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#15204799
A Strategy to Promote Sound Money: Decentralize the State
December 20, 2021 - 2:52 PM, Matt Ray

For more than a century, an inflationary monetary policy has plagued the United States. Most recently, price inflation has become the most obvious consequence of the Federal Reserve’s actions to the public. Other effects, while less visible, have been no less pernicious. Indeed, inflation is particularly insidious because rising prices can mask a transfer of wealth. Additionally, the Fed’s policies of artificially low interest rates and quantitative easing have discouraged savings and fueled boom-bust cycles.

As these monetary issues have continued to intensify, the need for solutions has become more urgent. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the ways in which paper money and centralization reinforce each other, and to explore how political decentralization can promote sound money.

One of the more obvious ways fiat money enables centralization is by removing the limitations on the power of the government to inflate the currency that exist under a commodity money standard. Under a system of unbacked fiat money, there are fewer limitations the ability of the regime to increase government spending by inflating the money supply.

Still, the central government risks the depreciation of its own currency in terms of harder currencies. As a territorial monopolist of compulsion, however, a state can compel the acceptance of its currency through legal tender laws and by taxing or even prohibiting alternatives within its jurisdiction. From this it follows that as a state expands the territory under its control, it can compel more people to accept its currency—for example by requiring the payment of taxes in the government’s official currency. To illustrate this, we will review some of the ways the United States government has reinforced its currency.

In 1865, the federal government imposed a tax on state banknotes to limit their circulation. However, Franklin Roosevelt went even further by prohibiting American citizens from owning more than a small amount of monetary gold. While this prohibition has since been repealed, capital gains taxes still limit the use of gold. Internationally, military dominance has helped the United States secure the dollar’s status as reserve currency through international monetary agreements and supranational organizations like the International Monetary Fund, which allow for coordinated inflation. These are some of the ways in which centralization has enabled the US’s fiat money.

In distinct contrast, decentralization would weaken the current monetary system. Indeed, taken to its logical conclusion, decentralization would eventually require the abandonment of the current system and the restoration of sound money. Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains:

Yet if one then imagines a proliferation of ever smaller national territories, ultimately to the point where each household forms its own country, [Milton] Friedman’s proposal is revealed for what it is—an outright absurdity. For if every household were to issue its own paper currency, the world would be right back at barter. No one would accept anyone else’s paper, economic calculation would be impossible, and trade would come to a virtual standstill. It is only due to centuries of political centralization and the fact that only a relatively small number of countries and national currencies remain, and hence that the disintegrative consequences and calculational difficulties are far less severe, that this could have been overlooked. From this theoretical insight it follows that secession, provided it proceeds far enough, will actually promote monetary integration. In a world of hundreds of thousands of independent political units, each country would have to abandon the current fiat money system which has been responsible for the greatest worldwide inflation in all of human history and once again adopt an international commodity money system such as the gold standard.

As we have seen, the current system of freely fluctuating paper currencies with the US dollar as reserve currency would not have been possible without political centralization. Put differently, the system of multiple paper currencies hinders exchange. At the same time, the further decentralization proceeds, the more difficult it becomes to maintain a relatively high standard of living under a policy of autarky. Thus, as decentralization proceeds and the pressure for free trade increases, it becomes increasingly necessary to adopt an international currency outside the control of any government.

To be sure, there are more direct ways to restore sound money. Ludwig von Mises has explained how this could be accomplished. However, we should not expect policymakers to embrace Mises’s proposal any time soon. In the short term, the nullification or repeal of all taxes on alternatives to fiat money—such as gold and bitcoin—is a reasonable goal for a decentralist strategy.

Decentralization is not a panacea that will cure our monetary ills overnight. But it would represent an important first step toward the restoration of sound money.

https://mises.org/wire/strategy-promote ... lize-state
#15204969
@BlutoSays,
Sir, you and I are never going to agree.

Let me point out some problems with that above.
1] For to US to go off the dollar and onto gold, either 1] those holding US bonds, etc. will loose most of that store of value, or 2] the value of a troy oz. of gold would have to be set very high, maybe over $10K/oz.

2] Despite economists going on about the US paying-off its debt, to do this by taxing $28T out of the economy is flatly impossible. This is because taxing even $2T out of the economy would destroy the US economy.

3] Japan has a fiat yen. It has had a large deficit for 30 years now and inflation ws less the 1% before the pandemic. and the pandemic can cause shortages, and shortages of food and energy can cause inflation. So, the economic theory that above article is based on can't explain what Japan has not had inflation for the last 30 years.

4] That economic theory forgets that 'money' is a store of value, among other things. This means that if the nation's gov. feeds deficit currency units into the economy at a rate that matches the savings rate (whether by nationals or by foreigners), then inflation will be low.
. . . We saw this in the US from the early 90s thru to 2019.

