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Libertarians often seem to equate "stable political system" with "autocrat grinds dissent under his bootheel until he dies" and "sound currency" with gold, which sounds nice until you take even a cursory look at the historical record.
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# ? Nov 12, 2015 04:44 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 17:42 |
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All those crashes under the gold standard were actually caused by the fed exacerbating the business cycle, even the ones from before the fed was created. No no, especially the ones from before the fed was created. Also feudalism was the most moral, free, and nonviolent political system because Jews/Spaniards/Saracens/sodomites/heretics/monophysites/Levellers/literate women were burned at the stake before their dangerous new ideas could aggress against the covenant community.
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# ? Nov 12, 2015 04:51 |
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StandardVC10 posted:Libertarians ... sounds nice until you take even a cursory look at the historical record.
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# ? Nov 12, 2015 05:22 |
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Halloween Jack posted:Is it actually possible to establish a currency system that protects itself? The Roman emperors had no trouble I can remember when they deemed it necessary to mint debased coins.
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# ? Nov 12, 2015 07:55 |
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paragon1 posted:The Emperors actually had a whole bunch of huge fuckin' problems with currency that slowly built up over time, despite several reforms of the mint system and attempts to reverse debasement and what have you. Unfortunately no one had really figured out that monetary inflation is a thing yet so there was only so much they could do. Eventually one of the Eastern emperors, I forget which one, just said "gently caress it we'll start new coinage with gold now and never debase it." And that worked well for a while so long as you weren't poor. Though really you could say that about most of human history. The other issue is that counterfeiting was rampant through much of history. One of the reasons that metal currencies got debased was that people kept coming up with coins that looked really similar but were made of cheaper metals. The whole point of a coin is that it's an easier way to move precious metals. When a gold standard exists you'd have people trading quantities of gold so it could be coins, bars, chunks, jewelry, whatever. This is why merchants had scales. Of course poor folks got dicked over by not owning scales; trick scales existed and merchants would be like "well it's 5 coins for that" when really the actual weight of the gold it was worth was 3 coins. Then, of course, greedy people who had enough power and influence to control or have access to a mint would make slightly less pure metal coins and be all like "yup, totally silver!" Similar things happened with other metals, too. This is why things like trifle pewter existed. Cut that poo poo with lead; lead is cheap. The other massive issue with metal coinage was gold shaving. Since not everybody could have access to scales like the merchants had people would just trade in numbers of coins but raw metals still had value. So the wealthy would hire people to take all their coins, shave off little bits of them, then go spend them on things. They'd still have 10,000 coins but would increase their wealth by a certain quantity of gold which could be melted down and sold or just minted into more coins.
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# ? Nov 12, 2015 13:13 |
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It's weird when you look at coinage and wonder if inflation and interest weren't derived entirely from people debasing and shaving their coins.
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# ? Nov 12, 2015 14:21 |
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Lets not even get started on the fun time that accrue when you accidentally discover a whole new continent full of gold and silver and suddenly have your available currency increasing far far faster then your underling economy.
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# ? Nov 12, 2015 14:30 |
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Vorpal Cat posted:Lets not even get started on the fun time that accrue when you accidentally discover a whole new continent full of gold and silver and suddenly have your available currency increasing far far faster then your underling economy. That or all the fun effects of mercantilism or my personal favorite; obscenely wealthy people hoarding gold to increase its value then using it to buy lots of land only to flood the market with gold to debase everybody else's wealth. Then hey gently caress you they own all the land you'll pay them to work on it or starve to death.
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# ? Nov 12, 2015 14:41 |
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I've considered these arguments, but, were the gold coins in question purestrain gold?
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# ? Nov 12, 2015 15:26 |
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jrodefeld posted:Note to mods: You know who I am. I'm a libertarian who is staring his own thread, which is acceptable according to the rules, I assume? There are two reasons I want to start a specific thread rather than retread over the "other" libertarian thread and just post comments there. In the first place, I want this discussion to be more narrow in scope. And I want to say something at the beginning that everyone will have a chance to read. On Caros's thread, he specifically poisoned the well from the very beginning by writing an OP describing libertarianism and its adherents in an unflattering and, from my perspective, misleading way. By the time I first posted on that thread, there had already been something like two hundred pages of people making GBS threads on libertarianism before I had a chance to defend it. And since the thread was almost entirely directed at me in particular (it would not exist without my having posted here in the past), you can understand how I'd like to have a bit more discretion about the framing of the debate when I am outnumbered 30 to 1.
