not spilling.

                These days I use Open Source programs for most software. There are exceptions, Quicken for one. I would change, but then I’d have get hubby using it too, … um, nope. We also purchase TurboTax. We end up filing 3 of the 5 free federal tax returns on it. We file state via snail mail. Could use the free online version for mom’s stuff, but not ours or our son’s, so why?

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          4. $300-500 is not uncommon for engineering texts. Especially junior/senior level ones. Amazon (and many school bookstores) will rent you one for say 1/6th the price. Big scam is they roll the editions every 2-3 years so the problems change and the value of the used books drops effectively to 0. Even introductory science books (like Chem I, Intro Physics, basic calculus) can run $2-300 for standard publisher fare. OpenStax covers some of this, at least their introductory Chemistry is decent (although my wife the Chem Prof thinks their order and focus is a bit odd). Online its free. Printed runs $55 (new) with 4 color illustrations. Other texts are available for other subjects and for k-12 though I would look at them first I fear that anything subjective (like history or literature) using the open model will tend to the liberal side of things.

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            1. Ah book inflation. BSEE from ’70 to ’74, maybe $100 for a full load semester’s worth of books.
              MSEE ’87 – ’90. Maximum 2 classes per quarter. $150 or so. (Modulo the instructor who passed out his own notes and didn’t use an official book. Best instructor I had.)

              Liked by 1 person

              1. What I was quoting was current as of 2014-2018. The OpenStax chem book is as of right now, the one it replaced was ~$300 last year.

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                1. I wonder how well the textbook inflation compares to tuition. Trying to get comparable, in my case, book cost was 3-4X in 16 years. The good news for me was that after I passed the course, HP would reimburse me for tuition and books. (And the books were mine, not the company’s.)

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                  1. College inflation.

                    Comparison:

                    ’74 – ’75 was < $2000 for: Everything (dorm/food, books, tuition & fees).

                    ’86 – $800 Tuition and fees, do not remember what the math book cost, but it was only one class. Which until winter ’88 was paid by my employer (they moved the company).

                    ’88 – ’89 ~ $2000 / term full time (~$10k for 5 terms) Started full time Spring ’88. No housing costs because by then that was a sunk cost.

                    ’07 – ’12 (Kid is now in college) $18k – $22k / year everything, and that was just our costs, some of it was offset by scholarships and small onetime rewards. Books? Expensive. But not the same inflation as tuition and dorms or apartments (last of which has gotten even worse since then). From what I’ve read just here on this blog, we got off light.

                    These are full 4 year state universities. The community college, ’83 – 85 (hadn’t planned on going for the 2nd 4 year degree), in comparison, was not a sticker shock, even after 10 years. The later 4 year was a sticker shock. The last one was even more of a sticker shock. Even worse because the first, ’74, and the last, ’07, were the same state university.

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        3. In a sense. Many of them are books that the authors/professors require their students purchase for their college classes.

          Some of my textbooks were upwards of $200 (in the 90’s) and the publishers got away with it because the books were required reading for primary courses.

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          1. Back before, oh, 2010, I could see charging more for high-end art books and textbooks with lots of diagrams and different scripts, because the kinds of paper, ink, and the labor needed to get all the fonts and illustrations right.

            Now? Maybe for the true reproductions of rare books, the kind where the paper feels like vellum and the run is very limited. But that’s a niche market indeed. Textbooks? Different story. Ordinary academic monographs? Oh heck no.

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          2. “publishers got away with it because the books were required reading for primary courses.”

            Too often written by the instructor of the class. Chemistry and Biology lab books weren’t particularly inexpensive either, back in the day. Our forestry lab books were a lot less expensive. Printed by the university press on campus. Don’t know how the price changed for other universities that used the same texts, by the same authors. Yes, authors were our professors at (redacted) university. The one sticker shock we didn’t have when son went back to school, was the text book costs. Had not gone up as much. Although the ebook “rental” cost was a shock, plus the student did not then own the book at the end of the term.

            Liked by 1 person

      1. Finding the optimum money-making price for a book is a hard problem, and there is a human tendency to intuit a higher optimum price than the actual optimum price. It’s part of the natural human tendency to overestimate the total size or worth of “big” over the total size or worth of “many.”

        Baen has prospered by offering low prices for their ebooks (until Amazon told them to stop) and by being generous with free samples. Most people, including most publishers and authors, find this seriously counter-intuitive.

