@icedquinn I was friends with a tax man. He turned out to be a POS but I can maybe shine some light on their thinking.
They think they are doing a public service. They arent really anti-rich usually or anything like that. But they do think they are making america a better place by doing a necessary service.
@icedquinn Very, the arabs arent going to bomb themselv...... nevermind.
@icedquinn Gotta stop being a tard before you can retard.
@icedquinn @freemo Keeping the money printer going. That's what causes inflation. Taxes won't stop inflation.
@freemo @icedquinn Basically they use a elaborate money laundering system.
Its actually more like a loan to the public, and the amount of money generated is based on an auction that is priced effectively betting on the future value of the american economy.
@freemo @icedquinn Is that basically what a bond is?
@icedquinn @freemo The debasing of currency didn't work out well for the Roman Empire. They did it to fund their endless wars.
100% of people who eat spinach eventually die. Therefore spinach must be unhealthy.
Not even remotely true. Gold has widly changed in its trade value over the years. In fact just in our lifetime gold has swung considerably.
To give you an idea as to actual numbers, the buying-power of gold today is 10% of what it was in 1980 and 20% of what it was since 1720.
Gold has value for the same reason fiat has value... The qty is relatively fixed and cant be easily fabricated.
When did I say it cant be fabricated... I said **easily** fabricated... is it easy to get one of those printers? No, in fact only one specific authority in the whole universe has one.
@icedquinn @freemo @romin Gold and silver is fungible. It has many uses including industrial as opposed to fiat that is just paper or digital.
Both gold and money have utility and are fungible.
The utility of money is being able to transport large amounts of value/wealth with very little weight, and in a way that is tracable. Gold on the other hand is quite heavy but more importantly if stolen is untracable so is also much harder to retrieve and much easier to offload when stolen.
@freemo @icedquinn @romin You don't need alot of gold to move alot of money at $2000 USD per ounce. The fact it is hard to trace is actually a plus.
And yet .... nothing remotely like the great depression has happened since.
Always funny when people argue from points where we have monumental evidence of history showing the contrary.
Its the same thing you hear from communists about how great it should be theory yet ::Gestures to every communist country in history::
@freemo @icedquinn @posrev @romin
Do anarchists trade via barter? Or do they just rape and pillage? Since there's no order in true anarchy, there's no currency...
Sure.. remind me again which society had no fiat currency and a stable economy, I dont remember one.
@freemo @icedquinn @romin I think captalism is actually good with little or no manipulation by government. Austrian economics.
On that we agree, but I was using communism as an example of similar way of thinking.
@freemo @icedquinn @romin Yes, most communist countries are run by tyrants. China is abit different in that they embrace capitalism.
To pay for a project like hyperloop someone would have to move 740,000 kg of gold to pay for it. Just moving that if it sunk or was stolen would destabalize whole economies. Now imagine projects that cost trillions.
It also would be slow to move, taking upward of a week if its across the globe (with huge risk for theft)
Now compare that to fiat which is mostly digital as you point out. It is nearly complete safe, and moved instantly.
@freemo @icedquinn @romin That's why fiat should be backed by gold. But I think the horse has already bolted.
Sure except as we covered last time we tried that we had the great depression (and quite a bit of instability before hand).
Economic theory knew the instability would happen and new fiat would solve it. We moved to fiat and the theory turned out to be true, things have been **significantly** more stable ever since.
When the science and data very clearly shows economic theory is right and that backing money with gold leads to poverty and instability why would you or anyone argue to go back to that? Its already been demonstrated to be a bad idea and the solution has consistently demonstrated to be better.
@freemo @icedquinn @romin When people see that inflation rises by the week and the cost of living keeps rising. It's hard to agree that this economic system is working for them.
Thats because Trump violated the process we had established (and earlier Obama did something similar but to a lesser extent)... namely, Quantitative Easing.. Which totally circumvents the usual process for producing new money.
@freemo @icedquinn The US currency used to be backed by gold bullion.
Yea, thankfully when we learned just how unstable that made our economy we changed it. In fact the great depression was a huge reason to get off the gold standard as it was a large contributing factor
yea no, not what happened. The fiat being gold-backed was well established as a problem not a boon.. and while yes some people object to the fed and im not saying the fed and the way it structured is a good idea by any means, but not backing money with gold was absolutely the right decision.
Being above 0, yet wildly varying in buying power is not an indication of success quite the opposite.
Just as fiat money which is demonstratably more stable, usually over long periods of time, and then failing when the government fails is likewise not an indication it was a failure overall. Sure eventually it may fail in the end along with the nation that backs it, but the rest of the time it is wildly more useful than gold due to its stability.
@freemo @icedquinn I thought it was caused by the Fed and the crash of the stockmarket.
Not the federal bank, the fed hadnt existed yet. It was created as part of the solution.
It was a stockmarket crash, and the full details are rather involved, but the gold backing the money was a central part of the problem and removing that fixed it, which is why we have never seen a crash remotely likely it since.
Yea and? WE arent discussing stock market crashes or their effect on economies as a whole. We are talking about crashes in economy related to how we back our money. Crashed from other sources like the stock market is another matter.
and yet we have never seen a financial collapse like it since... the theory explained it would happen, the theory explained by not backing it with gold, and now it doesnt happen like it used to.
Proof is in the pudding.
@icedquinn @freemo sweet jesus Pooh, that's not honey! You're eating Modern Monetary Theory!
Inflation depends purely on the supply of currency in circulation. To be able to "take away" money via taxes to counteract inflation caused by "infinitely printing" money they'd have to destroy the tax money or at least never spend it, ever. This entire theory is a very roundabout way of stating the simple fact that "government takes taxes to fund its spending" in a way that justifies either a) "muh economy is bullshit, let's print more money to make everyone rich" or b) "muh economy is bullshit and just a pretend tool of the authoritarian government to do what it wants".
MMM is interesting because it's used on both sides of the political spectrum in an attempt to mask bad economy takes.