I can't help but think that any monetary restructuring along these lines should be accompanied by a simultaneous fiscal restructuring along Georgist lines. There is really no reason to let landlords buy back in to their passively appreciating asset, whose value to varying degrees tracks and captures government improvements, so take this opportunity to buy them out once and for all.
Curtis has already acknowledged that the natural financial return on low-risk passive market investing should be very small when investment capital is abundant. Only investors/speculators with signal to add to the market should expect to make gains over and above natural deflation. The same should be true for land. You make gains on land when you identify the best use that it can be put to. Otherwise, you get to enjoy the natural deflationary returns to savings that everyone else does.
If we go Yarvins formalism theory, then no one owns any land, they only own an agreement with a sovereign (a secondary right to a land). I think in that case Sovereigns are incentivised to make agreements such that their land is put to best use, thus preventing hoarding by actors who never sell land. My point is in a formalist utopia, Georgian reforms are not necessary it might arise out of a natural consequence of soveriegn competition
>There is really no reason to let landlords buy back in
While we are fantasizing about perfect, impossible restructurings of this or that — I might as well point out: In a financial/assets restructuring, there are vanishingly few reasons to let landlords *live*. If I were trying to match your comment’s tone, I would probably say “there is no reason to let BlackRock buy (up thousands/millions of homes).” But landlords are fucked, homie.
Mr. Yarvin does always employ a very nice “nobody needs to be punished” approach in these tracks. [side note: I really enjoy this piece because it brings together a lot of his reaction/restructuring thoughts in a neat little way].
Anyway — In the real world, the Nazis get genital torture. Land “lords”? In any reaction/eat-the-rich/what have you *on Earth*, that name is going to prove realllllyyyyyy unfortunate.
I don't really follow your argument here. If BlackRock wants to pay the most to buy what the sovereign is selling, why wouldn't the sovereign sell it to them?
All that I'm arguing is that the sovereign should not sell back the land, because the land is the primary source of revenue for the sovereign. It makes the laws of the land, it enforces those laws on the land, it provides services to those who exist on the land, and the highest bidder wins the contract to use the land within the terms of the contract. We could literally make the "social contract" real and bootstrap the entirety of law on the basis of rental agreements with the sovereign.
You let landlords live for the same reason reason that you let the professors live: "they're all our people now." This idea is basically MM's formalism. It's good because the idea sells: nobody has to get their head cut off. Nobody even has to take a financial haircut. They just don't get the option to buy back their political power. If Bob is restructuring the monetary system, then Bob has already taken their political power. They will ultimately be glad when they see how much better Bob wields it.
doooooooom, I understand your thinking here a lot better after reading this and your other comments. Commonwealth countries already have a version of this. It doesn't really work that well. I mean, it could work a lot better in a competent non-oligarchy. In Canada, for instance, 90+ percent of the land mass today is still owned by "the crown". There is a significant amount of revenue brought in from the land through leasing and mineral royalties... but even more than that, most of the land usage is gifted out in absurd portions to embarrassingly ineffectual cosmopolitan regime stuff, like for bizarre "anti-racist" or "environmental" usage. Functionally crown land is basically just leisure land for acolytes of the regime. Like there are 10's of thousands of high value acres around Whistler currently gifted to sierra club like groups for "snowshoeing" "rock climbing" and "horseback riding".
Does China use a system like what you are proposing? Does it work better there?
"There is really no reason to let landlords buy back in to their passively appreciating asset, whose value to varying degrees tracks and captures government improvements, so take this opportunity to buy them out once and for all."
1) real estate appreciation is a result of monetary inflation not government... improvements.
2) this is kind of super 1900's era culture war policy stuff is not really the point here.
"1) real estate appreciation is a result of monetary inflation not government... improvements."
Monetary inflation is not the only factor that makes land values tend upward over time. Land has a natural scarcity. As people get richer (i.e. their purchasing power goes up, which is what happens to savings in a deflationary economy that accumulates capital rather than dissipates it) they will be more willing to spend on good quality land. As the government creates improvements (i.e. offers high quality services, isn't that exactly why we are here and not on a libertarian blog?), these will be captured by landowners because it will make the property that benefits more valuable. As Curtis has argued many times, a profit-oriented government should not be leaking this source of revenue. This is how your pristine lake turns into a parasite bath.