5] The US Gov. has had a surplus 7 times since 1790. In every case after a few years there was a recession or aka "Bank Panic". This is because the Gov. was sucking value out of the economy. This reduced spending. The reduced spending caused corps to lay off workers. we call this a recession.
. . . Not every recession was caused by the Gov. having a surplus. There are other causes. The main one is illustrated by the GFC/2008. The Gov. had a big deficit and still there was a recession. The way this happens is that in the boom corps and people borrow money from banks. This creates new money which is spent and adds to someone's income. That someone spends it and another gets income, etc., etc. This seems fine until the day that many can't make the next payment. When this happens for enough people, the banks slow their lending. This slowing of lending reduce the incomes of many. Reducing incomes is the same trigger that starts all recessions.

6] Sound money is always unstable. In all economies money tends to rise to the top income earners and wealthy people. If they don't spend it as fast as they earn it, then the wealthy are sucking money out of the economy, and very soon the economy will freeze up because the mass of people can't buy things because they don't have money from an income. People like to be able to save money, to store value for a rainy day. Fiat money makes this easy. Sound money makes it impossible for almost all people.
.
#15205013
BlutoSays wrote:
Decentralize



Did you ever hear of the Civil War?

The Austrian school is fake political science pretending to be economics. It's a joke in poor taste.

There are so many things wrong with it it's hard to know where to start.

But one obvious thing will do for today. When we became the reserve currency, after WW2, other countries started holding dollars (of course). That meant we needed to have more dollars printed for them to hold.. Our economy was roaring, which meant it needed a lot more money. And we had incredible levels of military spending, which meant we needed even more money...

The result was that we were spending too much money. We had set up the Bretton Woods agreements to punish those that spent too much. We didn't think that it would bite us on the ass. But it did, the French did a big run at our gold reserves. Nixon had no choice but to take us off the gold standard. There was no choice, we had backed ourselves into that corner.

While the way we got there was regrettable, there is nothing inherently wrong with fiat money. Money is mostly about score keeping.

But we kept up our bad habits, and used our reserve status to take advantage of other countries.

By now you may have realized this is kinda complicated. There is no simple or easy way out of our situation. This is doubly true with Republicans giving tax cuts to the rich all the time. That is slow motion suicide.

https://www.amazon.com/Price-Inequality-Divided-Society-Endangers/dp/0393345068/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2T8WZS0XJGD1W&keywords=the+price+of+inequality+joseph+stiglitz&qid=1640808554&sprefix=stiglitz+the+pr%2Caps%2C96&sr=8-1
#15205034
Steve_American wrote:@BlutoSays,
Sir, you and I are never going to agree.

Let me point out some problems with that above.
1] For to US to go off the dollar and onto gold, either 1] those holding US bonds, etc. will loose most of that store of value, or 2] the value of a troy oz. of gold would have to be set very high, maybe over $10K/oz.

That tells you that there's a problem right there. At least when we were tied to gold (because it's value is already inherent in the metal based on the labor and mining put into it in the first place), the currency is indexed to it. That's not to say that one federal reserve note needs to buy one dollar worth of gold, but you can at least have SOME backing in a precious metal to dampen the congressional and fed spending appetite. If you can't haul at least X percentage of gold out of the ground, then you can't create another dollar until you do. It's natural resistance to debasing the currency full on. This BS of the US Treasury creating dollars and selling them to the federal reserve in some black box magic is BS. Okay? I'll say again, it's BS. Nevermind they're doing that more and more lately because treasuries are not selling as well at government auctions as they used to. That should be a warning to you.

2] Despite economists going on about the US paying-off its debt, to do this by taxing $28T out of the economy is flatly impossible. This is because taxing even $2T out of the economy would destroy the US economy.

If you have $28 Trillion in debt and can't tax $2 Trillion, there's a problem. You KNOW there is. Let's stop with the shenanigans. This BS about tax the rich is just that. They aren't going to pay; DC is going to go after the middle class on their way to default. On a side note, I laugh when someone says we saved $500 million on X, or one of the biggest mergers of a two corporations is worth two billion. Or Bernie Madoff's pyramid scheme cost $60 Billion. The US government spends $13+ BILLION every f'n DAY to run itself and hand out checks, seven days a week. I hope you understand the magnitude of that number. $13 BILLION EVERY DAY.

3] Japan has a fiat yen. It has had a large deficit for 30 years now and inflation ws less the 1% before the pandemic. and the pandemic can cause shortages, and shortages of food and energy can cause inflation. So, the economic theory that above article is based on can't explain what Japan has not had inflation for the last 30 years.

