Agreed.

I don't think "Contentionism" is necessarily a new insight though perhaps it is a more formal way of talking about an old and ongoing reality.

One of the books that is near the top of list of books I plan to read is Victor Hugo 1862 classic Les Misérables. The musical was good but I suspect it is a pale shadow of the original. The story is one centered around the tyranny of the law the conditions that make such tyranny inevitable and ultimately the forces that allow for the law to be overthrown. An argument for Contentionism from 155 years ago.

I provided two possible definitions of slavery which one are you using or are you arguing for a different definition of slavery?

Definitions must be clearly laid out or arguments have no meaning. Without clearly defining slavery arguments about "slave labor" are fundamentally incoherent.


Are you trying to make the case that my comments above or elsewhere are those of a Marxist?  I have written about the importance of religion in the Health and Religion my position there is decisively anti-Marxist.

It is actually your argument that it's all just nature and economics that fits in very well with the "Marxist" ideology.

Karl Marx's Analysis of Religion
http://atheism.about.com/od/philosophyofreligion/a/marx_4.htm

My question for you iamnotback is do you agree with Marx analysis of religion above? Are you "a Marxist" on this issue?

I do not recall ever commenting on racism. Slavery is indeed gone if we define slavery as the legal and socially acceptable practice of reducing one individual to the status of another individual's property.

If you want to redefine slavery as the condition of not being free then of course "slavery" will never be gone. Approaching freedom is a asymptote not an absolute.

Yes, but mainly via education.

Consider the resistance that would form against a fractional reserve bitcoin bank.
Ultimately the transparency of the blockchain and the ability to securely hold your own funds offchain would make this much harder to pull off than with fiat or gold. Not impossible but harder and thus less profitable. Cryptocurrency helps illuminate the nature of usury. Ignorance is the foremost enemy of progress.

The best parallels for how we can move beyond usury can likely be found in two prior historical transitions.

A) The transition from economies of slave labor to economies of surfs and feudalism.

B) The transition from feudalism to republicanism.

Ultimately, the process of moving beyond usury will probably be similar to those prior transitions. Painful, slow,  halting and unlikely to be completed in our lifetimes.

That is understandable not everyone likes musicals even good ones. Maybe the problem is the genre?

Are you a rap fan? This song won a Grammy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zICb-9m2dGA

Voltaire [1768], "Response to the author of the book, The Three Impostors"

"Insipid writer, you pretend to draw for your readers
The portraits of your 3 impostors;
How is it that, witlessly, you have become the fourth?
Why, poor enemy of the supreme essence,
Do you confuse Mohammed and the Creator,
And the deeds of man with God, his author?...
Criticize the servant, but respect the master.
God should not suffer for the stupidity of the priest:
Let us recognize this God, although he is poorly served.
...
In vain you raise as an objection to me the hypocritical insolence
Of these proud charlatans promoted to high honors,
Nourished by our work, quenched by our tears;
Of these Caesars tainted by their usurped grandeur;
A priest on the Capitoline hill where Pompea triumphed;
Of these wretches in sandals, the excrement of humanity,
Soaking there detestable hands in our blood;
At the sound of their voice a hundred towns are covered in ruins,
And the horrible matins of bloodied Paris:
I know these awful monuments better than you;
I have unmasked them with my pen for the past fifty years.
But, as the fearsome enemy of this fanaticism,
I have also celebrated God when the devil was vanquished.
I always distinguished between religion
And the misery bred of superstition. "

Not really my style of music but much better than your initial offering.
I prefer music that tells more of a story. Like this:

Valjean Arrested
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWOsZj-AjHQ&list=PL71A8E218EA55A570&index=2

François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire) [1768], "Response to the author of the book, The Three Impostors"

"My lodging is filled with lizards and rats;
But the architect exists, and anyone who denies it
Is touched with madness under the guise of wisdom.
Consult Zoroaster, and Minos, and Solon,
And the martyr Socrates, and the great Cicero:
They all adored a master, a judge, a father.
This sublime system is necessary to man.
It is the sacred tie that binds society,
The first foundation of holy equity,
The bridle to the wicked, the hope of the just.

If the heavens, stripped of his noble imprint,
Could ever cease to attest to his being,
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
Let the wise man announce him and kings fear him.
Kings, if you oppress me, if your eminencies disdain
The tears of the innocent that you cause to flow,
My avenger is in the heavens: learn to tremble.
Such, at least, is the fruit of a useful creed.