"2) this is kind of super 1900's era culture war policy stuff is not really the point here."
I'm not arguing that the government should tax land and cut an equal sized check to everyone, or that a government doesn't have the right to impose other taxes. I'm just arguing that Georgist economics informs good fiscal policy in the same way that we recognize Austrian economics as informing good monetary policy.
There is also an aesthetic and temporal aspect to this. Whoever is sovereign over the land is the true owner (primary property). Governments in the past were technologically limited in their ability to exercise this sovereignty, so they had to divide up and delegate their powers in exchange for obligations in the reverse direction (feudalism). Government in the 21st century, and especially in the 22nd, shouldn't have this problem, so the serfs should be taxed directly. If the serfs aren't happy with this then they're free to hop on the next airplane heading out.
(1) I am still extremely unconvinced that real estate prices generally have seen an increase from anything but expansionary monetary policy. I have closely watched the real estate markets in many "loser" towns over the last 15 years. Real estate prices there have tripled or quintupled in that time span. During the same period these places have seen zero government improvement or intervention, and have undergone considerable economic and demographic decline. Massive price increases in the face of awful economic fundamentals? That's a monetary phenomenon. Absent expansionary monetary policy these properties would have seen a significant decline in value, not a passive increase.
I think you're right that monetary policy is the primary driver of any recent changes in real estate values. The abysmal quality of real government services and amenities implies that the effect of these on land values should generally be small or even negative. But remember, we are imagining a new regime that is competent and that provides high-quality amenities. Funding those amenities directly by charging a market rental fee for effected land will allow that regime to fully internalize the financial consequences of its decisions. This creates the proper incentive structure for the regime - it brings their skin into the game. At the same time it will avoid creating additional incentives outside of the regime to try to corrupt or undermine its decisions.
I never understood these posts at first either till I read a book on Austrian Economics. Basically we have less dollars than the worth of all goods available. In a normal economic system that makes no sense, the currency should naturally be able to buy all the goods available on the market. The only reason this is happening is because we have something called Future Dollars that with the existing dollars covers all the existing assets in the market. The future dollars are treasury bonds of the government. Now if tomorrow we promise to stop printing any money, all the future dollars become worthless (As the interest rises to it's market price). The basically is a deflationary spiral, everyone will try to get rid of their future dollars for any real asset they can get. This would also affect the current dollar and make them worthless too, basically a deflationary spiral that is caused due to wrong incentives generated by suddenly breaking this machine. A better solution is to convert all future dollars into current dollars and give it to everyone. Because of the headache of how future dollars has transmitted into the economy, doing this is far harder than said. We need to as Curtis saud buy up all assets and print money, so now people have no assets like homes, stocks etc, they only have dollars. Then we can auction all these assets back onto the market (they can use the money we gave them to buy back their asset, we can offer them a discount to prevent too much chaos). With this we have eliminated future dollars and only have current dollars. Now if we promise to end this system, there won't be any deflationary spiral and we can start a new austrian economic system that will have no inflation, recession etc and is completely sane
Suppose that there's only a hundred dollars in the universe, and there's no other kind of money. Would that entail that a dollar is a permission-slip to take possession of one percent of everything that's "for sale" in the universe? (I'm just trying to understand what money is.)
Yes, it would be nice if someone would summarize Curtis's proposal in ordinary language, without the use of weird words such as "liabilities" and "assets".
I take it that Curtis wants the king to (1) destroy all existing money, (2) take everything in the USA that people have other than the old money (which is all destroyed), and (3) give the people that he's taken the stuff from some kind of new money that they could then use to buy things with (and the more stuff he's taken from you, the more new money you get). The person who offers the most new money to the king for something that the king has taken would then get to have this thing.
Okay, so does that mean that banks are all destroyed and the bankers just get new money in exchange for the buildings and furniture and cars and things of that sort that the king has taken from them?
