Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

Trade is built into our human nature. We all want stuff we can’t have, and no one can produce everything. Even if all the raw materials and all the skills and all the knowledge was possessed, there isn’t enough time for a single (person, city, country) to produce enough to fill all desires.

So we trade to get what we want. This has been the case for all of human civilization and I am confident if you could peer into the earliest time periods the rocks sharpened during the Stone Age traveled far and wide as well. Trying to ban or artificially limit trade is like trying to limit the tides - you are battling against a decentralized force of human desire.

This is the same reason you can’t ban drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling - and on the positive side love, children, religion - both categories of which have been attempted by various governments in recent and distant times.

I like history because it shows us how stable we are as humans. The context changes but our desires and motivations do not.

> Trade is built into our human nature.

I'd go deeper than that, I'd say trade is built into nature.

Forests have economies, sharing resources. Deciduous trees over-produce "food" in the summer, when their big leaves pay off, which they share with the conifers. In return, the conifers (which have food year-round because they don't drop their needles) give food to the deciduous trees in early spring, before the new leaves form.

Yet, no H. neanderthal. site has yielded any scrap of unambiguous evidence of long-distance trade. It might be their defining quality, vs H. sap. But they were undeniably human, otherwise.

I don't know if Denisovans traded, but they seem to have had a rotary drill tens of millennia ahead of us. Apparently there was at least one other human species in southern Asia, not resolved yet, who left a genetic trace.

You skirt dangerously close to "markets are a law of nature". Make no mistake, every last detail of our markets had to be invented. Millions of variations were tried, and are still being tried. It has not converged yet.

I disagree - to trade is to be human, and markets are emergent phenomena rather than designed ones. Otherwise North Korea wouldn’t have black markets.

So, Neanderthal do not qualify, then? Your view of humanity is artificially narrow.

North Korea is as much a product of shared history as anyplace else.

Not sure I follow. My point is North Korea is a communist dictatorship that bans markets yet they exist anyway

North Korea wishes they could keep their population in a vacuum divorced from history, but wishing has been ineffective. Of course their upper echelon is passionately involved in international commerce.

Modern markets have rules. Such as property rights. Those are invented. There's nothing fundamentally natural about them.

Humans engage in every kind of relationship imaginable. No surprise that trade is one of them.

Markets and trading predate any formal type of rules. We have rules in certain markets now but this was not the case for most of history

Literally no markets anywhere, ever, operate without invented rules.

> Trade is built into our human nature.

Even some animals do understand some kind of trading. Monkeys will steal your cap and give it back to you in exchange for food.

This is a tangent, but about your last point, I wonder how humans will handle this once we’ve had many decamillennia of extremely well documented history, so that the human patterns have repeated over and over and over so much that there’s no illusion of progress in human nature anymore.

(Of course, it’s possible that we’ll end up modifying ourselves by e.g. genetic means so that this won’t really be happening.)

Strange comment - nobody was suggesting banning trade (even weirder about banning sex).

The recent rise in mercantilism / trade wars / tariffs / America (or insert country) First / China one child policies / China and Soviet state official atheism / Russia and China banning gays

Ok, points taken, except with 'China and Soviet state official atheism'. I don't see the relevance to either trade or sex.

I see it as a restriction on an innate desire of humanity which is therefore impossible to constrain or stop, merely drive it underground.

It is questionable if it's universally innate, there being many atheists, but now you've explained it I can see your point.

Have to say you used some ill-focussed or ill-expressed arguments which is why I have been repeatedly chasing you for an explanation. Take that as you will. But thanks for clarifying.

We want to ban sex? Interesting-- explains the falling birthrates. :)

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/05/asia/indonesia-new-code-p...

This certainly seems to be a ban on sex outside of marriage.

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