Economic Devastation

[THX 1138]

Hey guys can somebody give me the link again to that article about global derivaties. It was in the economist or london times or some other big newspaper, and it was an illustration that compared stock markets, bitcoin, gold and other markets to the total global derivative market, and it was illustrated in a picture.

Can some1 give me the link again please?

Was this the one?

http://money.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and-markets-in-one-visualization/

Yes that one, thanks you very much.

I was going to show that picture to a friend, because he doesnt believe me that the 1.6 quadrillion derivatives exist

Ah, good. I used it myself to illustrate the scale of them to a couple of relatives who aren't into finance.

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[Yakamoto]

Productivity is not a virtue that brings entitlements to wealth, productivity is a zero sum game within the pareto boundary, for one to produce more some one else needs to produce less, therefore increasing ones productivity comes with a cost to someone else. so it should be increasingly harder to produce more just in par with the increasing justification of the need to be more productive. Claiming that just because one is productive should be entitled to more, is like claiming that people prefer not to be productive,and also denying that healthy humans have a basic need of self actualization...

This sounds awfully close to the ideas promoted by Communism. Productivity is not a virtue that brings entitlements to wealth? Enforcing that would seem to require nothing less then the total abolishment of private property along with some form of totalitarian government to enforce the redistribution.

We should not say that one man's hour is worth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.

Communism has been tried. In every attempt to date it failed and killed millions.

For me the only entitlement to wealth goes to the one that increases the total productivity and pushes the pareto boundary further. In that sense Bill Gates fortune is well deserved but it also means that Linus should be equally awarded.

Communism, Fascism, Capitalism they are Ideas. Ideas kill... always  You really want to rate Ideas by body count? How many kills the Right to Property has?

That's actually kind of an interesting way to rank ideas, based on body count, but at the same time they're both very different, as they should be.

I would argue each has the same body count, communism is comprised primarily of enemies of the state and civilians due to the lack of care that occurs in such communist states, using the USSR and Communist China as an example. This can be argued however.

Capitalism's body count is comprised mainly of soldiers (and a small portion civilian deaths) due to the warfare that occurs due to the need to expand or control more resources, due to the influence of corporations on Governments.

I wouldn't take that as the primary way to compare it, but that's just my idea as to how it would hypothetically work.



Personally, I think it all comes down to how much the idea of reward for the amount of work or creativeness is valued. Bill Gates got to where he is because he created an item which has become highly valued, but at the same time he didn't necessarily work as hard as everyone else to get to where he was.

[RealBitcoin]

Capitalism's body count is comprised mainly of soldiers (and a small portion civilian deaths) due to the warfare that occurs due to the need to expand or control more resources, due to the influence of corporations on Governments.

That is nonsense, you are talking about fascism , not capitalism.

In capitalism you dont need to wage war to expand, in a real free market you just accodomate your price to your supply.  You expand through success not violence.

If you have little resources, price will go up, just as simple as that. But with technology, you can make things efficient.


Corporations are a fascist tool.

[CoinCube]

Productivity is not a virtue that brings entitlements to wealth, productivity is a zero sum game within the pareto boundary, for one to produce more some one else needs to produce less, therefore increasing ones productivity comes with a cost to someone else. so it should be increasingly harder to produce more just in par with the increasing justification of the need to be more productive. Claiming that just because one is productive should be entitled to more, is like claiming that people prefer not to be productive,and also denying that healthy humans have a basic need of self actualization...

This sounds awfully close to the ideas promoted by Communism...

...

Communism has been tried. In every attempt to date it failed and killed millions.

For me the only entitlement to wealth goes to the one that increases the total productivity and pushes the pareto boundary further. In that sense Bill Gates fortune is well deserved but it also means that Linus should be equally awarded.

Communism, Fascism, Capitalism they are Ideas. Ideas kill... always  You really want to rate Ideas by body count? How many kills the Right to Property has?

I have to agree with Yakamoto that examining ideas by their body count is certainly an interesting viewpoint. Battles over the right to property undoubtedly have killed many any era of history is full of examples.

However, the the push for individual rights in the Renaissance including property rights facilitated the both the Enlightenment and later Industrial revolutions. Without solid property rights it is unlikely society would have advanced to anywhere near the point is has today. Investment in a factory cannot happen if the investor is not confident his capital will be protected.      

