Economics Lesson: How the Price System And Cooperation In A Free Market Eliminate Poverty | Hn 142

**Adam Haman** (0:07)
Hello there, and welcome to Haman Nature. I am Adam Haman. That spiky fellow over there is my buddy Tyrone. How are you doing, man?

**Tyrone** (0:16)
I'm doing good. I'm feeling a little nerdy today.

**Adam Haman** (0:20)
That is very good because our episode today is going to be the second in our installment, covering this new book, relatively new, Economics in Three Lessons, that looks like this. A reprisal of Henry Hazlitt's famous Economics in One Lesson. This new one is by Hunter Lewis, who has written a bunch of interesting books. We are going through this book bit by bit, piece by piece, and breaking it down, and giving our commentary, teaching you economics and other stuff.

**Tyrone** (0:58)
Yeah. The previous episode in this playlist, we started with the first lesson. That was just a nice short one-chapter lesson on the topic of sustainability, what that means from an economic perspective. Now we're moving on to Lesson Two, but we're going to break this lesson up into three episodes, because it's a bit of a longer section in the book. It's multiple chapters, so we're going to tackle a couple of chapters at a time. Today we're going to do Lesson Two, and from the book, that's Chapters Two and Three. As I mentioned, Lesson One was titled Sustainability. Lesson Two is titled The Free Price System. All right. So, Chapter Two. Oh, and if you hadn't watched the first video, folks, I highly recommend you go back because, you know, these lessons build on top of each other. But the way we're doing this is I'm literally just going to read from the book, pause every once in a while, and we'll fill in with some commentary and feedback, maybe clarify things. I mean, sometimes a lot of this stuff is written in older language, ways of speaking. So, you know, Adam might reinterpret some of this stuff for you because he's the big brain on the show.

**Adam Haman** (2:21)
Plus I'm old.

**Tyrone** (2:22)
I'm the handsome idiot.

**Adam Haman** (2:23)
Plus I'm old, I know old stuff.

**Tyrone** (2:27)
All right, so chapter two, the central role played by Free Prices. And he starts the chapter with a quote from Osteen Dahl.
Soviet socialism collapsed because it did not tell the economic truth. All right, well, why is the human race so poor? That is a good question. Why do billions still lack enough even to eat? As this author noted in an earlier book, even a small sum of money, such as $10, if compounded at 3% over 1,000 years, would produce a sum equal to twice the world's wealth today. It should be ridiculously easy over time to end human poverty. Why have we failed to do so? Failure to cooperate, to work together is the obvious answer. There is very little each of us can do alone, but there is endless opportunity in organizing ourselves to work constructively together in an ever-broadening circle. Like children, we refuse to do what is clearly in our long-term interest to do. We either think only of the short-term or sacrifice the common and greater good for the immediate benefit of our particular group. Moreover, we cover up and lie about what we are doing. Lie both to ourselves and others. So that first part there, Adam, seems to be kind of just a statement, observation of basic human nature itself. Do you have any additional thoughts on that?

**Adam Haman** (4:18)
Well, yeah, he glosses over it kind of quickly in this chapter. I'm not sure if he's exactly done doing that in just these first two paragraphs, but he's really talking about if humans want to prosper, we have to cooperate and get beyond the high time preference that is our basic, brutish nature when we're all starving and rooting around in the dirt for grubs and rotten fruit or whatever. And so we're talking about economics as the study of how you get from that barbaric situation to human cooperation and prosperity, and free prices have a lot to do with that, and how do you get those? You adhere to some basic tenets of civilization, such as free association, private property rights, rule of law, contracts, stopping theft and violence and all that horrible stuff. And I really love that he's emphasizing, again, that the time preference thing as being the bedrock of civilization. He's exactly right.

**Tyrone** (5:19)
All right. So Hunter Lewis continues on in the chapter. How can we do better? First of all, we must be assured of our physical safety and the safety of our property. How can we consider the long term if our life and property are at risk at any moment from human predators, whether criminal or sanctioned by the government? It is difficult to consider the long term if everything we have can be stolen at any moment. But safety and protection from theft is not enough either. In addition, we need an honest system of mutual exchange that everyone can rely on. A corrupt and dishonest economic system does not create wealth, it destroys it. And we talk a lot about that on the show, right? That this fake fiat monetary system that we have corrupts society, corrupts your soul, corrupts everything it touches until eventually, it's just going to destroy society, it's going to decay it.