Starving the Monkeys: Fight Back Smarter

by Tom Baugh

  Consider a lowly kilowatt-hour, an essential resource for push which is, for now, taken for granted by most who might be reading this book. We shall see how valuable this ten-cent resource is in a moment, but for now consider its use.

  Imagine giving a reasonably functional computer, itself a concentrate of some of the best ideas of humanity, and a kilowatt-hour to an engineer. He might use these resources to design a product or a highway overpass which delivers a higher quality of life to many others for years to come.

  Give that same computer and kilowatt-hour to a Zimbabwean farmer, and at best he might use it as a stone to repair a wall or burn a bulb in his hut for a day. This does not mean that the Zimbabwean is stupid or incompetent, just that in his world these items have little consequence as they are completely out of context. For example, his hut may not even have a bulb or wiring to power it. And you thought it was time to label me a racist, didn't you?

  Does the engineer consume more than his "fair share" of the world's resources? From the perspective of the typical monkey, you bet! But, does that engineer produce more value more efficiently with those resources than the Zimbabwean farmer? Yep. In fact, the Zimbabwean may receive aid in the form of grain which was grown with that engineer's product or shipped over his bridge. So who should more rightfully be allocated those resources?

  The middle group of mankind in the figure includes those who have excess resources beyond mere subsistence. But, these persons may lack access to resources, including ideas or motivation, which would enable them to become significantly productive. Whether or not a particular individual inhabits this group depends on the perspective of the observer. If you spend a non-trivial amount of your income in a big-box discount store, you are probably here. This group is limited to accessing only those resources which are considered, in marketing terms, mass-market, high-volume and low margin.

  A large block of humanity trickles down into the subsistence region, populated by the third group. There is a minimum amount of stuff which is required to maintain life, and so by definition no member of humanity has access to resources below this minimum value, at least for very long. Otherwise, they would die of starvation or exposure. As we shall see, collectivist policies and interventions require that these people remain hostage to their circumstances in order to maintain the collectivist's hold on power.

  Because their circumstances are so marginal, it is the intent of the collectivist to strip them of their power. The first power which the collectivist seeks to remove is the power of ideas to change those circumstances for themselves. As a result, they will never represent a significant market of return value for the rest of humanity. And so, they will remain a hole into which is poured resources seized from others.

  The net effect of this resource distribution from the more prosperous groups to the lower is not that this group improves in their circumstances, but that it increases in size. This increase in size happens both in absolute terms as well as a percentage of population. Some members of the middle group (not to be confused with our notion of middle class, although there is significant overlap), frustrated by their being blocked from higher levels, may decide to relax into the resource distribution which guarantees a minimum subsistence. Meanwhile, members of the lower group may increase of their own accord by reproduction or deferred starvation.

  Now hand out the collectivist ideal of universal suffrage, unlike that more responsible suffrage envisioned by the founders, and you can easily predict where society will head.

  So to what group do monkeys belong? Surprisingly, all of them. We shall see in a moment that monkeys come in all colors, shapes and inhabit a variety of social strata. Many social theorists might imagine, through elitist lenses, that monkeys are concentrated in the lower strata. But, this shortsighted view ignores the fact that children of the successful can turn into absolute brats, while children of the hard-worn can learn lessons which their parents never imagined. Collectivist intervention, however, denies upward mobility to the latter while encouraging the former to plummet as far as they wish.

  Similarly, men exist in all these groups as well. In most cases, intervention of the collective seeks to suppress individuality in order to enslave them and push them down in the strata. At the least, this intervention prevents them from moving upward and acquiring additional resources for their own application.

  The Value of Work We will return to the economic philosophy in a moment, but first we need to take time to discuss the notion of work. Collectivist ideals, whether originating from the secular or religious realm, imagine that physical work itself has virtue, when in fact man's muscles are of very little consequence. This is not to say that a good sweaty day in the field doesn't release endorphins to improve one's mood. Or improve the form of the lady who sweats as you watch her exertions from the shade. No, I just mean that a diesel tractor might do the actual job better and faster.

  Work is the ability to transform stuff into more valuable resources. I mentioned earlier that energy is the means with which stuff is transformed, and so energy powers work. But what exactly is the value of work? Well, within the context of Baugh's Theorem, let's first see how much energy is required to perform a certain amount of work.

  In scientific terms, work is measured in Joules. A kilowatt-hour which comes from the wall socket costs, at the time of this writing, about ten cents. If political and environmental rhetoric is to be taken at face value, you will soon pine for this price.

  This kilowatt-hour contains three million, six hundred thousand Joules, or 3.6 Mega Joules (MJ). One might imagine that this is not a lot of energy in our modern terms, it being capable of powering a sixty-watt light bulb for only about sixteen hours. But one would be very, very wrong about what that dime buys.

  Imagine that you have a pond which sits six feet below the level of a field which requires irrigation. For kicks, you hand your wife an empty two-liter bottle and tell her to fill it up in the pond and dump it in the field. Ignore for a moment the pleasant undulations which result as she walks back and forth between the pond and the field. Instead, consider only the act of her bending over to fill it and then stretching on her tippy toes to pour it out six feet above.

