you’re a farmer. you’re the only farmer in a country with 100 citizens, including yourself. you are extremely efficient. you are 100% efficient. you make a lot of money as a farmer because the demand is exactly equal to supply. you can charge absolutely whatever you want. and you do.
the countryfolk try everything to steal your secrets, but you all live in a nation with dead soil. you have the secret knowledge that it takes to farm in this dead soil. you have no competition. until some innovation or thievery happens, this monopoly will continue.
one day, ten children are born. their mothers and fathers provide food for them out of their own allotment until the children are 10 years old. but suddenly efficiency is down by about 10% and you have 30 hungry people in your country (the mother of each child, the father of each child and each child itself).
you are a moral farmer. you are an ethical farmer. you are a good farmer. you are a smart farmer. you offer to increase productivity by teaching one extra child to grow food.
the child studies for 10 years. at the end of those 10 years, that child is 100% efficient at growing crops. the population is now 110, and overall food production is now 82% higher.
the child goes out on his own and becomes a farmer. there are now two farmers in the nation.
suddenly, your income as a farmer drops by nearly 50%. you do some quick analysis and realize that the child is not only selling all of his food, but the market value has dropped by nearly half and he has undercut you by a small percentage.
you cannot change past events, but you can influence future events. you are now in a moral quandary, so you weigh all your options, ethical or not.
what are your options?
- murder the child and allow hunger to resume
- murder the child and 9 other people in the nation
- exile the child and 9 other people
- kill yourself and 9 other people
- take the hit to your income, make a back door financial deal with the child and live a more modest life
- teach another child to farm at 100% efficiency to disrupt the system
- optimize efficiency, drive the child out of business and corner the market
- enslave the child and stop working 90% of the time
- become an theocratic/autocratic/idealist leader, enslave the population and make them all collective farmers
- encourage people to breed like rats so that the population increases to 200 and demand catches up with supply
- kill the child, teach 9 new people to farm, enforce a way to limit their farming ability to 1% efficiency
- develop a technocracy, imprison the physical population in virtual version of plato’s cave, provide them subsistence and allow only those who can solve intellectual puzzles to earn better subsistence and reproduce
well? which of these economic systems suits you best? which economic system are we in now? which of these systems hasn’t been implemented in the last 10K years?
all trick questions, dummy!
this is the one we live (aka, simplified, present-day capitalism): corner and dominate the market through a rigged educational system. teach 6 stupid children to farm badly for free, teach 2 middling children to farm decently well for tuition, teach 1 gifted child to farm well for free as a student on scholarship, stop teaching, invest in all of their farms, watch most of them fail as farmers and some of them retrain in new industries, collect rents & interest such that you get large sums of passive income for the rest of your life, all the while slowly passing your arcane knowledge of finance on to the only gifted student (who should also be your son), hiring 6 of the failed farmers to build your secluded mansion on the beach, hiring one of the failed farmers to be your butler, another your cook, another your maid (“side pussy”), one to be your sex slave (“wife”) and finally retire in comfort and decadence.
it pays to construct an educational system that encourages failure. economic ruin comes to nations whose educational system is overly functional. did you think this country would get away with it forever? no, my friend! we are quickly running out of women, chinese, indians (dot and feather!), blacks, mexicans, developing nations and third world countries to exploit!