We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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National anthem of Libertaria The excellent Dominic Frisby is crowdfunding a music video for his National Anthem of Libertaria. He is very much out there spreading good ideas, including in such unfriendly territory as the Edinburgh Festival. I applaud his efforts.
Arise libertarians
Above totalitarians
Our guide is the mighty invisible hand
Reject state controllers
Collectors and patrollers
Our choices are better than government plans
Taxation is a form of theft
Free markets and free trade are best
Free speech, free movement, free minds and free choice
Our actions are all voluntary
Not coerced or compulsory
War we abhor, socialism does not work
No debt or inflation
No stealth confiscation
No pigs in the trough at the gravy to drink
No state education
To brainwash our nation
No experts dictate what to do, what to think
We scorn your fiat currency
Gold and bitcoin is our money
We own ourselves and we live and let live
We take responsibility
Life, love and liberty
Leave us alone, let a thousand flowers bloom
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Free movement – does that mean we have no border control what so ever?
You can interpret song lyrics however you like. Maybe it means you can invite anyone into your house you like.
Look, we don’t have to get all Judean People’s Front about it. Libertarianism is a broad church. The road is long. Walk as far along it as you can with whatever friends you can muster.
“let a thousand flowers bloom”
That’s close to Mao’s urging that opened the Cultural Revolution. But then, libertarians adopt many leftist notions, like open borders, free trade, the blank slate, magic dirt, etc., etc.
That poem needs work. Just because we are libertarians does not mean we have to present our views in the weak form of free verse – it just makes us look lazy. Several rhymes and scansions need work. Some fixes are easy – for example, ‘Collectors and patrollers’ just needs to be ‘Collectors, patrollers’ and We scorn your fiat currency can just omit ‘your’ – but some other lines need serious recasting for rhythm. As for rhyme, ‘theft’ is rhymed with ‘best’ !! – oh, dear.
As regards content, not form, I agree with Stuart (September 17, 2019 at 2:11 pm) above that “free movement” begs questions and should be omitted. Likewise, ‘War we abhor deserves the “And WWII (against Hitler) – abhor fighting the nazis, do libertarians?” rejoinder it will get. The paraphrase of Mao in the very last line is also unwise (and pretty meaningless).
It is OK as a first draft and has some decent lines, but I estimate a minimum of three rewrites before it is ready for prime time. Verse 3 passes muster as is (but might No pigs at the trough, of our gravy to drink be better) but the other three need work.
(I’m busy at the moment but may have suggestions.)
Ha! Funny how different people take different meanings.
I read that line and thought “Heh heh, nice one, good dig at communism. Communism let one hundred flowers bloom – libertarianism will give us a thousand!“”
neonsnake (September 17, 2019 at 4:12 pm), it’s just propaganda. Mao said “Let a hundred flowers bloom.” He could as easily have said a thousand, or ten thousand, or a million. Corbyn or Jo Swinton or the Greens can promise blooming flowers in whatever number they want. Why would anyone not already convinced be even interested – any more than you and I hear Mao’s phrase and think, “Oh, communism must have something after all – it lets an entire hundred flowers bloom”?
The third verse presents ideas one could at least defend – that inflation takes money out of your pocket and into bureaucrats’ pockets for example, or that ‘expertise’ is the excuse for bullying – but literally any programme can claim to let flowers bloom. It’s not diagnostic. (Do you remember the natural law party’s manifesto decades back? They promised that light from the sun would continue to reach the earth under their administration, and also reflected light from the moon! To be fair that was an analogy explaining how we’d be perfectly in line with the EU and also perfectly free and British.)
It’s like those ads where afterwards you may remember the jingle or the joke but can’t for the life of you recall even which kind of product was being advertised. 🙂
Legal Daisy Spacing lets a hundred flowers bloom – under strictly regulated conditions, of course. 🙂
Of course. But I don’t think the line is saying anything deeper than “it’s ten times as good”.
Tough crowd this evening! 😀
Legal Daisy Spacing looks fun, mind.
“Peacenik anarchists? No thanks!”
(I mostly kid. But I’m also a Hayekian, not a Rothbardian.
