- cross-posted to:
- workreform@lemmy.world
- socialism
- breadtube@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- workreform@lemmy.world
- socialism
- breadtube@lemmygrad.ml
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Often attributed to Henry Ford: It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory
Of course, economics is largely pseudoscientific gobbledyremoved.
Sound economics exist but they’re exceedingly rare on campus and entirely absent from corporate media.
To co-opt another Henry Ford quip: you can have any economics you want, as long as it’s neoliberal.
They do? I’d love to have economic theories with at least some predictive power.
Marxist economists are the way to go. I would suggest Michael Hudson.
Some basic economic concepts like utility are useful.
Simple, because we the plebs accept their paper as money. Stop accepting it and their power diminishes rapidly.
It needs to be replaced with something else. Which I’m not opposed to. As long as it isn’t crypto currency.
I think it should be crypto, but not bitcoin. That way we know exactly how much exists all the time and know the rate of inflation/deflation to stop theft via printer.
Crypto has largely been adopted as an investment vehicle, meaning that people will hold on to it in the hopes that it will increase in value. That fact alone holds it back from widespread adoption as a means of exchange. A bit of inflation is necessary for currencies. But who is going to adopt a currency that isn’t already in circulation, isn’t backed by a major power, and experiences inflation?
You are right. The well known crypto bitcoin has a lot of holders but very few users for small transactions. You just don’t buy your starbucks coffee with bitcoin because of the stupid high fees to do so. I use Monero which is inflationary as each block puts 0.6 new Monero into circulation. However, that is fixed and does not change so the inflation rate trends towards zero. Right now it is ~0.9% inflation per year. Because of this small inflation however, transaction fees stay very low at less than a penny (US). The whole design is around being a digital version of the cash in your pocket and people use it as such. While it still fluctuates quite a bit against a currency like the dollar it is less volitile than other cryptos because it changes hands pretty often. It falls much less than other crypto during “crypto winter” but also does not atain nearly the highs of other cryptos during upswings.
As to your point about backing, at least Monero, bitcoin, etc use proof of work (POW) which requires real people to dedicate real resources to obtain it. I know a lot of people hate proof of work due to its power draw, but its no worse for the environment than say gold mining. So the electricity and hardware that is mining is what backs the currency. It basically is a digital representation of electricity. “here, i will trade you this kilowatt of electricity for that slice of pizza.”
There’s no such thing as theft via printer. Just theft via improper wages. And crypto will do nothing to address that. Any currency would need to be fiat still as well. Fear of fiat currencies is irrational. The closest thing to problems with it are with those who might be administering it. But value capital more than people.
The governmyth and big banks are just allowed to create new money out of nothing whenever they want. This process puts more money into existance chasing the same quantity of goods. This therefore dilutes the value of all the money that came before it (such as the money currently in your savings account) and makes it worth less. If i made you worth less i would go to jail for theft, when they make you worth less they get away with it, but its still theft. Look at Argentina where inflation is rampant, crypto is actually a good store of wealth their. We find it volatile, they find it necessary.
That is not an argument against fiat currency or government. Merely and acknowledgment for the necessity of responsive and responsible government.
The quantity of goods is not set. It can grow and shrink. Therefore the money supply should be allowed to grow and shrink. Something only Fiat currencies can do. Further having a unit of currency that is the value in and of itself while also being finite. Always arrives at the point at which in order to increase one’s own value. It’s inevitably becomes more effective to hoard said resource. Increasing its scarcity and your own perceived value at the cost of everyone else. Something that cannot be done effectively with a fiat currency. The more they hoard the more they can be printed to keep the economy and Society liquid.
In fact there is no currency more perfect than a Fiat currency. It has no inherent issues unto itself. Any issues that arise from it always arise from those administering it. Not the concept itself. We should have never let thieving capitalists set the value of our currency. It should have always been tied to the value of a worker’s labor and paid to that worker. Our monetary policy failures are failures to tax effectively.
What is your thought on the fair tax idea where the IRS would be abolished and a 20% sales tax put in place so the IRS cant ruin lives because you filled out a form wrong. Personally i think we should either have no tax at all and no central government or we should have everyone pay the same tax as everyone else. Doing it as a sales tax would disincentivise buying in excess and help reduce debt too since people would be less inclined to buy something and have to pay the tax on it. Sure, a millionaire may buy a farari, but they are going to pay 20% tax on it and not very likely buy one again next year.
Fair tax is anything but fair. Disproportionately punishing those that are not wealthy. People must consume to survive. Taxing that would only impact their ability to survive in the long run. Conversely the wealthy get wealthy by stealing more than they consume. Making a flat 20% tax on their consumption useless. As the amount of their theft consistently increases. Our ability to recover it decreases.
A recurring 20% tax on wealth might be workable. But that isn’t what the so called fair tax has ever been about. There should be no minimum wage anywhere in the world. There absolutely however should be tightly controlled maximum wages and compensation. After which things are taxed at 100%.
Because they can print as much money as they want, devaluing yours in the process. Just like they did for the bank bailouts. A trillion dollar wealth transfer from the 99% to the 1%. Bitcoin was designed to solve this, the first block even contains a reference to it. BTC is neutral, international currency that knows no borders and which has a fixed supply and clear, unambiguous monetary policy. Nobody can ever turn on the money printer. It has been faithfully relaying transactions for people for 15 years without a single hack or day of downtime.
It makes functional currency available to anybody with a phone and an internet connection, which matters a lot in the global south and to the “unbanked” and “underbanked”. There are billions of people who have cell phones but no stable banking or monetary system or who regularly experience hyperinflation, Bitcoin solves this problem for them. Transactions settle in seconds to minutes which is much much faster than most in-country bank transfers let alone international. Fees can be as low as a penny with Bitcoin’s lightning network which can scale basically infinitely. Lightning transactions settle in under a second.
It does all of this with about .1% of global energy usage, most of which comes from renewables since Bitcoin miners inherently seek out the cheapest electricity available which tends to come from over-provisioned renewables during times of low electric demand. This is massively less electrical usage than even remittance services alone (western union etc) use, let alone the entire banking system and the carbon impact of moving around physical money from place to place.
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