You have heard of Pascal’s wager and the atheist wager.
Based on the comments from my last post and this Reddit thread, I have formulated two new wagers.
The first is the typical sky-is-falling-bernanke-will-eat-your-babies-carbs-kill-unicorns-i-hate-the-verizon-can-you-hear-me-now-guy-and-flouride-is-destroying-our-precious-bodily-fluids-!!!!111oneone.
If you believe a financial apocalypse will occur and/or there is a “revolution” that somehow magically “restarts” civilization, this is your wager:
| Financial collapse happens | Collapse does not happen | |
|---|---|---|
| Belief | You are a Pyrrhic King until the division of labor breaks down and you resort to cannibalism; you can’t buy anything with your gold because no one makes anything — and those that could, you just ate. | You physically look like a disheveled beach bum and Google cache makes your crankery permanent (-1 Reproduction sweepstakes) |
| Disbelief | You dine and die with the lot of them, first eating the gizzards of sloth-like Pyrrhic Kings whose gold cache(s) are inedible and weigh them down. | You are the life of the party, people enjoy being with you in part because you do not smell or look like a caveman (+1 Reproduction sweepstakes) |
The second wager below is an illustrative rebuttal to the above self-delusional, self-defeating, borderline-anti-capitalistic, eschatological fantasy. The hero of this story is the entrepreneur who tries either way.
Go get ‘em tiger:
| Entrepreneurship creates wealth — rain or shine | Entrepreneurship mysteriously fails to create wealth | |
|---|---|---|
| Belief | You retire comfortably after creating multiple streams of income and do not need to peddle affiliate newsletters, colloidal silver recipes and Truther conspiracies to stay alive. | Your CV looks good and you know what not to do in the future. Civilization collapses because economic calculation – coordinated by markets and entrepreneurs – is mysteriously impossible. |
| Disbelief | Other entrepreneurs around you generate wealth, creating a wealthier, healthier and cleaner world. The positive spillover effect pulls you up from your living-in-the-basement-bootstraps. | You have no job skills, no people skills and no assets. No one wants to reproduce with you. But it does not matter – entrepreneurs and markets are mysteriously unable to calculate – and thus civilization cannot grow from beyond a Hobbesian stone age. |
The point of this carnal, non-supernatural exercise is clear, that no matter what happens,there is no net negative consequences for promoting entrepreneurship or partaking in it yourself.
To use a sport analogy, why be a fair weather capitalist?
If capitalism and markets can outproduce state consumption, why not promote libertarianism and entrepreneurship? Why wait around until “just the perfect political atmosphere” is created? Why wait until there is no more government debt? Why wait until the stars are aligned just right? Why wait until after a collapse or after a “revolution?” [Keep reading…]
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