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I don’t know as much as I ought to about the Greco-Persian wars, but the tiny nugget of understanding I have is as follows: The Greeks were a collection of squabbling city states all controlled independently. They spent most of their time farming and discussing philosophy; when they weren’t doing that, they were fighting each other. Persia was a rapidly growing empire controlled by one king and his appointed cronies, financed by treasure taken from conquered nations. The Persians, first under Darius, and then Xerxes, were trying to expand their empire by adding Greece. The Greeks didn’t realy care for this idea.

Xerxes, the Persian emperor, doesn’t really want to fight a long protracted battle to control the Greeks. He’d much rather have them submit to him like the rest of the peoples he’s had his army conquer. He sends out a bunch of messengers to Greeks, telling them they should surrender to him. “I’ll treat you well,” he says, “Just pay taxes to me and do whatever I say, and we’ll be good.” The Greeks, not really famous for their hospitality, respond by throwing the Persian messengers down a well.

Everything started to go pretty poorly for the greeks around this time; a variety of bad omens were observed. It was decided that maybe they shouldn’t have thrown those Persians down the well after all. The greeks figured they should offer some of their own men to make up for the Persians they killed. A call goes out for patriotic young men to sacrifice themselves for their country, and two guys step forward – Sperthias and Bulis. These aren’t just random joes; they’re from well off families. Think of two frat boys at Duke.

Sperthias and Bulis make their way to the persian capital. Everybody in Persia knows what these guys are doing, and they’re respected for it. A Persian Official, Hydarnes, gives them a place to stay. He’s impressed by their conviction and courage. He tries to convince them to join the Persians. “You guys are brave,” he says. “Xerxes knows how to reward brave guys. If you join him, you could be in charge of Greece.”

Their response to Hydarnes gives me shivers each time I read it:

“Hydames, you have not equally weighed each side in your advice to us. For you have tried the one which you advise, the other has remained untried by you. You know what it means to be a slave, but you have never yet tried freedom, to know whether it is sweet or not. For if you had tried it, you would have advised us to fight for it, not merely with spears, but also with axes.”

Can you imagine anyone with that attitude now? Recently, Iran (modern Persia) captured a bunch of British Marines. Instead of fighting to their deaths, the Marines simply acquiesed to the Iranians and went willingly as prisoners. They posed for a bunch of propoganda pictures, and were eventually released.  Watching the whole episdoe disgusted. me I have nothing but contempt for those who would let themselves be used in such a way, for ‘men’ who value their wretched lives over all else. That seems to make me a minority.

Sperthias and Bulis argued that Hydarnes counciled against fighting for freedom because he didn’t understand what freedom was like. We live in a world freedom is the only thing many people have known, and for that reason, they don’t really value it. Like the Persian satrap Hydarnes, they argue against fighting for freedom. Not because they don’t know what it’s like to be free, but because they don’t know what it’s like to be a slave. They’d rather be alive than free. I think that’s a damn shame.

In my experienece, most people have little to no understanding of capitalism. They think it encourages greed, and they are completely wrong in that belief. Unfortunately, it’s not just critics of capitalism that think this – I’ve met many defenders of capitalism who have the attitude that greed is good. Greedy people are assholes, and if the world were rid of them, it’d be a lovely place. I think it’s absurd to even debate that. Unfortunately, many defenders of free markets try to do just that. They don’t really understand why the thing they’re defending is worth defending; they just know that the alternative is worse. The fact that many defenders of capitalism try to defend greed probably causes many intelligent, well meaning people to become socialists. This reaction, is, of course, based upon a logical fallacy – a poor argument in support of an idea says nothing about whether the idea itself is poor. The principles underlying free-market capitalism aren’t based upon the idea that greedy people are good, they’re based upon the idea that greedy people are greedy.