Most countries have fiat. That's not the point. We're the world's reserve currency, but we're really pushing it and there's only advocacy for more of that. At some point, you have to slow down, step back and have a REALISTIC view of what we're doing. These f...ks are like teenagers... they just want and want and want endlessly with no concept of reality. Most of federal spending is on entitlements by far, and 70% of the federal budget are transfer payments. That's f'n ridiculous and unsustainable.

4] That economic theory forgets that 'money' is a store of value, among other things. This means that if the nation's gov. feeds deficit currency units into the economy at a rate that matches the savings rate (whether by nationals or by foreigners), then inflation will be low.
. . . We saw this in the US from the early 90s thru to 2019.

Money (currency specifically) is a store of value because of it's rarity. There's no backing. It's just paper and promise. We have a shitty savings rate in the U.S. People live hand to mouth because of A) lack of willpower and B) lack of basic financial education and a lack of drive. IOW, it's not because of circumstances. You could take every dollar from everyone, redistribute it equally among the US population and in five years, the people who had money before would have it again.

5] The US Gov. has had a surplus 7 times since 1790. In every case after a few years there was a recession or aka "Bank Panic". This is because the Gov. was sucking value out of the economy. This reduced spending. The reduced spending caused corps to lay off workers. we call this a recession.
. . . Not every recession was caused by the Gov. having a surplus. There are other causes. The main one is illustrated by the GFC/2008. The Gov. had a big deficit and still there was a recession. The way this happens is that in the boom corps and people borrow money from banks. This creates new money which is spent and adds to someone's income. That someone spends it and another gets income, etc., etc. This seems fine until the day that many can't make the next payment. When this happens for enough people, the banks slow their lending. This slowing of lending reduce the incomes of many. Reducing incomes is the same trigger that starts all recessions.

Yes, we've had ups and downs. That's no reason for this financial suicide. We've had QE 1,2,3, TANF, TALF Maiden Lane 1,2,3 and on and on and on. Enough already! We've had shenanigans, but never like this. This is a panic situation. This is nosebleed. BTW, I'm sure you know about the new rules on bank bail-ins vs. bailouts. We're already going down the road of 2008 CDOs and CDSs. Only they changed the term to bespoke funds. Total financial BS and Washington DC could care less because they're embroiled in wokeness. F all that noise. It's all about "fairness" in housing whether you can afford it or not. Same with educational loans and nationalized health care. C'mon... terms like "risk corridors". These are snakeoil salespeople in Washington DC. These people are putting us in jeopardy, GD it.

6] Sound money is always unstable. In all economies money tends to rise to the top income earners and wealthy people. If they don't spend it as fast as they earn it, then the wealthy are sucking money out of the economy, and very soon the economy will freeze up because the mass of people can't buy things because they don't have money from an income. People like to be able to save money, to store value for a rainy day. Fiat money makes this easy. Sound money makes it impossible for almost all people.


Oh please. They're not saving today. Their money comes from handouts from Uncle Sham. We don't have a crisis of people not having enough money. We have a crisis of too few goods and people with too much money that didn't earn it, so they don't "feel" economic policy until the federal spigot gets turned off. You don't fix that by helicopter drops. BBB and all the other spending is BS. You know it. I know it. The DNC (and many RINOs) know it, but all they care about are votes. You've given up on sound money because it affects all your other political views. But TANFL.

We in the USA are NOT above the laws of economics and mathematics.

Yes, we will never agree.


.
#15205038
BlutoSays wrote:

gold standard...





In a recent survey of economists, not one wanted to go back to the gold standard.

That's partly because it can't be done, and partly because it would set off a Great Depression, and mostly because it's incredibly stupid.

You want to back dollars with gold. There's not enough gold for one thing, and the run on our gold reserves that forced us off gold would start back up instantly. If you don't allow gold runs, you essentially have what we have now. We have Fort Knox, but it's pure, unadulterated symbolism.

You are so far out of your depth, I am embarrassed for you.
#15205039
BlutoSays wrote:A Strategy to Promote Sound Money: Decentralize the State
December 20, 2021 - 2:52 PM, Matt Ray

For more than a century, an inflationary monetary policy has plagued the United States. Most recently, price inflation has become the most obvious consequence of the Federal Reserve’s actions to the public. Other effects, while less visible, have been no less pernicious. Indeed, inflation is particularly insidious because rising prices can mask a transfer of wealth. Additionally, the Fed’s policies of artificially low interest rates and quantitative easing have discouraged savings and fueled boom-bust cycles.

As these monetary issues have continued to intensify, the need for solutions has become more urgent. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the ways in which paper money and centralization reinforce each other, and to explore how political decentralization can promote sound money.

