Happiness: A Worthwhile Purpose in Life

Experts would like to make us believe that there are objective standards in attaining happiness. From such premise, they come with all sorts of math-psychology based models or methodology, e.g. Happiness economics, to ascertain happiness. They attribute happiness mostly to well-being and wealth, from which they justify institutional coercion to supposedly attain such goals.

The fact is that happiness is subjective. Happiness comes from within us, as individuals. Happiness is distinct from person to person. As a state of mind, Happiness revolves around our preferences, value scales and ideals as expressed through expectations, goals and corresponding actions.

This means that happiness have not just been about material things, or about social acceptance or social status but of having a worthwhile purpose in life.

Libertarian author Robert Ringer explains at the Early to Rise 

Happiness has been defined in myriad ways over the centuries by some of the world’s greatest thinkers.  Aristotle described happiness as a condition rather than a destination.  Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to it as a journey.

But I think Viktor Frankl got to the heart of the matter even better when he explained that if there is a reason for happiness, happiness ensues.  Happiness, said Frankl, is a side effect of having a purpose in life.

In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl explained, “What man needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling of some goal worthy of him.”  In other words, man’s purpose in life is not to achieve goals, but to constantly strive toward them…

Why people look for issues to represent them:

Regardless of whether protest marches have to do with world peace, eradicating poverty, or saving whales from extinction, the reality is that they do not fill the void inherent in a meaningless life.  If man were to succeed in ridding the world of all disease, poverty, pestilence, famine, and war, what then would be the purpose of his existence?

As the struggle for man’s day-to-day survival has increasingly subsided, an important question has emerged:  survival for what?  In other words, just having the means to live is not enough; a person must have something to live for…

Finding your life’s purpose:

And if there is no purpose to an individual’s life — no meaning — then there’s no reason even to get out of bed in the morning, no reason to be alive.  In the words of the great Albert Einstein, “The man who regards his life as meaningless is not merely unhappy, but hardly fit for life.”

The more I reflect on the question, and the more I draw from my own experience and the experiences of others, the more convinced I am that striving toward goals is not a means to an end; striving is an end in itself.  Those who wish their lives away in anticipation of achieving some long-awaited goal do themselves a grave disservice…

The fact is that it’s possible to achieve all your goals in life, yet miss out on life itself.  And the best insurance policy against that happening is to have a worthwhile purpose in life and live in the present.

Read the full article here

Quote of the Day: The Knowledge Problem

As with Hayek’s work, central to Pennington’s book is a deep understanding of the knowledge problem.  This of course involves understanding that the relative values of alternative outputs that can be produced with the same set of inputs can be determined only in competitive, private-property-based markets.  But this understanding involves more; it also involves the realization that such knowledge is never and can never be “given” (as is assumed in economics textbooks).  That is, this knowledge is not simply revealed by decentralized, competitive decision-making; it is also produced by that process. 

No consumer comes to market with a detailed, full, and fixed scale of values that he seeks to satisfy.  That scale takes shape only as consumers confront actual alternative opportunities in the market.  Likewise, no producer comes to market with detailed, full, and fixed plans on exactly what to produce, how to produce it, and how much of it to produce.  Those plans take operational shape, and are modified, in light of actual experience in the market—a market whose details are always changing in unanticipated ways for both consumers and producers.

The knowledge problem, though, has yet another dimension beyond the economic.  It springs from the fact that different people have different scales of ethical and political values…Egalitarians of various stripes, “market-failure” theorists of various pedigrees, and environmentalists of various shades of green all typically base their social-engineering schemes not only on a presumed agreement on ends that is unlikely to exist, but also on the simplistic assumption that knowledge of the rankings of various ends is easily gathered and made known to government officials.

(bold emphasis added)

This splendid explanation of the knowledge problem is from Professor Donald Boudreaux’s book review of Mark Pennington’s Robust Political Economy at  the freemanonline.org

The Myth of ‘Safe Assets’

The IMF is concerned about the potential shortage of supply of “safe assets”

Writes the Wall Street Journal Blog

Worries about nations’ fiscal health could cut the world’s supply of “safe” government debt by 16% in the next four years, the International Monetary Fund said Wednesday.

