Altruism's Alternative

Yesterday's blog post gave a few examples of how altruism fails in practice. "Being nice" and "doing good" are historically unsound bases for social programs and progress. When we lead with our feelings, humans struggle to intellectually grasp the long-term implications of their actions. People literally die.

Soviet Russia and Mao's China promised to implement altruism by the people and for the people. The fundamental issue: it was by other people and for other people. The lay citizen starved before they got to ask "whom exactly?"

It is not sustainable to have people exhaust their resources and families doing things that are "good for society" because it's logically impossible to have it come back to them without extra value being created somewhere, somehow. Altruism might give you good karma, but it tends to be a one-way trip, and you cannot eat karma.

Altruism does not equate with productivity. There must be a competitive advantage or some hyper-concrete reason why a program tangibly creates positive ROI. And you, dear reader, MUST know this reason very clearly YOURSELF. You have to be able to articulate it and teach it to others.

Therefore, a rule of thumb: start skeptical. Assume donations and taxes only work if you directly know and trust the people running things to do a better job helping others than you would yourself. If you're not willing to do it yourself, then don't vote for it. Otherwise the nice-sounding but complicated programs will create waste and destroy society as their primary output.

Warren Buffett has lived in the same house since around the time Mao started melting pots and pans. He has learnt the lessons of history as well as anyone, and he knows how to invest his resources with positive ROI. When deciding how to best use his immense wealth to help others, he figured the best approach would be to entrust the task—and tens of billions of dollars—to his good friend Bill.

Now, I don't know if the Gates Foundation is spending Buffett's fortune well, but I bet it does a better job at uplifting humanity than the national bureaucracy. I wish I could have picked who got my $38,000+ in taxes instead of handing it to 20 million government workers who do many things I would prefer done differently.

Even better than charities, did you know some businesses have survived for over 1,000 years doing things like construction and wine-making? These companies employ families and create wealth for their communities. They don't need donations because they are profitable enough to sustain themselves. By buying their products, you are donating. You are voting to support these operations.

It's hard to wrap one's head around because capitalism is the opposite of altruism, seemingly selfish to the max. Initially, for-profit projects require investment and losses. No value is created in the short term. Investors seemingly just hand money to people they like. Then in the medium term, a few successful business owners get rich and inequality is necessarily a byproduct.

But in the long term, those individuals don't matter and die, while capitalism uplifts society. It creates opportunities, productivity, and a higher baseline standard of living for all via products and services. This is based on innovation and the key principle of efficiently decentralized decision-making. There is no functional limit on this principle.

Ideas are put into practice by people, at the right place and the right time, as best they can. Jeff Bezos is not actually all that different from the restaurant owner down the street. We just don't conceive of him as a decentralized player because his products happen to have reached billions of people.

How? Through massive new logistics channels and pioneering internet infrastructure, with a huge team—many of whom have also gotten rich alongside him. Starting as an unknown citizen who worked at McDonald's, this man eventually built and led a better USPS. On the way, he fulfilled DARPA's dreams to make the internet truly useful. Bezos's first mega-cash didn't come from Amazon. It was from a $250k investment in Google's $1M seed round, an investment that others could have...but Jeff Bezos did.

There is no inherent exclusion to the capitalist system. Of course, it's not perfectly fair. Of course, people have different starting conditions. Of course, people in positions of power might not be nice people. Of course, it requires you to work and expend effort—including emotional labor to ignore or fight back against the not nice people.

Unfortunately, the wisest ones are usually more concerned with silently getting stuff done rather than explaining their life philosophies in great detail to you. Even when they try, the counterargument exists—the system benefits them! Over time though, after enough life experience, everyone who doesn't commit suicide tends to become more fiscally conservative and pro-capitalist. There's a reason: try designing a better alternative system.

The United States of America was built on capitalism, and I'd personally like to see my country continue to exist without collapsing. I'd like competent business leaders in our communities to keep their money rather than giving it to the government. I've worked in the government, at a few different levels, under both Obama and Trump. I can confidently say the government right now needs fewer brains of higher quality, and more constraints on scope, but not more money.

You don't have to trust the business owner to do the right thing with their cash. If you let him have more margin, Buffett will lower prices at Dairy Queen and See's Candies himself, to the extent it creates more demand, without Zohran telling him an arbitrary new set of rules. In fact, Buffett will probably let his local managers run their shops however they need to, within reason.

The billionaires are not stealing from me. They are contributing more than their fair share, or at least more than me and my $38k. Who am I to say what anyone's "fair share" even is and where that line should be drawn, for example, yours?

All I know is we can go steal their business if we really want, assuming the government doesn't get in the way, by serving those same customers better than they're currently being served. So let's go make our own fortunes instead of telling others what to do. Be like Dario.

I'm glad many of my fellow citizens are greedily working to produce goods and services that others can purchase. If you're from a socialist country, you've seen firsthand the horrible effects of incompetent anti-capitalists voting to tax the rich and destroying incentives for wealth creation. But few have seen how that happens up close and personal...

It took me a while to warm up to the recent All-in interview with this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner. I thought her constant smile was weird at first, but by the end, I was in tears. It's not easy to google how María Corina Machado had her face stomped on and fractured by her fellow "civil" lawmakers in the Venezuelan National Assembly.

People who are willing to defend and propagate the kinds of programs I mentioned in yesterday's post tend, in the limit, to be truly disturbed. They cannot listen to reason or have productive dialogue. Anyone who reads this post and tries to physically harm me rather than writing their own blog in response, is a terrorist and should not be allowed to influence, manage, or direct national resources.

The real problem is the rest of us non-crazies whose lives are OK. We don't have a strong opinion and therefore don't speak up. Look, I'll gladly read your specific proposals. I'll gladly support positive-ROI social programs and spending by competent excellent leaders. I've yet to see one in the public sector that I would give more resources to.

You can prove me wrong by answering the questions in this essay. How can I prove you wrong? Tell me what evidence you need to see. If you understand my big-picture point here, then I'm sure we can find common ground.

Over the last couple thousand years, how did we go from millions of people to billions on this planet? With division of labor. With inventions manufactured and deployed at scale. Plows, bicycles, cars, tractors, airplanes, iPhones.

Capitalism is the only system which has lifted humankind out of poverty and the Malthusian survival mode of all other animals. Would you take away fire or the wheel, give up your microwave or your silverware?

It may not be fair in your eyes, on your preferred time horizons, but there is no other resource distribution system that works in practice. Failing to learn from our historical mistakes makes us not only stupid but also evil. Passively evil, at least, if not actively.

By giving away my money and telling this story on youtube, I'm seeking to harness the altruist instinct. I aim to re-orient our society and culture towards more kindness, more generosity, more human flourishing, and a greater good that will outlast all of us.

That greater good is called capitalism.