Consider a simple story. I frequently start political or philsophical discussions over meals, I suppose because I enjoy harangueing people with my ideas, and I usually eat in some sort of group if I can. Suppose we are eating at a fast food restaurant, and we have finished our meal. Most fast food places provide garabge cans, and bins for used trays. When customers finish eating, they usually take their trays, empty them in the trash, and stack them in the bins. Some people just leave their trash at the table. In any case, the restaurant will pay people to clean up the restaurant, to make sure it looks nice. A nice restaurant is more enjoyable for everybody than a dirty restaurant. The owners of restaurant pay people to clean it up because they want to entice customers into their restaurant. They are motivated by greed. Their greed, coupled with the mechanism of capitalism, ensures that there will be somebody to clean up the mess and that it will get cleaned up.

The people who leave their food on the table are also greedy. Are they making the world better through their greed? No, not at all. They’re leaving their crap for other people to clean up. Does capitalism encourage this? No. It’s not designed to, either. The reason I think capitalism is a great idea is that it ensures that people who are greedy – the restaurant owners – will still be encouraged to do things that benefit others – like cleaning up the mess left by other lazy people. My support for capitalism certainly doesn’t mean I think that greed is a good thing, or that the world would be better if there were more greedy people in it. It just means that I recognize the reality of the world, that it is full of people who are greedy, and that greed is an extremely reliable motive.

There’s a lot more to my support of capitalism – particularly, because of the freedom in a capitalist system. Even if planned economies were more efficient and lead to better standards of living, I wouldn’t want to live in one, because I value my freedom above all else. Fortunately for me, and my fellow capitalists, planned economies are lousy, and despite the warnings of leftist academics in the past, the planned economies around the world have stagnated and collapsed, unable to deliver upon promises made, while the more free markets have grown and prospered.

I think that finding an economic model to subsidize fixed-cost development of ideas is the problem to solve right now. An effective solution would have extremely positive benefits for every human being on the face of the earth. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a simple example: The cost of developing a drug, testing it, and proving that it works so the satisfaction of various regulatory bodies is very high, on the order of one billion dollars. The cost of actually manufacturing the drug once it’s approved, howerver, is almost zero in most cases.

Currently, the way companies pay for development of drugs is through monopolies granted to them by the government: if you pay the cost to develop an idea, you’re the only one who can use the idea for a certain period of time. This worked well in the past, when fixed cost development was rarer. The patent model presents all kinds of problems now that most development in developed nations is of the fixed cost variety. Software patents are granted for absurd algorithms, and the question of ‘content ownership’ leads to manufacturers spending their time finding creative ways to break their products by incorporating ‘Digital Rights Management’ software. I think it’s also far from the ideal situation. In an ideal world, there would be no such thing as patents, and people would still develop ideas anyhow. How can we approximate this idea?

I have a simple solution that I think might actually work. It invovles government and taxation and redistribution of income, so I think it’s something that ought to be considered very carefully, but I think it would be quite effective. Although it is a form of government spending, If this system were implemented in place of other existing governmental systems, I think it could have a positive effect on the budget at as whole. Here’s how it would work:

Every american citizen gets a “basket” of money to spend annually. This basket of money is given to them by the government, but not in the form of cash. The ‘basket’ is given in the form of electronic tokens with monetary values. Americans can choose to spend these tokens however they want. Any person or group can sign up to accept these tokens. Signing up to accept the tokens requires you to agree to disclose as public knowledge all intellectual works you (or your company) produces, as well as your financial records.

I’m not sure what value these tokens would have, but my thinking now is that if every american had around $1,000 worth of tokens to spend, that amount of money ($300 Billion) would more than exceed the amount of public and private money spent to develop drugs and other fixed cost programs. By comparison, in 2007, the NSF recieved just 6 Billion Dollars.

Basically, it’s a micropayment system that people are forced to buy into, and which they can only spend on entities that agree to make public all intellectual works that they produce. The money could be accepted by charities, which would simplify the tax code by allowing us to eliminate the concept of a tax-exempt organizations. The money could be accepted by bloggers who agreed to make all of their information public,

The advantage it has over just having people giving that money away now is largely psychological, I think. People are reluctant to fork over money in a micropayment sense, especially for something they’re already getting for free. If you had $1,000 worth of these tokens, however, and you had to spend them somehow (or else the government would simply reclaim the money internally), people would spend them on things they thought were really important. Market-driven solutions, I think, are always best.

You could maybe extend this model further, and use it to pay for the entire education system. The more I think about it, the more I like it. What do you think?