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| Hey folks, welcome to this new series of videos that I'm going to be doing, whenever the fancy catches me, titled Unlikely Economics. | |
| For the first one, I want to talk about what the term economics actually means. | |
| Now, you've probably read at some point in a textbook that it comes from, I believe, the Greek word for the household economy. | |
| And it's only in the past couple centuries that we've started to use it to describe the nation as a whole. | |
| It was originally termed political economy. | |
| Economy meant the household 200 years ago, but if you're going to be a weirdo like Adam Smith and talk about the nation as a whole, you would call it political economy. | |
| But nowadays, most people, aside from hearing that, don't really think about it. | |
| They don't think about the etymology or what that means. | |
| And now we're cursed with a state that sees everything as these numbers that they can tweak and pull and, you know, don't watch what the left hand is doing while the right hand pulls a rabbit out of the hat. | |
| We're left with this economic voodoo. | |
| And a lot of that gets corrected when you think about what a household economy actually is. | |
| Now, one of the more autistic things that you hear from the feminist circles is this very angry argument about how women do unpaid work in the household. | |
| In fact, a wife is worth $120,000 a year. | |
| Good luck selling those skills on the free market, but we're supposed to believe this juggling act that the feminists do by using cherry-picked numbers for all of this. | |
| And this is your typical modern materialist autist type argument. | |
| You know, it's missing the forest for the trees. | |
| So let's talk about a traditional household. | |
| Not a modern household because there's so many conveniences now. | |
| Let's go back in time and imagine a fictitious household from one or two hundred years ago. | |
| Now back then, we didn't have fast food all over the place. | |
| Food required cooking. | |
| There was a lot of work to be done in a household, not just if you were living on a farm, but for any household. | |
| Cooking the food, preserving the food, mending clothing, looking after the children. | |
| All of these different activities are required. | |
| And so the household was this partnership between the husband and the wife. | |
| Part of the economy was financial. | |
| Part of the economy was the husband going out to work or the wife doing some arts and crafts. | |
| Maybe she's weaving baskets, maybe she's selling preserved pickles to the neighbors, etc. | |
| But that was not the entire economy. | |
| The economy was not mistaken for just the money coming in. | |
| The economy of the household was how the division of labor occurred between the man and the woman. | |
| It was the investment being put into the children. | |
| And not just the we're saving up for the college fund investment, but that the children were expected eventually to be contributing members to the household. | |
| And this would vary from child to child. | |
| You'd have, you know, maybe one son would go into the military, one would go into trade, another might be a really good musician, you know, be really talented there. | |
| And so, you know, maybe that kid becomes a musician and hopefully can make some connections for the family. | |
| These were not hard-nosed business decisions like we think of nowadays, because at the core of the family, you know, from a purely self-interested standpoint, the family doesn't make any sense. | |
| Sacrificing your life to save your children doesn't make any sense when you could always survive and have more children. | |
| You know, going to a prostitute makes more sense than getting a wife from a purely economic standpoint, using the modern term of economics. | |
| The original term, the home economy that the Greeks talked about, took all of this into account. | |
| It understood that the household was more than just a financial unit. | |
| It was more than just an engine of production. | |
| That humanity is more than just a machine that uses vegetables and meat instead of gasoline. | |
| It understood more was going on to this. | |
| And the vast majority of the activity is not something that you measure in dollars or shekels. | |
| It's only with the modern perversion of the term and this materialist, this pseudo-scientific modernity where we pretend that we can measure everything. | |
| If we can measure it, we'll include it. | |
| If we can't measure it, oh, it doesn't matter. | |
| So if we can measure a woman's labor in the household and say she's worth $150,000 a year, well, ladies, you should divorce your husband. | |
| But we can't measure the emotional support. | |
| Like having a wife in your 20s, having a supportive wife that helps the man in his career, we can't measure the effects that that has. | |
| The joy of having children, the stability, and the long-term effects. | |
| I mean, sure, you can come up with stats on the criminality amongst those that grow up in single mother households, but all of these unmeasurables, we completely ignore them, but we look at the numbers. | |
| And so when we discuss political economy, the exact same issue happens. | |
| We look at numbers, we look at tax rates, we look at all of that while ignoring things like infrastructure, ignoring things like culture. | |
| Because you can't measure culture. | |
| Now you can feel culture. | |
| You can look at something abhorrent like Piss Christ, and it's obvious that's not art. | |
| But because we measure everything by materialist standards now, by, you know, by financial standards, well, Piss Christ is definitely art. | |
| It's worth millions of dollars. | |
| So it's important to remember that when we're talking about economics, it originally meant something far deeper, far more complex. | |
| It is art and science. | |
| And these people, especially the Keynesians, who pretend to be able to measure everything, are absolutely blind. | |
| They see a bunch of trees and they're like, well, I've never seen a forest. | |
| There's some trees here, but what's a forest? | |
| You know? | |
| And so they play games, the numbers, and they completely destroy the very essence of what a political economy is supposed to be. | |
| Political economy is supposed to be about taking the country and making it grow, caring about the country and making wise decisions for the country in the same manner that a husband and wife, even without having a spreadsheet for every single thing that they do in the household, can get together and discuss and benefit one another to create a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts. | |
| So it's been the first episode of Unlikely Economics. | |
| Hope you enjoyed it, folks. |