In Europe the notion of private property and property rights emerged in the Renaissance as international trade by merchants gave rise to mercantilist ideas. In 16th Century Europe Lutheranism and the Protestant Reformation advanced property rights using biblical terminology. Protestant work ethic and views on man's destiny came to underline social view in emerging capitalist economies in Early modern Europe. The right to private property emerged as a radical demand for human rights vis-a-vis the state in the 17th Century revolutionary Europe. But in the 18th and 19th Century the right to property as a human right became subject of intense controversy.

I will concede the point that body count alone is an insufficient metric to judge the merits of an idea. However, it remains a significant data point. For ideas with a known high body counts like communism the onus is on its promoters demonstrably prove some massive society wide benefit that justifies the carnage.

I am not really following your argument thaaanos. You state that productivity is not a virtue that brings entitlements to wealth implying that those who are productive should be taxed and their excess productivity transferred to those who produce less and then you state that those who increase total productivity deserve their wealth. All productive individuals increase total productivity either by reducing the cost of their product or by freeing/pushing less efficient competitors to explore other activities. You stated above that productivity is a zero sum game. This conceptualization appears at least on cursory examination to be false. Perhaps that is the the core of our disagreement?    

[TPTB_need_war]

DRM has nothing to do with it all. Thus I assume you don't understand the issue.

You are not giving him due credit. (AM is not a typical BTCT slouch.)  It is an allusion to "reflections on trusting trust" https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf

I think I did correct my myopia in the subsequent reply to him. And I think the points reached sort of a stalemate. I don't dismiss his point, but if that white paper above is our concern, then none of the software we use is trustworthy. Okay I understand the point that doing something once and we all have to rely on that, is different than we all each download our software and run diverse hardware. But is it? Seems we all are running the hardware made by Intel and all the download links run through routers controlled by TPTB.

So all-in-all, I accepted his point. I think anonymity is a clusterfuck. Given the way Zerocash's forum treated me (they removed all my posts after they realized I was explaining serious flaws and challenges), I don't expect any success from them either.

I'd like to move on away from anonymity. Maybe one day in the future we could make some mixers based on Zerocash (long after their effort has faded into the dust) and maybe use it for some few esoteric uses for anonymity. But reliable anonymity on a widescale is unfortunately a delusion that even I had to finally come to grips with. Sad to say.

As for unreliable anonymity, I can do that now with Bitcoin. I just go use an unregistered wireless network connection. Eventually that will be impossible, but for now it is available in some jurisdictions.

If someone could identify a use for ring mixing that applied to businesses who don't mind if the NSA is tracking their privacy, then perhaps I could be convinced there is a market. But as I wrote before, the NSA has employees and those employees can't be trusted to not sell your privacy to your competitors. Corruption is the rule, not the exception. A mouse will always eat the cheese.

I start to comprehend now how it might be true when Martin Armstrong says we might descend into a Dark Age.

The only way I can think to fight back now is go for popularity and control in the hands of the people. Win the political war.

[thaaanos]

Productivity is not a virtue that brings entitlements to wealth, productivity is a zero sum game within the pareto boundary, for one to produce more some one else needs to produce less, therefore increasing ones productivity comes with a cost to someone else. so it should be increasingly harder to produce more just in par with the increasing justification of the need to be more productive. Claiming that just because one is productive should be entitled to more, is like claiming that people prefer not to be productive,and also denying that healthy humans have a basic need of self actualization...

This sounds awfully close to the ideas promoted by Communism...

...

Communism has been tried. In every attempt to date it failed and killed millions.

For me the only entitlement to wealth goes to the one that increases the total productivity and pushes the pareto boundary further. In that sense Bill Gates fortune is well deserved but it also means that Linus should be equally awarded.

Communism, Fascism, Capitalism they are Ideas. Ideas kill... always  You really want to rate Ideas by body count? How many kills the Right to Property has?

I have to agree with Yakamoto that examining ideas by their body count is certainly an interesting viewpoint. Battles over the right to property undoubtedly have killed many any era of history is full of examples.

However, the the push for individual rights in the Renaissance including property rights facilitated the both the Enlightenment and later Industrial revolutions. Without solid property rights it is unlikely society would have advanced to anywhere near the point is has today. Investment in a factory cannot happen if the investor is not confident his capital will be protected.      