        Liked by 2 people

                1. Well, I couldn’t find a $50 SF Kindle eBook just now, but I found the following.

                  The Quest for Cloud Seeds Kindle Edition
                  by Tatiane Milkievicz (Author)
                  $40.00

                  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DJ3Q828Q/ref=sr_1_37?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.ejnm-ap6LzAKBR3FFKXvsCrfKytutpnc9ILbplEoWX8urZUSZpReL5gi983AxnpHkqIA4ZJa-rDsieAPGA2hzQ.fWkwPlxVlpbXcXQjp1eRoU6INnFDCv7wQtju7BLCyjs&dib_tag=se&fst=as%3Aoff&qid=1727483285&refinements=p_n_feature_nine_browse-bin%3A3291437011%2Cp_n_date%3A1249100011&rnid=1249099011&s=digital-text&sr=1-37

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                    1. From the blurb, it’s about “The Horrors of Climate Change Which Never Ever Happened Before” (TM), so I’m not surprised that the price is also delusional.

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      1. I seem to remember that the author I was thinking of was a female author.

        But there could be more than one author with that idiot mind-set.

        Liked by 2 people

  6. These are the same You’re-a-peons that scream when someone like Trump talks about NATO being obsolete and threatening to put an end to Uncle Sugar’s free gravy train.

    Liked by 2 people

    2. The Reader notes it isn’t just the gravy train. By expanding NATO, the Western European countries (which form the core of the EU and its bureaucracy) moved the trip wire for ‘the Americans are coming’ somewhere in Eastern Europe, ensuring that even if there was a conflict with Russia, it likely wouldn’t come spoil their party. While the Reader wouldn’t have disbanded it until January 1, 1992, he agrees it should have been disbanded. The Reader is pretty sure the ghost of George Marshall is looking at NATO still being around after 3 decades past its due date and going WTF.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. The original “stop Russia from being a d!ck” border for NATO was right up against the Russian invaded area.

        -Russia- moved that border -way- westward in 89-91 by losing control of the former Warsaw Pact area.

        We and our new associates thus merely restored the natural “stop Russia from being a d!ck” border back where it belongs. Right up against Russia.

        Russia wants us to revert NATO smaller, so they can revert to being a d!ck in previously prodded nations. None of whom want them prodding back in. None.

        If Russia wants to stop beign treated as an unwanted d!ck by other countries, all they have to do is stop being an unwanted d!ck in other folks countries. Its really simple. Their raging paranoia doesnt give them license to d!ck their neighbors repeatedly.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. The GDP of the EU is roughly 8x that of Russia. There is no need for the United States to provide for the common defense of the European Union. If they don’t want to defend themselves against Russia, that is not our problem.

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          1. ^THIS. While I’m all for helping my fellow man, that should be done at the individual/family/church level–not “sure, we’ll be the world’s bouncer!”

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            1. If we do not, then we lose. Freedom requires active measures to stomp various petty but expansionist tyrants before they can be existential threats to -us-, their natural enemy. Deter them now, or battle them later.

              Folks saying “but if we just leave them be, they will leave us be.” totally fail to understand the enemy. And enemy Russia is. They are the enemy of anything that doesn’t obey Russia. They will not leave us be. They never have, and never will, until we persuade them it’s not worth it.

              Russia just wants back all prior “Russian” places. We share a border with them, folks should realize. And they want their North American territories back, same as all the other “Russias”.

              Of course they do. What magic do you suppose makes us, and Alaska or the Pacific Northwest, and different than Ukraine and Poland, other than proximity and cost?

              Expansionist. Means expands as willing and able. Best fence in that weed when easy, yes?

              Spare me the “it’s America’s fault!” propaganda. It’s bullcrap.

              We are the exemplar Free Country. If we want to be that long term, we thus have to do ther hard work, even if some other lazy d!ckheads slack off.

              And note that Poland is well exceeding it’s treaty obligations. Because they -do- understand the existential threat. So we are not going it alone.

              Russia won’t stop until they have a major change of heart. Because they -like- being the world’s bully. They cannot yet, as a nation, see any other way.

              So we either deal with the problem now when small, and keepnit so, or when it has grown and metasticized.

              Because it isn’t going away, doesn’t want to coexist, and understands our very existence makes them look dumb and evil.

              So just stop folks, with the “Blame America” stuff. I aint buying it, because it ignores reality.

              It’s our job to keep as much of the world free as we can, because that is the only way to keep -us- free, long term.