Occasionally, I play around with the idea of taking Yarvin posts, and both A) Transforming them to basic language and B) Condensing them greatly with the objective of reaching a greater audience.
"A regulator is better than a teacher, but an explosion is still a good teacher. Uninsured bank runs are one path to a financial system that doesn’t have bank runs. Make sure the explosion isn’t bigger than the system, though."
Maturity transformation is profitable (compared to Austrian banking) in the short term (i.e. until the next bank run). So in the absence of legal prohibitions, it would remain ubiquitous. Anyone who learned their less would simply be driven from the market.
As bad as this blog is (recursive Moldbug), the comments are truly amazing. Concentrated, ultra-dense autism that leads absolutely nowhere. If only this mental force could be harnessed for something like organizing all extant pennies by color grading.
Did you like Brian Boru's comment or were you being sarcastic? My first wife's mother used to tell her (the mother's) live-in boyfriend, "Jim, sarcasm has no place in child-rearing." Eh, she wasn't very kind to me ... nor was her daughter (my first wife).
Has Curtis ever grappled with Milton Friedman (as elucidated by Scott Sumner)? Mises was pretty good, and Austrians have something to say (I think Hayek is great), but Curtis is overly fond of Austrian sleight of hand syllogisms, leading to a facile take on monetary economics IMO.
I mean “stable prices, fixed money supply…” only with utter stagnation.
I could be wrong about this, so if I'm missing something, please feel free to help me understand better.
So the underlying theory here is that stuff is always worth some specific value in dollars. However, if the amount of dollars in the economy was suddenly drastically altered, which is essentially what he was describing in the thought experiment, it's possible that it might just entirely detach the economy from dollars at all.
This is sort of what happened in England a few times, when the amount of gold and silver necessary for everyday transactions was flatly not available, paper money came into being to prop up the "lost" precious metals (usually loaned to a bankrupt sovereign). It's entirely possible that, to avoid the inevitable deflationary suck, an alternative method of ledger-keeping comes into being, essentially re-inflating the money supply.
In a sort of micro-example, imagine that a small community has no dollars in cash after teh suk. They still have stuff, and that stuff is not worthless. They *could* choose to start bartering with each other and coming up with some informal system of "cash", like cigarettes in jail. This might go a long way towards ameliorating the deflation.
But *would* it happen? Probably not. Hence the zombie apocalypse.
Venezuelan prison currency remained stable while the bolívar crashed. Prisoners were the only ones able to reliably get supplies like toilet paper, so villager would come to the prison to barter.
If money is a blurry reflection of value, and value (that is, goodness) is the presence of God, then money is a blurry reflection of the presence of God.
Now, human beings are "made in God's image"; thus human beings are blurry reflections of God (the Logos being the crystal-clear reflection. So, the difference between a human being and money is that while a human being is a blurry reflection of God, money is a blurry reflection of God's presence.
Thus man:money::God:God's presence. It follows that money is man's presence.
Has all the necessary links and is one of UQs sauciest post. Although my favorite saucy post from the moldbug era will always be about Felix salmon and Bitcoin:
If anyone is interested in the very real dangers of a "Fedcoin" this conversation will make it very understandable. Not really a thought experiment but if you wonder how it might work, worth a listen:
Yarvin seems to have missed the solution to his own Selden Crisis, quite possibly because he is not evil enough to see it.
FedGov, having issued the FedCoin, should immediately declare it illegal to own and confiscate all of them -- offering at some fixed parity, in trade whatever "new dollar" denominated bank accounts are now contemplated, under changed institutional arrangements. 35 New Dollars per FedCoin.
This was more or less FDR's solution to a similar problem. Once you are in New Deal 2.0 territory, you now find whether there is a crisis or not is purely an institutional matter, and the bit about the currency not of the essence.
BTW, a more interesting thought experiment might be, what would happen if SDRs were replaced by BancorCoins, and some sort of globalist regime enforced upon the Fed.
