Interesting discussion from Isaac Arthur. To his credit, he doesn’t totally mangle the issues he has only a bit of familiarity with, namely money and property rights.
Regarding money, he seems to realize it will always be needed, unlike the unrealistic fantasies of quasi-postscarcity utopias like the Star Trek universe. But he does not seem to quite understand that money is not necessary simply to make trade easier, but also to overcome the calculation problem that faces any barter (non-catallactic) society: you need common units to compare heterogeneous factors. This is one thing even many libertarians and Austrians seem to overlook; they often emphasize that money arose to overcome the double-coincidence of wants problem of a barter society, but neglect the other problem of barter: that without money prices compare heterogeneous factors for either cost-accounting or for forecasting projects in the future, economic calculation is not possible. In other words, the emergency of money solves two problems of barter: the double-coincidence of wants, and the inability to engage in comparison and calculation (for both accounting and forecasting).
See, on this particular issue:
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- KOL337 | Join the Wasabikas Ep. 15.0: You Don’t Own Bitcoin—Property Rights, Praxeology and the Foundations of Private Law, with Max Hillebrand
- KOL401 | Sazmining Twitter Space: Bitcoin & Property Rights
- LIBERTARIAN ANSWER MAN: Smart Contracts
- KOL430 | An Insider’s Introduction to Austrian Economics, Bastiat Society—Houston
For more on this topic generally, see:
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- Kinsella, The Great Mises-Hayek Dehomogenization/Economic Calculation Debate (Feb. 8, 2016)
- Jeffrey M. Herbener, Calculation and the Question of Arithmetic, RAE, Vol. 9, No. 1, (1996)
- Kinsella, Economic Calculation Under Socialism, Appendix I to Protecting Foreign Investment Under International Law: Legal Aspects of Political Risk (1997)
If Arthur grasped this he might be a bit more careful in his and scientists’ musings about money being represented by “energy” blah blah blah. (For another scientist who goes a bit too far with his scientistic metaphors about money and “energy” (as Michael Sayor does as well), see Astrophysicist: “Here’s The Math for Bitcoin To Hit $1M”.)
Second, he seems to recognize normal property concepts break down when it’s easy to reproduce exact copies of other objects. He is out of his depth here and does not seem to recognize that this implies IP law is illegitimate, but to his credit he drops the topic and leaves it alone and does not suggest he agrees with IP or arguments for it.
