> - It's the economic system that forces them to view you as a monetization opportunity. And destroys the principled ones who refuse.
Trading with people makes you richer, not poorer. Not participating in the economy makes you poor because the natural state of animals is to be poor. Rent-seeking is bad, but a state where you have wealth without participating in the economy and without being exploited is extremely artificial and hard to maintain (even though it'd be cool if we got it.)
> a state where you have wealth without participating in the economy
I wouldn’t call that artificial nor hard to maintain: it’s axiomatically impossible. You’re participating in the economy whenever you create or receive anything of value.
Even in a hypothetical scenario where you’re making absolutely everything you consume yourself from your own materials and giving it out (the complexity of which makes it impossible), there is an economy of action and resource distribution needed to make that happen. Any kind of decision making about the distribution of resources are economic decisions.
This is semantics, most people here understand this, and I realize you’re making a similar point, but I’m hearing more and more casual dismissal of economic concerns as somehow separate from human concerns. The extent to which the economy does or does not effectively balance the human concerns of those participating in it is a measurement of the effectiveness of that economy.
Any kind of “new economy” needs to recognized the complexity of allocating resources effectively and the hugely disparate and varied range of desires, concerns, abilities, and resources between people. The realization that free trade generally leads to greater wealth was essentially an enlightenment era realization that decentralizing decisions about resource allocation is more efficient than trying to manage all of that complexity centrally. A lot of discussion about “democratizing the economy” seems to veer towards centralized redistribution and control rather than actual decentralization and democratization.
Yep, I agree of course. If you're not "participating in the economy" then you can't be rich, and hoarding wealth usually makes it worthless. That's why Atlas Shrugged was nonsense.
But you can sort of do it short term - retired people and the idle rich do exist - and a lot of people assume you can, like saying a billionaire actually has a billion USD they could give out, or thinking their employer's going to replace them with an AI.
Only if the deal is beneficial to you. If the parties are not interdependent, there is every incentive for one party to maximze their gain at the expense of the other.
There's plenty of examples to be found. Were the Native Americans richer after they traded their land to the colonists? Are African nations really richer after they traded their oil reserves to Western corporations?
Trading with people makes you richer, not poorer. Not participating in the economy makes you poor because the natural state of animals is to be poor. Rent-seeking is bad, but a state where you have wealth without participating in the economy and without being exploited is extremely artificial and hard to maintain (even though it'd be cool if we got it.)