Economic Totalitarianism

[TPTB_need_war]

There is another possibility which is that States like Texas become more prosperous and don't need any additional socialism. The Federal government may try to force prosperous States to pay for failing States such as Illinois. So we might have the Millennials saying "hell yeah, I don't want to pay for those in Illinois".

I so often seem to write Armstrong's blog posts a few days before he writes them:

So on this subject, it is a VERY SERIOUS ISSUE. I have reported on “lobbying” efforts that have been taking place behind the curtain from my direct sources. There are states looking for Congress to create some sort of mandatory contribution that would take from people’s private savings to bail out state workers. Nothing has been decided as of yet. However, I would expect this to become more forceful next year when Social Security goes bust.

[1715090512]

1715090512

[1715090512]

1715090512

[trollercoaster]

http://www.zdnet.com/article/uk-spy-bill-will-force-tech-firms-to-disclose-future-products-before-launch/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3556298/Plans-drawn-blown-United-States-Europe-Britain-little-say-warns-Tory-minister.html

[TPTB_need_war]

BTW ... I went to New Orleans with my GF and her flaming gay bff (worst mistake ever).  Don't envy anyone who had to grow up in that shithole.

Hahaha. Yeah but there was time when the Jazz and culture was really raw and real, but it is mostly just a shithole now with the redeeming qualities (the remaining creole culture) not at the commercialized junctures that you would see if just passing through.

I don't miss the thuggery, but I do miss the outlandish and even the creole culture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtwJvgPJ9xw

I guess I have a little bit of the crazy rebel thug in me.

[OROBTC]

http://www.zdnet.com/article/uk-spy-bill-will-force-tech-firms-to-disclose-future-products-before-launch/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3556298/Plans-drawn-blown-United-States-Europe-Britain-little-say-warns-Tory-minister.html

trollerc

Two interesting links as usual, thanks.

The USA should butt-out of the UK's affairs re Brexit.  It's not our business.  Obama just sticking it is again.

The UK is almost getting scary!  Cameras, and now they want to ban encryption and submit products before launching?  F**k 'em.

[CoinCube]

A couple of interesting news article today related to health and totalitarianism

"Why Our Children Should Hate Us" - Read The Lance Simmens Article Banned By The Huffington Post
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-28/why-our-children-should-hate-us-read-lance-simmens-article-banned-huffington-post

Although Lance Simmens has been intimately involved in public life for several decades, you’ve probably never heard of him. As such, a little introduction is needed.

As mentioned, Lance Simmens’ career was spent in public policy. Specifically, he worked for two U.S. Presidents as well as a couple of senators and governors. Since retirement, he’s been a prolific writer, publishing 180 articles at the Huffington Post over the past 8 years. As such, it came as a great shock to him to discover that one of his recent articles was removed by the Huffington Post shortly after publication. It was the first article ever rejected by the online publication, and the unacceptable subject matter was nothing more than a positive review of the banned everywhere documentary VAXXED.

Icegate: Now NSIDC Caught Tampering With Climate Records
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/04/28/icegate-now-nsidc-caught-tampering-with-climate-records/

NSIDC’s comprised a press release a few weeks ago claiming that 5+ year old sea ice is at its smallest level on record. To prove it, they’ve produced a new chart...

But according to Steven Goddard of the Real Science website this claim needs to be taken with a huge pinch of salt... they’ve gone and deleted all the old style maps from their archive.

At least they thought they had.

But a sharp eyed reader of Goddard’s managed to find one old style map that NSIDC had forgotten to delete. This enabled Goddard to compare the new style map with an old style map for the same week. What he discovered is that NSIDC has been making some dramatic and unexplained adjustments to the record: about half the 5+ year sea ice which should be there, for example, has been mysteriously erased.

When debate is censored and forbidden and scientific data is 'corrected' to fit the approved narratives one knows we are living in very dangerous times. In the words of C.S. Lewis

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive

[OROBTC]

...

CoinCube and amigos here

C. S. Lewis is a great writer who I have gotten a lot from.  He had a lot of insights into very important subjects, and is worth reading.

Although I had not seen your quotation above, CC, it just shows he was a top-drawer thinker on many things.

[TPTB_need_war]

Interest rates may or may not matter to Venture Capitalists , but it does matter to individuals that can think and want a profit while keeping their principle intact. 

Only an idiot would believe a checking/savings account is a safe place to keep money right now.

Those so-called idiots outnumber your VCs and they are risk averse.
They will trust their cash in a mattress before BTC.
And they will determine if BTC ever reaches true Utility. 
BTC has still got years of Public Relations efforts to go thru before the majority of the public trusts them.


 

And the governments can clamp down on BTC at any time using capital controls on the exchanges, because if the most of the world doesn't accept BTC unless they can immediately convert it to fiat as has been explained upthread by smooth (e.g. Bitpay, etc), then BTC becomes an illiquid asset once the government issues capital controls. BTC is not immune to government action (especially G20 coordinated action) because BTC is not a widespread unit-of-account.