In Europe the notion of private property and property rights emerged in the Renaissance as international trade by merchants gave rise to mercantilist ideas. In 16th Century Europe Lutheranism and the Protestant Reformation advanced property rights using biblical terminology. Protestant work ethic and views on man's destiny came to underline social view in emerging capitalist economies in Early modern Europe. The right to private property emerged as a radical demand for human rights vis-a-vis the state in the 17th Century revolutionary Europe. But in the 18th and 19th Century the right to property as a human right became subject of intense controversy.

I will concede the point that body count alone is an insufficient metric to judge the merits of an idea. However, it remains a significant data point. For ideas with a known high body counts like communism the onus is on its promoters demonstrably prove some massive society wide benefit that justifies the carnage.

I am not really following your argument thaaanos. You state that productivity is not a virtue that brings entitlements to wealth implying that those who are productive should be taxed and their excess productivity transferred to those who produce less and then you state that those who increase total productivity deserve their wealth. All productive individuals increase total productivity either by reducing the cost of their product or by freeing/pushing less efficient competitors to explore other activities. You stated above that productivity is a zero sum game. This conceptualization appears at least on cursory examination to be false. Perhaps that is the the core of our disagreement?    

Body count of an Idea as a metric is truly an interesting view but I wouldn't count on it as a metric although it is easier measured that the preferable inverse that really matters ie:"Lives Saved" which is very difficult to measure cause it is in the hypothetical space, this is actually demonstrated in the Trolley Problems.
IE Imagine the Lives Saved by 1bn Chinese missing the Industrial Revolution, and not becoming a consumerism society, does communism now look as bad?
Body count I would use it more as evidence of evil which is funny as most probably the most deadly Idea is "God"

To the point yes I think the crux is that Productivity is in most cases a zero sum game and only certain events increase productivity ie Industrial Revolution, Computer Revolution, Genetic Revolution and in my mind the individuals involved in those events that increase standards of living and total production capacity have a well deserved wealth.
The rest and more common people simply compete over who will take a piece of a fixed amount of productivity, this is showcased by never actually reaching full employment. If total production capacity was not fixed, ie not a zero sum game then there would be no unemployment.
But unbounded Total production capacity "impossible" due to the fact that production must balance Demand and that would be that Demand would be unbounded.
Planned obsolescence, ponzi real estate growth, black holing production are tricks we have played over time to keep Demand and thus Production up but eventually a plateu is reached.
The real argument though that plagues economy discussion and from which all arguments stem is: Demand drives Production? or Production drives Demand?. Me I think its like EM waves, They are entangled in a lockstep and this is why economy behaves in a wavelike pattern. Differential equations have not yet reached the minds of economists, math is too hard I guess.

[STT]

Ah, good. I used it myself to illustrate the scale of them to a couple of relatives who aren't into finance.

Not all derivative contracts are payable.  They will be 40 different contracts for Apple December but at that point in time there can only be one price and so one liability to pay out.  The number is big as most will never pay anything, they arent actual assets. 
   I think its comparable to the insurance market, there is a ton of liability but its not likely every house on the whole companies books will burn down in one year and events such a firestorm bomb or a volcano will be excluded

[RealBitcoin]

Ah, good. I used it myself to illustrate the scale of them to a couple of relatives who aren't into finance.

Not all derivative contracts are payable.  They will be 40 different contracts for Apple December but at that point in time there can only be one price and so one liability to pay out.  The number is big as most will never pay anything, they arent actual assets. 
   I think its comparable to the insurance market, there is a ton of liability but its not likely every house on the whole companies books will burn down in one year and events such a firestorm bomb or a volcano will be excluded

Obviously they are based on infinite rehipothycation, it's like selling the same car infinite times.


You have 1 company that generates X $ yearly income, you have a stock that covers that company's income proportional to how much you own.

Then you have 1 stock option that is a claim on the stock pool itself not the income, and can be bet on.

Then you have a derivative on that option, that is a claim on the option pool, and it's bet on that itself.

And so on.


And from the original X income ,you have a claim upon a claim upon a claim , on the same income , infinite times, and with even more complex derivatives that they come up with.

It's obviously a huge scam and when it collapses, they will cause big catastrophe with it.

[STT]

Options date back to when farmers sold their crop in the Spring for financing or just to capture a good price .  Come Autumn, they may never have a crop to sell but they've sold it forward anyway (potentially they must buy at market).  Its a valid instrument and it is leveraged and potentially dangerous especially as every farmer could fail in that harvest from bad weather.  Its something dating back hundreds of years, I wouldnt call it a scam.