And this metallism and bitcoin stuff is bullshit.)
Yes, it does seem more like an Anarchist anthem (if that is not a contradiction in terms) rather than a Libertarian anthem.
As Rob Fisher says, “Libertarianism is a broad church”. But the breadth of that church is probably a reflection of how far removed it is from genuine influence. It is tough to see the Anarchist end of the Libertarian spectrum ever getting comfortable with the Limited Government end.
And is the “free choice” term intended to be a blatant pander to the abortion extremist vote? 🙂
😆 😆 😆
Crikey, chaps and chapesses, it’s just a song!
Where does a Libertarian get their water from?
A “Well, actually…”
Yes, tough crowd, neonsnake.
“It is tough to see the Anarchist end of the Libertarian spectrum ever getting comfortable with the Limited Government end.”
I dunno, I’m an anarcho-capitalist inasmuch as I think it could work and would be a good idea. But I don’t expect it to be achievable any time soon so I can work with anyone who wants a smaller state than the one we’ve got.
“metallism and bitcoin stuff is bullshit”
Money that the state can’t inflate sounds useful, though.
“Money that the state can’t inflate sounds useful, though.”
True. But money that the market can’t inflate is less so. The demand for money varies over time. If the supply is fixed, the price fluctuates violently.
Imagine we start off with a community of 100 people. We need a certain amount of money to run trade with sensible numbers. Now imagine it “goes viral” and a hundred million people try to get in on the new currency over the period of a week. What’s going to happen to the price of each token if you can’t expand supply to meet the new demand?
The total amount of money represents all the partial trades currently in progress across the whole market. Start with the idea of barter – you exchange grain for boots, or turnips for ploughs, say. But as a farmer with grain wanting new boots, you can’t always find a cobbler with boots wanting grain. So you split the transaction into two, spread across time. You exchange grain for money, and then at a later time you exchange money for boots. The money keeps track of these split-across-time transactions. They’re just IOUs, a legally enforceable, transferable promise to pay something of value at a later date.
As the number and character of trades going on across the marketplace changes, so does the demand for money. The supply of money has to track it fairly closely, or all the extra people wanting to do long-term split-over-time trades will have to wait until some of the tokens become available. People who want to save for their old age might be hanging on to it for a very long time indeed, and if people start living longer, or the population grows or shrinks, that’s going to shift some impressively large amounts of money around the system.
Yes, it’s a jolly good idea to stop the politicians messing with the supply of money in their efforts to “control” or “improve” the economy. The results are as bad as when they try to mess with the price of any other goods or services (like labour, or house prices, or rent, …). But no, you don’t want a currency whose supply can’t track demand.
Outrageous. You’re clearly a socialist.
Burn him!
(The song is a fun ditty. I’ve been listening to the rest of the album tonight for a laugh while making dinner. It’s fun, if not quite my cup of tea, musically. Passive Aggressive Hip Hop is quite good, mind, as is Hate Speech. I don’t quite agree with everything he’s saying, I’m not quite a “bash the woke” guy, but it’s amusing enough)
Free movement – does that mean we have no border control what so ever?
Border control is less important if you don’t have a welfare state and work or starve ethics.
But you can’t place “libertarian” along the same continuum that separates “left” and “right”. It isn’t measured along the same axis. There are progressive libertarians and there are conservative libertarians. It’s like left-handed meat-eaters and right-handed meat-eaters – there’s a communication of a characteristic, but no causal connection.
You don’t need to embrace conservatism to be libertarian.
As well as all the other tosh, Bob Sykes even thinks FREE TRADE is a leftist notion 😆
But then, libertarians adopt many leftist notions, like open borders, free trade, the blank slate, magic dirt, etc., etc.
Yeah, uh, as noted above, no.
Open borders I’ll give him (back to Communist internationalism), but “free trade” has never been “leftist”.
And open borders is not inherently libertarian, either. Hayek would have looked at you blankly if you’d tried to tell him he had to support open borders, and Nozick’s Utopias explicitly have only an outbound open border. You may not be coerced to remain in a polity you do not want to remain in; that is not an argument that any polity must let you in. That the current Reason staffers [Dalmia] have an obsession with it is not a “libertarian” problem. It’s their problem.
