Trading with people makes you richer, not poorer. Not participating in the economy makes you poor because the natural state of animals is to be poor. Rent-seeking is bad, but a state where you have wealth without participating in the economy and without being exploited is extremely artificial and hard to maintain (even though it'd be cool if we got it.)

I wouldn’t call that artificial nor hard to maintain: it’s axiomatically impossible. You’re participating in the economy whenever you create or receive anything of value.

Even in a hypothetical scenario where you’re making absolutely everything you consume yourself from your own materials and giving it out (the complexity of which makes it impossible), there is an economy of action and resource distribution needed to make that happen. Any kind of decision making about the distribution of resources are economic decisions.

This is semantics, most people here understand this, and I realize you’re making a similar point, but I’m hearing more and more casual dismissal of economic concerns as somehow separate from human concerns. The extent to which the economy does or does not effectively balance the human concerns of those participating in it is a measurement of the effectiveness of that economy.

Any kind of “new economy” needs to recognized the complexity of allocating resources effectively and the hugely disparate and varied range of desires, concerns, abilities, and resources between people. The realization that free trade generally leads to greater wealth was essentially an enlightenment era realization that decentralizing decisions about resource allocation is more efficient than trying to manage all of that complexity centrally. A lot of discussion about “democratizing the economy” seems to veer towards centralized redistribution and control rather than actual decentralization and democratization.

But you can sort of do it short term - retired people and the idle rich do exist - and a lot of people assume you can, like saying a billionaire actually has a billion USD they could give out, or thinking their employer's going to replace them with an AI.

Only if the deal is beneficial to you. If the parties are not interdependent, there is every incentive for one party to maximze their gain at the expense of the other.

There's plenty of examples to be found. Were the Native Americans richer after they traded their land to the colonists? Are African nations really richer after they traded their oil reserves to Western corporations?

For example, we can offset some mechanistic parts of government to decentralized systems.

Or we can change ownership structures to promote cooperative modes of entreprise.

We can also use decentralized systems to make government more accountable by preventing those in power from hiding their misdeeds.

There is a lot that can be done to move away from markets where there is decentralization but no flexibility as the profit motive reins supreme, and centralized government that can operate arbitrarily but based on central motivations.

The circumstances surrounding this discussion don't seem compatible with your claims.

- The big central site that has no choice but to monetize you, because otherwise its investor funding will run out

- An overly complicated and geeky system trying to recreate the efficiencies of centralisation without centralisation, and trust without trust (and generally, getting the wrong sort of trust, see Schneier). Ends up being a vicious wild west if it catches on at all, because that centralisation was doing something useful.

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The problem with humans is that ego is decoupled from entropy.

There were benevolent kings/dictators/CEOs, but eventually they die or they try to hold onto power for the sake of it. Either way eventually the corrupt or corrupt-able rule.

If you can solve the corruptability of the ego or solve entropy, I agree with your assessment.

Until then, we need deterministic rules managed by computers that cannot be corrupted, and if corrupted, it’s quickly and easily obvious to everyone.

Once that (currently shaky) foundation is solved, it becomes significantly simpler (because of the durability) to solve those higher level problems over time and with technology or by changing hearts and minds, whichever is simpler.

One of them was brilliant enough to be a communist economist and win the Nobel prize in economics somehow.

I don't know if that would have worked to begin with, and certainly those writers often were authoritarian in some ways, but it might interest you how they thought and reasoned about the problem and solution you described.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Memorial_Prize_l...

Outside the Soviet Union perhaps the most known is Paul Cockshott.

FWIW: I binged on David Graeber last year. You might also enjoy his works. Especially the book Debt: The First 5000 Years.

I'm keen to find other authors, thinkers like Graeber. People thinking outside of the classical Liberal paradigm, outside of the Hayek vs Keynes food fight. Especially anyone thinking about participatory democracy.