The opposite could happen also, every farmer has a good crop and the food is vastly over priced so the option is worthless.  This risk has always been there, it was placed solely on the farmer to their profit or ruin and this instrument allows distributed handling and so its useful to society.  Some people specialise in handling that risk just like insurance I guess

[RealBitcoin]

Options date back to when farmers sold their crop in the Spring for financing or just to capture a good price .  Come Autumn, they may never have a crop to sell but they've sold it forward anyway (potentially they must buy at market).  Its a valid instrument and it is leveraged and potentially dangerous especially as every farmer could fail in that harvest from bad weather.  Its something dating back hundreds of years, I wouldnt call it a scam.

The opposite could happen also, every farmer has a good crop and the food is vastly over priced so the option is worthless.  This risk has always been there, it was placed solely on the farmer to their profit or ruin and this instrument allows distributed handling and so its useful to society.  Some people specialise in handling that risk just like insurance I guess

It's hard to define what is a scam and what is not. And we must be consistent otherwise we are dishonest.


We either call the new altcoins:   dishonest devs trying to make a quick buck with scam IPO    or     unlucky innovative devs having bad luck creating a new coin and then giving up.

It's hard to tell, and you can say the same for the derivatives, they are either a scam to get as much money possible, or an unlucky and flawed financial product that will just destroy itself.

Either all of them are a scam, or none of them are a scam. Or perhaps the scale is what dictates it's classification.

[THX 1138]

Ah, good. I used it myself to illustrate the scale of them to a couple of relatives who aren't into finance.

Not all derivative contracts are payable.  They will be 40 different contracts for Apple December but at that point in time there can only be one price and so one liability to pay out.  The number is big as most will never pay anything, they arent actual assets. 
   I think its comparable to the insurance market, there is a ton of liability but its not likely every house on the whole companies books will burn down in one year and events such a firestorm bomb or a volcano will be excluded

Obviously they are based on infinite rehipothycation, it's like selling the same car infinite times.


You have 1 company that generates X $ yearly income, you have a stock that covers that company's income proportional to how much you own.

Then you have 1 stock option that is a claim on the stock pool itself not the income, and can be bet on.

Then you have a derivative on that option, that is a claim on the option pool, and it's bet on that itself.

And so on.


And from the original X income ,you have a claim upon a claim upon a claim , on the same income , infinite times, and with even more complex derivatives that they come up with.

It's obviously a huge scam and when it collapses, they will cause big catastrophe with it.

Options date back to when farmers sold their crop in the Spring for financing or just to capture a good price .  Come Autumn, they may never have a crop to sell but they've sold it forward anyway (potentially they must buy at market).  Its a valid instrument and it is leveraged and potentially dangerous especially as every farmer could fail in that harvest from bad weather.  Its something dating back hundreds of years, I wouldnt call it a scam.

The opposite could happen also, every farmer has a good crop and the food is vastly over priced so the option is worthless.  This risk has always been there, it was placed solely on the farmer to their profit or ruin and this instrument allows distributed handling and so its useful to society.  Some people specialise in handling that risk just like insurance I guess

It's hard to define what is a scam and what is not. And we must be consistent otherwise we are dishonest.


We either call the new altcoins:   dishonest devs trying to make a quick buck with scam IPO    or     unlucky innovative devs having bad luck creating a new coin and then giving up.

It's hard to tell, and you can say the same for the derivatives, they are either a scam to get as much money possible, or an unlucky and flawed financial product that will just destroy itself.

Either all of them are a scam, or none of them are a scam. Or perhaps the scale is what dictates it's classification.

So, a mix of known unknowns and also unknown unknowns, come the day of the great reckoning?

[CoinCube]

Options date back to when farmers sold their crop in the Spring for financing or just to capture a good price .  Come Autumn, they may never have a crop to sell but they've sold it forward anyway (potentially they must buy at market).  Its a valid instrument and it is leveraged and potentially dangerous especially as every farmer could fail in that harvest from bad weather.  Its something dating back hundreds of years, I wouldnt call it a scam.

Here is another take.
http://www.truthistreason.net/a-simple-explanation-of-derivatives

A simple explanation of derivatives

Heidi is the owner of a small bar in Detroit. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with a new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later. Heidi keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans).

Word gets around about Heidi’s “drink now, pay later” marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi’s bar. Soon, she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit. By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi’s gross sales volume increases massively.