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# ? Nov 12, 2015 16:00 |
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Vorpal Cat posted:Lets not even get started on the fun time that accrue when you accidentally discover a whole new continent full of gold and silver and suddenly have your available currency increasing far far faster then your underling economy. Or the fun time the king of a previously unknown country went on vacation and turned the Mediterranean economy into a smoldering crater just by souvenir shopping
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# ? Nov 13, 2015 00:42 |
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DarklyDreaming posted:Or the fun time the king of a previously unknown country went on vacation and turned the Mediterranean economy into a smoldering crater just by souvenir shopping You've piqued my interest. Who was this?
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# ? Nov 13, 2015 03:08 |
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YF19pilot posted:You've piqued my interest. Who was this? Mansa Musa went on Hajj and spent what was, for the Mediterranean at the time, a commodities price point shifting amount of gold.
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# ? Nov 13, 2015 03:30 |
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YF19pilot posted:You've piqued my interest. Who was this? Musa Keita I was the King of the Mali Empire during the early 1300's, though Islam had reached West Africa a few decades before that he was the first major Muslim leader in Sub-Saharan Africa. Being such he had to go to Mecca at least once as all Muslims are supposed to. When he did so in 1324 he and his entourage bought so many rugs, scented candles, paintings and other random crap that was for sale in every market from Morocco to Jedda that the price of gold plummeted to almost nothing overnight and stayed that way for at least 10 years. Edit: Beaten because I just had to be wordier.
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# ? Nov 13, 2015 03:40 |
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You've never heard of a the king who single handily wrecked a the economy of a fairly substantial area because he's black. And the whole Muslim thing probably isn't helping.
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# ? Nov 13, 2015 04:12 |
ToxicSlurpee posted:That or all the fun effects of mercantilism or my personal favorite; obscenely wealthy people hoarding gold to increase its value then using it to buy lots of land only to flood the market with gold to debase everybody else's wealth. Then hey gently caress you they own all the land you'll pay them to work on it or starve to death. One theory I heard about the whole purestrain thing is that when the US goes back on the Gold Standard, they'll just declare that all dollars presently extant are valued at the gold in Fort Knox or whatever, which would presumably increase the price of gold by about two orders of magnitude. This is probably very appealing when your largest assets are three one-ounce krugerrands.
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# ? Nov 13, 2015 04:15 |
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Klaus88 posted:You've never heard of a the king who single handily wrecked a the economy of a fairly substantial area because he's black. And the whole Muslim thing probably isn't helping. I heard of Mansa Musa being a wealthy Mali king, I hadn't heard that particular detail of his rule.
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# ? Nov 13, 2015 05:09 |
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Nessus posted:I believe this is considered a feature, not a bug. It's the same reason why bitcoin can only go up. Since the protocol restricts the total number of bitcoins that can ever be mined to 21 million, once it replaces all $1.4trillion of US currency in circulation, each one will be worth $67,000 and all the savvy early-adopters who buy/mine a few hundred bitcoins now will be millionaires! And once the entire $43trillion of wealth in the USA is valued in those 21 million bitcoins, each one will represent $2 million in assets! And once bitcoins becomes the world currency I'll buy a small country somewhere and be king and won't my manager at taco bell and those girls who wouldn't go out with me rue the day they failed to appreciate my genius now that I can buy them and sell them as many times as I want (and you can be sure I will).
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# ? Nov 13, 2015 05:10 |
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Nessus posted:I believe this is considered a feature, not a bug. The right wing of America knows that it's losing so it's cashing out. Right now it's a gigantic scam. It's a racket. Have you ever noticed how every Republican presidential candidate just happens to release a book around campaign time? Even people that have zero hope of actually making it suddenly have a book chock full of wisdom on how to fix America. Then you have Palin's TV channel and people like Glenn Beck harping on gold all day, ever day. Every Republican policy boils down to "rich get money, poor get hosed" in some way or another. I'm pretty sure they know this election is lost and America is seeing what they've been up to so they're just milking it for all its worth while they can.
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# ? Nov 13, 2015 05:34 |
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The right wing of America knows that it's losing so it's cashing out. Right now it's a gigantic scam. It's a racket. Have you ever noticed how every Republican presidential candidate just happens to release a book around campaign time?
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# ? Nov 13, 2015 15:40 |
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I've been working on a theory. Money is just an agreement by society that it owes you, so we should just unilaterally cancel the debt society owes certain rich assholes.