In case my line of reasoning is unclear here -- Yarvin has presented us with a question, what would happen if the Fed ever stopped operating as a 'lender of last resort' to the banking system. Well, we can imaging them replaced by a global lender of last resort, with geopolitical consequences.
Also, if the institutions failed and we really were only left with high powered money, we would be repeating an experiment that's already been done -- Norfed issued silver backed 'bailments'. Taking the high powered money you still want to deposit it (Bitcoins are easily lost) -- so you either give them to a an institution that manages your wallet (bailment), or you just sell it to a bank-like institution that promises to pay you a different, equally valued coin, on demand (but then they do banking stuff with your coin).
The scenario is a mix of Hyperchartalism (the government creates money with digital tokens you can use to pay your taxes, delivered on the horns of a bayonet), and 'what would happen if a constitutional amendment were to prohibit fractional reserve banking in any form'.
"...tired, ineffectual imitations of the official press, without impact or interest...." Breitbart and Revolver should hire some unemployed Wes Anderson fan to do their fonts and graphics. Make it look like The Atlantic. This would force The Atlantic to change it's look. Keep up this process and keep them shifting until The Atlantic looks like those Rhodesian Selous Scout web pages Mr. Yarvin used to visit.
The ProPublica/Twitter privacy stuff is comedy gold, Mr. Yarvin. Nice one.
I like to listen to Harvard and Stanford law professors talk to each other on youtube, trying to place such exceptions within the nominal legal regime. They almost pull it off, it's pretty impressive. Like to see any of you try, it's not easy.
When I first subscribed to Gray Mirror, I wrote an email (probably never read) asking yarvin to write about maturity transformation again.
This is pretty close at least
I can't help but think that any monetary restructuring along these lines should be accompanied by a simultaneous fiscal restructuring along Georgist lines. There is really no reason to let landlords buy back in to their passively appreciating asset, whose value to varying degrees tracks and captures government improvements, so take this opportunity to buy them out once and for all.
Curtis has already acknowledged that the natural financial return on low-risk passive market investing should be very small when investment capital is abundant. Only investors/speculators with signal to add to the market should expect to make gains over and above natural deflation. The same should be true for land. You make gains on land when you identify the best use that it can be put to. Otherwise, you get to enjoy the natural deflationary returns to savings that everyone else does.
If we go Yarvins formalism theory, then no one owns any land, they only own an agreement with a sovereign (a secondary right to a land). I think in that case Sovereigns are incentivised to make agreements such that their land is put to best use, thus preventing hoarding by actors who never sell land. My point is in a formalist utopia, Georgian reforms are not necessary it might arise out of a natural consequence of soveriegn competition
>There is really no reason to let landlords buy back in
While we are fantasizing about perfect, impossible restructurings of this or that — I might as well point out: In a financial/assets restructuring, there are vanishingly few reasons to let landlords *live*. If I were trying to match your comment’s tone, I would probably say “there is no reason to let BlackRock buy (up thousands/millions of homes).” But landlords are fucked, homie.
Mr. Yarvin does always employ a very nice “nobody needs to be punished” approach in these tracks. [side note: I really enjoy this piece because it brings together a lot of his reaction/restructuring thoughts in a neat little way].
Anyway — In the real world, the Nazis get genital torture. Land “lords”? In any reaction/eat-the-rich/what have you *on Earth*, that name is going to prove realllllyyyyyy unfortunate.
I don't really follow your argument here. If BlackRock wants to pay the most to buy what the sovereign is selling, why wouldn't the sovereign sell it to them?
All that I'm arguing is that the sovereign should not sell back the land, because the land is the primary source of revenue for the sovereign. It makes the laws of the land, it enforces those laws on the land, it provides services to those who exist on the land, and the highest bidder wins the contract to use the land within the terms of the contract. We could literally make the "social contract" real and bootstrap the entirety of law on the basis of rental agreements with the sovereign.
