We vastly underestimate what we can do with our physical labor. I just went to build a house with Casas por Cristo in Acuna, Mexico. It's a missions trip to build homes for poor people, where all the materials are ready to build and the volunteers essentially take all the material and build a house.

What was amazing about this was that it only took three days to build with about 15 people. And a significant part of that was waiting for the concrete to dry. And that's the house from founddation to roof, electrical to windows, drywall to stucco.

While machines and fancy equipment certainly speeds things up a lot, most of what can be done is still limited by human labor. And boy, is it amazing what that's capable of. Sure, it wasn't a huge house (maybe 500 sq ft), but it was fully functioning with insulation, metal roof, windows and doors. The bathroom was an addition that could be done in another couple of days. The big thing is that so much of it could be done so quickly.

You can build houses very efficiently and quickly even if the labor isn't very experienced. Which makes you wonder, why is housing so expensive?

There's a huge premium on housing because of fiat money being such a terrible savings vehicle, but the rot of fiat money goes much deeper. The labor itself is much more expensive, and there is a significant amount of rent seeking in the form of government regulations, like building codes. There's also the fact that building is considered very blue-collar, and most people aspire to white collar work. That in itself is a cultural norm that has proliferated via fiat money. Blue collar work, the kind that builds and fixes real things with hands, is considered below the people that sit on a computer making powerpoint presentations and word documents.

Now not all white collar jobs are bad. But there's no doubt that white collar jobs have proliferated because of fiat money. Look up any bureaucracies in any large industry and you'll see that they've grown like cancer. Health care, education, military, HR, government have bureaucracies that have significantly outpaced the people that do any real meaningful work. This is definitely not market competition and it's the opposite of capitalism. It's socialism that grows steadily from the money stolen from the productive people.

Which is why my experience is such a shock. I've become so used to things taking forever to build, that when I see human labor really doing something productive, I'm shocked at how effective it is. We've been so burdened with bureaucratic overhead in almost everything we do that watching people be productive is a shock.

One of the things I look forward to in a Bitcoin world is the unleashing of labor. Our work is what builds things, but it can also be used to steal. Unfortunately, fiat money incentivizes much more of the latter and less of the former. When our work is aligned with civilization, we'll really take off.

Come for the number go up, stay for civilization go up, beauty go up, building go up.