Why is Good Bad?

(What do AI, information entropy, and fiat money have in common?)

When is good news bad news? Or more precisely, why do so many people prefer to believe that things are bad when they are really good?

We, Rightful Freedom, don't actually know why people want to believe things are bad when they're really good (although we have a couple of guesses), but we will say this much: As of this writing, from the perspective of our society as a whole, most things are actually pretty good. In spite of what many of us like to believe.

As we will see, a lot of important things are pretty good, and they have been getting better. But will they keep getting better? Probably not, if the government has its way. And it usually does.

What if back in, say, 1971,

• the US government had started cutting regulations instead of adding more

• the US government had started becoming smaller instead of bigger

• the US government had begun to be less powerful instead of more powerful

Then by now, almost all Americans would be better off in almost every way. (The only people who wouldn't be better off are those people who work for the US government.)

A related question:

What makes goods cost less? There are lots of causes of goods costing less, but the biggest one is government getting out of the way. If governments get out of the way, then goods will cost less.

“Mostly deregulated markets, where production is subject to competition and automatization, can result in substantial reduction in time price and consequent increase in abundance. Let us keep that in mind as the debate over the appropriate level of restrictions on the freedom of the market rages around the world…”

Who said that? We will provide the source in a second.

But as you know, that's not what happened in America. The Government did not get out of the way. Since 1971, the US government has gotten bigger, more expensive, more powerful, and more destructive. But why, you may ask, do we pick on the year 1971? Because this:

Note that while the real cost of consumer goods has fallen dramatically (even if we prefer not to believe that), the costs of the things that government is heavily involved in have increased dramatically, such as education, healthcare, and government itself. The cost of those things has skyrocketed, while the quality of those things has increased little, if at all. In fact, although the cost of consumer goods has fallen, much of that price is actually hidden taxes and the cost of government regulation of the producers of the goods. In other words, without all that unnecessary government intervention, the price of consumer goods would be much lower than it is.

“AI Will Take People’s Jobs!!!”

A lot of people hate AI and are afraid of it. It's a fact that AI will take some people's jobs. But let's put that another way: AI will do work for people that people used to do. All the people who used to have to do that work will be able to do something else instead. Or to do nothing at all. Just take it easy, or learn to play the banjo, or not. Think about it this way:

How many hours will you have to work next year to provide yourself with the same amount of goods that you have now? The answer that AI gives us is, “Less hours”. And it's true, because, for one thing, AI will be doing work, and we the people won’t have to do that work anymore. Is that really bad news?

Was cameras taking pictures for us bad news, because it unemployed some painters of landscapes and portraits? In your heart, you know the answer.

You may ask, “If progress is a good thing, then how does it happen?”

Good question. The short answer is: free enterprise and spontaneous order. For a more detailed answer, check out Michael Magoon’s Substack, “The Five Keys to Progress: An essential unifying concept for understanding human material progress.”

Another question.

Which is more likely? Good things turn out to be bad? Or bad things turn out to be good?

Again, we don't know the answer. Maybe you'd like to give us your opinion down in the comments. We'd be interested to hear what you think.

Who is the iconoclast?

Who breaks through the conventional wisdom? Who turns the false into the truth. Who brings the good news?

Doomslayer (humanprogress.org) for one. But there are others.

Iconoclasm now:

QUESTION EVERYTHING; THEN DESTROY THE LIES.

Enough Rightful Freedom for now? Or maybe you’d like to go on to the BONUS ROUND!

What else happened in 1971?

1971 was the year that Richard Nixon ‘closed the gold window’, and the US government finally completed taking control of the dollar system, as 100% fiat money.

1971 was the year that Edward McIrvine published “Energy and Information” in Scientific American (a publication that was, at that time, about science) reporting the conversation of two of the four greatest geniuses of the 20th century, John von Neumann and Claude Shannon, about what to call one of the most important concepts in science, communication, and mathematics: information entropy. McIrvine quoted Shannon:

My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'

Edward McIrvine “Energy and Information” Scientific American (1917) 225(3): 179-190.

Coincidence?