  That bottle of water weighs about 2 kilograms, or a little over four pounds. When she is lifting that bottle up a six-foot height she is moving it through a distance of about 2 meters. In scientific terms, assuming you are on Earth around sea-level at the time, she has just performed about 40 Joules of work on the water:

  Now recall that a kilowatt-hour is 3,600,000 J, or about ninety thousand times as large. A completely efficient pump would be able to do this ninety thousand times with that same ten cents of electricity which ran your sixty watt bulb for sixteen hours.

  A pump which was only fifty percent efficient would only be able to lift forty-five thousand two-liter bottles. But even so, this is far out of proportion to the work required of a person, who would also have to wait for the bottles to fill and empty. For argument's sake, we will assume perfect efficiency, although the same arguments apply equally well with whatever pump of poor efficiency you might care to buy.

  A kilowatt-hour can perform the same amount of work whether it takes an hour, a minute or a day. In any of these time periods, ninety thousand bottles are moved uphill. Just for fun, let's assume our pump does this amount of work in an hour. Take any muscle-bound brute you might imagine, and set him at the task in the place of your wife while she takes a break to prepare dinner. There is no chance he can perform this work, which requires lifting just short of 27 bottles per second, with muscle power alone. Even at fifty-percent efficiency he still needs to move more than 13 bottles each second, assuming they were filled and waiting for him to pick up and toss over the dam.

  And if he does manage this Herculean feat for an hour, imagine what might happen to you after you offer to pay him a dime for his hour's effort. You at least will get a little head start as he catches his breath.

  Yet, a seven-year-old girl m
ight raise little yellow chicks and trade them for a dime. If she trades this dime for electricity, she can get this work done all day long every day so long as she has peeps to pay. These things now retail for about two bucks a peep in small quantities, by the way. Or 1.8 million bottles moved uphill per little yellow chick. All she needs is a pump and some hose, and she isn't going to get that from Zimbabwe, or from any others in the lower groups, is she?

  Electricity, at ten cents per kilowatt-hour, is ridiculously cheap when compared to the work it can perform. To prove my point, I challenge you to get that amount of work done for ten cents using any method you choose. You will rapidly run out of options.

  An interesting corollary to this idea is that if you actually need to pump water, there is a certain minimum amount of energy required to get it done. Once you have a perfectly efficient pump, unattainable in reality, you will still need a minimum of one kilowatt-hour to move those ninety-thousand bottles of water up that hill into the irrigation system. Budget any less, and get ready to have less food. Wishing to save the planet, hoping to change physics, or dancing your rabbit isn't going to make any difference.

  Gasoline, or diesel for that matter, is also terribly cheap at current prices. 100 mL of either, or a little less than half a cup of these liquid fuels, contains about the same amount of push as a kilowatt-hour of electricity. At $4.00 per gallon, 100 mL of either fuel costs about the same ten cents. So, if gasoline or diesel are less than that per gallon they are undervalued compared to electricity, which as we have seen is itself cheap.

  Compare either fuel or electricity to minimum wage, and the work capable of being done by minimum wage muscles, and you will see that minimum wage work is worth less than it is paid. Far less. No one in his right mind would hand a minimum wage worker a shovel when there is an option to put skilled operator at the controls of a diesel backhoe. Yet, many job creation programs, or exhortations to work for the good of the soul, are functionally no better than this obviously contrived example.

  Notice that I said skilled operator. That skilled operator is using his mind to control the machine. The machine amplifies his efforts at his command through the relatively weak and puny apparatus of his body, whatever its form. It is his skill at operating the machine which makes him of value, not the strength of his limbs or his status in a collective. A quadruple amputee operating that backhoe, with a suitable interface to his facial muscles and limb stubs, would beat whatever minimum-wage shoveler you pick. It is the fuel and the machine which make the difference. Put that same amputee at the controls of teleoperated mining equipment, such as in use in Canada today, and there would no longer be any need for heroic coal-miner folk songs.

  At ten cents per kilowatt-hour, or $4.00 per gallon, energy is ridiculously cheap compared to the work it enables you to perform. At ten times the price, I would still want it, and will find some way to pay for it. At hundred times the price, it is uncomfortable, but still cheap. Imagine paying that water brute $10.00, or one hundred times the cost of a kilowatt-hour as I write this, to lift your water. Although his hour is now within the economic realm for an hour of labor, he still physically can't compete. The effort required to lift ninety-thousand bottles is just too much.

  Not that manual labor is unimportant, far from it. Someone had to assemble that backhoe, and service it, or put the screws in that pump. But unless you want to live in a world in which a shovel is your only option, you had better get in the way of nuts who want to limit access to energy by whatever method. Otherwise, kiss those roads and bridges goodbye, along with all those frozen foods. And start digging and hauling the old way. And learn to ignore the smell of rotting flesh. When it gets to that point the shovel itself is in question, too. Ore had to be hauled, smelted and forged into that shovel's blade. But each of these operations uses carbon (gasp).