You let landlords live for the same reason reason that you let the professors live: "they're all our people now." This idea is basically MM's formalism. It's good because the idea sells: nobody has to get their head cut off. Nobody even has to take a financial haircut. They just don't get the option to buy back their political power. If Bob is restructuring the monetary system, then Bob has already taken their political power. They will ultimately be glad when they see how much better Bob wields it.
doooooooom, I understand your thinking here a lot better after reading this and your other comments. Commonwealth countries already have a version of this. It doesn't really work that well. I mean, it could work a lot better in a competent non-oligarchy. In Canada, for instance, 90+ percent of the land mass today is still owned by "the crown". There is a significant amount of revenue brought in from the land through leasing and mineral royalties... but even more than that, most of the land usage is gifted out in absurd portions to embarrassingly ineffectual cosmopolitan regime stuff, like for bizarre "anti-racist" or "environmental" usage. Functionally crown land is basically just leisure land for acolytes of the regime. Like there are 10's of thousands of high value acres around Whistler currently gifted to sierra club like groups for "snowshoeing" "rock climbing" and "horseback riding".
Does China use a system like what you are proposing? Does it work better there?
"There is really no reason to let landlords buy back in to their passively appreciating asset, whose value to varying degrees tracks and captures government improvements, so take this opportunity to buy them out once and for all."
1) real estate appreciation is a result of monetary inflation not government... improvements.
2) this is kind of super 1900's era culture war policy stuff is not really the point here.
"1) real estate appreciation is a result of monetary inflation not government... improvements."
Monetary inflation is not the only factor that makes land values tend upward over time. Land has a natural scarcity. As people get richer (i.e. their purchasing power goes up, which is what happens to savings in a deflationary economy that accumulates capital rather than dissipates it) they will be more willing to spend on good quality land. As the government creates improvements (i.e. offers high quality services, isn't that exactly why we are here and not on a libertarian blog?), these will be captured by landowners because it will make the property that benefits more valuable. As Curtis has argued many times, a profit-oriented government should not be leaking this source of revenue. This is how your pristine lake turns into a parasite bath.
"2) this is kind of super 1900's era culture war policy stuff is not really the point here."
I'm not arguing that the government should tax land and cut an equal sized check to everyone, or that a government doesn't have the right to impose other taxes. I'm just arguing that Georgist economics informs good fiscal policy in the same way that we recognize Austrian economics as informing good monetary policy.
There is also an aesthetic and temporal aspect to this. Whoever is sovereign over the land is the true owner (primary property). Governments in the past were technologically limited in their ability to exercise this sovereignty, so they had to divide up and delegate their powers in exchange for obligations in the reverse direction (feudalism). Government in the 21st century, and especially in the 22nd, shouldn't have this problem, so the serfs should be taxed directly. If the serfs aren't happy with this then they're free to hop on the next airplane heading out.
(2) Fair point, touche.
(1) I am still extremely unconvinced that real estate prices generally have seen an increase from anything but expansionary monetary policy. I have closely watched the real estate markets in many "loser" towns over the last 15 years. Real estate prices there have tripled or quintupled in that time span. During the same period these places have seen zero government improvement or intervention, and have undergone considerable economic and demographic decline. Massive price increases in the face of awful economic fundamentals? That's a monetary phenomenon. Absent expansionary monetary policy these properties would have seen a significant decline in value, not a passive increase.
I think you're right that monetary policy is the primary driver of any recent changes in real estate values. The abysmal quality of real government services and amenities implies that the effect of these on land values should generally be small or even negative. But remember, we are imagining a new regime that is competent and that provides high-quality amenities. Funding those amenities directly by charging a market rental fee for effected land will allow that regime to fully internalize the financial consequences of its decisions. This creates the proper incentive structure for the regime - it brings their skin into the game. At the same time it will avoid creating additional incentives outside of the regime to try to corrupt or undermine its decisions.
I usually think I understand Curtis, but I don't really understand this piece much at all.
