On today's curation y focus on economics. I know I haven't been posing these curation posts daily. I like to maintain a good quality when it comes to what I share. I also don't know how much you guys enjoy these posts. So let me know if you want these curation posts more frequently.

Terminal Democracy, by Majority Vote

It's an interview of Nick Giambruno who is a very intelligent and educated person when it comes to the business world. I don'mean that he is some idiot with a college degree. I don't know even if he has any. What I know is that he has learned things the hard and hands on way with years of experience.

He is also no fan of Democracy which is always a plus (as long as you are not an idiot who consider more authoritarianism is the better way)

I grew up in the U.S., and admittedly still have this blue passport which means I’m still stuck on the American tax farm. So I pay attention to the political and social trends there very closely. And it’s truly alarming. Doug Casey, who has been observing the political and economic trends in the US carefully for decades— and is a lot wiser than I am—says this is as divided as he has seen the country during his lifetime. I absolutely agree with him on that.

Yet, I think this is quite a logical and predictable outcome. This is the natural endgame of democracy—which is really just mob rule—and a fiat currency system. It’s like a toxic cocktail. Ask yourself, what happens in a fiat currency system? Obviously, over time, the currency loses value. Consequently, people feel pinched as their expenses go up in real terms. They might not be aware of what’s going on behind the scenes, but they sure as hell know it’s getting harder and harder to make ends meet. Then, along come these Santa Clause politicians who promise everyone freebies. It’s a very easy to understand relationship.

It should include government employees, as well as companies like Lockheed Martin and Goldman Sachs, which exist largely on political dollars as opposed to free market dollars. These aren’t entities of the free-market. These are every bit the welfare recipients too, only corporation-sized.

Doug Casey on Social Media

Many younger readers may not remember this, but there actually existed a time before everybody knew everything, when people had to read books and discuss them, engage in healthy debate and rigorous dialectic in order to learn and develop intellectually. Now that everyone apparently has plenty of time to Instagram their kale salads and “like” one and other’s cat pictures, are we to assume mankind has finally reached the End of Learning…some new Age of Enlightenment?

I'm a millennial myself. But I happened to be one of the smarter ones and honestly, I can relate to the above statement. Even during the time I was actually using Fakebook because "kids at school" I still barely put 2 hour into it for a whole week and even that was mostly because of using FB as an alternative to SMS.

I still have a special place in me for paperback books. Hardcover books are cool and they are a great way to collect masterpieces. But being someone reading on the go and with a limited budget to buy books and due to ease of use and lack of weight, I just greatly enjoy paperback. Here is a cool video to go with the mood:

I think a good lesson to remember is to ask yourself "How does this help anybody?" before engaging in something. Can you learn something? Can you teach someone? Does it add value to your life? Even if it doesn't help you, does it help someone else or does it help the community? Do things wheh the answer for these questions happen to a a "Yes".

The Most Important Message In The Entire Interview

I know there’s a lot of talk about regulating FB, or breaking it up. That’s a bad idea; the government should have zero to do with business in general—and areas related to free speech in particular. I’m disgusted by the fact FB has kicked Alex Jones and others off their platform. But they have a right to do so, as a private company. Although, on the other hand, they’re almost a creature of the State. But that’s not an excuse for the government to “step in”. What will happen is that a newer, better Facebook lookalike—or a dozen of them—will replace them. FB will self-destruct. It’s a non-problem.

To be frank, you and I don’t really have that much in common with most of the 7.3 billion people on this planet. In fact, while I like many individual humans, I despise humanity in general. The more people you put together in a group, the more they act like chimpanzees. Big groups force down the lowest common denominator.

I've made the same point at different occasions on the comment sections. Now you are seeing i on a post and even though they are not my own words, I stand by those words

What If Governemtns Were Funded on Voluntary Taxation

Over time, people would learn to provide a “reasonable” tip, because, without any tip at all, Government would shut down. (And we still want those nice roads to be maintained.) But there’s another facet to this and it’s an important one. If Government operated on the basis of voluntary taxation, as do coffee shop servers, they’d quickly learn to make sure that, on a daily basis, their most important task would be to assure that their constituents were receiving good service. They’d learn that their primary preoccupation would need to be the well-being of their constituents.