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# ? Nov 13, 2015 15:44 |
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Nevvy Z posted:I've been working on a theory. Money is just an agreement by society that it owes you, so we should just unilaterally cancel the debt society owes certain rich assholes.
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# ? Nov 13, 2015 16:12 |
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I love this, did a goon make it
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# ? Nov 13, 2015 16:26 |
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Halloween Jack posted:Doesn't every candidate from every party do that? What's a lot more telling is the campaign and convention industry built up around the Tea Party. At the moment I can't find the articles I read, about conservative campaign organizers and others of their ilk, living the high life on money donated by rank-and-file Tea Partiers, and doing it all with a nod and a wink to the fact that they know the movement is meaningless. The big difference though is that Republican candidates who don't have the slightest prayer have been hanging on as long as possible to keep themselves in the spotlight. It's why the party is such a clown car. Compare that to the Democrats who will have their hopefuls but not 15 candidates all tripping over each other to say the most ridiculous thing. Notice that the Republican party was reluctant to put a stopper on the number of candidates but finally actually had to. There's more of them every year and you have people like Ron Paul who was never going to be president, ever, cropping up in every drat election. If you look at it once it becomes apparent that a Democratic candidate is hopeless they'll bow out and cheer on whoever the candidate turns out to be from the sidelines. For the GOP they've had to start throwing people out.
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# ? Nov 13, 2015 19:17 |
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Halloween Jack posted:An almost universal concept among OPCA movements is that there's a difference between a human being and their "legal person," a legal fiction created by the government, which is just a corporation anyway. The goal of their nonsense filings is to claim all their income, property, and the benefits of citizenship, but dump all their debts and obligations on their "legal person," which they then disavow. They don't just use this tactic to protest taxes and court-ordered debt like fines and child support, but also to try to nullify private debts like mortgages and car loans. Another cornerstone of their beliefs is that the government is really just a corporation, hence all the bizarre behaviour and nonsense filings to avoid what they think are hidden procedural "traps" that constitute consent to a contract. So in a Libertopian future, they'd still be practicing pseudolegal witchcraft, but targeted at their DRO instead of the state judicial system. Ooh, ooh, ooh, you forgot the best one. Many of the Sov-Cit gurus claim that the Social Security Act established a secret multi-billion dollar fund for each citizen that the government cashes in on once you die, and you can make withdrawals from it if you know the secret password. You might need to transfer it from your "legal person" to your "natural person," but it probably varies from scam to scam.
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# ? Nov 13, 2015 20:11 |
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Halloween Jack posted:Doesn't every candidate from every party do that? What's a lot more telling is the campaign and convention industry built up around the Tea Party. At the moment I can't find the articles I read, about conservative campaign organizers and others of their ilk, living the high life on money donated by rank-and-file Tea Partiers, and doing it all with a nod and a wink to the fact that they know the movement is meaningless. Those conventions (like all other conventions) are also roiling sex parties, meaning that the upper-crust of young attractive rich "leaders" ruin their marriages and otherwise become invested in keeping the movement running.
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# ? Nov 13, 2015 23:49 |
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OP should start another thread with an even longer introduction
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# ? Nov 16, 2015 19:10 |
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Twerkteam Pizza posted:OP should start another thread with an even longer introduction It's what he does. Give it another 2-3 months he'll be back with another glorified street-sermon and rant about how totally notracist his idols are.
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# ? Nov 16, 2015 19:39 |
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DarklyDreaming posted:It's what he does. Give it another 2-3 months he'll be back with another glorified street-sermon and rant about how totally notracist his idols are. I can't wait
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# ? Nov 17, 2015 02:51 |
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Twerkteam Pizza posted:I can't wait Let's just say there are reasons that goons posting in D&D act like Jesus came back every time JRod chooses to post here again.
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# ? Nov 17, 2015 02:53 |
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He truly is the best worst poster. There are never signs of trolling or genuine mental illness to ruin the fun, just a bottomless fountain of pure stupidity from which we can drink as much as we please.