              Bullies dont do win-win. That only works between Free countries. Thus someone wins, someone loses.

              Choose.

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              1. The folks in the Baltic that i spoke with were diplomatic but blunt, aside from the Finns. They were very carefully neutral, which fits. Note that this was before the Polish soldier got killed on the Belorussian border, and Finland closed their own Russian border completely.

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              2. The problem is, is that since the end of WW2 it has been ONLY America providing the money, the weapons, the manpower, etc, while the rest of the world sat back and more or less did nothing. They didn’t even contribute the previously-agreed upon fair share in terms of money. If we’re going to keep acting this role, then the rest of the countries who claim to be our allies need to damn well step up and pull their weight–because the US going into ever deeper debt to in part support them (not to mention prop up bad regimes) isn’t sustainable. Trump had a good start with wanting to do away with NATO and replace it with something less detrimental to the US, and with insisting that Europe cough up the money they’d agreed to decades ago.

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                1. To be fair, there are a few countries meeting their treaty obligations in terms of contributions, not many, but some.

                  David Lang

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                  1. The Reader notes that except for the US and UK, all of the NATO countries making their 2% of GNP commitment are east of Germany. And the Reader expects that the UK will lapse under the Labor government (if they don’t withdraw from NATO entirely).

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          2. …that is not our problem.

            Given trade patterns and world economics, I would say that is a difficult assertion to back up. The engaged U.S. is a world power economically as well as militarily, and I just don’t see how a withdrawn unengaged isolationist U.S. , back turned on Europe getting subdued by Russia and China in spite of what they “should” be able to do, with us playing at trading hats with ourselves on our desert island, would continue to exert economic power anymore. In fact it seems to me we’d shortly be in the boat we found ourselves in early in 1942, not at war but facing two expanding hostile hegemonic powers nearly alone.

            Better to not have to climb out of a hole before starting a job.

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            1. The Reader believes that, unlike 1945, we have our own hole to dig out of. And neither Russia or China poise a threat that cannot be addressed regionally if there is a desire. And the Reader is not calling for ‘isolationism’ but for rational engagement with the world as it is, not as it was in 1945 or 1991.

              Liked by 1 person

          3. We are not isolated from Russia. Worst case, they are 30 minutes away.

            We can deal with d!cs when they are fairly small, or watch them glom up an empire, -then- deal with them.

            We do not have the option to not deal with them.

            It is in our interest to encourage Freedom, and thwart Tyranny. Because Tyranny cannot leave us be. Our existence refutes theirs. Thus we can deal with them early or late.

            Folks ignore reality at their peril, because they cannot ignore the result of ignorance.

            We can oppose and defeat Iran now, or after they deploy 100 multi-megaton ICBMs. We are, after all, their main opponent, by their own statements.

            Are you under the impression that if we ignore them, they won’t bother us meaningfully? The evidence does not support that view.

            Not at all.

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            2. To frame it a bit more bloodily-

              we can shoot the terrorist who is really obvious about threatening us when he’s in our sights, or we can wait until he brings down two sky scrapers full of people and then start fighting.

              With fewer allies, because they already killed off the weaker folks who resisted them.

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                1. No. We’d really prefer you drop the Hitler crap. Both Steve and I have reason and plenty to object to that. Yes, personal reasons, but also being in human and in possession of a brain. Thanks.

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        2. It is funny how countries which have experience with Russia up close and personal like are gung ho about “PLEASE ANYBODY ELSE”. Versus western Europe who in recent decades have based their entire energy policy on “what does the Kremlin want us to do?”.

          Liked by 1 person

      2. This is a very good point: The REFORGER “Hello Ami’s Come Save Europe Again” tripwire used to be the East German-West German border. Now it’s 600 miles (a thousand kilometers in the obscure French system) east at the Polish border with Belarus, with zero German infrastructure being shelled if the formerly Red Army were to make a border crossing there, only Polish infrastructure, so from the German point of view it’s a win-win.

        When it was possible that Russia would join the civilized world NATO was an anachronism, but given how it’s turned out we’d have just had to reinvent it. There needs to be a counter-Russia military alliance given how Russia continues to behave.

        And there is little actual evidence that the continued existence of NATO has anything to do with The Shirtless Tsar’s cross-border adventures. He and apparently the rest of Russia want to Make Russia Imperial Again, and the existence or nonexistence of alliances opposing such seem to mean little.