One of the more obvious ways fiat money enables centralization is by removing the limitations on the power of the government to inflate the currency that exist under a commodity money standard. Under a system of unbacked fiat money, there are fewer limitations the ability of the regime to increase government spending by inflating the money supply.

Still, the central government risks the depreciation of its own currency in terms of harder currencies. As a territorial monopolist of compulsion, however, a state can compel the acceptance of its currency through legal tender laws and by taxing or even prohibiting alternatives within its jurisdiction. From this it follows that as a state expands the territory under its control, it can compel more people to accept its currency—for example by requiring the payment of taxes in the government’s official currency. To illustrate this, we will review some of the ways the United States government has reinforced its currency.

In 1865, the federal government imposed a tax on state banknotes to limit their circulation. However, Franklin Roosevelt went even further by prohibiting American citizens from owning more than a small amount of monetary gold. While this prohibition has since been repealed, capital gains taxes still limit the use of gold. Internationally, military dominance has helped the United States secure the dollar’s status as reserve currency through international monetary agreements and supranational organizations like the International Monetary Fund, which allow for coordinated inflation. These are some of the ways in which centralization has enabled the US’s fiat money.

In distinct contrast, decentralization would weaken the current monetary system. Indeed, taken to its logical conclusion, decentralization would eventually require the abandonment of the current system and the restoration of sound money. Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains:

Yet if one then imagines a proliferation of ever smaller national territories, ultimately to the point where each household forms its own country, [Milton] Friedman’s proposal is revealed for what it is—an outright absurdity. For if every household were to issue its own paper currency, the world would be right back at barter. No one would accept anyone else’s paper, economic calculation would be impossible, and trade would come to a virtual standstill. It is only due to centuries of political centralization and the fact that only a relatively small number of countries and national currencies remain, and hence that the disintegrative consequences and calculational difficulties are far less severe, that this could have been overlooked. From this theoretical insight it follows that secession, provided it proceeds far enough, will actually promote monetary integration. In a world of hundreds of thousands of independent political units, each country would have to abandon the current fiat money system which has been responsible for the greatest worldwide inflation in all of human history and once again adopt an international commodity money system such as the gold standard.

As we have seen, the current system of freely fluctuating paper currencies with the US dollar as reserve currency would not have been possible without political centralization. Put differently, the system of multiple paper currencies hinders exchange. At the same time, the further decentralization proceeds, the more difficult it becomes to maintain a relatively high standard of living under a policy of autarky. Thus, as decentralization proceeds and the pressure for free trade increases, it becomes increasingly necessary to adopt an international currency outside the control of any government.

To be sure, there are more direct ways to restore sound money. Ludwig von Mises has explained how this could be accomplished. However, we should not expect policymakers to embrace Mises’s proposal any time soon. In the short term, the nullification or repeal of all taxes on alternatives to fiat money—such as gold and bitcoin—is a reasonable goal for a decentralist strategy.

Decentralization is not a panacea that will cure our monetary ills overnight. But it would represent an important first step toward the restoration of sound money.

https://mises.org/wire/strategy-promote ... lize-state


SO no armed forces, no polcie forces, no infrastructure, no regulation, no schools, no hospitals.

Mo clue , No Idea,

This is just propaganda for dumb shills so rich people can avoid even a modest contribution to the society that supports them so lavishly

Self destruction for short term greed.
#15205041
pugsville wrote:SO no armed forces, no polcie forces, no infrastructure, no regulation, no schools, no hospitals.

Mo clue , No Idea,

This is just propaganda for dumb shills so rich people can avoid even a modest contribution to the society that supports them so lavishly

Self destruction for short term greed.

Ain’t you heard what socialism is? Its government and so less government means less socialism which is for the greater good :D
#15205088
Freakin' conservatives *always* fetishize the money supply itself.

It's *not* the money supply -- it's the balance between labor inputs, and material *outputs* (goods and services). Capitalism always tends towards *overproduction*, driving prices *down*, an indicator of *deflation*, not inflation.

The concern-at-any-cost with the underlying exchange-value valuation of the national currency is implicitly, ultimately a *strong-dollar* position, meaning that any such strong-dollar person will not care how much workers are *exploited*, to provide the *value* for that underlying value of the national currency / U.S. dollar.

Far from 'decentralizing' (buzzword) the state, any given currency / dollar / gold / Bitcoin / whatever, is actually *dependent* on the central / federal government, for whatever extent of *enforcement* is necessary for that monetary / economic system, such as safeguarding all forms of private property, with lethal police and military force.

Just ask a conservative -- where does economic value *come from* -- ?


Forty years since the PATCO strike: Part one - WSWS

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/0 ... c-a03.html


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show
Image
#15205094
@BlutoSays,
There is no point in quoting the above reply. The system would just delete it.

