Can you believe the year is halfway over? And that means it's time to answer questions asked
by $3 supporters for the month of June. Don't worry, you've NEVER missed your chance: you
can always use the links below to go to Patreon or SubscribeStar and subscribe at the $3 level to ask
me questions for the current month, and there are special links below to ask me questions for July.
Let's start on SubscribeStar where Rainbow Asteroids asks: "Why do illegal heroin producers
lace heroin with fentanyl? Wouldn't the overdoses from the fentanyl prevent any repeat customers,
thus losing money and potential profit for the heroin producers?"
You would think, but the incentives for the black market don't work that way. To them,
overdoses are just a cost of doing business, and since they don't have competition from legitimate
pharmaceutical companies, they don't think it's worth it to have proper quality control,
making a dependable, consistent dosage, and making sure it isn't cut with anything dangerous.
Fentanyl is a LOT cheaper to produce than heroin, since you can just make it in a lab
and so you don't need a grow operation. Growing poppies takes time, and authorities can spot it
from helicopters or whatever. Fentanyl can be made indoors or in an underground lab.
So you're not only cutting costs with fentanyl, you're also cutting risk.
Especially when you consider that even a black market fentanyl lab is much safer than a meth lab.
In short, the money they save using fentanyl outweighs anything they'd
lose by losing the business of the few who overdose.
Tomasz Urbański asks: "Is it just me or is the idea of 'you shouldn't have
kids unless you're perfect parent' is at least partially responsible for population decline?"
I don't think so. Pretty much all of it has to do with economics.
The current thinking on this is called Life History Theory,
which replaced the older r/K selection theory which was discredited in the 1990s.
They talk about "age and stage" patterns: This has to do with how old you are,
versus the perceived stage of life you're in. It used to be,
if you were 15 in a lot of cultures, you were ready to get married and start a family.
But that wasn't the case everywhere. If you look at genealogical records,
there are many places where people waited until 30 or so to start having kids.
The difference is, in those areas, people often lived until their 70s, whereas in the other
places with the younger marriage ages, they were doing good to make it through their 50s.
When I was growing up, people in their 80s were considered infirmed and could do very little.
Nowadays, there are people in their 80s who live very active lifestyles,
and people in their 50s today look more like people in their 30s back in the 1970s.
It also has to do with the perceived resources available, and keep in mind
that we're talking about evolutionary psychology so this is unconscious.
If you live in a poor area, you tend to have a lot of kids because most of them
won't make it to adulthood. That was actually the case most places until the 20th century.
If you live in a well-to-do area, or today in a typical place in the US,
you basically have all the food and resources you want.
That means it's more likely offspring will survive, so people have fewer kids.
They actually call that "capital breeding." Capital breeders use resources they accumulated
before breeding to pay for raising their young. That's contrasted with
income breeders, who have to gain resources to raise the kids while raising them.
It's a spectrum, though: few people are purely capital breeders or purely income breeders.
Population density also factors into it. If you're in the suburbs, you're in a pretty optimal area:
you have all the resources you need to survive, and plenty of space as well.
In that scenario, the tendency is towards replacement fertility: every couple has two kids.
But if you live crammed into an inner city, you have a minimal reproductive value (that's the
term they use), so the tendency is to have fewer kids, with a fertility rate below replacement.
So instead of "you shouldn't have kids unless you're perfect parent" being responsible for the
population decline, it's more likely that it's the other way around: the idea of waiting to have kids
when you're in a better situation and have greater knowledge of parenting is a RESULT of this:
people psychologically are prone to wait to have kids, and in more crowded cities, fewer kids, and
are generally more aligned with capital breeders, and this is a reason they come up with for it.
Over on Patreon, Sidd Padmanaban asks: "If you were to give a TED talk on some
libertarianism-related topic, what would it be and what would the talk be titled?"
The answer probably depends on what kind of mood I'm in when they ask me. Right now,
I'd probably do it on how many of our most exalted policies are actually eugenics programs.
That's something I've done a number of videos on,
that more people really need to know about and hardly anyone is pointing out.
Finally, The Executioner asks: "How would debt be handled in a Libertarian order? If someone takes
out a significant balance and refuses to pay how would lenders handle this? Without debtors prisons
(not endorsing them or approve of them) how would people be incentivized to pay off their debts?"
I think mostly the way it is now, with a free market version of credit ratings.
If someone is hip deep in debt and won't pay it, why on Earth should YOU lend them any money?
And if you're a landlord, why should you continue renting to them for fear they won't pay?
Bob Murphy has a good video on this kind of thing, he was doing it for all sorts of crime,
not just debt, but what sort of things would an ancap society have that's analogous to prisons?
And he has his own solution, which he stylizes as hotels. Not THE solution, of course, but just one
possibility, and with freed minds, people will probably come up with all sorts of solutions.
And there would even be more than one in play, so you could make the choice.
If a DDRO comes at you, and you tell them, hey, instead of putting the screws on me
for my future paychecks, how about I check into a Murphy Hotel? Or whatever.
So your question really seems to contain an invalid assumption: "How would debt be handled"
implies that there's a single solution for it, AND that we know what it is now. There are all sorts
of potential solutions, most of which we probably haven't even thought of, and entrepreneurs will
be incentivized to come up with them and try them out and we'll go with the ones that work the best.
So, that's it for another month! Thanks for watching! Comments for the Comment
God! Shares for the Share Throne! And please hit Like, Subscribe, and the bell,
and go to donate.bogosity.tv to keep me doing what I do. You'll also find the links to my Patreon
and SubscribeStar there so you can become a regular supporter and get all my content
early and ad-free, and you can also get other benefits like special Discord access, as well
as monthly AMAs and shout-outs. Thanks again, and until next time, stay strong and be free.