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        1. The Europeans probably should have a military alliance to deter Russia. If they want one they should create it. An American diplomacy worth a crap would have done it’s best to facilitate it 30 years ago.

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          1. I don’t care if there is sneering (and note no Poles are sneering at all – I like the Poles), it is in our own best interests to make the thing work.

            Not charity, but self interest.

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          3. Bingo. If we had dissolved NATO thirty years ago and had to reform it in the last decade or so, I think Europe would take Uncle Sucker slightly less for granted.

            I think.

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    3. DJT is a great negotiator. His efforts there, shocking the NATO slackers by actually saying they should (quell horror) meet their treaty commitments, resulted in significant increases in military expenditures before Tsar Vlad did his latest in a string of nastiness. Success is a dish best served with hot sauce.

      Liked by 2 people

  8. Value is what a willing buyer and willing seller agree it is worth in that moment in time. As Sarah notes, things change.

    I am currently reading something which incorporates the Royal Navy’s travails building enough ships to sustain the blockades during the Napoleonic Wars, due to a shortage of trees at that point in Great Britain. They had a lot of trees in Canada and India, and they were trying to build up shipyard capacity there, but the shipyards and shipwrights were in GB and the wood was not, especially the long masts and spars a fighting ship needs. And part of the reason for that was a lot of trees went into charcoal production, because the existing tech could not drain deeper coal mines…until steam pumps started to be produced, which made deeper mines possible and flooded the market with coal, which made charcoal worth a lot less and the trees worth a lot more if left to grow full size…but that takes a long time, and Boney was rampaging around the Continent Right Now…

    Things change. The pie grows. The eeeevil mustache twirling American capitalists were penniless immigrants coming through New York Harbor a few years back, while the eeeevil capitalists in GB were not very well off second or third sons who went off to India and made their fortune in trade, then came back and funded a coal mine, or a weaving mill, or a steam powered cannon foundry, a New Thing on land previously running a few sheep.

    Such risk and bootstrapping and pie enlargement is nowhere in Marx.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. In 1806 a retired Admiral used to walk around his estate with a pocketful of acorns and plant them in likely spots so GB would have ample oak trees in a hundred years time. Of course, a hundred years later GB was building steel dreadnought battleships and oak trees were superfluous.

      Liked by 3 people

      2. Trees are nice.

        Though one Englishmen spoke contemptuously of American trees because they weren’t proof that a great lord held estates here. They just grew without anyone bothering to cut them down.

        Liked by 1 person

        2. Sounds like a Brit, obsessed with “birth status”…

          “I say, where is your master?”

          “That sumbitch ain’t been born.”

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    2. *Wags paw* It wasn’t the lack of trees per se, it was the lack of properly curved trees, especially live oaks. England had imported masts from the Baltic for quite a while, and knew that was a problem. North America had pines and firs for masts, and properly curved live oaks and other trees. (If they grew in that shape, there were far fewer stress points and places for failure than it wood was carved and spliced or bolted.) Charcoalers and smiths often owned their own wood supply, specifically so they wouldn’t be competing with the Crown, and so they would have the proper kind of wood. They could use coppiced or pollarded oaks, willows, and other “small woods.”

      Um, yeah, I spent waaaaayyyy too much time reading about medieval and early modern wood uses and law suits.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Sure, and they were still building commercial ships during the wars, and were never really in a wartime economy as we’d see such, and if they were truly desperate they would have cut trees in the royal forest lands, which as far as I know they never did because “it is just not done…”

        BUT, the hull shortage was bad enough they pulled the whole Copenhagen thing in 1807 pretty much just to abscond with the Danish fleet.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. One American grievance was the insistence that suitable mast trees had to be cut down for that, AND despite all the extra labor it took, they paid no more than for ordinary lumber.

        In the lead-up to the Revolution, sending masts over stopped before the firing began. It didn’t exactly harm our side that a lot more ships were unusable because they had to replace the masts. Especially since Scandinavian timber was inferior — smaller — and where American trees could just be used as masts, they had to go back to building them.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. Well, conditions at the point of transaction, in time and space, might change the value of that water, as might any risk the seller assumed getting it there, but the whole point is the value that is reasonable is what a willing buyer and a willing seller, both uncoerced, would agree to for a transaction. “The worth of a thing is what that thing will bring.”