So, there BlutoSays offers not one word to refute anything I said. All he does is to mock the ideas he disagrees with.

1] He didn't offer a fairly detailed plan for how the US can get back on to a gold standard.
2] He didn't offer a plan to pay-OFF the US debt. Instead he said that it is a problem that the economy can't tolerate have $2T of its net assets and incomes destroyed. He didn't say that it isn't a problem, i.e. that it can be done without destroying the US economy. The facts are that Clinton had surpluses tht totaled less than $1T and it was enough to cause the dot-com recession.
3] He didn't try to explain how Japan can have had large deficits for 30 year where now the debt to GDP ratio is 240%, and before covid inflation was < 0.5%, bond yields in 2nd-dary market are < 0.5%, and all the bonds are sold with 2 to 3 times as many bids as bonds.
4] He didn't address the fact that in the US all deficit spending is done by selling bonds that are by definition going into savings.
5] He didn't deny that every time the US has had a surplus for a few years, this has caused a recession. All he said is this time it is worse.
6] He didn't deny that sound currencies are always unstable. He didn't grok that the reason the savings rate is so low is that wages are too low. Workers can't save because rents are high and wages are low, so they live pay check to pay check. And they don't waste money either.
.
#15205096
ckaihatsu wrote:Freakin' conservatives *always* fetishize the money supply itself.

It's *not* the money supply -- it's the balance between labor inputs, and material *outputs* (goods and services). Capitalism always tends towards *overproduction*, driving prices *down*, an indicator of *deflation*, not inflation.

The concern-at-any-cost with the underlying exchange-value valuation of the national currency is implicitly, ultimately a *strong-dollar* position, meaning that any such strong-dollar person will not care how much workers are *exploited*, to provide the *value* for that underlying value of the national currency / U.S. dollar.

Far from 'decentralizing' (buzzword) the state, any given currency / dollar / gold / Bitcoin / whatever, is actually *dependent* on the central / federal government, for whatever extent of *enforcement* is necessary for that monetary / economic system, such as safeguarding all forms of private property, with lethal police and military force.

Just ask a conservative -- where does economic value *come from* -- ?


Forty years since the PATCO strike: Part one - WSWS

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/0 ... c-a03.html


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Image[/spoiler]

My take away from this image is across the bottom of it.
That shows [according to its designer or maker] that Labor adds more of the value in, but Capital takes more of the value out.

The, across the top. The corp sells its stuff or service into the economy. which has money. BUT, because the workers are paid too little the corp has trouble selling all it could make or provide.
. . . The holders of Capital don't spend all they earn, they save some. This savings deprives someone of income, because his product isn't being bought.
.
#15205115
pugsville wrote:No it's not. Collective organizations did not have to Government ones.

I know I know, I’m being hyperbolic of the typical American position in which any public good performed by government may be labelled socialism.
It is in fact a great advantage of institutions to be independent the state and run voluntarily in civil society.
Some people learned the hard way that some welfare was better through Unions than it was through the state which has great potential but easily gets rolled back in staff, resources and made humiliating. See that with centerlink becoming a total shitshow shortly before the fires sending an influx of people from destroyed communities.
Notice that it is how the liberal party justifies privatization and defunding is to cut resources to state institutions and once it doesn’t work well say it shows that it doesn’t work and attack it further. Just as how in media they present Rudd’s policy on closing the gap a failure bur forget to mention that it was effectively destroyed with the removal of funding.
#15205149
What public good do today's cabinet level departments perform?

The Department of Agriculture doesn't grow a GD thing.

The Department of Energy produces no energy whatsoever.

The Department of Justice doesn't mete out justice. It's just a political arm of the DNC at this point.

The borders are unprotected, although congress has mandated they be protected.

Most politicians don't adhere to the basic separation of powers doctrine spelled out in the Constitution.

The whole fucking federal government is nothing but a drag on the airframe. It's too big, too sloppy and it's a jobs program for useless fucks who couldn't make a living any other way.
#15205151
BlutoSays wrote:What public good do today's cabinet level departments perform?

The Department of Agriculture doesn't grow a GD thing.

The Department of Energy produces no energy whatsoever.

The Department of Justice doesn't mete out justice. It's just a political arm of the DNC at this point.

The borders are unprotected, although congress has mandated they be protected.

Most politicians don't adhere to the basic separation of powers doctrine spelled out in the Constitution.

The whole fucking federal government is nothing but a drag on the airframe. It's too big, too sloppy and it's a jobs program for useless fucks who couldn't make a living any other way.