But you, faulty logician, whose sad foolishness
Dares to reassure them in the path of crime,
What fruit do you expect to reap from your fine arguments?
Will your children be more obedient to your voice?
Your friends, at time of need, more useful and reliable?
Your wife more honest? and your new renter,
For not believing in God, will he pay you better?
Alas! let's leave intact human belief in fear and hope.
...
I see from afar that era coming, those happy days,
When philosophy, enlightening humanity,
Must lead them in peace to the feet of the common master;
Frightful fanaticism will tremble to appear there:
There will be less dogma with more virtue. "

You are very welcome. I am actually still in the process of reading this book having only gotten up to the chapter on usury which it nails. It has the best description of the cost and consequences of usury that I have read anywhere. I cannot comment yet on the later chapters.

The book is available for free to read online from the author here:
http://sacred-economics.com/read-online/

Or it can be purchased here:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1583943978/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=theascentofhu-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399349&creativeASIN=1583943978

I read it up to chapter 6 online and then bought a copy. I am waiting for my hard copy to arrive to finish the rest.

Why participate in a system that creates unpayable debt via usury? The answer of course is that we should not its dumb if we value the long term success and progress of society. However, large scale change on this issue is probably not going to happen in our lifetimes usury is very profitable. Change would require a degree of wisdom that we do not yet have. Indeed the idea is not even conceivable without a currency system that does not have usury at its core and does not easily facilitate usury. Bitcoin is interesting as an option along these lines. Charles Eisenstein argues for a gift economy but I have not read those later chapters yet.



Because our entire economy is now dependent on it. We cannot simply get rid of it without economic collapse which would just lead back eventually to usury again. We can no more top-down abolish usury then the Roman empire could have abolished slavery. We must develop a functioning alternative first and then out-compete usury. Does the economics of cryptocurrency help provide an alternative and thus the ability to route around usury? I believe the answer to this question is quite possibly yes. This is one of the reasons I have an investment in bitcoins.

That's because you are deaf
Here are a few pieces of quality music completely religion free just for you stats. 

Dave Thomas - La Noyee solo (Yann Tiersen cover)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI76sKLMkMU

Russian Folk Music - Russian Winter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4iDAqTglzQ

Ukulele weeps by Jake Shimabukuro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puSkP3uym5k

To understand the problem of a bitcoin only currency growth must be understood as an integral. In any economy at a given instant there are various investment opportunities. In an economy capable of a theoretical 5% growth there will be investments that return 1% growth and those that return 50% growth. However the integral of growth opportunities the sum of all all actual known growth opportunities is a fixed value. We can never know with certainty what this is as it involves the cumulative knowledge and opportunities available to all members society.

If we hypothesize that at a specific time growth opportunity averages 5% across the economy then ideal money should be at least theoretically capable of matching resources to investment opportunity to actualize this growth.

In a bitcoin only economy if expected growth is 5% only investments with an expected return of greater then 5% will be considered. All economic opportunities with expected return between 0.1% and 5% will be ignored as it is a better economic decision to simply hold bitcoins and free ride on the faster growing sectors of the economy. Thus actual growth will not be 5% it will be less. Exactly how much less depends on the distribution of growth opportunities some have argued this is a Pareto distribution but that is irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion. The take home message is that all growth opportunities between 0 and 5% are lost. The money fails as an optimal signalling system. Depending on the distribution growth may only be 3% when the economy is capable of 5%. This generalized under-investment never goes away. There will always be under-exploitation of opportunity in such a system.

It is impossible to know from a top-down perspective what actual growth opportunities are. Opportunities are unlikely to exponentially grow forever nor are they likely to zero out forever. Both situations are possible, however,  at any given time so a money with zero debasement is is potentially just as flawed as one set at 5% in terms of optimally matching capital to growth opportunities.

However, if we introduce competing currencies one optimal in a scenario of eternal exponential growth (electronic fiat) and one optimal in an environment of zero growth (bitcoin) and allow capital to move freely between them then individual actors moving back an forth between the two currencies can alter the economic signalling. Once you introduce simultaneous monetary systems the value of each does not necessarily track economic growth instead the values become driven by capital flows between them which in turn is driven by expectation and available opportunities. These two currencies send opposing economic messages. Bitcoin introduces a tendency towards under-investment fiat towards over-investment.