        And to Kammy: If the seller manages to get it where or when it’s abundant and sell it to the buyer where or when it’s scarce, the seller is neither “gouging” nor “gauging”, it’s “business”.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. In the comments someone says that 20 hours is slander. They work way more.
      Guys, I used to go to work with my brother who worked a fairly normal office job. (Mostly because his office was quieter to study in than my mom’s house)
      Between coffee breaks (two morning, two afternoon) 2 hour lunch hour and just having friends drop by the office to shoot the breeze?
      20 hours a week is a gross exaggeration. I’d guess 15 for the average week. I once kept track and come up with between 2 and three hours a day of actual head down work.
      (And was appalled. I guess I was always a displaced American.)

      Liked by 2 people

        1. Remember that the primary American lesson-learned from WWII was that it was cheaper in the end to fund and if necessary man defenses over there beforehand than to have to install them by force across invasion beaches after yet another European Civilizational Oopsie occured.

          Liked by 2 people

      2. We briefly had a sort of “foreign exchange” intern at my old job, who was from the Netherlands. She said that it was totally okay for people to be stoned at work, back home, because nobody could tell the difference.

        I don’t know why she only worked with us briefly, but I have my suspicions.

        Liked by 2 people

      3. Similar, I’m sorry to say, with beauracracy. I wanted to work 8 hours a day, but many days I finished everything in sight early. Mind you, when the fecal matter did impact the rotating oscillator it could be overwhelming. (Say, six or seven 400-page-plus tech manuals to edit and correct in two weeks. Of course, I was OCD in my editing).

        But that didn’t happen often. Though I still salute the civilian Army engineers who put in eight-plus hour days at the work site, then worked over drawings at the hotel for a couple of hours every night, six days a week for somewhere over a month. I really have no idea how long they kept it up, as I was only there for about 10 days (and I wasn’t involved in the night sessions).

        Liked by 1 person

  10. what little good economics there is in Marx comes from Adam Smith. Read Smith on labor wages where he points out that wages will go to bare subsistence unless the economy is growing. Growth, an expanding pie, drives higher than subsistence wages. Now read Marx where he uses the first part of Smiths analysis and not the second. Marx is only intelligible given a fixed pie.

    Liked by 2 people

      1. more years ago than I’d like, I did an extract of parallel tracts from Smith and Marx where I showed just how badly Marx used Smith, wish I knew where it was. It’s probably in my box room but might as well be on the moon. I’m sure it’s been done by someone else, but I was happy with the work I did, I learned a lot. Marx is better on Ricardo and Malthus, but still misses most of their point. Malignant narcissism will do that.

        the cure for Marxism is reading Marx, unless you’re an academic your Marxism won’t survive the experience. Power hungry psychopaths use Marx as their means, they don’t actually believe such rubbish.

        Liked by 2 people

              2. The Reader believes Marx only reads better in the original Cardassian. Something was lost in the Cardassian to Klingon translation.

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  11. A fundamental misunderstanding of economics is thinking that transactions are win-lose in nature always. If the trade is uncoerced it’s always win-win. You buy the product because you value it more than the money you already have. They sell the product because they value your money more than the product they already have. You wish you could have praid less, they wish they could have sold it for more. You both walk away more satisfied than you were before, otherwise the transaction would never take place. This win-win microcosm is why freedom to engage in commerce works. It’s non-fixed pie by its very nature.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. That works as long as there’s no coercion from outside [cough…Obamacare…cough]. Of course, that’s the point; a free market simply works, until government takes a hand (or more likely, a foot). :-x

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  13. The Reader notes a couple of points (apologies in advance for the rant). First, the hominid firmware he alluded to on a previous post defaults to what we today call the Marxist theory of value. It takes intensive overwriting of that firmware in culture and education for Homo Sapiens to get beyond it. Second, the Reader has come to believe that what we call conventional economics is fundamentally flawed. Micro economics explains market equilibrium and the point in time allocation of scarce resources but little else. It appears to spend most of its energy today identifying ever smaller ‘market failures’ with ever louder voices to justify government meddling. Macro economics has about the same relation to reality as ‘climate science’ does and has about the same record of accurate prediction. Neither has a believable theory of ‘economic’ growth – put in quotation marks because growth appears to be a phenomenon independent of the current study of economics. The hominid firmware looks at current economics and goes ‘too complicated and not helpful’. The Reader believes that a study of growth starts with the axiom that there is only one resource on this planet (apologies to dolphins if I’m wrong here) and that is the human mind. He hasn’t found an economist who starts there although Thomas Sowell gets close at some points. The bottom line is that humanity has a predisposition to Marxism that needs major investment in culture and education to overcome and the failure of economics to support that investment with a sensible alternate explanation hasn’t helped.