Wow, we agree on something.
We agree the current Federal Gov. since 2000 has been useless. Maybe even since 1982.
Sometimes it is more useless though.
.
#15205152
Steve_American wrote:@BlutoSays,
There is no point in quoting the above reply. The system would just delete it.

So, there BlutoSays offers not one word to refute anything I said. All he does is to mock the ideas he disagrees with.

1] He didn't offer a fairly detailed plan for how the US can get back on to a gold standard.
2] He didn't offer a plan to pay-OFF the US debt. Instead he said that it is a problem that the economy can't tolerate have $2T of its net assets and incomes destroyed. He didn't say that it isn't a problem, i.e. that it can be done without destroying the US economy. The facts are that Clinton had surpluses tht totaled less than $1T and it was enough to cause the dot-com recession.
3] He didn't try to explain how Japan can have had large deficits for 30 year where now the debt to GDP ratio is 240%, and before covid inflation was < 0.5%, bond yields in 2nd-dary market are < 0.5%, and all the bonds are sold with 2 to 3 times as many bids as bonds.
4] He didn't address the fact that in the US all deficit spending is done by selling bonds that are by definition going into savings.
5] He didn't deny that every time the US has had a surplus for a few years, this has caused a recession. All he said is this time it is worse.
6] He didn't deny that sound currencies are always unstable. He didn't grok that the reason the savings rate is so low is that wages are too low. Workers can't save because rents are high and wages are low, so they live pay check to pay check. And they don't waste money either.
.



You sound to me like an educated fool and there are many of you around.

1) You begin to reinstitute the gold standard by defining a percentage of the dollar that must be backed in either gold or silver, two metals of which there are FINITE amounts. You then mandate there will be no further money created. That's key. You then begin to purchase gold (or mine and process it) and store it as a store of value and confidence. You will have to raise taxes. And you raise them on EVERYONE. I don't GAS about sob stories. EVERYONE pays.
2) You pay off the debt by cutting back on spending. When someone comes up with 3000 page spending bills that no one reads, you tell them to sit down and STFU. Moreover, breaking the federal budget down in to 13 separate bills like we had before would also help instead of one gigantic omnibus bill crammed with everything in it passed once a year. Washington DC is sloppy. Also look at Nixon's Impoundment Control Act of 1974. Parts of that law (struck down, but it could be revisted) would be useful in beating back congress from their endless graft and corruption.
3) Venezuela wasn't a shit hole until it was.
4) Going into savings? WTF are you talking about. Learn about fractional banking. It's a frigging reverse pyramid scheme to expand the money supply out of thin air.
5) Admin Edit: Rule 2 Violation at this point I'm not talking about a surplus. I'm talking about SOME SEMBLANCE of restraint on federal spending. A concept you obviously can't grasp.
6) Sounds currencies are stable. Wages are NOT too low. Wages must be indexed to whatever the value the consumer receives by free market principles. That means I'm not going to mandate someone must be paid $15 to flip a burger, because a bureaucratic motherfucker in DC who has never flipped a burger in their life "feels" that that is what the prevailing wage should be. If you do that, you drive enterprise out of business because mandating inputs, outputs and costs of labor and goods ruins businesses. You will not successfully mandate people will work at this pay because you think it's the right thing to do. And if everyone is unemployed because there are no businesses because of your proclamations from ivory towers on what people will do, then we are in a world of shit, which is EXACTLY what people like you are driving us towards with your "progress".

"We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us" - Old Soviet saying
#15205159
BlutoSays wrote:

You begin to reinstitute the gold standard by defining a percentage of the dollar that must be backed in either gold or silver




Long time ago, a member of the audience asked Stiglitz about about bringing back the gold standard. He gave it a good chuckle, and then blew the idea to hell. But I don't think you'd understand what he said.

There is simply no way to bring back the gold standard.

Either the percentage is so small it's a joke (and not functionally different from what we have now) or it would set off a Great Depression after China hoovered Fort Knox bare, including the dust.

You don't have the vaguest idea of what you're talking about. You don't even know you keep trying to apply microeconomic ideas to a macroeconomic world...
#15205163
BlutoSays wrote: Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains:

Oh, please. Hans-Hermann Hoppe is one of the most dishonest "intellectuals" who ever lived. Everything he says is fallacious, disingenuous nonsense. Watch:
Yet if one then imagines a proliferation of ever smaller national territories, ultimately to the point where each household forms its own country, [Milton] Friedman’s proposal is revealed for what it is—an outright absurdity.

See? Friedman proposed no such thing. The absurdity is entirely a contrivance of Hoppe's own cesspool of a mind.
For if every household were to issue its own paper currency, the world would be right back at barter. No one would accept anyone else’s paper, economic calculation would be impossible, and trade would come to a virtual standstill.