(The blank slate? Who’s adopted that? Someone, probably, but that’s no more a “libertarian” thing than “being a fan of sports team X” because a libertarian happened to do it.
I don’t even know what his “magic dirt” thing is supposed to be, and I don’t really care precisely because of the way he’s not-arguing a point; this is trolling, not discussion.)
In the world we live in today, I tend to agree (also with the point of inbound Vs outbound).
I would say there’s a utopian view that goes “What right does the government have to prevent me selling my privately owned house to someone from Norway, and further to prevent that person from then living in their newly acquired privately owned property?”
It’s utopian, and requires lots of caveats, but it’s not unreasonable.
Oh, and “well, actually” free trade is leftist to its core. I trade my life for the next few years for ration books. No money changes hand, ergo Leftist Free Trade!
😛
“And open borders is not inherently libertarian, either.”
In the sense that there are ardent libertarians on both sides of pretty much all those positions, yes. (It’s why I smiled when I read the lyrics to the the song and predicted what was about to happen…) I personally didn’t agree on the currency thing, but I knew that there are a lot of goldbugs among the libertarians so I figured that was probably fair enough. And I’ve often argued that open borders are a corollary of free markets (in labour and culture), and the principle that society has no business forbidding anything unless it does unconsented harm to others. But I’m well aware others vehemently disagree. I’d like to think that one of the other merits of libertarians is that we’re more tolerant of such disagreements in our community.
“Magic dirt” I had to look up myself. It’s a term for the belief that when people immigrate to a nation, they become culturally like the nation purely by virtue of the soil they’re standing on. Move to Britain, and you thereby become ‘British’. If you’re born on British soil, you are ‘British’ by definition, even if culturally you act differently. It’s the magic power of the dirt you touch to transform nationality and culture. It’s a bit of a straw man, I’d say. Partly it’s a question of there being multiple definitions. (What definition of ‘British’ are you using?) Largely it’s an attack on those who argue that cultural integration can and does happen, albeit slowly, over generations. I don’t recall seeing anyone actually arguing the ‘magic dirt’ position here, although I don’t rule it out that there might be libertarians who do.
But I can’t think of any sense in which free trade is left wing, unless perhaps it’s referring to opposition to protectionism carried out by the bourgeois business-owning classes against the interests of the common people. However, that’s such a bizarre image requiring one to ignore pretty much everything else the left believe in about how an economy is to be run that I can’t see it serving even as the most ridiculous and transparent straw man. But who knows? If even a Prince of the Realm and Heir to the Throne can be considered ‘left wing’, who knows where the boundaries of such a concept lie?
I might. Make of that what you will.
In all honesty, now that I understand what it means (I didn’t, and couldn’t be arsed to Google it. Thanks for saving me the effort), I might argue for it. There’s ample evidence for people assimilating, becoming more secular, that I wouldn’t be prepared to dismiss it entirely.
It might take two generations. I’ve enough experience with first generation immigrants to understand the difficulties they might face.
I’ve also enough experience with ex-pats, in say China, which are, of course, an entirely different thing 😉
The children of first generation immigrants face difficult problems. There’s more to this “magic dirt” thing than first appears. These people are struggling against two different pillars. Over time, they become more integrated, and more secular. This is just a fact.
neonsnake (September 18, 2019 at 7:32 pm), the mass immigration experience of US history did not make people more secular – on the contrary. One prosaic cause was that immigrants naturally went somewhere they knew about – because people speaking the same language were already there and knowledge of this filtered back to the old country – and when they arrived they naturally went to the local church to meet earlier-arrived immigrants who could advise them.
Similarly, an obvious approach for a fresh immigrant from the middle east who wants advice on how to navigate today’s UK is to go to the local mosque. There he is sure of finding people who have faced and survived issues he now faces, and who understand his language and viewpoint.
The historical experience of the US suggests this effect will reinforce such ties, relative to their strength back home.
Sure. I can only speak of my own life experience of a few decades in East London, which is the exact opposite of that.
