Trade Is Just Taking With a Smile On It

In my last post, I talked about replacing the entrepreneur mindset with a survival mindset -- thinking in terms of risk, threat vectors, and staying on the board instead of "building value" and "growing organically." That piece was about the practical framework: how to think.

This one is about what you see when you start thinking that way. Because once you adopt the survival lens and start looking at the systems around you -- trade, money, law, institutions -- you realize that what you were told about how they work and what's actually happening are very different things.

What "Trade" Actually Is

We've all internalized a beautiful story about how the economy works. You create value, you exchange it fairly, and everyone wins. It's a nice story. It keeps things running. But look at it through the survival lens and the picture changes.

Trade is one thing when everything's already on the table and you don't need to go get it from the Congo. But what are you doing when you go over to the Congo to "buy" resources for pennies on the dollar? Are you really trading? You have comfort, peace, resources, safety. They can't come to where you are to get what you have. But you can go where they are and take what they have and give them what they're able to demand -- what their government lets them demand based on how well it's able to protect them from being taken from. Is that really trade? Or is it a graduated form of taking?

Now bring it closer to home. Is it really trade when a billionaire wants something that a thousandaire (not a real word, but you get it) has? The billionaire wants the thousandaire's time. He wants the time of many, many thousandaires so they can build what he wants. They can say no to him, sure. But they can't say no to everyone, or they'll never be able to get what they need to buy food and survival. They can't survive without saying yes.

That's not trade. That's taking with a smile on it.

I'm not pointing this out to complain about it. I'm pointing it out because if you don't see it, you can't navigate it. The people at the top see it clearly, and they operate accordingly. They're not evil for it -- they're just not pretending. The question is whether you're going to keep pretending or start seeing clearly too.

Nature is all about taking and surviving. Taking a resource, taking a life. Trade is a layer we built on top of that reality. A very useful layer -- maybe the most important invention in human history. But underneath it, the dynamics of taking never went away. They just got dressed up.

The Treadmill

Apply the same lens to how money works, and you'll see something even more fundamental.

Banks don't lend out money they have. Through fractional reserve lending, they create money from thin air -- they take in a deposit and lend out multiples of it. Every loan creates new dollars that didn't exist before. This means the money supply is constantly expanding, which means inflation is baked in structurally. It's not a bug. It's the feature.

What does inflation actually do? It erodes the value of whatever you're holding. Your savings lose purchasing power every single year. Your cash rots. The only way to stay even is to put your money to work -- invest it, risk it, deploy it. And the only way to get ahead is to take on debt and leverage, because debt gets cheaper over time while assets get more expensive. The entire system is a treadmill that punishes you for standing still.

This is a system of control. It ensures that no critical mass of people can ever accumulate enough stability to just bow out. You can never save your way to freedom, because your savings are melting. You can never just "have enough," because enough today isn't enough tomorrow. You have to keep participating. You have to keep working. You have to keep feeding the economy with your time and labor, because the alternative is watching everything you've built slowly dissolve.

Now -- and this is the key -- the treadmill doesn't apply to everyone equally. If you get rich enough, inflation barely touches you. You own the assets that inflate. You hold the debt that others service. The system that keeps most people running is the same system that compounds your advantage once you've broken through to the other side of it. That's not a flaw in the design. That's the design.

Once you see this, you understand why "just work hard and save" is a script -- not a strategy. It keeps the treadmill spinning for the people who benefit from it spinning. The survival-minded person sees this and doesn't get angry. They get strategic. They ask: how do I get to the other side? How do I stop being the one on the treadmill and start being the one who owns it?

The System Works -- But Not the Way You Think

Here's the part that most people miss when they hear all this, and the part that I think is actually the most interesting.

Understanding the world in terms of taking doesn't mean it's a zero-sum bloodbath where nobody can thrive. I don't believe that. We live inside a system -- a nation that protects its citizens from each other, that honors a system of trade via currency, that enforces laws and contracts. And that system genuinely works. It's a real accomplishment. It keeps things stable enough for billions of people to live relatively peaceful, productive lives. It allows people who prefer not to think in terms of survival -- who want to create, to enjoy, to live peacefully -- to do exactly that.

But the system is still amenable to those who think in terms of taking. More than amenable -- it's dominated by them. The people who think this way end up on top of the people who don't, every single time, because the system doesn't prevent it. It just smooths out the edges.

Take the courts. Sure, the legal system is "fair." Everyone gets their day. But what does that day actually look like when one side has spent a lifetime accumulating power and the other side hasn't? One side can afford the better attorneys -- not just better, but the ones who have relationships with the judges, who know the clerks, who've been through this a thousand times. One side can apply pressure in ways that never show up in a courtroom -- a call to a mutual associate, a business relationship that suddenly gets complicated, a counterclaim that costs the other side more to fight than the original dispute was worth. One side can outlast the other simply by making the process expensive enough that the other side gives up.

Is that corruption? Not technically. The system works exactly as designed. It's just that the system was designed by people who think in terms of taking and survival, and it naturally advantages those who continue to think that way. The rules are real, the courts are real, the protections are real -- but access to all of it scales with power. And power accumulates to those who think strategically about how to take and hold it.

Seeing the Architecture

What I find most valuable about all this isn't the anger or the edge or the "everyone's out to get you" feeling. It's the clarity.

Once you see the architecture -- the inflation treadmill, the graduated taking dressed up as trade, the way power scales inside institutions that are nominally fair -- you can very plainly start to understand what it is about our system that actually works, and why. You can see what keeps things in harmony. You can see what allows people who prefer not to think in these terms to still exist comfortably within it. You can appreciate the engineering of it, even as you learn to navigate it at a level most people never will.

Anyone who is not able to take what they want on some level is submitting, unless they want for nothing. And any form of submission is a slippery slope toward dependence. But the system is specifically designed to make submission tolerable -- even enjoyable. And for most people, that's fine. It works for them, and they live good lives inside it.

The question is just whether you want to understand the architecture or live inside it without knowing what's holding it up. One isn't morally better than the other. But one gives you a hell of a lot more options.

And once you see it, you can't un-see it.