That is just baldly false, as David Graeber demonstrated in "Debt: the First 5000 Years." Individually issued credit instruments have been used for both household purchases and mercantile trade far more than gold for thousands of years.
It is only due to centuries of political centralization and the fact that only a relatively small number of countries and national currencies remain, and hence that the disintegrative consequences and calculational difficulties are far less severe, that this could have been overlooked.

It is Hoppe who has overlooked the actual history of money and trade.
From this theoretical insight

I.e., bald falsehood Hoppe dreamed up out of nothing.
In a world of hundreds of thousands of independent political units, each country would have to abandon the current fiat money system which has been responsible for the greatest worldwide inflation in all of human history

Garbage. It's the debt money system run by private commercial banksters for their own unearned profit that has caused the inflation, not fiat money. Every time their greed makes them lend too much for asset price speculation (which is always), government has to rescue the economy from deflationary collapse by bailing them out -- i.e., printing more money to paper over their foolish loans to speculators.
and once again adopt an international commodity money system such as the gold standard.

What nonsense. The gold standard was feasible at one time, but no longer. If anyone attempted to convert to a gold standard now, the resulting deflation would wreck their economy. It's almost as bad as $#!+coin, whose paradigm is even more deflationary than gold's.
#15205210
BlutoSays wrote:You sound to me like an educated fool and there are many of you around.

1) You begin to reinstitute the gold standard by defining a percentage of the dollar that must be backed in either gold or silver, two metals of which there are FINITE amounts. You then mandate there will be no further money created. That's key. You then begin to purchase gold (or mine and process it) and store it as a store of value and confidence. You will have to raise taxes. And you raise them on EVERYONE. I don't GAS about sob stories. EVERYONE pays.
2) You pay off the debt by cutting back on spending. When someone comes up with 3000 page spending bills that no one reads, you tell them to sit down and STFU. Moreover, breaking the federal budget down in to 13 separate bills like we had before would also help instead of one gigantic omnibus bill crammed with everything in it passed once a year. Washington DC is sloppy. Also look at Nixon's Impoundment Control Act of 1974. Parts of that law (struck down, but it could be revisted) would be useful in beating back congress from their endless graft and corruption.
3) Venezuela wasn't a shit hole until it was.
4) Going into savings? WTF are you talking about. Learn about fractional banking. It's a frigging reverse pyramid scheme to expand the money supply out of thin air.
5) Insult deleted, at this point I'm not talking about a surplus. I'm talking about SOME SEMBLANCE of restraint on federal spending. A concept you obviously can't grasp.
6) Sounds currencies are stable. Wages are NOT too low. Wages must be indexed to whatever the value the consumer receives by free market principles. That means I'm not going to mandate someone must be paid $15 to flip a burger, because a bureaucratic motherfucker in DC who has never flipped a burger in their life "feels" that that is what the prevailing wage should be. If you do that, you drive enterprise out of business because mandating inputs, outputs and costs of labor and goods ruins businesses. You will not successfully mandate people will work at this pay because you think it's the right thing to do. And if everyone is unemployed because there are no businesses because of your proclamations from ivory towers on what people will do, then we are in a world of shit, which is EXACTLY what people like you are driving us towards with your "progress".