  As for me, I'm going to figure out how to pay for that ten-dollar kilowatt-hour, or make it myself, no matter how the monkeys choose to starve themselves. You can too.

  Ideas are Transformative Man's most useful tools, and his best weapon against raw nature and privation, are his ideas. His best ideas are those which manipulate his environment in ways which produce a more beneficial arrangement of stuff, which usually leads to an increased quality of life.

  However, ideas can be destructive as well as constructive. The destructive forms of ideas are those propounded by monkeys, and which tend to redistribute stuff in ways detrimental to those who worked to accumulate it. Redistribution takes away resources, including stuff and time, from those men best able to transform them into more useful stuff. Redistribution then gives those resources to monkeys who only consume. Because of redistribution, society as a whole suffers. In the short term, however, monkeys prosper from this redistribution, so from their perspective as a loyal constituency of the collective, justice has been done.

  Where Money Comes From We are now prepared to see where all value, and by extension the useless fiat currency known as money, comes from.

  All money (meaning more of each resource) is derived from locally increasing the quality of life for someone else. It is that simple.

  Value doesn't get created by cheating or scheming or creating a need or a government program. Those things can get you money, but are destructive to the culture as a whole. Schemes remove value from a society, and are the economic equivalent of a tornado. The destruction wrought may create jobs for some, but value was destroyed nonetheless.

  No, actual economic value gets created when someone, somewhere is willing to increase your quality of life in exchange for your increasing theirs. A scientist might restate that idea as:

  Scientists and engineers use the Greek letter Δ, pronounced delta, to indicate a change. In the above expression, Q represents the quality of life matrix which we have been discussing, in the context of a particular individual. I now drop the subscript i to indicate that I mean an individual in a culture, as there really is no analog for cultural quality of life.

  Quality of life has no context outside the perspective of an individual. A diamond lying on the ground means nothing to a culture unless at least one individual places a value on it. And only then does it have any referential value to another individual who might seek it to trade to the first.

  This sounds like that old counter-culture quote: "All values are relative." In economic terms, it is absolutely true. At lunch time that dollar in my pocket isn't worth to me as much as that giga value burger. From the restaurant's perspective, exactly the opposite is true, or else they wouldn't give me that burger for my dollar, they would keep it for themselves.

  The same reasoning applies to quality of life. People must have different values for their quality of life. If not, we would all be just fighting over the same stuff. I don't want a diamond. But if I unearthed a bunch of them with my backhoe one day I would certainly start looking around for someone who did want one. The exchange I would subsequently make with them would improve both our lives. Even if I could only find one person whom a diamond would benefit, I would still be able to increase the overall quality of life in the culture by that tiny amount.

  If I couldn't find a single individual who placed value on those diamonds, they would just be useless rocks, unless I fooled someone into thinking they were valuable. And then the overall quality of life in the culture would go down, since I would have received valuable money in exchange for ultimately damaging someone else's actual quality of life.

  This is an important point. No cultural more or value has any intrinsic context unless it benefits at least one individual somewhere. But often in our modern economy, imaginary benefits are substituted for real benefits. If someone tries to convince you to sacrifice some quality of your life, without recompense, then it is because he seeks to transfer that value to himself or others at your expense. To hide this fact the monkey collective will often state this one-sided transfer in other terms, such as "save the planet" or "benefit all mankind" or "reduce your carbon footprint". By allowing your
preferences to be manipulated in this way, you are participating willingly in your self-sacrifice.

  More importantly, understanding that money (from now on I use money to mean the underlying resource value which it is supposed to represent, and not the useless script itself) comes from increasing the quality of life of someone else allows all things to be understood in their proper context. This then is what scientists might call the Theory of Everything, at least in sociological terms. Notice that I didn't say in economic terms. This idea is more sublime than mere economics, and derives from the way in which God has decided that man should interact with His nature and each other. It also explains the otherwise stupefying ways of the monkey, his destructive nature, and the many gambits which the monkey might employ to eat men alive. This idea also explains the only rational solution which remains to the monkey question, all other efforts having been exhausted.

  We saw before that quality of life depends on the amount of stuff (including stored energy), push, time and ideas available to individuals. But quality of life also depends heavily upon the value which each individual chooses to assign to those quantities. From this we can derive several important principles, each of which shows how to increase one's own quality of life in service to one's fellows. Or, as the monkey chooses to do, shows how to seize unearned value from the efforts of their betters. We will first concentrate on the positive side of this idea, which includes increasing the quality of life for others directly, or indirectly by pumping value.

  Locally Increase Quality of Life The first practical way to employ the quality of life formulation of value is, as Og and Pok discovered, to increase the quality of life matrix for others in exchange for quality of life for yourself. I call this concept increasing Q, or adding positive delta Q. In addition to mere trade of goods, when you help your customers or clients meet their goals through your services, you are doing the same thing by increasing their quality of life.