Don't mix greed with the instinct the survive. Greed is a gluttonous desire to possess or consume more than one needs, despite the consequences.

The best place to start is to ask yourself... lost purchasing power against what?  Who decided where to set the $1 baseline on that chart and what are they using to consider how value has fluctuated?  It seems like they've used gold (no surprise there).  Is a speculative metal like gold the best thing to use to determine relative purchasing power of the dollar?  Why not use eggs, milk, iron, corn, sheep, oil, etc.?

A loaf of bread cost $0.05 1930 and it costs $3.00 today, but is that the whole story?  $0.05 was a couple hours' wage back in 1930.  $3.00 is less than half of minimum hourly wage today.  So yea, you could purchase a nice car for $2,500 back in the day, but that was a year's salary for many people.  So were people really better off when the dollar's purchasing power was higher?  Obviously a good bit of that chart is exaggeration and hyperbole, because the average American wasn't exactly rolling in wealth when the dollar was at its supposed peak.


The dollar's purchasing power is entirely relative.  If real wages increase at the same rate the dollar declines in value, then the decline isn't really a big deal - stuff costs more, but everyone makes more. If real wages increase at a slower rate than the dollar declines (or decline themselves), then we've got issues.  Obviously that's only the tip of the iceberg (foreign trade really messes everything up), but it's a good place to start to decide whether the decline is of concern or not.

Stuff like that is misleading.  There is FAR FAR more to the monetary control debate than "zomg the dollar is worth only a fraction of what it was!!!"  Charts like that designed to get an emotional reaction out of people that don't think.  Without even getting into details, just consider for a second that in 1900 people worked for pennies an hour.  So, yes, the dollar was worth more, but that's only a tiny part of the story.  You can't just look at relative value of a dollar and ignore all other factors.

I've challenged this person to define "Free Market" many times.  He never does it.  Yet, I've just challenged him again to it, let's hope he's up for it this time; yet I sense he won't be.  Just like Hayek, Freidman, Hazlitt and others never define it.  Because if they did one would realize that it doesn't exist or has no tangible meaning.  It is a blast of rhetorical hot air that politicians, economists and other vested interests use to dupe a populace into trusting "the market" (a body dominated by the largest fish composed of massive power players, cartels and monopolies) over the population.  If you put it in those terms then obviously nobody would sign up for it.

Yeah, this is the sawm guy that had another article saying essentially bitcoin wont succeed because they have no intrinsic value, that was a poor article.

This article is even worse in quality, essentially he says bitcoin is going down....for good, and doesn't even give any reasons why, never mind that he doesn't mention any of the reasons for the drops over the last month either.

Poor journalism, just ignore.

Let's say sovereign power was divided up at a city level. Every city became its own country and there was no higher power than said city. The laws were determined by whatever means and if you didn't like them an countless selection of cities could be chosen from.

Wouldn't this be ideal? Wouldn't this enable improvement by enabling true competition-by-choice on a political level?

Now, some are going to say it would scary to go from city-to-city because of highly diverse sets of laws. Well, if it becomes too much an inconvenience, don't you think the natural desire will be to ease such a scenario? As individuals, we adapt to social norms and I am sure the electing populaces will meet in the middle on issues as well -- but still be different enough to retain their sovereign power.

Cities could merge, secede and so forth but c'est la vie. To limit such things is only a hinderance to the competitive process. To claim that one would eventually control them all is just as inane as saying somebody will eventually rule the entire Bitcoin network. Each of these states would eventually gather enough force to hold their own.

I am essentially advocating an entirely decentralized network of sovereign powers.

Do you think it would work? How would we achieve this?

look what inflationary Fed policies have done to the Middle East.  soaring costs of food and financial inequities are what drove the revolutions in these countries IMO.  i followed the Egyptian revolt realtime via Twitter and AlJazeera and there is no question in my mind these were the tenets behind the younger generations revolt. 

central banks cannot continue on the same path of monetizing debt.  the markets are screaming for a correction via deflation.

They are relative to each other. As long as you sell for less than you bought for, you're doing it right.

you start with a functional system.

the US culture of an illusion of workplace safety is ridiculous and i agree.  too much focus is placed on trivial crap, deflecting attention from actual gaping holes in the regulations e.g. no double belting (having two ropes so one is always attached while you're moving the other one to a new attachment point) requirement at extreme heights such as radio towers or wind turbines.

i'm not sure whether your last sentence is being serious or not, but OSHA regs do not require that.  fall protection is not required unless you're above 25 feet.

Socialism is good.  Regulation is great.  The reason the U.S. is in a mess is due to the Futures and Commodities Modernization Act of 2000 creating a completely unregulated derivatives, CDO, CDS, and MBS market, which catalyzed the real estate boom and allowed lots of stupid banks to loan to greedy Americans to buy homes that were two sizes too large for their budget.  The deleveraging of this mess is what's caused the situation we're in now.  If we had regulations in place requiring more disclosure of information or restrictions on the scope of a collateralized debt obligation and mortgage-backed security, this whole situation wouldn't have occurred.

For more information youtube Khan Academy, as I'm too lazy to explain in detail basic economics to clueless fifth grade-level tea partiers here.

Tchau

me too.  That would cause inflation and make my own debt less significant.

Fire up those printing presses.

They are all owned by the same rich people.

What regulation does is raise the minimum standard. Companies are allowed and encouraged to go above the minimum standard, but not below. Yes it's needed.
I have nothing against market solution to problems, but believing it's the one and all solution to all problems is naive to the point of stupidity.

On the topic of this thread:  Darn.  :\  I was hoping they'd run out of money so they would HAVE to start cutting out all the crap that we don't need the government running/giving away.