"We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us" - Old Soviet saying


1] If you don't exchange dollars for gold, you are not on a gold standard. A percentage at some set exchange rate just means you can run out of gold before foreigners run out of dollars. And just NOT allowing the debt limit to be increased, means that interest payments would make the nation slash spending to pay interest on $28T. The Gov. spent the Soc. Sec. Trust Fund. Your plan would steal the money we have all paid in FICA taxes, because SS payments would be slashed, which would make millions of retired people starve.
. . . MMT says that we can't just use various data of just money to tell if inflation will happen. These data include the total money supply and the GDP, etc. Instead economists need to learn how to estimate the amount of unused resources the Gov. or the national economy has access to. This includes raw resources and also labor with the needed skills. So, MMT is NOT saying any amount of "printing money" is fine and dandy. *ALL* claims that this is what MMT says are *lies* or taken from or based on the lies of economists who know they are lying (or are idiots).
2] Exactly, raise taxes and cut spending to have a surplus is how you pay-down to someday pay-OFF the debt. The problem that you are still not understanding is that all spending in someone's income, by definition. This includes Gov. spending. If the Gov. has a surplus that by definition means the non- gov. sector of the economy (people, corps, and foreigners) will have to draw down savings because it must be in deficit if the US Gov. is in surplus. This is just accounting.
. . . OTOH, England and later the UK has had a debt since 1694, this is for 325 years. During that time it has borrowed in almost every year. In every year it borrowed it paid the interest with borrowed Pounds. It also has according to your theory diluted its currency and it also has had low inflation until the pandemic. This is for 325 years, now. When will it need to PAY-OFF its debt? WTF, during that time it even lost its Empire, and that didn't cause the markets to make it pay-OFF its debt. The whole idea your theory has about national debts is wrong, flatly false.
3] Pointing to some other nation is not explaining why Japan can deficit spend until its debt is 240% of its GDP and still never see inflation or high bond interest rates for 30 years.
. . . The theory doesn't have a 5 year lag between dilution the money supply and the expected inflation, let alone 30 years.
4] What does fractional banking have to do with US Gov. bond sales? I bet that you, sir, don't know yet that banks don't lend their depositors money. They create money with every loan. It is bank loans that add to the money supply that is being spent. Gov. bond sales go into bonds that can't be spent, they can only be sold to another who wants to save, and so buys the bond.
5] OK, if you say so. However, the theory you are using does talk about making the grand children pay to pay-off the debt. OTOH, the US Gov. has had a fiat dollar for 50 years now, and it hasn't needed to even pay-down the debt. All though, it has done so for some few years. The last time in the late 90s, with Clinton's fake surplus (fake because it just moved some items foo the budget) and even this fake surplus was enough of a reduction in spending to CAUSE the Dot-com recession.
6] Sound currencies are not stable in the way I explained.
. . . Wages are too low. You, sir, are making the mistake of assuming that the US economy is a perfect market, here a perfect labor market. IT isn't a prefect market. The theory that the market will find the correct price with the invisible hand doesn't apply to markets that are not perfect. BTW -- for those who don't know, in a perfect market *all* the buyers and sellers know everything relevant about all relevant things AND no player in the market has Monopoly pricing power.
. . . As everyone knows nobody knows everything about everything, and many corps now have monopoly pricing power.
. . . In logic, all proofs that the form of something like this in this specific case =>
If the US is perfect market (as defined above) and the theory is correct for perfect markets, then the prices of labor and stuff in that market will be the perfect prices. But, if one of the 2 premises is false then the conclusion is invalid. I have shown that the 1st premise is false, therefore, the conclusion is not proved. The proof is invalid.
. . . Economics gets away with this shit. If you were charged with a crime your lawyer would not let this sort of logic stand, and the judge would back her up. The prosecution can't assume as a fact things that have been shown to be false. This is as it should be. This same rule should apply to all theories in economics also. Economics matters just as much a legal justice, because the policies econ. recommends effect everyone in the economy.
.
Last edited by Steve_American on 31 Dec 2021 03:56, edited 1 time in total.
#15205216
BlutoSays wrote:You sound to me like an educated fool and there are many of you around.

1) You begin to reinstitute the gold standard by defining a percentage of the dollar that must be backed in either gold or silver, two metals of which there are FINITE amounts. You then mandate there will be no further money created. That's key. You then begin to purchase gold (or mine and process it) and store it as a store of value and confidence. You will have to raise taxes. And you raise them on EVERYONE. I don't GAS about sob stories. EVERYONE pays.
2) You pay off the debt by cutting back on spending. When someone comes up with 3000 page spending bills that no one reads, you tell them to sit down and STFU. Moreover, breaking the federal budget down in to 13 separate bills like we had before would also help instead of one gigantic omnibus bill crammed with everything in it passed once a year. Washington DC is sloppy. Also look at Nixon's Impoundment Control Act of 1974. Parts of that law (struck down, but it could be revisted) would be useful in beating back congress from their endless graft and corruption.
3) Venezuela wasn't a shit hole until it was.
4) Going into savings? WTF are you talking about. Learn about fractional banking. It's a frigging reverse pyramid scheme to expand the money supply out of thin air.
5) Motherfucker, at this point I'm not talking about a surplus. I'm talking about SOME SEMBLANCE of restraint on federal spending. A concept you obviously can't grasp.
6) Sounds currencies are stable. Wages are NOT too low. Wages must be indexed to whatever the value the consumer receives by free market principles. That means I'm not going to mandate someone must be paid $15 to flip a burger, because a bureaucratic motherfucker in DC who has never flipped a burger in their life "feels" that that is what the prevailing wage should be. If you do that, you drive enterprise out of business because mandating inputs, outputs and costs of labor and goods ruins businesses. You will not successfully mandate people will work at this pay because you think it's the right thing to do. And if everyone is unemployed because there are no businesses because of your proclamations from ivory towers on what people will do, then we are in a world of shit, which is EXACTLY what people like you are driving us towards with your "progress".

"We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us" - Old Soviet saying


You donlt understand economics. Not even a little bit.

Driving people into long term poverty destroys the economy n the long run. Low wages stifles innovation and rewards lazy buinesses.

The Industrial revolution was a product of high wages,
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