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# ? Nov 17, 2015 02:59 |
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Nolanar posted:He truly is the best worst poster. There are never signs of trolling or genuine mental illness to ruin the fun, just a bottomless fountain of pure stupidity from which we can drink as much as we please. This makes me happy
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# ? Nov 17, 2015 14:02 |
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Twerkteam Pizza posted:This makes me happy Keep in mind that it's now one month or so since his last couple of posts... And the obligatory reminder that in one of them he held up literal slave-states as something the US should aspire to, because those states were more 'economically free'. The depths of Jrode's stupidity may literally be infinite. ( Yes, I know I keep harping on that, but it's just so loving out there that how can I not? )
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# ? Nov 17, 2015 16:10 |
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TLM3101 posted:Keep in mind that it's now one month or so since his last couple of posts... And the obligatory reminder that in one of them he held up literal slave-states as something the US should aspire to, because those states were more 'economically free'. The depths of Jrode's stupidity may literally be infinite. Getting him to acknowledge he lauded literal slave states should be the next watermelon-test when he posts again/a new thread. Lord knows I'm not going to leave it alone either!
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# ? Nov 17, 2015 17:09 |
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TLM3101 posted:Keep in mind that it's now one month or so since his last couple of posts... And the obligatory reminder that in one of them he held up literal slave-states as something the US should aspire to, because those states were more 'economically free'. The depths of Jrode's stupidity may literally be infinite. It isn't even just that it's out there and ridiculous because it's not an incidental detail or accident or whatever. His reckoning of "economic freedom" (or the one he accepted as authoritative) does not take into account whether a nation's economy employs slave labor. If this is what libertarian understandings of economic freedom can overlook, they are garbage. He has to account for that if he wants anyone to take "economic freedom" seriously.
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# ? Nov 17, 2015 18:00 |
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DarklyDreaming posted:It's what he does. Give it another 2-3 months he'll be back with another glorified street-sermon and rant about how totally notracist his idols are. "Look, I don't want to talk about racism, let's move on to other points." *vomits 2,000 words about how not-racist his idols are, keeps conversation about racism, drops 3 more Mises.org links*
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# ? Nov 17, 2015 18:03 |
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Getting him to acknowledge he lauded literal slave states should be the next watermelon-test when he posts again/a new thread. Lord knows I'm not going to leave it alone either! Thank god I'm not the only one still hung up on that. It was just such a moment that I had to re-read the original post a couple of times to make sure I understood it correctly. GunnerJ posted:It isn't even just that it's out there and ridiculous because it's not an incidental detail or accident or whatever. His reckoning of "economic freedom" (or the one he accepted as authoritative) does not take into account whether a nation's economy employs slave labor. If this is what libertarian understandings of economic freedom can overlook, they are garbage. He has to account for that if he wants anyone to take "economic freedom" seriously. There are, as far as I can see, two possibilities here, and both are equally vile and disturbing. Either, JRode's recokning of economic freedom follows what you've said here, and he simply doesn't care whether an economy incorporates slave labor, which is abhorrently cynical and callous. OR - and even worse - since a slave-state allows fellow human beings to be bought, sold, and used as property, he considers these states to be more 'economically free' because there is another arena for economic activity. That just so happens to obliterate any human dignity or worth of the 'commoditity', that is to say the actual peoplebeing sold. Now, in the purest, most abstractly technical sense, that would make these states more economically free. It's just that this argument is also completely vile and indicative of a truly repugnant view of humanity and human rights in general, in addition to being cynical and callous. So, yeah. I want to loving grill the bastard on this.
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# ? Nov 17, 2015 18:24 |
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TLM3101 posted:There are, as far as I can see, two possibilities here, and both are equally vile and disturbing. Either, JRode's recokning of economic freedom follows what you've said here, and he simply doesn't care whether an economy incorporates slave labor, which is abhorrently cynical and callous. Well there is a third possibility: he just copy-pasted that list from mises.org without really reading it. Given his known history of plagiarizing things he's not entirely read, I'd not rule it out.
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# ? Nov 17, 2015 18:32 |
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Well there is a third possibility: he just copy-pasted that list from mises.org without really reading it. Given his known history of plagiarizing things he's not entirely read, I'd not rule it out. This, except he took it from the Cato Institute. jrodefeld posted:Cato puts out a yearly report where they rank the countries of the world according to their "economic freedom", i.e. correlation of policies with libertarian ideology. This year, the United States ranks 16th. He was just citing it as "data" to prove that the UK and Switzerland are actually libertarian, so we can be like those European countries you progressives love so much if we just do whatever he says. He probably didn't even notice that Qatar and the UAE were on the list.
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# ? Nov 17, 2015 19:19 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 17:42 |
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he also, itt, did a "you wouldn't say that to my face id do a fight at you" at me and i lol'ed
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# ? Nov 17, 2015 19:20 |