admittedly
i can understand being a copblob
i can't really understand the appeal of being a tax man
🇳🇱
@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 @freemo Keeping the money printer going. That's what causes inflation. Taxes won't stop inflation.
which amounts to a very elaborate reverse robinhood where the state continously issues loans for more money than exists and seizes it to pay off ever increasing debt loads.
@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.
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.
there are literally zero advantages to fiat for everyone but controllers. it lets authority spend capital it doesn't have because it takes the populace a comical amount of time to finally correct (hyperinflation.)
the USD is literally just backed by "proof of bombs" as it were.
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.
>"the thing's length has widly changed over the years"
@icedquinn
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.
@posrev