Neonsnake: “Over time, they [immigrants and their children] become more integrated, and more secular. This is just a fact.”
I don’t know what the statistics say, and given the definitional difficulties would probably be highly skeptical of them even if I did. Overall impression is that your view (and experience) is correct for most immigrants and their descendants. For most of history, immigration was tough and only the most determined & most able made it — usually with a strong desire to integrate into their chosen society and make a success of their new life, for themselves and especially for their children.
The main exception in the past has probably been where so many people of one background emigrated to one particular area that they formed a largely self-sufficient community. Examples would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Chinese in various parts of the US. But even there, over time the barriers have tended to break down. A white boy in California these days is nothing unless he has an ethnically-Asian girlfriend. The Melting Pot still works, to some extent.
But there does appear to be a fork in the road for the children & grandchildren of immigrants. Most do tend to become more integrated, more secular — but not all. Perhaps one factor is that immigration has become easier (at least for certain groups of people), which may be changing the characteristics of more recent immigrants — and thereby changing the influences on some in the 2nd & 3rd generation.
“One prosaic cause was that immigrants naturally went somewhere they knew about – because people speaking the same language were already there and knowledge of this filtered back to the old country – and when they arrived they naturally went to the local church to meet earlier-arrived immigrants who could advise them.”
I’d have thought ethnic restaurants would be a more obvious and easy to find location for that…
But yes, increasing secularism is a late 20th century phenomenon, even in America.
I’ll note here that “magic dirt” is a pejorative term, used mostly by the racist nationalists to make fun of the idea that immigrants turn into citizens.
To a large extent, immigrants do assimilate. But we also have the notable exceptions that do not, and it’s those groups that drive the anti-immigrant movement to distraction.
I just returned from Minneapolis, where there are parts of Little Somalia where one such as I does not get out of his vehicle. We have 80,000 Somalis, many of whom are insular and racist, who speak little English, who hold non-Muslims in contempt, and who seem to want nothing more than to import their own failed society here. Their gangs are taking over, and they’re led by honest-to-gosh warlords, just like at home.
So I’ll testify here that both narratives are correct to some extent. Immigrants do integrate and become more secular, and they also do not.
Isn’t a Nationalist Libertarian song or anthem also another contradiction in terms? If we don’t learn all the lyrics, do we become de-citizened?
And he does indeed appear to be a racist nationalist, so…
Crikey. I’ll avoid using the term itself then!
In libertarian theory all people are just individuals, and not part of a collective (nation or culture or religion). Besides, pure libertarians don’t have much use or sympathy with Religion at all. And, all individuals are the same – isn’t it so?
You cannot be born into a Nation or Culture or Religion. You can only adhere to one, or any other community or group, out of your own free choice.
That’s my understanding of libertarian thoughts.
The rate is one important factor. To “import their own failed society here” requires that a sufficient number arrive sufficiently rapidly.
The confidence or cringingness of the host society also matters.
“In libertarian theory all people are just individuals, and not part of a collective (nation or culture or religion).”
Sort of. That’s a bit of an over-simplification. We’re individuals first, but we’re also part of collectives that operate by encouraging us to act as individuals to the greatest extent possible, while allowing everyone else the same freedom.
Consider the idea of the free market. That’s obviously a collective. But it isn’t the sort of collective where the government tells each member how much to make of each good, and how much to buy of it. Nor is it the sort where society imposes mandatory norms on what and how much you should make or buy. Everyone makes what they choose to, based primarily on their individual capabilities and desires but constrained by market prices. Everyone buys what they choose to, based on their individual preferences, constrained by market prices. You are free to do as you choose, subject to the constraint that if you require the help of others to do it, you have to help them achieve their dreams in mutually beneficial exchange.
The issue is that when people say “collective” they think that means one of the coercive collectives, where compliance with the common culture is enforced, where the interests of individuals are subordinated to the collective. A free market is still a collective, but a minimally coercive one. The culture is the union of all the things its individual members want to do. Individuals come first, the collective is built out of all the millions of individual choices, of individuals interacting with one another. Necessary interations are negotiated, not coerced.
