Skills

42. The less skilled a man is the more money he will require to make up for his lack of skillfulness. He must employ others to be skilled for him.

59. To be skilled is to have a security more secure than any amount of fiat currency.

63. The desire for money is an expression of his passivity. One wants to be secure enough to no longer do anything, to no longer feel anything. Verily, money obstructs the motivation to learn new skills.

67. A man of great and varied skill is fearless and confident. He knows he is ignorant of nothing. He requires neither money or other men and his life and his happiness he makes for himself. But the wealthy man is always fearful for his wealth, for stripped of his money he becomes helpless, unable to call upon those with skills to act for him.

86. Some skills: cultural (languages, customs, geography, etc.); physical (strength, speed, endurance of pain, coordination, self-defense, street smarts, experience against fists, knives, guns, etc.); technical (medical for his own body, bicycles, motorcycles, small engines, electrical, plumbing, etc.); economic (Austrian economics (von Mises, Hayek), history of fiat currencies, central banking and its effects, inflation/deflation dynamic, the carry trade, the yield curve, trading knowledge to protect any assets, etc.); survival (constructing shelters, water, fire, hunting and trapping, foraging for edible plants, farming, fishing, etc.); weapons (rifles, pistols, knives, etc.); intellectual (Plato, Stoics/Cynics/Epicurians, Sophocles, Augustine, Montaigne, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger/Sartre (one should be versed in some highly technical philosophy--it enhances discipline), Tolstoy, Hemingway, Hamsun, Celine, etc.); hard sciences and philosophy of science (from Feynman and Heisenberg to Feyerabend and Popper and Kuhn); miscellaneous (understanding women and their different motivations and handling and directing them, legal defense skills, prison life and survival, horsemanship, painting, music, writing, photography, ethology (Lorenz), etc.)

97. To be free is to be comprehensively skilled. To be free is not to require the skills of others. Indeed, it is in part that money may act as a substitute for skills that makes it anti-thetical to freedom.