But, of course, it could be argued that those constituents who were forever asking Government for handouts would be saying, “We want more free stuff, or you’re not going to be getting any tips from me.” But Government would quickly learn that the more “free” stuff they gave out, the smaller their own take would be. Very quickly, they’d learn to say, “Look, we need to make, at a minimum, a living wage in this government business, and if you want free stuff, the system simply isn’t going to work. Money out can’t be greater than money in.”

And so, within a very short time, governments (the very people who invented the idea of free stuff to constituents and have, for generations, insisted that it’s not a problem) would be providing constituents with a lesson in economics – one that’s entirely realistic. (Remember: before politicians introduced the idea of “entitlements”, they didn’t exist and no one expected them.) And there’s one further benefit in a voluntary tax system. The more efficiently the government was run, the more money the constituents would retain, and have the opportunity to either spend more or invest. If this were so, they’d be more comfortable paying higher tips. (This is not conjecture. In countries that have low-tax or no-tax regimes, people tend to be generous tippers, as they tend to retain more wealth.)

The government that performed well would inherently be receiving greater revenue and therefore their own personal income could be higher, but never so high that it cut dangerously into the services that they provided.

Just imagine how the world would look like if this was the norm. It won't be a Utopia yet. But things would get closer to that. I mean have you seen a restaurant with bad service thrive? Have you seen a restaurant with good service thrive? Well, there you have natural selection via free markets. I've also added my own thoughts in an old article of mine titled: Government as a Service; A new perspective on Governments and taking the best of the two worlds of Anarchy and Minarchy Have fun reading.

Turkey: A Glimpse of America’s Future

Turkey has a GDP of only $900 billion. It has external debt of only $500 billion. These numbers are so small – compared to a $90 trillion world economy… and $250 trillion of debt – that investors shirk it off. The problem is “contained,” they say, echoing those famous words of Ben Bernanke in September 2007. Then, it was Lehman Brothers that was in trouble. That crack was tiny, too; Lehman had only $619 billion in debt. Then, too, there seemed little reason to worry. Ben Bernanke had taken over from Alan Greenspan. The Greenspan Put had become the Bernanke Put. The future could jolly well wait.

And Bernanke did come through. With nearly $4 trillion in extra central bank credit, he succeeded in reviving the wildest fantasies of the bubble era… But not before the wall had come down and the stock market had been crushed under the rubble.

More to come on how Turkey… China… and the USA will reckon with unpayable debt.

I know that some of you are very smart traders and you probably even own some gold miners (they give way bigger returns compared to just owning Gold/Silver) and Bitshares have its pegged assets which you can own and trade for tiny fees without any fear of governments shutting down the exchanges. During the last bubble the governments almost did this. So don't trust too much on stock exchanges beig open. That's why I advice on crypto and especially a DEX like Bitshares.

Just go to https://wallet.bitshares.org and you can get your own account without any centralized gatekeepers getting in your way. It won't take much time like STEEM signup. Just give it a shot.

Is The Sharing Economy Exploitative

In other words, the effect of the sharing economy on the study of economics may (and likely is) the liberation of economic analysis from materialist biases. Economics becomes the subjectivist social science it was always meant to be. So in terms of economic theory, the sharing economy can help make the study of economics what it should be and always should have been: the study of the creation and distribution of [subjective] value and the unplanned social orders that emerge in the prosperity-creating process.

But what about exploitation?

I find the argument that the 'gig economy' makes people accept lower wages highly fascinating. Suddenly it is a problem to these critics, mainly on the left, that 'workers' own their own capital. When personal property becomes capital, a source of income, then the obvious implication is a decentralization of capital ownership.

In capitalism you can only win by doing something better or cheaper or by inventing something completely new. I don't think these gigs would be great income sources. It would be much like the "old times" made digital and well scaled. But the products and services would be so cheap that most people would be able o afford even the things that were seen as luxuries few years ago.

When I was in middle school, owning a smartphone was a luxury. A little later 4G became a luxury. Now both of those things a abundant. This is real development. But I do have a feeling that the gig economy will create more income inequality due to some people being really good at what they do and ending up with a large portion of the wealth. Think about YouTubers for an example. Even a minnow account like me earning few dollars is has bee able to stay within the top 1000 highest earning accounts on STEEM.

A Gift of Education From FEE (Foundation for Economic Education)