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        1. And then some neanderthal entrepreneur relabeled it as “well-aged mammoth” and made a killing in the market. Unfortunately, he invested his wealth in Doggerland real estate, and lost it all in the post-glacial flooding.

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  14. My understanding is that Marx claimed or implied something more baroque than a fixed pie. His claims or implications or confused ramblings were that expanding the pie was Evil and could only happen through Evil means. And that the bigger the pie became, the less necessary and tolerable the Evil of expanding it further. And so he claimed that a point would soon be reached when the evilly exploited workers would spontaneously rise up to put an end to the evil of Big Expanding Pie.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. Ah, yes, the idea that wealth can only be created by crime and trickery, rather than by good ideas, good products, and honest dealing.

      Marx repeatedly said that trade was fraud and that private ownership of anything was theft, and that all economic activity was basically criminal.

      Of course, he thought it was a great idea to r*pe his maid, who just wanted a paycheck, so obviously the criminality was in himself.

      Liked by 1 person

        2. Nah, she continued to work for him. She even acknowledge that he was his son. Marx insisted that the boy only visit her coming through the back door.

          Liked by 1 person

              1. So, as 11b termed it for Vlad, Karl, founder of The Universal Church of Envy, was just totally and completely a d1ck.

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                  1. I don’t have it in the original Romanian, but I think this it Vlad Tepes: “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, and Bad Neighbors Make Good Fences.”

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  16. <blockquote>It would be like aliens who crp gold buying your weekly trash from you for a kilo in gold. You were throwing the stuff away, anyway, and for them gold is literally waste, while you can put it in a Swiss bank account and retire in style. Of course, over time, the aliens who crp gold will make it valueless, and once your descendants have the drive that makes trash into power to travel the stars, they’ll hate you for selling your potato peelings and used cat litter. But that’s because value is not static, and the economy is not a fixed, limited pie.</blockquote>

    Now why does that make me think of maple syrup, high tech, and hollow asteroids?

    Liked by 1 person

      1. Now that WordPress is using Markdown, the way to do a blockquote is email-style quoting: a single > character followed by a space at the start of the paragraph.

        This paragraph had a single > plus space combo at the front.

        Then to finish the blockquote, press Enter twice.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. Hollow asteroids might provide a good means of vacuum evaporation of excess water from maple sap, producing syrup with little expenditure of energy. The problem lies with expensive, high tech transportation out of the Earth’s gravity well to get it to the asteroid. The energy need to get it there far exceeds the energy needed to evaporate the water to make the syrup. I guess you could say that rockets have no value in maple syrup production, no matter how much they cost to make.

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      1. Like many others, you left an important factor out of your calculations:

        The folks buying the syrup provide what they consider junk tech for priceless maple syrup.

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        1. Great book, but John made two mistakes that REALLY bug me, a big one and a small one.

          The small one — Troy’s AI should have been named after Hector, not that useless fop Paris.

          THE BIG ONE — the internal levers, or ‘horns’, for rotating the battle station. NO. NO. NO. They move the spaceship drive units closer to the station’s center of gravity, making them less effective at turning it. The temporary levers extruded from the outside, those were fine. They allowed the Paws to apply force farther out from the station’s center of gravity. The internal ones are the opposite of effective.

          The best place for them is buried a couple hundred meters into the inner wall.

          I can’t believe nobody caught that before it went to the printers.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. In my defense, I was concentrating on getting stocked up on maple syrup at the time… and Mr. Ringo did neglect to look me up and ask me…

            I don’t blame him. We’ve never been introduced and I know nothing about asteroid propulsion.

            😁

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        2. Ah, but the Tyler Vernon trades for the junk molycirc, priceless on Earth but worthless to the aliens, with a relatively worthless commodity, Maple Syrup, for which the aliens go nuts, in exchange. See, an uncoerced willing buyer and willing seller come to a reasonable valuation of an exchange, even in the absence of a common currency.

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  18. Quick off-topic. If you are the praying type, please do so for the folks that were in the path of ex-Hurricane Helene. Florida is bad enough, but the mountains of both Carolinas and Tennessee are absolutely devastated right now. Boone, Asheville, Hendersonville, Elizabethton, Newport, you name a town along the I-40 or I-26 corridors and they are flooded. One entire carriageway of I-40 collapsed near the TN/NC state line. As in completely washed out, undermined, and gone, and the other one is closed. This is the worst flooding in those mountains in living memory.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. We’re trying to get there for a volunteer project. Have no idea whether we will get through, or even if the project will go off, as the camp is outside Hendersonville.

