Taking Milton Friedman to the Woodshed

[benjamindees]

Good article which points out some things that need to be more widely known:

http://mises.org/daily/6439/David-Stockman-vs-the-Friedman-Cult

“Friedman never even entertained the possibility that once the central bank was freed from the stern discipline of protecting its gold reserves, it would fall into the hands of monetary activists and central planners”

[Impaler]

The point concerning the operation of central banks, will the managers be 'political' or 'faithful monetary eunuchs' is rather central to BTC.  Most people claim that BTC has no central bank operator, but this is wrong, the protocol is doing the job of a central bank manager and Satoshi programmed it to be a blind utterly tyrannical manager that would mint a predetermined quantity of coins hourly for years to come.

Their exists a false dichotomy between this 'blind tyrant' and a the 'political man' with the rejection of the latter sending people into the arms of the former with disastrously unstable valuation of BTC as a result.  A 'faithful monetary eunuchs' COULD be programmed if people really put their minds too it, an example already exists too.  Difficulty adjustment is not set in stone, we don't know what difficulty will be 3 years from know but we know the difficulty-algorithm eunuch will be faithfully keeping the block rate to around 10 minutes which is what matters.

A faithful monetary eunuch needs some important data about prices to crunch and that's the rub, no simplistic first-order data from the block-chain would be accurate and most importantly free from manipulation.  My conclusion is that a fully realized futures market must exist inside the block-chain that will allow present and future to trade places so to speak.  By selling future right to mine coins for present coins the expected inflation or deflation rate can be determined and then a counteracting change in money supply created automatically.

[canadense]

Yes. This is the Austrian School critique of monetarism and is richly presented in the writings of Murray Rothbard. Gold and Bitcoin are the countervailing response to the money supply diddlers of the centralized confiscatory statist planners.