However, BTC has apparently become the unit-of-account of crypto-gambling, but it is not yet certain if the demand for that will remain if people no longer believe they can cash out to fiat unfettered when they want to, and the risk of CC failure due to centralization is a big factor that would cause speculators to be hesitant about thinking they could HODL/gamble in BTC long-term until capital controls cease.

This is my goal is to fix the centralization problem with my CC design and also I am going to make CC a very popular unit-of-account for social network payments. But first I am creating a new programming language, then I have to create the social network, and then finally the CC, so hell may freeze over before I am done. 

Note I also contributed the key technical insight[1] into how to make decentralized exchange work so it can't be jammed.

[1] Find my posts in this thread and note that TierNolan is one of the original inventors of the DE protocol, but it had a jamming flaw until I fixed it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1364951.0

[RealBitcoin]

at this stage of the imminent global liquidity squeeze as interest rates rise and with the risks of CC failure due to centralization, is either very poor already and gambling with lunch money, or is a high stakes gambler and not a prudent investor.

Increased interest rate on fiat =/= bitcoin goes down

Bitcoin is not a crypto commodity in a bubble, it's a safe haven + long term wealth storage when all of it goes down.


If the interest rates rise globally, there will be hyperinflation, and the inflation will always be higher than the interest rate, so any investor dumb enough to hold cash will either get bailed in, or get hyperinflated.

Bitcoin is not in a bubble, the fiat financial markets are.

[Yakamoto]

at this stage of the imminent global liquidity squeeze as interest rates rise and with the risks of CC failure due to centralization, is either very poor already and gambling with lunch money, or is a high stakes gambler and not a prudent investor.

Increased interest rate on fiat =/= bitcoin goes down

Bitcoin is not a crypto commodity in a bubble, it's a safe haven + long term wealth storage when all of it goes down.


If the interest rates rise globally, there will be hyperinflation, and the inflation will always be higher than the interest rate, so any investor dumb enough to hold cash will either get bailed in, or get hyperinflated.

Bitcoin is not in a bubble, the fiat financial markets are.

That's... actually a really good perspective on this.

I've never thought that the fiat markets were stable, but I never realised that Bitcoin is basically a rapidly-updating form of gold, and it is a far better form of financial security than holding money ever would be.

[TPTB_need_war]

This is yet another reason why we need a successful decentralized social network:

Illegal immigrant is arrested over murder of American nanny in Austria after she took him in to stop him being deported - and is revealed to have raped underage girl



(nb: facebook owns the © on her picture. You know who owns your digital stuff after you get killed.)

[TPTB_need_war]

If the interest rates rise globally, there will be hyperinflation

Utter nonsense.

It will be massive deflation due to sovereign debt defaults. The governments are not going to drop money from helicopters. Please understand what is really going on.

[Yakamoto]

This is yet another reason why we need a successful decentralized social network:

Illegal immigrant is arrested over murder of American nanny in Austria after she took him in to stop him being deported - and is revealed to have raped underage girl



(nb: facebook owns the © on her picture. You know who owns your digital stuff after you get killed.)

That's what happens when you give someone the ability to make their own business where you get people to post about themselves; they get access to the pictures, can say they own anything, and use it for their advantage.

It's all a game of money.

[trollercoaster]

This is yet another reason why we need a successful decentralized social network:

Illegal immigrant is arrested over murder of American nanny in Austria after she took him in to stop him being deported - and is revealed to have raped underage girl



(nb: facebook owns the © on her picture. You know who owns your digital stuff after you get killed.)

The first thing I was ever told NOT to do on the internet was publish my real info, it's pretty fucked up how it has transformed from those days. 

[TPTB_need_war]

Enslave?  I think one wotld currency would be a good thing.   Anything to bring humanity together instead of dividing us. We need to tear down political boundaries and remake the world.   And hey, isn't that what bitcoin is for?

It would help a lot if you'd my prior posts in this thread (when I used to have the username 'iamback'):

I chose to agree. This would be the single biggest issue that would cause an enslaving of nations.
thats why we need country fiat and bitcoin.

I thought we are already in this situation.

*Ahem the US dollar? last time I checked everyone loves it, despite its covered bad value.

So why would it recourse into another world reserve currency.

The difference will be that the new one-world reserve coming approximately 2020, will not be controlled by any nation, but rather by a world government body.

This will be viewed by the world as more fair. But in reality it will be much less fair, because the world government will act basically the way the Troika does in the EU now, lending to the nations and never letting them default. They will lend in the world currency, but the people will be paid in their nation's shit currency which is debased like hell by the national politics. So then when the national currency loses value, the people are stuck paying back loans in the relatively more expensive world currency.