A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Heidi’s borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the drinkers (unemployed alcoholics) as collateral.
At the bank’s corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions trading these future securities, and transform the customer loans into DRINK BONDS.

These “securities” then are bundled together and traded on international securities markets.
Naive investors don’t really understand that the securities being sold to them as “AAA Secured Bonds” are actually packaged debts of unemployed alcoholics.  Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation’s leading brokerage houses.

[CoinCube]

Body count of an Idea as a metric is truly an interesting view but I wouldn't count on it as a metric although it is easier measured that the preferable inverse that really matters ie:"Lives Saved" which is very difficult to measure cause it is in the hypothetical space, this is actually demonstrated in the Trolley Problems.
IE Imagine the Lives Saved by 1bn Chinese missing the Industrial Revolution, and not becoming a consumerism society, does communism now look as bad?
Body count I would use it more as evidence of evil which is funny as most probably the most deadly Idea is "God"
...

"God" as a the most deadly idea? Not at all sure I would agree with that. No doubt many have died in religious wars and in religious disputes but that that is far from the entire picture. Lets look at one of my favorite religious groups the Mormons (Disclaimer: I am not Mormon).

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/22/mormons-more-likely-to-marry-have-more-children-than-other-u-s-religious-groups/

Mormons also tend to have more children than other groups. Mormons ages 40-59 have had an average of 3.4 children in their lifetime, well above the comparable figure for all Americans in that age range and higher than any other group.

Mormons have twice as many children as secular couples. Mormon couples have 3.4 children compared to 1.7 per secular couple. You can debate if this is a good thing or not but such births must weigh against any deaths caused by religion. Also you will be hard pressed to find many deaths associated with the idea "Mormonism". Indeed rather than a deadly idea Mormonism seems to act almost as a vaccine against several of the dominant and ultimately destructive social trends in our society.

I am not following your logic when you say lives were saved by China missing the Industrial Revolution? It is the authoritarian nature of the Chinese government that enabled it to legislate and enforce the one child policy. The Chinese government itself admits that this policy prevented 400 million births. Therefore my initial take is that the lives saved by China not becoming a liberal consumerist society following WWII now stands somewhere around negative 400 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
 
Due to time limitations I will reply to your comments on productivity tomorrow.

[thaaanos]

Body count of an Idea as a metric is truly an interesting view but I wouldn't count on it as a metric although it is easier measured that the preferable inverse that really matters ie:"Lives Saved" which is very difficult to measure cause it is in the hypothetical space, this is actually demonstrated in the Trolley Problems.
IE Imagine the Lives Saved by 1bn Chinese missing the Industrial Revolution, and not becoming a consumerism society, does communism now look as bad?
Body count I would use it more as evidence of evil which is funny as most probably the most deadly Idea is "God"
...

"God" as a the most deadly idea? Not at all sure I would agree with that. No doubt many have died in religious wars and in religious disputes but that that is far from the entire picture. Lets look at one of my favorite religious groups the Mormons (Disclaimer: I am not Mormon).

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/22/mormons-more-likely-to-marry-have-more-children-than-other-u-s-religious-groups/

Mormons also tend to have more children than other groups. Mormons ages 40-59 have had an average of 3.4 children in their lifetime, well above the comparable figure for all Americans in that age range and higher than any other group.

Mormons have twice as many children as secular couples. Mormon couples have 3.4 children compared to 1.7 per secular couple. You can debate if this is a good thing or not but such births must weigh against any deaths caused by religion. Also you will be hard pressed to find many deaths associated with the idea "Mormonism". Indeed rather than a deadly idea Mormonism seems to act almost as a vaccine against several of the dominant and ultimately destructive social trends in our society.

I am not following your logic when you say lives were saved by China missing the Industrial Revolution? It is the authoritarian nature of the Chinese government that enabled it to legislate and enforce the one child policy. The Chinese government itself admits that this policy prevented 400 million births. Therefore my initial take is that the lives saved by China not becoming a liberal consumerist society following WWII now stands somewhere around negative 400 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
 
Due to time limitations I will reply to your comments on productivity tomorrow.

