Start Ups Will Not Save Us: Unflattening The World

This reminded me a lot of PG's "How To Make Wealth" ( http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html ) essay. Graham wrote: "Making wealth is not the only way to get rich. For most of human history it has not even been the most common. Until a few centuries ago, the main sources of wealth were mines, slaves and serfs, land, and cattle, and the only ways to acquire these rapidly were by inheritance, marriage, conquest, or confiscation. Naturally wealth had a bad reputation."

Friedman has something of a grasp of that part, but he's a tremendous cretin, and doesn't get the very important point that acquiring wealth fast by the deeply problematic routes above, is far easier than making wealth. The ability to make wealth is problematic to people who currently hold a tremendous amount of concentrated wealth, and they are trying to stamp it out. They're humans in the grip of a cognitive bias, unable (modulo a few folks like Warren Buffett and George Soros) to comprehend that more real wealth benefits everyone. They've also generally abandoned real wealth and gone into ephemeral financial instruments, with a retrograde result - we're on our way back to the disastrous situation where you can safely assume that anyone with wealth acquired it by immoral means.

Since I come from this point of view, I find that the critiques of Friedman also slightly miss the point - you're going to need to destroy a lot of what we currently think of as 'wealth' if you want anything remotely resembling social justice, and naturally the people who hold that false wealth will resist this. I am fine with that because I believe we're back to the point where there's a de facto inherited aristocracy and that the old problems of wealth and power have not at all gone away no matter how much we enjoy the symbols and pageant of representational democracy.

"If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars—fight to win"

trade wars end in real wars all too often.