“Besides, pure libertarians don’t have much use or sympathy with Religion at all.”
Freedom of Belief is one of the most important freedoms Libertarians support. Libertarians certainly don’t have much sympathy with the coercive religions (everyone must believe this religion, the religion forbids even unbelievers doing X, Y, and Z…), or the coercive parts of religions, at least. And when in thinking about such abstract principles as Freedom of Belief they look at all the many different religions with all their competing and mutually contradictory claims in the abstract, it’s a common consequence to become sceptical about their objective truth. But a lot of Western moral and philosophical thought is underpinned by historical religious thinking, and we commonly cite the Bible, Taoism, and other traditions in explaining this or that point. People take comfort from religion and spirituality. We’ve got no problem with that.
And after all, religions are just one sort of contested belief, and not really any different to all the political, philosophical, scientific, mathematical, and aesthetic beliefs we all have. If we demand beliefs have to be factually true and objectively provable, we’d have nothing left! *All* our beliefs are vulnerable to scepticism. So it would be dangerous to turn the blowtorch on religion, only to find someone else turning it on our own cherished belief system. (As Bishop Berkeley did to the mathematicians and their ‘infinitesimals’. “The ghosts of departed quantities”, as he put it.) So the rule on religions is “live and let live”.
“You cannot be born into a Nation or Culture or Religion. You can only adhere to one, or any other community or group, out of your own free choice.”
You choose as an individual, but your choice is heavily influenced (it should not be mandated) by the community you are in. Like in a free market you’re free to buy whatever you want, but your choice is influenced by the price at which your fellows are willing to sell.
So culture (national or religious) can also be thought of as a free market in ideas and beliefs. People can pick up the beliefs that appeal to them, that work best for them. If the British happen to like the taste of curry, there’s no rule saying we can’t adopt it, just because it’s “Not British” or some nonsense like that. It’s a fact that people tend to pick up their ideas from the people around them, so being born in a country or religious community will tend to influence us. But it should always be our choice, and if we see something another culture has that we like, competing beliefs and practices shouldn’t be walled out.
That’s my view, anyway. But the collective noun for a group of libertarians seems to be “argument”(!), so who am I to say?
Nonsense on stilts! You don’t know what you’re talking about!
Sorry. Couldn’t resist 😉
The actual anthem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya9MK4y3R3w
Gold for me.
And when someone lends out money (say a “banker”) they should lend out the physical commodity (the actual gold or silver – or whatever physical commodity is being used as money) and they must not pretend they still have the money AFTER they have lent it out – not till when, and if, the physical commodity is returned to them.
Both the fiat money of governments and the Credit Bubble finance of “bankers” (with their “needs of trade” fallacies) discredit capitalism – causing economic chaos and decay and artificial (as opposed to natural) inequality on an extreme scale – this Richard Cantillon pointed out some three centuries ago.
“And when someone lends out money (say a “banker”) they should lend out the physical commodity (the actual gold or silver – or whatever physical commodity is being used as money) and they must not pretend they still have the money AFTER they have lent it out – not till when, and if, the physical commodity is returned to them.”
They don’t. That’s not even the wrong version of how it works!
The promises of ordinary, honourable men are worth more than gold. All money is based on promises – credible, legally enforceable, and transferable – to deliver goods/services of value at a later date.
If you go into a bank to take out a loan, they hand you a printed sheet of paper worth a few pennies, in which you promise to pay the bearer a certain sum every month for a number of years. It is a promise to deliver the fruit of your future labour. When you sign it, making it contractually binding, your signature, your name, turns it from a printed sheet of paper worth a few pennies to a variety of money worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. It’s a trick as impressive as spinning straw into gold!
Anyone who holds it can – at the agreed future dates – exchange it for years worth of your labour. That sheet of paper is far more valuable than its own weight in Gold.
The paper has monetary value now, but the holder cannot redeem it now. The holder can’t get their hands on the work until many years later. This is the concept of liquidity. The money the borrower has created is not very liquid. But they have an urgent need to spend money now – they need a house to live in – and so they hand their illiquid money to the bank in exchange for a more liquid form of money they can spend more widely. The bank only exchanges one form of money for another. The bank does not create money, the borrower does. By making a promise.
