Really? I remember reading about some libertarians in New Hamshire that used a spare garage in someones house to acommodate homeless people because it was very cold ouside. The government threaten them to close it because they did not have the license. At the end, the government did not have the balls to go ahead. Just an example of the opposite situation.

The fact that the government promises a guarantee does not mean its real. It just means its a promise.

Lets see how the keynesians spin this one. The price index in the UK is around 4%, yet unemployment is not going down and GDP just slipped into negative again.

Thats not suppose to happen because some "economist" say that rising prices promotes investment and spending and reduces unemployment. They also say that prices can not go up when GDP is down and unemployment is high. Reality differs.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/uk-...big-head-scrat

For anyone that want to check the Bank of England balance sheet and the reaction to the crisis: http://www.cumber.com/content/misc/boe.pdf Quite impressive. It took a while for the new money to reach the market but its happening.

EDIT: The sad part is that keynesians will keep saying that their policies are designed to help the poor, etc... when in reality what is happening is that rising prices are going to hit the unemployed the harderst.

I could not have answered better.

The first reaction of an authoritarian is always: "but what about the poor?" like if they really care for the poor and not for power.

But this "survival of the fittest" is just a strawman. The market is collaboration, absence of violence.

Government is the way some people get to use and justify violence to gain privileges over the rest. With the question I am trying to turn the vision that government is there to help, towards a vision that government intervention hurts.


I did not explain myself or you did not get it. I am not saying lefties want a dictatorship (although some do). I am saying that internally and probably without them knowing they want a democracy (because its the polically correct way of thinking) that does what they want. When you talk to central economic planners (and this is true for right wingers also) the problem is always that the government is not doing exactly what they propose. If only the government did want they propose everything would be dandy. This is what I call the semi-god complex. It feels good for the ego.

Btw, I am talking about authoritarian lefties (social-democrats and so on). I consider myself a lefty.

Dont sell it as a plan to do nothing, because it is not true that libertarians propose to do nothing. Libertarians propose that the government should do nothing, that is extremely different than everybody doing nothing. You should say exactly what you said, that the government should let people self organize and attend their needs locally because government does not have the capacity to provide efficiently and any type of help by the government will in reality hurt people. If you want to be emotional you can ask them if they want to hurt people (it works with lefties).

The problem is that it is nice to think that you are some kind of semi-god that can centrally plan and resolve humanity problems, only if you had enough power. Its very nice for the ego, and some people buy it (I know because I did for a long time). Until you dont realize that you are being an egomaniacal fool to believe that you can centrally plan an economy you are gong to keep thinking that just chaning the law to exactly what you propose will solve all the problems of everyone (even when you dont even know the real problems of everyone, its absurd like that).

This is not really true even in a central bank system. The fractional banks protected by a central bank do create money through credit, but that does not mean all the money in circulation is debt based, just most of it.

And during this crisis it has become evident that considering only the banking system as the source of money in the present monetary system will make you get the economy wrong. Understanding the present banking system is important, but there are more parts to the monetary system. If money was all debt and the banking system was the only way to create/destroy money there would be heavy deflation right now. But there is not.

Thanks. Looks interesting.


+1

Its even worse.

Not only inflation steals from some to give to a few (as you describe it), but it also makes the economy underperform because it creates malinvestments and in extreme cases bubbles. So its not only stealing a part of the pie for a few, its making the pie smaller or not as big as it could be.

Inflation really makes the middle class and specially the poor miserable.

The EMH is crap. They dont even acknowledge the possibility of bubbles. EMH is used for modeling financial investments mathematically and may have its uses in some specific cases, but as a general economic theory is crap, nonsense. So I would not make much of it.

Wow. The most surprising part is that he is a very good bass player. Impressive technique.

Satoshi is a p2p virtual entity.

So basically the WIR is a bank in the form of a cooperative using their own privately issue currency, that the business that are part of the cooperative can use to lend to each other.

Bitcoin and WIR are similar in the sense that they are voluntary currencies not backed by any commodity. But they are very different in the way they opperate because bitcoin is decentralized and WIR is not, thus changing "the game" completely.

I would like to know how WIR creates money or if it opperates on a fixed amount.

I could not agree more. Money really is a function, not a determined object.

No problem in having your own definition, but when you are talking with someone agreeing in the meaning of the words is needed.

Honestly the one I stated is the most common definition of money that I have read. But you might have a different experience.

It seems to me it all depends on the definition of money. If you define money as whatever the people uses as medium of exchange, then a currency (or anything) that people uses as money becomes money (and stops being money when people dont use it as money anymore).

It seems to me that it is a convoluted way of saying "medium of exchange".


Isnt the objective of a currency to be money?

There has been a long time since I saw the movie but let me give you a quick list (if you are really interested in some area I can dig up and check some reliable sources about some specific period so you can take your own conclussions):

- Several of the quotes he uses on the film I found to be undocumented and dubious, f.e: Widrow Wilson saying at the end of his career that he regrets creating the Fed. It seems he never really felt sorry about it..

- During the Lincoln era he seems to imply that he was killed by the bankers because he wanted to keep printing and bankers did not want to. The reality is that the greenback was hyperinflating and the only way to avoid it was to stop printing it. Also, Lincoln approved a banking act at the end of the war that centralized the credit in the banks of New York, so bankers were happy about him.

- Then he talks about the silver thing like if it was a popular movement, when in reality it started as a industrialist thing. Actually all that part is horribly explained, and he talks about it like if it was a big crisis and then suddenly after some few years the USA has become a industrialized nation. It does not make sense, because it did not happen that way.

Etc...

As I said, if you are interested in some specific period I could look for some references so you can read and make your own opinion.

I dont have an opinion on peak-oil. I tried to look at the data but its a very specialized and closed industry so the data did not seem reliable enough, so I dont know if peak-oil is real or not.

But no matter if it is real or not it is being used to hide the monetary manipulation and the crisis they produce. Why am I saying this?

During the 50's and the 60's there was little talk about peak-oil. During the 70's with the Fed printing like crazy producing stagflation peak-oil was everywhere with "scientists" predicting with mathematical models that there was only petrol for 20 more years and forcing people to believe that petrol was the cause for rising prices. During the 80's no more peak oil. During the 90's no more peak oil. During the 2000's no more peak-oil. And now that there is a new crisis where the central banks are printing like crazy, peak-oil comes to the front again...

Peak-oil is somehow correlated with central bank printing...  

Now, even if peak-oil was real, the price increase would be progressive and over years. There would be no swings going from $80 to $140, then down to $30 and up to $80 again in like a year or year and a half. This movements are not supply and demand, they are monetary.

So it seems quite obvious to me that peak-oil is being used to hide the central bank manipulations. And it seems it will be used again when all the money the Fed has created leaks and prices start rising like crazy.

PS: If someone still believes that the 70's stagflation was caused by petrol: http://blogs.forbes.com/johntamny/2011/01/09/paul-krugman-channels-jimmy-carter-and-the-club-of-rome/

PS2: And you might want to check some Tomas Di Lorenzo video where he talks about how since the Rockefeller started in the petrol business the government has been promoting the scarcity of petrol. USA government officials said that petrol would never be found in California or Texas for example. EDIT: I found the Thomas Di Lorenzo video (government peak oil propaganda starts at 17:40): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DIuXMJK_YA