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by toxicunderGroov 21 hours ago
Local wood frames, carbon from Japan, hardware designed in the USA, produced in China with Nvidia soft. It's kind of funny if it wasn't so wasteful on global resources.
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The ghost of Milton Friedman is preparing his "pencil" speech as we speak!
Friedman was right. Unfortunately the world does not consist of civilised nations trading with eachother.

If the entire world was Dutch we'd be colonising the stars by now...

Friedman's gift to the world was erasing the legacy of justice and desire to help the common person Keynes left behind.

Keynes lived through two world wars and learned that global trade does not in fact mean that nations won't irrationally attack each other. In Keynes' view, the purpose of the economy is to lift up the average person out of poverty, and is so doing greatly eliminate one of the causes of war.

Just a few decades after world war 2 Friedman would come along and talk about the power of "freedom" (ie, keeping the current status quo). He would repeat the ideological lies that led to people being unprepared for WW1 / WW2, namely being that free trade means nations won't attack each other, that there is a price at which racism is reasonable, among many other things.

Friedman on segregation for example:

“...consider a situation in which there are grocery stores serving a neighborhood inhabited by people who have a strong aversion to being waited on by Negro clerks. Suppose one of the grocery stores has a vacancy for a clerk and the first applicant qualified in other respects happens to be a Negro. Let us suppose that as a result of the law the store is required to hire him. The effect of this action will be to reduce the business done by this store and to impose losses on the owner. If the preference of the community is strong enough, it may even cause the store to close. When the owner of the store hires white clerks in preference to Negroes in the absence of the law, he may not be expressing any preference or prejudice, or taste of his own. He may simply be transmitting the tastes of the community. He is, as it were, producing the services for the consumers that the consumers are willing to pay for. Nonetheless, he is harmed, and indeed may be the only one harmed appreciably, by a law which prohibits him from engaging in this activity, that is, prohibits him from pandering to the tastes of the community for having a white rather than a Negro clerk. The consumers, whose preferences the law is intended to curb, will be affected substantially only to the extent that the number of stores is limited and hence they must pay higher prices because one store has gone out of business.”