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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Can there be such a thing as too much fun?
Can there be such a thing as too much profit?
In both cases, I think ‘no’. And I wonder if the fear of ‘too much’ fun and ‘too much’ profit is fundamentally the same thing.
Like, when parents worry that their kids are having too much fun, and when socialists are suspicious of companies turning a profit… is that an expression of the same fear?
Maybe the role of profit in the economy is the same as that of fun in a single mind: it signals successful discovery of common preferences.
Coercion in the economy is when a trade happens even though the price would otherwise be too high for at least one of the parties involved.
If emotions are price signals in the mind, maybe bad emotions signal a high price. Coercing yourself to do something you don’t want to do then means to disregard that high price and do the thing anyway. You pay a high price you wouldn’t otherwise pay. Similar to coercion in the economy.
Is there a universal evil at work in both coercive economies and coercive minds? A kind of socialism of the mind?
Coercion in the economy is when a trade happens even though the price would otherwise be too high for at least one of the parties involved.
But coercion is also when a trade is forced NOT to happen even though it otherwise would have happened. Like outlawing certain types of trade through minimum-wage laws.