Libertarian Economic Logic (chart attached)

[jamesd at echeque.com]

On 2019-09-20 12:25, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
> I am confident I could learn to make a pencil, work to obtain
> required tools and inputs, and make a pencil.

If you had even started to think about what would be necessary to make a 
pencil, you would have sketched in an outline of how you would go about 
it.   How for example, would you form graphite into pencil leads?  How 
do you form anything?  With your bare hands?  What tools would you need?

Hint:  You cannot buy a machine for forming pencil leads, because that 
kind of machine is a one off - most machines for forming specific shapes 
are one offs.  You have to make the machine, just as Ivan the Troll had 
to make one off devices that formed high strength, high melting point 
steel into gun parts, for those parts of a gun where one cannot use 
anything more easily shapeable, those parts where one cannot use a 
threedee printer or a numerically controlled lathe.

And the fact that you have not sketched an outline tells me that you 
lack the knowledge to even think about what would be needed.

Machines exist for making arbitrary threedee shapes using additive or 
subtractive technologies, but there are rather severe limits to the 
materials they can shape, and the shapes they can achieve, so that in 
practice you wind up using several such devices to make the things that 
make the things that make the thing that you actually want to make. 
They cannot shape pencil lead or wood, or rather they can, but not to 
the shapes you need for a pencil.

So you would need to think about the kind of devices you would need for 
making a pencil, and then think about how to make those devices.

>   - a functional family requires interpersonal cohesion
> 
>   - a functional restaurant ditto
> 
>   - functional manufacturer ditto

Shockley was notoriously terrible at that, but he founded all of modern 
electronics.  Steve Jobs was mighty bad at that also, but Apple was only 
able to make groundbreaking new products when Steve Jobs was at the helm.

When they put Wernher von Braun in charge of what became NASA, they did 
not tell him he had to get on with people.  They told other people that 
they had to get on with Wernher von Braun.  He was not put in charge of 
NASA for his interpersonal skills, but because he could make rockets, 
and other people could not make rockets, even with his advice and 
information.

Nah, what you need to make stuff is knowing how to make stuff.  That is 
what in short supply.  Interpersonal skills are worth ten cents a bale, 
but only if already baled.  Interpersonal skills are inherently valuable 
only in the way water is inherently valuable.  Water is not valuable, 
because we have plenty of water.  There is a sense in which water is 
more valuable than diamonds, but nobody cares and nobody should care.