You're a Slave to Money, Then You Die

"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."

If you have not read _The hard thing about hard things_, you should. One of my favorites is this exchange when the company hits hard times:<p>Bill Campbell: &quot;It&#x27;s not about the money.&quot;<p>Ben Horowitz: &quot;What&#x27;s it about, Bill?&quot;<p>Bill: &quot;It&#x27;s about the FUCKING money.

Past a certain baseline, you&#x27;re only a slave to money to the extent that you&#x27;re a slave to your desires.

If you want wealth, stop renting out your time. Lean towards equity. You need to be able to make money even while sleeping.

Government was always supposed to be influenced &#x27;by the people&#x27; those people are usually aristocrats. That is fine if there are enough of them with different ideas. What has happened is the consolidation of the artiscroacy and thus the means of influence of government. This is where we are getting our ugly problems from.<p>What is the first step to fixing this? Bring voting into the 21ST century AND NOT HAVE VOTING SOFTWARE BE CONSIDERED A TRADE SECRET[1].<p>Voting shouldn&#x27;t be as onerous today and things like the Sun Light foundation[2] should be a household name.<p>We have all met jerks in our lives. People who lie,deciet, and cheat to get ahead. How is having the government covered in obscurity good for anyone?<p>1 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20190706&#x2F;17082642527&#x2F;voting-machine-makers-claim-names-entities-that-own-them-are-trade-secrets.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20190706&#x2F;17082642527&#x2F;votin...</a><p>2- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sunlightfoundation.com&#x2F;web-integrity-project&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sunlightfoundation.com&#x2F;web-integrity-project&#x2F;</a>

The term Neoliberalism attributed to post 1980 political figures is appropriate in that they tout themselves as classical liberal(hayek,mises,etc.) ideals proponents, but in reality they do not apply or conform to classical liberal ideals. The author does not understand that classical liberal interpretations of economics is an explanation of markets underlying principles. Reading mises, hayek, etc. Is akin to reading the code rather than using the software. The religious references in classical liberal writing is a reflection of how awesome it is to understand how something so seemingly complex works under quite simple principles.<p>The author conflates modern pseudo classical liberal rhetoric and application with intellectually sincere thought. It is hard to read this article and take him serious. Boiled down, this is just a piece of rhetoric. There is very little intellectual value.

&quot;Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but our self can free our minds.&quot; Bob Marley - Redemption Song

Money, particularly fiat currency, is a useful fiction. You&#x27;re not a slave of money as such, it&#x27;s a tool of enslavement by those who control how much money is allowed to exist and how much is allowed to circulate. As Iain M. Banks put it, &quot;Money is a sign of poverty&quot;.

Other than the author having the ability to use large words I&#x27;m not sure what I was supposed to have come away with from this piece at all, it&#x27;s just word salad.

Here&#x27;s the paragraph that&#x27;s making everyone mad:<p>&gt;Like the student and other forms of personal debt that prepare undergraduates to say two words—“Yes, boss”—the ideal of the entrepreneurial self serves a fundamentally disciplinary function: reinforcing the precarious nature of work in today’s digitalized, low-wage, precariously employed, and increasingly automated capitalism, one in which you are casually expendable and which places a premium on everlasting metamorphosis: upgrade your skills, your profile, your resume. But don’t worry, complain, or God help you, call a union: losing your job or seeing your skill set rendered obsolescent is an opportunity for “growth,” creativity, empowerment. When your own exploitation can be recast as a project rather than a problem—a source of fulfillment rather than an instance of injustice—then solidarity with others can be vilified as conformism, the herd instinct of normies, the last refuge of losers and mediocrities.

I&#x27;m not a religious man, but one quote from a religious leader has always stuck out to me. &quot;Interest is a terrific servant and a terrible master.&quot;<p>The polis, bazaar, and pulpit have always been at odds as a triumvirate. My bet is on the bazaar. Even when people are put in jail economics is manifest, using cigarettes or other trinkets as currency for favors and meager supplies. The &quot;market&quot; the author rails against is a strawman.

Having learned for myself that life has a purpose and there is life after death, with a just judge (and merciful, for the merciful), and that all things will be put in good order (my wording, emphasis on good): that all changes everything, for me at least.<p>Today is Easter, when we commemorate the empty tomb....

Everybody wants to consume the goods and services that others work to produce, but doesn&#x27;t want to do any of the work themselves. The best part of this article was the authors statement of the argument against:<p>&gt; many intellectuals deny that “neoliberalism” is anything more than a cipher, an elastic anathema for whatever its users find objectionable in contemporary life

Here working with abstractions causes a loss of connection to the various factors that contributed to our path. The resurgence of liberal capitalism came after decades of elites dealing with a 90% income tax rate and unions so powerful that their ability to actually produce anything for a profit was beginning to slip away. But of course the author has little if any knowledge of or empathy for contemporary business people now let alone such folk from decades ago.<p>All this talk of isms is supposed to be enlightening guidance, but ultimately governments need to set rules and tax rates and respond to various challenges. The mapping from ism to action is hardly ever direct and often ends up lost in mystery and obscurity.

You are slave to hope. You are slave to fear

&gt;Those are the gravitational principles of Jensen’s corporate cosmology, but it is also an eschatological narrative in which the kingdom of God has been replaced by capitalism as the consummation of history.<p>To me corporatism is against the principle of capitalism and free market.<p>Anyway, this article could have been written by Marx himself.

HN, mirror.

You know the circle is complete when &quot;Hacker News&quot; upvotes a religious diatribe on the boundaries and merits of neoliberalism.

It’s ad reductio it’s like saying soccer is pushing a ball. You could also say life is waking up eating sleeping and then death. It’s true but it’s definitely an emotional argument. I preferred the lectures on free will by Conway, it does not answer anything but it allows for a nice réflexion

How is then of the possible recent and ongoing attempts to reform the capitalist system like the gig economy, use of automation to make manual labour obsolete, rise of a democratized social media, disruptive innovation etc seem to have more stronger opposition from the left rather than the right, esp in the USA.<p>Many on the left seem to deeply in favour of preserving the status quo, and seems to not have the means or methods or vision of changing the very broken systems into something better.

Take note of the source of this article. Religion always shows up during dark days and creeps its tentacles around the vulnerable.<p>For many, you&#x27;re a slave to religion and then you die. People have used religion to control society way before capitalism became popular. To this day, it continues to control thoughts and behaviors of billions of people. Those who have acquired power in religious institutions abuse their power to influence all sorts of antisocial behavior. Society hasn&#x27;t only an issue with capitalism but also religion. There&#x27;s a strong argument that religion remains the greater threat.

One of the outcomes of the present crisis is that capital has in a way lost much of its value. The stock market took a beating, people who bought apartments for renting on AirBNB now have dead weight properties with possibly a mortgage to pay.<p>Meanwhile lots of people with well-paying jobs, like airline pilots for instance, took a blow putting them on practically the same level as low-paid workers and gig workers.<p>If this crisis continues for a long-enough period of time, it might just bring about a substantial reorientation of the global economy, and perhaps a new balance between capital and labor.