The notion of "God" and the Ideas around it has generated countless heated religion wars since the dawn of time. One may argue that the real reasons for war have been imperialistic but "God" has been used as a vehicle to motivate the masses and instrument the war, so the body count gets awarded to "God". Thankfully as science and the instruments of war advanced in efficiency, the religious passion waned. But if you normalize by total Human population I think it will be number 1.
Mormons are not a representative sample, they are generally a "new" dogma, so they don't provide anything to the discussion

Simple Aggregate CO2 production per capita in China had been consistently lower than in US or Europe, only recently China took the lead.  Had the Chinese followed the US paradigm and drive V8 cars instead of Bikes where would we now be?

[CoinCube]

Productivity is not a virtue that brings entitlements to wealth, productivity is a zero sum game within the pareto boundary, for one to produce more some one else needs to produce less, therefore increasing ones productivity comes with a cost to someone else.
...
I think the crux is that Productivity is in most cases a zero sum game and only certain events increase productivity ie Industrial Revolution, Computer Revolution, Genetic Revolution and in my mind the individuals involved in those events that increase standards of living and total production capacity have a well deserved wealth.

The rest and more common people simply compete over who will take a piece of a fixed amount of productivity, this is showcased by never actually reaching full employment. If total production capacity was not fixed, ie not a zero sum game then there would be no unemployment.

But unbounded Total production capacity "impossible" due to the fact that production must balance Demand and that would be that Demand would be unbounded.
Planned obsolescence, ponzi real estate growth, black holing production are tricks we have played over time to keep Demand and thus Production up but eventually a plateu is reached.

The real argument though that plagues economy discussion and from which all arguments stem is: Demand drives Production? or Production drives Demand?. Me I think its like EM waves, They are entangled in a lockstep and this is why economy behaves in a wavelike pattern. Differential equations have not yet reached the minds of economists, math is too hard I guess.

I disagree. Events like the industrial revolution are massive strides forward and increase the standard of living in an obvious manner. However, small gains in productivity also increase the standard of living. Your distinction between “types” of productivity is undefined and appears entirely arbitrary.  

Not only is productivity not zero sum misclassifying it as such risks the promotion of terrible public policy. Let’s examine a hypothetical society and try to find these zero sum interactions.

Imaging for a moment the mythical society of Shoetopia. It is a stagnate society with limited technological progress a more or less stable population (ideal setting for zero sum conflicts). In Shoetopia there is a demand for 100 new pairs of shoes a day and each shoemaker requires a full day of labor to make a pair of shoes. Shoetopia therefore has 100 shoemakers working on an average day. Now along comes Bob. Bob is the shoe genius of his time and due to exceptional hand eye coordination and self-discipline Bob can make 2 pairs of shoes in a day.  

Depending on the dynamics of the market one of two things will happen. 1) The price of shoes will drop until the price is low enough to that customers are willing to buy the excess shoes (consumers benefit) or 2) Some of Bobs less of efficient competition with shift their activity to some other market with the end result being less man hours of labor required for the production of the same number of shoes. If Bob is a one hit wonder his benefit to his society will be transient. If his shoe talent breeds true then his descendants will take over the shoe market and soon Shoetopia will only need 50 shoemakers allowing everyone in society more leisure time or freeing up 50 laborers to explore new markets or find something more interesting to do.

The toxic idea that personal productivity does not entitle one to the fruits of one’s own labor is an indirect argument for massive statist intervention in the economy as that is the only way to enforce such a prohibition. In the case of Shoetopia anti Bob laws would need to be passed either selectively taxing him of 50% of his earnings, directly seizing his shoes for “the public good”, or perhaps banning him outright from the shoemaking profession. Bob might not be happy about that so “reeducation camp” may be needed.    

[CoinCube]

Body count I would use it more as evidence of evil which is funny as most probably the most deadly Idea is "God"
…
The notion of "God" and the Ideas around it has generated countless heated religion wars since the dawn of time. One may argue that the real reasons for war have been imperialistic but "God" has been used as a vehicle to motivate the masses and instrument the war, so the body count gets awarded to "God". Thankfully as science and the instruments of war advanced in efficiency, the religious passion waned. But if you normalize by total Human population I think it will be number 1.
Mormons are not a representative sample, they are generally a "new" dogma, so they don't provide anything to the discussion

Ignoring for a moment the fact that you must project forward as well as look back and thus the Mormons cannot be so easily dismissed you also fail to consider the number of lives saved inter-group due to the strictures of religion. Christianity’s influence, in the west, set into motion the belief that man is accountable to God and that the law is the same regardless of status.

http://crossandquill.com/journey/the-influence-of-christianity-on-western-civilization/

Take the conflict between the Christian emperor Theodosius the Great and St. Ambrose. It happened in 300 A.D. when some in Thessalonica rioted and aroused the anger of the emperor who overreacted by slaughtering approximately seven thousand people, most of whom were innocent. Bishop Ambrose asked the emperor to repent and when Theodosius refused, the bishop excommunicated him. After a month Theodosius prostrated himself and repented in Ambrose’s cathedral.