I never understood these posts at first either till I read a book on Austrian Economics. Basically we have less dollars than the worth of all goods available. In a normal economic system that makes no sense, the currency should naturally be able to buy all the goods available on the market. The only reason this is happening is because we have something called Future Dollars that with the existing dollars covers all the existing assets in the market. The future dollars are treasury bonds of the government. Now if tomorrow we promise to stop printing any money, all the future dollars become worthless (As the interest rises to it's market price). The basically is a deflationary spiral, everyone will try to get rid of their future dollars for any real asset they can get. This would also affect the current dollar and make them worthless too, basically a deflationary spiral that is caused due to wrong incentives generated by suddenly breaking this machine. A better solution is to convert all future dollars into current dollars and give it to everyone. Because of the headache of how future dollars has transmitted into the economy, doing this is far harder than said. We need to as Curtis saud buy up all assets and print money, so now people have no assets like homes, stocks etc, they only have dollars. Then we can auction all these assets back onto the market (they can use the money we gave them to buy back their asset, we can offer them a discount to prevent too much chaos). With this we have eliminated future dollars and only have current dollars. Now if we promise to end this system, there won't be any deflationary spiral and we can start a new austrian economic system that will have no inflation, recession etc and is completely sane
Suppose that there's only a hundred dollars in the universe, and there's no other kind of money. Would that entail that a dollar is a permission-slip to take possession of one percent of everything that's "for sale" in the universe? (I'm just trying to understand what money is.)
Would be surprised if the answer isn't yes (also still learning)
deterministic jubilee
Yes, it would be nice if someone would summarize Curtis's proposal in ordinary language, without the use of weird words such as "liabilities" and "assets".
I take it that Curtis wants the king to (1) destroy all existing money, (2) take everything in the USA that people have other than the old money (which is all destroyed), and (3) give the people that he's taken the stuff from some kind of new money that they could then use to buy things with (and the more stuff he's taken from you, the more new money you get). The person who offers the most new money to the king for something that the king has taken would then get to have this thing.
Okay, so does that mean that banks are all destroyed and the bankers just get new money in exchange for the buildings and furniture and cars and things of that sort that the king has taken from them?
Occasionally, I play around with the idea of taking Yarvin posts, and both A) Transforming them to basic language and B) Condensing them greatly with the objective of reaching a greater audience.
"A regulator is better than a teacher, but an explosion is still a good teacher. Uninsured bank runs are one path to a financial system that doesn’t have bank runs. Make sure the explosion isn’t bigger than the system, though."
Maturity transformation is profitable (compared to Austrian banking) in the short term (i.e. until the next bank run). So in the absence of legal prohibitions, it would remain ubiquitous. Anyone who learned their less would simply be driven from the market.
As bad as this blog is (recursive Moldbug), the comments are truly amazing. Concentrated, ultra-dense autism that leads absolutely nowhere. If only this mental force could be harnessed for something like organizing all extant pennies by color grading.
This comment is like a worm in an apple.
Did you like Brian Boru's comment or were you being sarcastic? My first wife's mother used to tell her (the mother's) live-in boyfriend, "Jim, sarcasm has no place in child-rearing." Eh, she wasn't very kind to me ... nor was her daughter (my first wife).
Has Curtis ever grappled with Milton Friedman (as elucidated by Scott Sumner)? Mises was pretty good, and Austrians have something to say (I think Hayek is great), but Curtis is overly fond of Austrian sleight of hand syllogisms, leading to a facile take on monetary economics IMO.
I mean “stable prices, fixed money supply…” only with utter stagnation.
Brilliant, just brilliant.
I could be wrong about this, so if I'm missing something, please feel free to help me understand better.
So the underlying theory here is that stuff is always worth some specific value in dollars. However, if the amount of dollars in the economy was suddenly drastically altered, which is essentially what he was describing in the thought experiment, it's possible that it might just entirely detach the economy from dollars at all.
This is sort of what happened in England a few times, when the amount of gold and silver necessary for everyday transactions was flatly not available, paper money came into being to prop up the "lost" precious metals (usually loaned to a bankrupt sovereign). It's entirely possible that, to avoid the inevitable deflationary suck, an alternative method of ledger-keeping comes into being, essentially re-inflating the money supply.