As bad money drives good money to a premium such an economy would likely uses fiat as its primary transactional mechanism and bitcoin would be a savings vehicle. The question is whether two such currencies along with the the ability of individuals to rationally move between them would allow an economy to capture the economic growth that would be missed in a bitcoin only economy while avoiding the over-investment inherent to a economy using only debt based fiat.
 

 

Interesting article in zerohedge highlights the role of debt in solidifying centralization of governance.

In Stunning Admission, Draghi Says A Country Can Leave Eurozone But Must "Settle Its Bill First"
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-21/stunning-admission-draghi-says-country-can-leave-eurozone-must-settle-its-bill-first

The solution is for people and humanity to gradually learn from our mistakes ultimately improving our behavior.

The best educator is consequence and the inevitable suffering it brings.

The role of the state is not to protect us from our bad choices.

The role of the state is to protect the innocent from the bad choices of others.

The state is failure personified.

At its best it is a bumbling and inefficient helper.

At its worst it is a bull in a china shop.

The best the state can ever do is to contain and limit fallout to the individual alone.

Most of the time it accomplishes far less.

We agree on this but by your own logic we cannot know with certainty how high gold and silver will go so it is best set a fixed plan now to cash out gradually incrementally selling a portion at preset benchmark.

I do not know who FOA is or his relevance to this discussion. It sounds like he has previously presented a similar argument to my argument above. Every market has noise. Identifying a trend is not necessarily helpful for short term predictions. I think silver will do just fine over the next few years and closely track gold.

The flaw in your thinking r0ach is a misunderstanding of the immediate future. You seem to believe there will be a global hyper-inflationary collapse a worldwide Weimar Republic scenario leading to a global dark age and a return to a simpler time with  metals used for day to day transactions. This is not going to happen.


Economic collapse will be likely be staggered not simultaneous it will indeed threaten the life savings of those with money in the banks, those with pensions, and even to some degree those in stocks. It will result not in a return to metallic currency but an unstoppable political pressure to replace corrupt and "incompetent" national governments with "superior" global institutions. SDR or a similar electronic concept will be exchanged for sovereignty stabilizing unsteady markets. The immediate future involves the uncertainty of transitioning from multiple nation state fiats to a global fiat. All precious metals will probably do well during this transition period.

Global government will maintain stability via limited wealth transfers to contain unrest (universal guaranteed income) coupled with universal surveillance to destroy malcontents. Such a government will likely be at somewhat stable. However, the inefficiencies introduced will result lower growth rates then has been the recent historic norm.

We agree that political power originates in top-down processes that attempts to quell human diversity and impose order. Power always seeks centralization.

We agree that issues are best solved at the level of the individual. Should that fail issues are best solved at the level of family then the local neighborhood. It is only after failure to contain destructive variance at the neighborhood level that we differ.

You argue that state interventions should be opposed on principle as power naturally grows beyond its intended purpose. In the case of child protective services you envision a progressive encroachment of the state into the family. In Orwell's 1984 children were encouraged to spy on their parents watching them for disloyalty. Parents were afraid of their children.

I acknowledge that state interventions have major downsides including the tendency to insidiously grow. However, I view such interventions as a necessary mechanism to temporarily contain the worst forms of human evil. Behavior that forces harm upon another against their will cannot be allowed to operate unchecked without damaging the fabric of society. In the the extreme example of a father who starves, sexually abuses, or mutates his children the state must intervene.

The ultimate role of the state is to restrain and mitigate destructive behavior. This is the states only purpose for existing. You might counter that the dangers of state power are too great that the cure is worse than the disease and that evil behavior should be addressed by the neighborhood or written off as nature in action.

You would cite the "Iron Law of Economics" highlighting the dangers inherent in state power. I would counter that we are not all slaves to Pharaoh so the "Iron Law" cannot be the dominant vector in society.

You would argue that nature cannot be top-down controlled and attempts to do so must ultimately fail. I would counter that nature can be temporarily restrained and then ultimately transformed via grassroots transformation of its character.

You would cite Natural Law is the ultimate arbiter of truth. I would counter that Divine Law supersedes Natural Law and compels us to a higher calling.

