Has anyone seen or heard anything related to the following argument? I would like to find related resources or hear your thoughts on this. Also, I would like to develop the arguments so they can be used to promote liberty, Ron Paul’s campaign, etc.
A basic of human nature is that we learn to act from our experiences. As we act, we experience pain or pleasure. Based on the pain and pleasure feelings, we learn to do more of actions that provide more pleasure (or provide less pain) and to do less of the actions that give more pain (or less pleasure).
An example of this is touching a burning hot stove with your hand and getting burned, which causes severe pain. We quickly learn to stop touching the hot stove, and we yank our hand back. Both our conscious and unconscious remembers this, which will likely prevent us from repeating the act of touching a hot stove. If we did not have the feeling of pain associated with touching the hot stove, we would leave our hand on it or touch it again and severely injure the hand or worse. Basically, the pain protects us from disabling or killing oneself.
I am thinking that when governments interfere with this natural and fundamental process of learning, the result is that more damage is done than if the interference was not there, usually much more damage.
With this in mind, looking at the Wall Street bailouts you can see that the pain that should have been experienced by Wall Street was interfered with by shifting the pain to the US taxpayers, US dollar earners, and US dollar savers. Now, instead of learning from the mistake, these same people are more likely to repeat the mistakes. Ultimately, this results in further damage that disables society much more so than if there was no bailout.
Back to the stove example, the government bailout equates to taking the pain felt from touching the burning stove from the person touching the stove, and giving it to society. This seems like a noble and good-hearted cause, but actually would just end up doing more damage.
I am thinking that this would also apply to many of the government programs such as Social Security, Welfare, FMEA, government provided health care, and I am sure there are many more. I haven’t quite put the thought into all these programs yet. I also think that someone else has done heavy lifting in this area and that I am not fully aware of it yet.
A basic of human nature is that we learn to act from our experiences. As we act, we experience pain or pleasure. Based on the pain and pleasure feelings, we learn to do more of actions that provide more pleasure (or provide less pain) and to do less of the actions that give more pain (or less pleasure).
An example of this is touching a burning hot stove with your hand and getting burned, which causes severe pain. We quickly learn to stop touching the hot stove, and we yank our hand back. Both our conscious and unconscious remembers this, which will likely prevent us from repeating the act of touching a hot stove. If we did not have the feeling of pain associated with touching the hot stove, we would leave our hand on it or touch it again and severely injure the hand or worse. Basically, the pain protects us from disabling or killing oneself.
I am thinking that when governments interfere with this natural and fundamental process of learning, the result is that more damage is done than if the interference was not there, usually much more damage.
With this in mind, looking at the Wall Street bailouts you can see that the pain that should have been experienced by Wall Street was interfered with by shifting the pain to the US taxpayers, US dollar earners, and US dollar savers. Now, instead of learning from the mistake, these same people are more likely to repeat the mistakes. Ultimately, this results in further damage that disables society much more so than if there was no bailout.
Back to the stove example, the government bailout equates to taking the pain felt from touching the burning stove from the person touching the stove, and giving it to society. This seems like a noble and good-hearted cause, but actually would just end up doing more damage.
I am thinking that this would also apply to many of the government programs such as Social Security, Welfare, FMEA, government provided health care, and I am sure there are many more. I haven’t quite put the thought into all these programs yet. I also think that someone else has done heavy lifting in this area and that I am not fully aware of it yet.
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