Fugazi Finance

This post simply features a couple paragraphs from Arthur Hayes recent blog article "Airhead". We decided to repost here, as it encapsulates the essence of the human condition, culture, hydrocarbon energy and how it all relates to our current financial landscape. Enjoy!

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What’s the point? Why do you work so hard?

The point is feeding, clothing, and housing yourself and your family. But what’s the purpose of life once your earnings cover life’s necessities? With all this material wealth in the age of thinking machines and plentiful hydrocarbon energy, why do we still work so hard?

The point of the human condition is to consume art. Art takes many forms, but at its base level, it is an experience humans produce solely to entertain other humans. It is entirely useless and priceless at the same time.

Let’s step through some traditional art forms and talk about their usefulness.

Playing Sports - An exercise by which humans waste energy playing games while others watch.

Eating at Restaurants - An exercise by which humans enhance the flavours of food so that it is enjoyable to consume calories to continue living.

Listening to Music - There is no point to music other than enjoying it.

Dancing - Involves humans expending precious energy moving their bodies just for the fuck of it.

Looking at Visual Art - Involves humans creating visual objects for others to enjoy.

Collectively, these activities are the corpus of human culture. Culture makes life worth living, and for that reason, human culture creates trillions of dollars worth of economic activity. It is clear that the platforms that allow culture to be consumed and saved are insanely valuable.

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Fugazi Finance

The entire world instinctively recognises the fakeness of our current point in human civilisation's history. Out of the senseless destruction of WW2 came many technologies that have powered our modern civilisation. Peaceful, safe, and almost carbon-free nuclear energy generates many gigawatts of electricity. Billions of people can travel worldwide on commercial airlines. And of course, the most essential thing to come out of the war: the creation of a new form of silicon-based life, which we call thinking machines or computers.

The growth of the population and the relative wealth of humanity since the war has been astounding. But the easy stuff has been done, and now politicians, in an attempt to justify their existence, have turned to printing money to engage in all manner of activities that are a net drag on the human condition. Green energy is probably the most significant global malinvestment of this age. Because we have cheap and plentiful capital, which is just a derivative of cheap and plentiful hydrocarbons, politicians believe they could dictate natural laws rather than the other way around. Taking a less dense form of energy, such as wind and solar, and expecting them to replace more dense forms of energy like coal, natural gas, and oil, will never happen naturally. And by naturally, I mean without government subsidies or below-market interest rate loans.

The green energy hoax is just one example. Many of you rue the inflation that has taken place since Pax Americana eschewed the gold standard in 1971. Forget the YOY government-manipulated inflation statistics. The price of a loaf of bread in nominal terms is higher today than yesterday. That need not be the case in an age of brilliant technology and cheap energy.

You know this regardless of how the elites gaslight you.

Your response is to speculate. Your response is to purchase magic internet money. Your response is to bid up “scarce” digital forms of culture that you understand and appreciate.

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