Sorry for the headline. It's really not meant to be an insult. In fact, even an economist will tell you they prefer a frictionless universe. And what is a dick but a friction device? Its essence is friction. Economists will therefore readily admit they prefer the lack thereof. Rather than an insult, it's a compliment.

I think there is good dicklessness and bad dicklessness. The latter kind is the reason growth has stalled in the developing and developed world. Let me explain the hypothesis: You see, free markets work best without friction, the free movement of people, capital and ideas creates equilibrium and comparative advantage...

Except that there are borders. And borders are enforced by rules (but really by guns). And people get stuck behind borders. And what do the bad dickless do? They sell the enforcers more and more guns, in the name of frictionlessness. But it's in bad faith. Actually and obviously guns create friction. Guns are a reminder that your free thoughts are the tethered to a fleshy prison. Guns keep people from organizing and demanding higher wages, i.e. Equilibrium.

By now it has become fashionable for some dickless to frantically replace their missing dicks with guns, and to blame stagnant growth on overzealous pensions, entitlements promised during different times, which in hindsight we should have known we could never ever pay. General Motors, public schools, infrastructure, healthcare... all of these things failed because lazy people want too much money, say they to their hired guns.

But what if all of the things that cost insane amounts of money are not actually expensive? What if they simply reflect the cost you would need to pay to engage with the world using your actual dick instead of an abstraction, backed by a gun? In other words, what if other stuff, like clothes, sneakers and iphones only seems cheap because these are the only things we can successfully "abstract," i.e. maintain in disequilibrium with guns?

Like, when I need dental care or a doctors visit, I can't fly to Indonesia to buy that. It's too inconvenient, cause I'm three dimensional (actually four, but let's not even go there). I'm this clunky body and jet fuel is expensive especially considering the externalities etc. If my little kids need to go to school and interact with humans to learn, it's too inconvenient to fly to China to get them educated there, especially when I work literally on the other side of the planet.

So what becomes of the fucked up economy dreamed up by the paranoid variety of dickless economist? I think the beauty of flesh is that its rules, unlike the unbounded imagination, are fixed. And when equilibrium isn't allowed to happen gradually, it happens violently. Remember all of those guns that y'all sold to the godforsaken corners of the earth?

In other words, those hired guns gotta get paid. Once you reduce both consumers and makers to mere slaves, shackled by guns or debt or both, there isn't anyone left even to buy stuff anymore, and you run out of money to pay your hired guns... That's one way the disequilibrium could go.

OR we can try to have faith in frictionlessness. Relinquish our dicks. Realize that capital is essentially limitless because unlike material fleshy stuff education can be imparted instead of made, like love and friendship. Capital is not a resource to be mined and it is not a zero sum game. Humans aren't resources, insofar as they are dickless in good faith, they MAKE resources.

The steam engine was invented in Ancient Rome and was never developed because of the abundance of cheap slave labor. If the dickless had set the people free we could have had an industrial revolution half a millennium early. That is how we find ourselves in the year 2016 with billions much sicker, dumber, and having less free time than your average Roman slave. But then again, the Romans only had knives and bludgeons. Guns hadn't been invented yet.