This is precisely what the Troika did to the PIIGS to destroy them. They will then do this on a global scale to enslave us all.

I hope everyone understands the implied point in the OP of comparing the Euro vs. Greece to the one-world reserve currency vs. nations.

Greece was forced to borrow denominated in Euros during the speculative inflow of investment at the turn of the 21st century, but as Germany was more productive they benefited more from the Euro and Greece had no way to devalue their debt. So they are repaying the debt with a lower productive economy with massive egress of speculative investment.

The same problem with happen when the reserve currency for debt is SDRs and then all nations will be repaying their debts in SDRs while they won't have the policy tools to inflate nor deflate their debt burdens to respond to volatility in relative productivity and speculative ingress and egress of capital. Effectively they become a slave to the international central bank who can issue fractional reserve debt denominated in SDRs, which the banksters will surely have in their back pocket again. Just like the Fed now is pumping debt into the developing world making them short the dollar, then it will pull the rug from under them by raising interest rates sending the dollar higher and causing them to repay debt in more expensive dollars.

The only solution to this problem is for the Knowledge Age to rise and say "I don't need stored monetary capital, I need knowledge". I will quote from myself about this as follows.

[...]

So Armstrong has been pitching this idea that governments could just print the money they need for taxes. So the model he is proposing is where national currencies float against an international reserve currency, so governments can then mess up their own currencies if they wish. He prefer the governments just print the money from their central banks, and the relative success of nations at managing their economic and fiscal policies will determine their relative value of the national currencies relative to the inevitable one-world reserve currency.

But by Armstrong's own admission, trade only accounts for 10% of the world's capital flows and thus the vast majority of the world's wealth will choose the one-world reserve currency as its unit-of-account and thus who ever has their hands on the levers for the debasement and fractional reserves rules of the one-world reserve currency (e.g. the elite who run the World Bank, BIS, IMF, etc..) can then speculate and manipulate the national economies at-will. This will be just Goldman Sachs take over of Europe and Greece but on a global economy-of-scale level.

For analogous reasons as to why the Euro failed, the one-world reserve currency with national government debts denominated in separate currencies will also cause the nations to fail just like Greece did. The bottom line is that who ever controls the reserve currency of the world, holds the power to destroy and enslave the other nations.

Also Armstrong is contradicting himself on claiming above that the impetus for a move to a one-world reserve currency will be only for economic reasons and "not political".

coinits, calm down you are preaching to the choir. You perhaps don't realize I wrote the syndicated essay Bitcoin : The Digital Kill Switch. I am the one who has been writing that Bitcoin is owned by TPTB.

In spite of the arguable fact that Bitcoin is controlled by the global elite, my guarantee that it won't be the "winner take all" global currency remains certain.

First of all, simpleton readers don't seem to understand the distinction between a reserve currency and a circulating currency. Crypto-currencies are the latter. Dollar and Euro cash are examples of the latter. US Treasury and Euro-denominated bonds are the former (Tier 1 reserve assets in the BIS Basel model). IMF SDRs are the former.

The global elite are planning for a national (or regional) currencies floating against a global reserve currency. And they are planning for circulating currencies which are all digital. Bitcoin is one gambit in that mix.

Nope, but it would probably enslave Russia. Just look at what happened to the Ruble!

Incorrect! The one-world reserve currency will enslave all of the nations. Study my post #11 more carefully. You didn't comprehend it.


I suggest you relate that to "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" by John Perkins. And also relate that to the Asian crisis in 1998, which was caused by speculative international capital flows fleeing to Europe to take advantage of the ingress in investment that corresponded with the launch of the Euro.

Nations are inherently prone to short-term capital ingress and egress. Without their own central bank to inflate out of an egress crisis, they are enslaved by the unit-of-account which is imposed on them by investors.

The problem is fundamentally rooted in the ability of stored money to be a claim on future production. Instead when profitable production results from a diversity of knowledge innovations that are DIRECT (e.g. the customer uses your software, or they 3D print your design) and not just proxies diluted by mass production (e.g. factories make a million copies of your design), then stored money becomes incredibly difficult to invest. The more stored money you have, the faster it withers in relative value.

This is the paradigm shift coming on now due to the Knowledge Age.

In short, investing will become active instead of passive, and investing will be small and numerous (i.e. bottom-up) instead of large economy-of-scale fascism (i.e. top-down).

Sorry Armstrong! Storing capital in money instead of fine-grained (maximum division-of-labor) knowledge thus causing international capital flows that are the problem! That paradigm must be eliminated! We need capital flows to be instead actual finely-grained, bottom-up knowledge exchange, where capital becomes knowledge and not stored claims on future production.

Then there won't be any more nations, nor any one-world top-down slavery.

You say "no one will save and be productive"? Wrong! They will save up their knowledge gained by being productive instead of lazy! This is the paradigm shift of epic proportions and nearly no one sees it is happening.