In a sort of micro-example, imagine that a small community has no dollars in cash after teh suk. They still have stuff, and that stuff is not worthless. They *could* choose to start bartering with each other and coming up with some informal system of "cash", like cigarettes in jail. This might go a long way towards ameliorating the deflation.
But *would* it happen? Probably not. Hence the zombie apocalypse.
This might be of interest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60jGRGXOXbU
Venezuelan prison currency remained stable while the bolívar crashed. Prisoners were the only ones able to reliably get supplies like toilet paper, so villager would come to the prison to barter.
Value and money are both very mysterious.
If money is a blurry reflection of value, and value (that is, goodness) is the presence of God, then money is a blurry reflection of the presence of God.
Now, human beings are "made in God's image"; thus human beings are blurry reflections of God (the Logos being the crystal-clear reflection. So, the difference between a human being and money is that while a human being is a blurry reflection of God, money is a blurry reflection of God's presence.
Thus man:money::God:God's presence. It follows that money is man's presence.
I’m surprised there wasn’t a paragraph or two on fractional reserve banking.
When I first subscribed to Gray Mirror, I wrote an email (probably never read) asking yarvin to write about maturity transformation again.
This is pretty close at least
Where did he previously write about maturity transformation?
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2011/10/professor-krugman-on-maturity/
Has all the necessary links and is one of UQs sauciest post. Although my favorite saucy post from the moldbug era will always be about Felix salmon and Bitcoin:
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/04/felix-salmons-bitcoin-fud/
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/01/straightforward-explanation-of-present/
This one is my favorite, a WoW-themed explanation of MT
If anyone is interested in the very real dangers of a "Fedcoin" this conversation will make it very understandable. Not really a thought experiment but if you wonder how it might work, worth a listen:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-end-game-ep-6-lacy-hunt/id1508585135?i=1000487560045
Yarvin seems to have missed the solution to his own Selden Crisis, quite possibly because he is not evil enough to see it.
FedGov, having issued the FedCoin, should immediately declare it illegal to own and confiscate all of them -- offering at some fixed parity, in trade whatever "new dollar" denominated bank accounts are now contemplated, under changed institutional arrangements. 35 New Dollars per FedCoin.
This was more or less FDR's solution to a similar problem. Once you are in New Deal 2.0 territory, you now find whether there is a crisis or not is purely an institutional matter, and the bit about the currency not of the essence.
BTW, a more interesting thought experiment might be, what would happen if SDRs were replaced by BancorCoins, and some sort of globalist regime enforced upon the Fed.
In case my line of reasoning is unclear here -- Yarvin has presented us with a question, what would happen if the Fed ever stopped operating as a 'lender of last resort' to the banking system. Well, we can imaging them replaced by a global lender of last resort, with geopolitical consequences.
Also, if the institutions failed and we really were only left with high powered money, we would be repeating an experiment that's already been done -- Norfed issued silver backed 'bailments'. Taking the high powered money you still want to deposit it (Bitcoins are easily lost) -- so you either give them to a an institution that manages your wallet (bailment), or you just sell it to a bank-like institution that promises to pay you a different, equally valued coin, on demand (but then they do banking stuff with your coin).
The scenario is a mix of Hyperchartalism (the government creates money with digital tokens you can use to pay your taxes, delivered on the horns of a bayonet), and 'what would happen if a constitutional amendment were to prohibit fractional reserve banking in any form'.
Well, bad things. Decidedly bad things.
"...tired, ineffectual imitations of the official press, without impact or interest...." Breitbart and Revolver should hire some unemployed Wes Anderson fan to do their fonts and graphics. Make it look like The Atlantic. This would force The Atlantic to change it's look. Keep up this process and keep them shifting until The Atlantic looks like those Rhodesian Selous Scout web pages Mr. Yarvin used to visit.
The ProPublica/Twitter privacy stuff is comedy gold, Mr. Yarvin. Nice one.
I like to listen to Harvard and Stanford law professors talk to each other on youtube, trying to place such exceptions within the nominal legal regime. They almost pull it off, it's pretty impressive. Like to see any of you try, it's not easy.
~sicdev, I was right