      We’re safe where we are. It’s a bit windy, but only light rain. Now.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I keep hearing persistent statements that Asheville is cut off and that Hendersonville is flooded. I-40 and I-26 are both closed both sides of Asheville so you’d have to take back roads to get into the city itself and I’m not sure if they’re open. I’m also not sure if you can get to Hendersonville from the south on 26 either. I-40 will probably take months to get open between NC and TN (the eastbound lanes are literally GONE). Not sure what the damage is on 26 but it’s shut down northward between the TN state line and Erwin. I’ve never seen road closures like this in the mountains before. US 441 over Newfound Gap, US 321, US 74A are all also closed.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Thanks. My beloved thought he had a route planned, but it won’t work, either.

          For irony, when I looked at the radar map this morning I thought the worst was over. Silly me.

          Liked by 2 people

          1. Yeah, if the Googles can be trusted, I-26 around Hendersonville is closed, and US 64/NC 9 between Hendersonville and Chimney Rock is closed. Also US 176 and NC 225 in/south of Hendersonville look closed.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Update…it’s gloomy and soggy, but we are holding in place until we get word from the team leader, who is waiting for word from the camp manager. I figure no better than a 50-50 chance the project will go off.

              Now I’m worried about my favorite yarn shop in the area, which is down in a hollow in the country. Also the camp we worked in eastern Kentucky earlier, which is also down in a hollow and has been rained on for days.

              Liked by 1 person

    2. Grim of Grim’s Hall send an update from the NC/TN border area. Things are very bad and all roads are cut.

      “This is the first time I have been able to communicate since the hurricane hit Thursday night. The situation here is catastrophic. The hurricane dropped its load of water here in the mountains of North Carolina. All cellular towers are down. All power lines are down. I-40 is closed and so is I-26, eliminating the major ground lines of communication with eastern N, SC, and TN. Locally our county seat has no power or phones, although I have heard that 911 is back online for anyone who has a phone that can call them. No cellphones work, but some landlines do.”

      Source: https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2024/09/hurricane-update.html

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    3. I’m on the Florida gulf coast and just got my power back yesterday evening. The folks in the mountains north of us need lots of prayer.

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  19. Marx wanted to find a system and an easy way to do things. So then he tortured the data and redefined lots of terms. Then declared that he’d found a pattern in history and everything had to fit that pattern, including the future.

    And anyone who assumes fixed pie needs to explain how the smart phone and apps fit into it. I’ve got lots of prime fish and mineral water, I can wait. *Evil kitty smirk*

    Liked by 2 people

  21. I’ve seen the meme floating around to the effect that if the US government stole every cent from every billionaire in the country they’d have enough money to . . . run the government for a couple of months.

    Liked by 2 people

  22. Ah…well now I don’t know whether or not to be embarrassed that I made you write an entire blog post or be ‘fanboy’ proud that my comment spawned an entire post. In either case, thank you for taking the time to answer my question. I shall pass this on to my friend group. Oh, I also received your original answer fairly promptly, in my opinion.

    Liked by 2 people

      1. It ran afoul of my being on the phone with my mom. So I typed the Portuguese word….
        It’s okay because today I answered the phone to Morrigan in Portuguese…. Because I was editing the wedding guiding booklet.

        Liked by 1 person

              1. So many vengeance-and-death deities and demideities, from the Furies to Morrigu and Scáthach (and all female; hmmm…😉); so many targets. And so little time.

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  24. “We’re building a whole new world, and we’re not taking anything from anybody. We don’t owe you lot diddly. We don’t have to worry about illegal immigrants either, because we’ve got the only ship in the system that can make the trip in less than ten years.”

    “Oh yeah? Where did you get that space ship?”

    “We built it ourselves. We used junk for raw materials, that people paid us to get rid of. We gave them a good deal, too; they only paid us half what the dump would have charged. Our new world has just one rule: you work for what you get. You keep what you earn, too, because we don’t tax productive people to death supporting hordes of useless idlers. Anybody that believes the world owes them a living gets the one thing we do give away for free — a trip back to Earth.”