Ambrose readmitted the emperor only after several months of penance and when he promoted a law, which in the case of death sentences would allow a thirty-day lag before the execution would be enforced. One can only speculate how many other massacres were avoided throughout history by the mitigating influence of a religion who's commandments include "Thou shalt not kill"
 

IE Imagine the Lives Saved by 1bn Chinese missing the Industrial Revolution, and not becoming a consumerism society, does communism now look as bad?
...
Simple Aggregate CO2 production per capita in China had been consistently lower than in US or Europe, only recently China took the lead.  Had the Chinese followed the US paradigm and drive V8 cars instead of Bikes where would we now be?

Please tell me you are not arguing that the decimation of the Chinese people by Communism was all good because it lowered CO2 emissions. I don’t even know how to reply to that one so I will leave it to Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

Great Leap Forward Famine, was the period in the People's Republic of China between the years 1959 and 1961 characterized by widespread famine.

Estimates vary, but scholars have estimated the number of famine victims to be between 20 and 43 million.[3] Historian Frank Dikötter, having been granted special access to Chinese archival materials, estimates that there were at least 45 million premature deaths from 1958 to 1962. Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng concluded there were 36 million deaths due to starvation, while another 40 million others failed to be born, so that "China's total population loss during the Great Famine then comes to 76 million."[6]The term "Three Bitter Years" is often used by Chinese peasants to refer to this period.

The great Chinese famine was caused by social pressure, economic mismanagement, and radical changes in agriculture... Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese communist party, introduced drastic changes in farming which prohibited farm ownership.

[foggyb]

Capitalism's body count is comprised mainly of soldiers (and a small portion civilian deaths) due to the warfare that occurs due to the need to expand or control more resources, due to the influence of corporations on Governments.

That is nonsense, you are talking about fascism , not capitalism.

In capitalism you dont need to wage war to expand, in a real free market you just accodomate your price to your supply.  You expand through success not violence.

If you have little resources, price will go up, just as simple as that. But with technology, you can make things efficient.


Corporations are a fascist tool.

Well said. I'm so tired of mindless drones launching silly attacks on capitalism despite that it brought billions of people out of poverty and into prosperity. Sadly, that era is drawing to close. Capitalism is under a vicious attack.

[RealBitcoin]

Well said. I'm so tired of mindless drones launching silly attacks on capitalism despite that it brought billions of people out of poverty and into prosperity. Sadly, that era is drawing to close. Capitalism is under a vicious attack.

Capitalism has already died a long time ago, but the final blow was in the 70 after the removal of the last gold standard, and making fiat currencies tradeable thin air packages.

So i`m not mad at those that bash the current economy, but they really need to get their terminology correct. When most people think about capitalism, they think about huge corporations and shady CEO's, which is not what it's about.

Too bad nobody is alive from the 1800's to tell the real story about how free the economy & society was in that era.

[THX 1138]

Options date back to when farmers sold their crop in the Spring for financing or just to capture a good price .  Come Autumn, they may never have a crop to sell but they've sold it forward anyway (potentially they must buy at market).  Its a valid instrument and it is leveraged and potentially dangerous especially as every farmer could fail in that harvest from bad weather.  Its something dating back hundreds of years, I wouldnt call it a scam.

Here is another take.
http://www.truthistreason.net/a-simple-explanation-of-derivatives

A simple explanation of derivatives

Heidi is the owner of a small bar in Detroit. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with a new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later. Heidi keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans).

Word gets around about Heidi’s “drink now, pay later” marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi’s bar. Soon, she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit. By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi’s gross sales volume increases massively.

A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Heidi’s borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the drinkers (unemployed alcoholics) as collateral.
At the bank’s corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions trading these future securities, and transform the customer loans into DRINK BONDS.

These “securities” then are bundled together and traded on international securities markets.
Naive investors don’t really understand that the securities being sold to them as “AAA Secured Bonds” are actually packaged debts of unemployed alcoholics.  Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation’s leading brokerage houses.