I am very surprised that Armstrong can not conceptualize what I wrote above. He responded by pretending to himself that I am some simpleton who is only learning from him. He failed to understand I am not talking about the existing debts. I am talking about the new debts that will form after the global monetary reset (restructure or default).

My point is if we look at Greece, it sold its sovereign bonds denominated in the Euro(pean) reserve currency and thus it suffered pernicious (and self-reinforcing downward spiral of) austerity because it was not able to devalue the debt it owed by printing money to devalue its own currency and stimulate its economy by lowering the international cost of its exports and tourism industries.

Even more importantly as we can see with the dollar reserve currency now, countries that sell debt in denominated in their national currencies pay an interest premium compared to when they sell debt denominated in the reserve currency. This is one example of many reasons[1] that those who have control over the reserve currency's central bank, have enslaved the other nations. This is why a USA Treasury official famously said to his Third World cohort, "its our dollar, but it is your problem".

Armstrong is failing to understand that a reserve currency is inherently an enslavement paradigm. And the only possible way to eliminate this paradigm, is to make debt not profitable for investors. I explained how that will become the case with the shift from an Industrial Age to a Knowledge Age. But I think Armstrong is not smart enough to grasp the concept. Or he is too lazy to read the essays I wrote, which I had provided him links to.

Additionally I am shocked that Armstrong is conflating unit-of-account with unit-of-exchange. That is the most basic error. The coming one world reserve currency will not be a circulating currency that is used for retail transactions. If that were the case, then the nations wouldn't even have their own currencies any more. The reserve currency will be used for settlement internationally for exchange between the national currencies which will float against the one world reserve currency. I don't think the nations will agree to give up their control over their national currencies, rather they will just agree to a reserve currency that isn't controlled by the USA exclusively.

[1]   http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/economic_studies/an_exorbitant_privilege
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2009/09/cohen.htm
http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/john-butler/curse-reserve-currency-triffin-dilemma

[RealBitcoin]

If the interest rates rise globally, there will be hyperinflation

Utter nonsense.

It will be massive deflation due to sovereign debt defaults. The governments are not going to drop money from helicopters. Please understand what is really going on.

Yes thats true, but everytime there is a massive deflation, the central banks start injecting M1 money into the economy via QE.

It will always result in hyperinflation.


Massive bailins and asset deflation will cause big riots, so they rather just print out the money and pump it back.

[TPTB_need_war]

Yes thats true, but everytime there is a massive deflation, the central banks start injecting M1 money into the economy via QE.

QE does not inject money to the people.

[RealBitcoin]

Yes thats true, but everytime there is a massive deflation, the central banks start injecting M1 money into the economy via QE.

QE does not inject money to the people.

The current QE scheme pumps M3 and M2 money into the economy (that are conditional, loan based) by doing the repo scams between the banks and CB. Or by giving loans to banks that they will pass onto borrowers like corporations, or anyday mortgage owner.

In an event of all-out deflation, the central bank would inject money directly (M0 or rather M1 if they ban cash), and not via loans. They would just print out the money directly and buy up directly all assets that are falling.

Then everyone who is selling those assets (land,property, commodities,bonds, stocks etc) will still exit, and with the extra cash he got, and the printed money would be injected directly into the economy via those sellers.

And this way the injected money would directly increase prices, all around the board , resulting in hyperinflation.

This is exactly how the Weimar Republic went down.

[minor-transgression]

"QE does not inject money to the people."

Correct. Think of it as a pump that drains money from savers
via ultra low interest rates and sprays that money onto selected
banks' balance sheets.

[TPTB_need_war]

But gold has a utility that crypto-currency doesn't have, which is that it can't disappear due to the centralization inherent in profitable mining of proof-of-work or the centralization inherent in any proof-of-stake variant (don't make me justify this statement as we've discussed it ad nauseum before).

The utility of crypto-currency from a personal standpoint is much more prone to become a top-down controlled fiat.

Gold systemically doesn't solve the fiat problem, but to me personally it is guaranteed to not be a fiat, as I hold it in my hand and no government can cancel gold as they routinely do for cash[1]. They can erect capital controls, but my gold can remain buried until the government has changed.

In short, gold is more durable than crypto-currency. Whether that is useful to me personally or not, is a matter of personal analysis, perspective, and opinion.

[1]

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/uncategorized/europes-practice-of-cancelling-currency-the-dirty-little-secret-everyone-overlooks/ https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_america/americas-current-economy/the-war-on-cash-2/ https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/writings/2012-2/the-truth-about-gold-why-you-should-buy-it/ https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/uncategorized/says-law/

[TPTB_need_war]

“When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you. . . you may know that your society is doomed.”

Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand

    p. 413 ; Francisco d’Anconia to Bertram Scudder