“Okay dude, I know you don’t give a shit about money and you hate the government. But what’s the best kind of government, the best kind of economic system that you’ve read about. I mean, what works the best, man?”

-Steevo Bristol

Okay, Steevo, there are only three types of economic activity that I know of:

1. Giving

2. Trading

3. Taking

Economy geeks devote themselves to the discussion of various mixtures of the three.

Giving was the basic economic model of the primitive society, in which the most successful men were literally living in competition to give more away than the next guy, so that the women would give more away to them than to the next guy. Kings and conquerors down to Genghis Khan were very successful in terms of conquest and reign, when they followed this formula of giving it all away.

Trading is one of the two economic activities that takes place between different groups of primitives and between representatives of various nations and societies. Trading also occurs within societies that are based on taking rather than giving. Currently, formal—legal—trading is subject to taking.

Taking is the second economic activity engaged in between different primitive groups. Once one group has taken from another group so successfully that the weaker group fails to function as an independent economic unit, it is absorbed by the stronger group as a permanent source of taking. This process is called taxation and is made bearable in the mind of the weak “taxed” party by the mutually agreed upon fiction that the taker is not taking, but is rather facilitating giving to some third party. This is the root of the formation of States or Governments or Nations as we now know them. Nations rarely take from one another and subsist primarily as a macro-parasitic political organisms drinking the will of their subjects.

Our current economic models are all based on taking, fueled by trading, and still tolerant of giving, encompassing various formulas for the regulation of goods and will transfers. Much effort is used extolling the efficiency of this system or that, and things have been continually modified down through the ages to our present day. In many cases the form of the body politic is confused with the economic system in name.

Libertarians are people who want a society based on trade—ideally—exclusively based on trade, with no sanctioned taking. However, no such society has ever existed and there is no evidence that it can. Trade seems to have always been secondary to giving and/or taking.

The purpose of giving is to distribute goods and will as widely as possible within a certain, limited sphere, and it seems to have been universally successful and compatible with trading and taking as external pursuits. However, since the advent of nations, giving has continued to decline in importance and has no real effect on the human condition at present, and can be discounted as a viable activity. One might say that humanity died when the nation was born, and is now merely an echo within the body economic.

Current economic models are arguments between the proper balance of trading and taking. Since nations are positioned to take from trading, it is obvious that, for the health of the nation, which is the ethical unit that has replaced humanity, that taking is the most successful form of economic activity—to which Attila the Hun would certainly agree. So, when Peter Joseph of Zeitgeist fame debates Libertarian Stefan Molyneux, what you have is an argument between two apposing fantasies, as no system of trade has ever stood up to and defeated a system of taking and no system of giving has ever survived contact with a system of taking. So Peter extols a superseded system and Stefan a secondary system.

Note that many people will argue that systems of taking were systems of trading, such as 1590s England and 1890s America and even ancient Athens. But upon examination, these will all be seen to have been systems based on taking—of will and goods in the same harnessed human action—primarily through enslavement, with a greater than normal emphasis on trading. It seems the most growth-prone systems are taking systems tolerant of increased trading.

In terms of national efficiency, just as in combat, maximum force in the hands of the best-positioned decision-makers is crucial. Therefore, the end goal of any national economy is to concentrate as much goods and will* in the hands of the fewest people. This does occur toward the end of the life of most nations, when over 90% of all wealth is in the hands of less than 10%. Unfortunately, the combat analogy here is the mature sumo wrestler whose knees have finally given out, with most mature nations ending at the high end of a hockey stick wealth distribution graph—just like the 600 pound sumo wrestler—with collapse and/or decay.

So Steevo, they all work for their stated purpose: giving to spread goods and will, trading to improve the goods and will of both partners, and taking to concentrate goods and will into fewer hands, so it depends on what you want.

You want to be a member of a badass group, right?

Well, then taking is the way to go if you are a government. Trading is the way to go if you are not. In fact, drug dealers are traders, not takers, and have shown the ability to fight off governments better than other people, so trading is kind of like war on the government as long as it is illegal trading. Legal trading just feeds the taking system.

The only thing for certain is that giving is a failure because it fails to concentrate force, and as soon as someone with bad intentions shows up—and they do—then force is all that matters.

Merry Christmas, Steevo!

*Will is defined here as social leverage and/or moral sanction to act.