Thanks for this.

Continuing on the subject of derivatives, some of you might be interested to watch the second half of Episode 865 of The Keiser Report https://www.rt.com/shows/keiser-report/329642-episode-max-keiser-865/ (starting at 14:25 in) from a couple of days ago (yeah, I know he can be irritating, but...):  "...Max interviews investor Stephen Kendal and his terrifying derivatives model which shows the debt bubble growing larger and larger before each of the last two financial crises, whilst the markets stay the same size..."

Kendal asserts derivatives are a fifty-fifty bet; that in 2016 blockchain technology will for the first time make the derivatives market accountable, squeezing fraud out of the system (resulting in a crash); that the bubble is pushing one asset up and another down, ultimately levelling everything out; going on to claim that the most underpriced assets at the moment are gold and silver.

(Part One is worth watching too, talking about Mike Hearn's quitting as Bitcoin developer and joining the centralized and opaque R3 consortium.)

[TPTB_need_war]

Please put a pause on all your well-intended but rather useless (never ending) noise (drivel) about derivatives, what the government should do, evil of central banks, evil of debt, etc and all these superfluous issues that you can neither change nor which will determine the direction global society is headed. Let me have your undivided attention please. (RealBitcoin et al just please STFU for a while please since you won't grasp the relevance of the following)

Getting back to my writings (written in 2010 - 2012) which were the main theme of the OP of this thread back in 2013, and based on a recent paradigm-shift revelation on the markets for the crypto currency I am working on, I have now seen the light of how specifically the Knowledge Age I've been predicting will take form.

And glorious it is our future.

The key insight is that I now see how Knowledge Age producers (workers) will be paid digitally directly by Knowledge Age consumers, and the middle man can't exist (because the competition will be to remove him). I am not yet going to tell you exactly why this is so and all the mechanics because I need to retain this a secret for the time being while I am implementing this.

So what this means is that anonymity was never the way we were going to restructure government and fix society. Instead it is the coming social media metaphorsis of commerce such that there can't be a middle man which the government can expropriate. This is a critical distinction from the game theory in which the world operates now, because when the government can take on debt, promise everything to the masses, and then charge the costs of the taxes and/or end game regulatory capture to the large corporations (rich and upper middle class), then the majority (masses) are in no way incentivized to resist. This game theory is summarized in Some Iron Laws of Political Economics. CoinCube has also discussed this game theory upthread and I have some where in AnonyMint's archives better summarized and justified the Iron Law of Political Economics (I think the Dark Enlightenment thread and/or possibly upthread in this Economic Devastation thread).

So what happens when the majority earn their income and are paid directly by the consumers of the produced Knowledge Age work, is that the government can't charge the cost of the end game collapse of debt to any one! It is when the government can steal from the minority and buy off the majority with debt financed socialism, that the government power grows without bound until the minority is depleted and a Dark Age is entered. Luckily throughout history technology usually (but not always which is why there have been 600 year Dark Ages where only food was money) rescues society and the majority is able to recover its ability to earn income more directly. Examples of such past technological innovations would be soil management technology for agriculture, the spread of knowledge via the printing press, etc..

When the majority is directly earning the lion's share of the income in society, then the government will find it politically implausible to steal from the majority to redistribute, because the majority will refuse. It is only by appeasing the majority making them dependent on socialism and then stealing from those middle men who aggregate the capital, that the elite at the top are able to fool the majority into stealing from the minority and handing all the power to a super-minority elite. Without a minority to expropriate, the governments' debt collapses (this also includes the expectation that crypto currency can be redesigned to remain decentralized and thus the government won't be able to simply turn it into fiat again and print money out of thin air which steals from everyone and this also includes that even if they could, they will no longer be able to use that funny money to aggregate middle man controls... the entire paradigm of the Iron Law of Political Economics hinges on the existence of middle men extracting rents...this was a key epiphany)

Anonymity is entirely unrealistic and doesn't address the political-economic structural issue (that is why I have recently admonished Monero to look at anonymity as a way to make public block chains RELIABLY private, End-to End principled, and efficient but not for the purpose of avoiding taxation and encouraged them to look at making simple scripting private not just currency and thus I assert they need Zerocash/zk-snarks and not Cryptonote nor RingCT). Whereas a new way of thinking about social media and microtransactions does. Stay tuned for the second coming of Satoshi has arrived. And this will be the real deal.