The diminishing supply comes even as demand rises for safe assets such as high-quality corporate bonds and sovereign debt, which many banks and investors need amid market uncertainty and regulatory changes.

The shrinking pool of safe assets could create more worries about financial stability, the IMF said.

“Safe asset scarcity will increase the price of safety and compel investors to move down the safety scale as they scramble to obtain scarce assets,” the fund said in its Global Financial Stability Report. “It could also lead to more short-term spikes in volatility, and shortages of liquid, stable collateral that acts as the ‘lubricant’ or substitute of trust in financial transactions.”

The notion of ‘safe assets’, which rest on the assumption of ‘intrinsic value’, is really an illusion. It has been a myth repeatedly peddled, inculcated and propagandized for the public to accept the falsehood of the necessity of the welfare-warfare state. The power to tax does not guarantee economic and financial feasibility and consequently ‘security’.

Safety does not emerge out of government decree, as the recent crisis or as history shown whether applied to government bonds or to money.

Instead, valuations are subjectively determined by acting man or by individuals.

The great Professor Ludwig von Mises explained

Value is the importance that acting man attaches to ultimate ends. Only to ultimate ends is primary and original value assigned. Means are valued derivatively according to their serviceableness in contributing to the attainment of ultimate ends. Their valuation is derived from the valuation of the respective ends. They are important for man only as far as they make it possible for him to attain some ends.

Value is not intrinsic, it is not in things. It is within us; it is the way in which man reacts to the conditions of his environment.

Neither is value in words and doctrines. It is reflected in human conduct. It is not what a man or groups of men say about value that counts, but how they act. The oratory of moralists and the pompousness of party programs are significant as such. But they influence the course of human events only as far as they really determine the actions of men.

Put differently, to paraphrase a popular axiom, safe assets are in the eyes of the beholder.

Take for instance gold.

Gold was essentially an ignored asset at the start of the new millennium, however following 11 consecutive years of price increases, the public’s perception has substantially changed. Now gold has been incorporated as part of the safe asset list of the IMF.

Through history, gold’s perceived safety arises from the money attributes it possesses compared with, or relative to, fiat currencies.

As I previously wrote,

paper currencies are basically IOUs issued and stamped by governments as “legal tender” and backed by nothing but FAITH in the issuer. Because paper money is an IOU, it bears counterparty risks.

Where money as a medium of exchange requires these characteristics: durability, divisibility, scarcity, portability, uniformity and acceptability, unlimited issuance of paper money essentially diminishes the moneyness quality of paper currencies. As we cited earlier given the massive and full scale deployment of the printing press globally, such the raises the risk of a potential of disintegration of the present financial architecture.

However gold may not permanently be a refuge asset either. A serendipitous discovery of a process that enables gold to be produced abundantly would lead to a loss of the current attributes and thereby the subsequent loss of gold’s moneyness. And in the world of rapid advances in technology this is something we cannot discount.

To quote Dr. Frank Shostak

If the increase in the supply of gold were to persist, people would likely abandon gold as the medium of exchange and adopt another commodity.

Bottom line: Safety is matter of subjective individual valuations and definitely not decreed by politicians and or the bureaucracy.

Chart from Dr. Ed Yardeni

To the contrary, what government declares as “safe” are likely to be the riskiest assets. A good example is the ongoing crisis in the Eurozone where toxicity has surfaced out of supposed “safe” debt instruments.

It has been the nature of the state to abuse on their powers, by plundering their citizenry through arbitrary laws, or policies of financial repression (includes inflationism), that ultimately undermines the quality of government issued papers.

In short, self-destructive actions cannot be reckoned as ‘risk free’ which serves as a paradoxical, or must I add absurd, proposition.

Video: Understanding Subjective Value

Professor Don Boudreaux explains subjective value (hat tip Professor Art Carden; Mises Blog)

Video: Don Boudreaux on Subjective Value

Professor Don Boudreaux explains subjective value (from Learn Liberty)