I understand your position and believe you understand mine. I do not believe we are going to reach consensus at this time.

r0ach that is not an honest interpretation of what I wrote. I spoke of a hypothetical economic situation where only bitcoin was money and nothing else to only to highlight what the consequences of that scenario would be.

Human history is full of individual humans and groups imposing things the hallmark of progress is that less and less of that happens over time.

Metals are just a token that facilitate economic signaling. They are useful for this purpose because they are rare, durable, take work to obtain, and are difficult to debase. Metals actually can be defaulted on. All that has to happen for this to occur is for people to stop accepting them as a store of value. Their physical presence guarantees only their industrial value. Metals have a monetary value in excess of their industrial value only because there is someone willing to buy them from you who also believes metals have monetary value. Over time this metals network is gradually shrinking and in the long run it will continue to shrink.

This won't effect gold anytime soon. We do not yet have a token that is demonstrably better then gold but silver is a much weaker case as gold is obviously better. Your essay argues that historically silver and copper were also necessary as there was not enough gold in small enough denominations to provide the required liquidity. This may have been true in the past but will only be true in the future if one hypothesizes a collapse of society. If society and government don't collapse (which they won't) then we will simply transition to some new fiat. As a result silver is slowly being demonetized over time and this process will continue. Silver will probably do well in the short term as people look for safe havens to ride out an upcoming monetary reset to some form of global electronic fiat but medium to long term gradual demonetization will continue and therefore I expect silver to underperform both bitcoin and gold.

I also disagree with your dismissal of cryptocurrency. The technology is the first thing to come along in human history that offers the (yet to be fuilfilled) possibility of someday providing a superior token for economic signaling than gold. Dismissing it as a joke is unwise. I agree about the lack of a price floor though. Industrial demand gives metals a price floor cryptocurrency lacks.

This brings us to the question of what is ideal money?

Ideal money is not something that just holds its value over time. Money is ultimately a signalling system. Like the nervous system it's function is to coordinate independent actors directing their activity appropriately across the fitness landscape of the world and the economy.

Bitcoin could certainly be an ideal money but it would be ideal money for a very specific society. Bitcoin would be ideal money for a society that was entirely or mostly static with limited or no technological progress and a stable population. In such an environment an entirely fixed supply of money would be ideal. It would allow stable transmission of value facilitating division of labor and coordination across the economy.

If we imposed a system like bitcoin upon a society with growth potential people would still invest, but they would not invest appropriately in response to economic opportunities. They would under-invest because a fixed supply of money creates a strong incentive against risk. With an utterly fixed money supply you receive a percentage of future economic growth simply by doing nothing. Only the most promising growth opportunities would receive investment and those with more marginal returns would be ignored. A bitcoin monetary system thus creates a strong vector against growth or in bitcoin lingo a HODL mentality.

Similarly a currency build upon the expectation of eternal exponential growth also runs into difficulties. Economic growth is unpredictable as it requires knowledge formation. Nothing grows exponentially forever there will always be periods of consolidation with limited or even no growth. Fiat does not allow for such periods as the entire system starts to collapse in a prolonged zero growth environment. This collapse is why society introduces artificial growth via government spending, central bank purchases of bonds, wealth redistribution and guaranteed incomes. All of these interventions are inefficient and inhibit growth.

It is impossible for any monetary system that requires either exponential growth (fiat) or is optimal in zero growth environment (bitcoin) to appropriately coordinate economic actors to a dynamically changing economy. To be ideal money a system must be adaptable across all future economic landscapes facilitating growth or inhibiting it in response to underlying economic opportunities.

It may be possible to approximate ideal money with some form of dynamic algorithm that changes in response to economic activity and population size but I am skeptical for this represents an attempt at top-down central planning coordinating the money supply via growth measurements or economic models. If we allow for dynamic competition between multiple currencies, however, we eliminate the need for accurate top-down omniscience. As long as the cost of converting from one currency to another is low future money does need to be a single uniform system. With a multitude of currencies to choose from (each based on differing fundamentals) actors would be able to move between currency systems depending on their economic needs and opportunities. This movement would alter the fundamental value of these currency options. The aggregate growth vector would become dynamically adaptable to all scenarios and thus appropriately coordinate actors across the broader economy (fitness landscape).