The year is coming to an end, and since December is known for taking time to reflect on what you have achieved and accomplished, it is also time for me to constantly check the bubble you are living in.

Yesterday I had a good old friend from high school as a guest, he was traveling through to have a New Year's Eve party with other friends tonight further down his travel plans.

It was so nice to see him again for 1.5 days! It is hard to keep in touch with friends from long distances. Sure you have messangers and so on, but face to face will always be the best.

So we settled down with a good cocktail #830620 and some whiskey yesterday.

At some point he wanted to talk about politics and economics. He wanted my opinion. Knowing that I am a hardcore libertarian, he wanted to know if there was a shift to a more moderate point since I have been a teacher for 4 years now and will soon be a father (#771612). Basically, I finally calmed down a bit.

I still have the same views, if not more radical ones.

He wanted to talk about the collapse of the German government and the increase in health care costs and rising social security as well as paypal, cash and crypto.

To make a long story short, here is the tl:dr:

Collapse of the German Government:

The libertarian party FPD was rightly kicked out because they did not want to increase the debt and so they wanted people to suffer and where not willing to help when people were in need.

The increase of costs in social security and especially in health care is due to private companies, private health insurances and the biggest problem that there is not only one government run security agency.

Too many choices are not good for people, how would they ever know what is good and what is bad, and since there are too many the government cannot control prices, so they spiral out of control.

Cash, PayPal, Crypto should all be banned since people will find a workaround and do shadow trading that cannot be taxed by the government, thats why the poor government is broke! If we would pay our taxes properly there would not be such a big debt problem. People should not try to disguise their transactions! If they have nothing to hide, they should not try in the first place. That would increase safety and tax revenue!

Of course I was against all that and was for individual liberty and privatization.

Which he found absurd. Haven't we already learned that capitalism has completely failed and we need to create something new with a strong technocratic lean state to run the show?

In his defense, he is one of my smartest friends, he fixed so many IT problems and helped me with other things in the 36 hours he was with me! He is a nice guy, smart and makes good money, I bet he makes double what I make.

We have a lot in common, but in philosophy, politics and economics we could not be more different.

Why do I have so many academic friends with well-paying jobs who get everything so absurdly wrong?

Our bubble is so small, so tight, that they cannot even grasp what we are living.

Everyone should be responsible for their own choices? Normal people? Sorry, but they would fail! They are not smart enough to run their own lives. That is why we need the state to protect people from themselves!

This idea fills me with fear every time I hear it.

He was sorry to hear that I was still such a fanatic against the state. I had no problem with that. If he wants to stay poor (even though he is much richer than I am), go have fun.

I am glad that we have reached an age where we can still be friends and these silly issues do not come between us. But it just goes to show how weird conversations with normal people can be!

Lets see what conversations 2025 has in store for us all.