techwooded

I like a lot of what other people have said here (faith backed by a trusted party, representation of debt, etc), but I just want to drive home the point that money has value because we said it has value. Under a system of barter, you end up with people valuing things differently. So we switched to the gold standard, but then that constrained growth. Now we have fiat currency which is based on faith.

The reason why we chose gold was because it was relatively useless at the time, only good for making things look pretty essentially. It was valuable because it was rare, and since it was rare, a central authority could control the supply because it takes a lot of capital to extract and process. Modern fiat is similar, but the rarity (making it a good substitute for value of other goods and services) comes from the government being the only person who can issue it. It’s honestly kind of a weird paradox. It has to be cheap and ubiquitous enough that the supply isn’t limited, but rare enough that we accept it as a stand in for value. In an alternate universe, we could have chosen river rocks (not useful for other purposes, so no one would be tempted to take supply out of the system to use for other means, and pretty ubiquitous), but we couldn’t effectively control the supply.

I think Libertarianism is incompatible with the way that humans operate as a society. Almost all flavors of libertarianism puts an individual’s right to live as they choose as long as that doesn’t violate the rights of others through force or fraud. Humans like to associate themselves into groups, and in almost any group there will be an imbalance in power, whether that’s economic power, physical power (strength), or even something as abstract as eloquence or how outgoing you are. The issue then becomes that someone somewhere has to enforce the right to not be forced into giving up rights. In the classical construction of how libertarians view government, it is very easy to become more powerful than those meant to enforce limits on power. Even in our current political system, you see this when companies will spend more on their anti-trust court cases than the entire FTC spends total in a decade. Libertarianism has no mechanism to keep the enforcer the most powerful party involved

I’m interested where this comes from too. Is it just because they aren’t a FOSS project?

Similar idea to how the Dao works in Daoism. “The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao”

For audiobooks, I personally use Libro FM, though audiobooks.com is also an alternate source. Unfortunately if you’re looking only at price, you won’t be able to move past Audible because they employ so many shady and bad-for-authors practices that their prices are artificially low. If you’re only interested in getting DRM-free Cory Doctorow books, Craphound.