    Liked by 1 person

          1. I’ll be right behind you. I’ll even come out of retirement to do something productive, which doesn’t seem to be possible here these days, at least not for the 70+ crowd.

            Like

      2. Perhaps the first city on Mars should be named Galts Gulch? Certainly first Lunar colony ought to be Luna City, Presuming it is NOT New Beijing :-( .

        Liked by 1 person

          1. From your lips to the Authors ears.

            Given the PLA Navy had it’s latest high end SSN sink at dockside you are probably right. Either that or they’ll send 10,000 to get a city population of 100. They shan’t be able to play those kinds of games for much longer.

            Liked by 1 person

      1. I’m writing it. Haven’t got that far yet, but the first 19 chapters are on my FanFiction page. Just click on my screen name, then read ‘Lost Soul’. You can check out my other stories while you’re at it.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. I’m pretty sure it’s too closely tied to the Date A Live anime series (now owned by Sony the Evil) to go commercial. Indeed, later in the story the main characters are going to get a nasty-gram from Sony’s lawyers about how much she resembles one of their copyrighted characters. Never mind that she’s the original the character was modeled after…

            So it’s just going to remain as Fan Fiction. There’s a lot more story I want to tell.

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            1. Yeah, getting in Sony’s sights, whether justified or not, is a Bad Thing (TM). I remember a small restaurant in Annapolis owned by a woman named Sony F[xxxx]. It was called Sony’s, and one fine day she got a visit from a team of lawyers from Sony, who threatened her with a lawsuit unless she changed the name, even though it was her name. I haven’t bought anything from Sony since.

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              1. Yeah, I seem to recall McDonald’s trying that one in England on a Scottish lady named McDonald….. Only to receive a personal visit from a henchman of the McDonald of Clan McDonald in full regalia, explaining in pointed language just who owned that name first….. 😇😇😇

                Liked by 1 person

    3. sounds like ripe picking for a strongman. There will be opposition, but not that organized, and ‘you keep what you make’ will let him grow quite a bit before others gather together to oppose him

      and after that incident, with the organizations formed to fight him really disband and settle back to the ‘ideal’?

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      1. Oh, no, he’s talking to the Important People back on Earth, that believe they’re owed a piece of the action. Because Galt’s World is becoming successful and prosperous, and their strangled economies aren’t, so they must have ‘stolen’ that prosperity from Earth. A ‘fixed pie’ mentality, applied to the entire universe.

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  25. Haven’t read the comments yet, so may have already been discussed.

    1. Changing value of something is easily envisioned by the petroleum industry. That sticky, ugly, stinky black stuff seeping out of the ground was considered something that de-valued property for centuries. Then, some enterprising souls figured out a use for it and it added-value to property.
    2. Places that at one time were considered nearly worthless have become extremely wealthy over the last century because of the massive amounts of petroleum that were able to be (fairly) easily extracted and sold for profit. Quite a few of these places are owned by “people of color.”

    Sports cards would also make a good example of the changing value of a product over time. I have thousands of baseball cards that I paid approximately $0.02-$0.05 per card for back in the day. Some of these are still roughly still at the value, but others are worth hundreds of dollars. Others <b>were</b> worth hundreds of dollars, but have since slipped back down into the tens or even single dollar amounts as demand has dropped.

    Liked by 1 person

  26. Oh, and Wolt*Johnson4, you’re just jealous. I make about the same amount as you do, as does my wife so our household income is about double yours. And we also only end up with about $500-$700 per month after expenses to spend on retirement investments and entertainment. Actually, due to the crappy economy and rising inflation, we have less than that at the end of the month right now. Times are tough everywhere. Suck it up, buttercup.

    Liked by 1 person

  27. Just FYI but the Marxists have been good enough to put all of their writings for free online so what you don’t remember, you can search.
    https://www.marxists.org/

    It was there I found the letters Karl exchanged with his father and discovered one of the wisest things I’ve read:
    “will you ever be capable of imparting happiness to those immediately around you?”
    Written by the Father to Karl. A fair measure of a good life in my opinion. Did you impart happiness to those around you?

    (In Karl’s case he was quite wretched indeed.)

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I recommend that site if you want free documents and decent sources on Marxism. Their translations are decent to very good. I use it when I need references for class or to check certain quotations (and misquotes).

      Liked by 1 person

  28. First of all let’s dispose of the idea that Marx was an economist. 

    Sarah, anyone can claim to be an economist; witness AOC and Paul Krugman…. 🤢

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