And if ever the bank should receive demands to return the liquid cash it has lent out from its depositors, it can take those stacks of paper-more-valuable-than-Gold from its vault, and sell them to another bank. The other bank thereafter receives the repayments. The original bank has the funds to repay the depositors. The bank is not claiming to be storing money it doesn’t have – its vault is full of the stuff. The only issue with it is that it is in an illiquid form, and needs to be converted to something more liquid.
The common error of understanding, I think, arises from thinking of money as identical with wealth. For the holder of the promise, it is. But for the giver of the promise, it is the opposite of wealth – it is debt, an obligation. It gets put into a different mental category. And people outside the financial idustry more commonly think of money in concrete terms as a special sort of valuable physical object you can possess – coins or notes. ‘Promises’ are not material objects, they’re immaterial ideas and beliefs of highly questionable reality. The promise of repayment is only of potential value, not actual. When people look at their bank balance, they are imagining that somewhere inside the bank there is a physical stack of notes and coins (or a lump of Gold) there that ‘belongs to them’. That stack of loan contracts in the corner of the vault doesn’t look at all how they imagined it.
Another reason for all the arguments about it may be that the concept of a promise having value requires trust. And when people believe that the government creates all the money (because the only form of money they can think of is the concrete notes and coins sort), and they don’t trust the government, then they don’t trust the money.
The government doesn’t create most of the money. Ordinary people, making promises to one another, create most of the money. It’s value is underpinned by the promised future labour of borrowers everywhere. It can be created as easily as making a promise, and the only limit on its production is the extent to which we can persuade other people we will deliver. And our need for it expands and contracts with our need to trade where we cannot barter.
Paul, (if you mean what that sentence seems to be saying), in a future libertarian state that eliminated fiat money, it would need the sort of interference we usually associate with socialists to prevent gold being deposited in banks, banks issuing certificates of deposit and also lending at interest, etc.. (With some caution) I favour the end of fiat money – because governments cannot be trusted to operate it without a brake, and British financial history suggests it was better when we had the brake. However there are innate reasons why fractional reserve banking antedates fiat money (though, alas, the practice creates an incentive for governments to regulate it – thus starting the whole cycle up again).
You may on the contrary merely be saying that some ability to check that the bank is being honest about the state of its reserves – so some regulation by some kind of independent inspectorate – is still needed. I’m not sure I am understanding you.
(I see Nullius has commented above on the same issue.)
Tolstoy’s ‘War & Peace’ has the analogy of history as a steam locomotive charging down the tracks. The smoke seems to go backwards, possibly giving the impression that it is the smoke going backwards which pushes the locomotive forward.
Perhaps money is like the smoke from the locomotive? It tricks us into thinking that it is pushing the engine of the economy forward. But money is not wealth — it does not matter whether that money is gold or fiat or cowrie shells. Wealth is the capacity to produce, and the smoke of money comes from that productive capacity and trails behind it. The capacity to produce comes from knowledge, innovation, investment, and horsepower.
Thanks to Keynes and others, the Smart Kids now believe that they can push the real economy forward by manipulating the money smoke. It is another one of those Bad Ideas with which modern life is littered. It certainly would be better to take control of the money supply out of the hands of political cliques — because that might force them to think about the real economy, and what actually drives it forward.
I wrote this a few years ago. It even scans. I think the last two lines of the chorus scan better than the original, and certainly sings better. I Then ran out of steam half way through the second verse. Does anybody fancy taking it and having a go at a few more verses.
The Libertarian International
Arise ye victims from your hunger
Arise ye prisoners of the state
For freedom now proclaims her wonders
Claim the right to choose your fate!
Away with useless regulation
Open markets arise, arise
Once freed of all the old restrictions
We will work to win the prize
Chorus:
So colleagues now rally
For progress gathers pace
The spirit of free enterprise
inspires the human race
V2
We seek no violent revolution
We claim no class as enemies
For free exchange of goods and service
Is for the good of both parties
……………?