Robbing the Cookie Jar
By Capital Thinking • Issue #866 • View online
When I read about the culture wars in America and around the world, one of the things I pay attention to is capital. Capital, and access to it, often determines if you can create opportunity for yourself and increase your standard of living.
The Real Problem: Access to Capital
Jeff Carter | Points and Figures:
Governments cannot be the primary capital provider. However, their policies can ease access.
If the government is the primary capital provider access to capital gets politicized. That’s crony capitalism and detrimental to a well-functioning and healthy society. At an extreme, it’s communism or socialism.
We know those two forms of government wind up murdering people and the data shows they have murdered millions of people since Russia became the first country to embrace that form of societal organization in the early 1900s.
As Latin America drifts to the left, expect human suffering and death to increase in the nations that implement left-wing policies.
I was watching social media yesterday and I saw Senator Elizabeth Warren say Bitcoin was an “environmental disaster”. When has she been on the right side of any economic innovation or policy? Not to be outdone, former President Trump said he was against Bitcoin because it was competition for the dollar.
Funny thing, if we want to solve for a lot of environmental disasters that are caused by energy production, the best way to do it is nuclear power and I doubt seriously if Warren would be on board with that or if she is even intelligent enough to understand it.
Competition is good. It creates innovation, drives prices down, and raises standards of living.
One of the promises of cryptocurrency is creating more access to capital to people who need it. It also has promise to destroy friction in smaller markets that are inefficient. My friend Gil Valentine has witnessed it first hand as he rolled out crypto ATMs with his company Athena Bitcoin.
All the time, we read about government policy limiting access to capital. Dodd-Frank crushed community banking and that ended access to capital in neighborhoods that needed it.
People call for regulation in places that it is not needed. There is tremendous fear that some snake oil salesperson will steal grandma’s money.
When I look at a lot of the social problems America is having, a lot of it boils down to breaking down regulatory barriers that stop access to capital and stop competition in various sectors of our economy, especially including education.
Photo by Josh Appel on Unsplash