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mlooney

Story Friday, May 8, 2020

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9 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:
12 hours ago, hkmaly said:

"What if" scenarios like this may seem simple on first look, but in reality are no more reliable than the "what if Newton have as much success in alchemy as he had in optics".

Then your precious metal standard would have the value of the lesser of it's current value and the value of producing it from other materials. We can actually do that now. We can synthesis gold from other elements. The cost to do so is prohibitive. The gold may well be an unstable isotope as well.

... actually I think producing gold was NOT what Newton made possible there. Although it's some time I've read it ...

And yes: technically, we can already turn lead into gold, as alchemists wanted. It just needs unpractical amount of energy. No such luck with other alchemy goals, yet: no elixir of immortality, no universal medicine, no universal solvent.

And electromagnetic waves are very useful but don't really allow everything aetheric manipulation was supposed to. Specifically, it doesn't allow to attract asteroid from space to Earth, which was part of plot in mentioned book ...

9 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:
12 hours ago, hkmaly said:

 ... then, few governments tried to abandon it and start printing money and found that they can get rich by it.

That didn't really work out for them. No one has ever printed an excess of currency without damaging their economy; in the extreme cases devaluing their currency to such an extent that is became essentially worthless; no one remains rich, the regime changes, and the perpetrators are no longer in control.

It worked for the first because they got other nation's gold before people understood how printing the money works. It stopped working since then, of course. Except for the perpetrators, those generally are able to find some way to get rich (certainly involving trades of those printed money for something more stable).

9 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Hitler came to power in the wake of one of these events, it was likely a factor.

Germany couldn't afford gold standard between wars due to reparations for the first one, so yes, definitely factor.

10 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:
12 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Since the abandonment of gold standard, we (whole world) are basically living on debt. We can't really return to gold standard without paying that debt - which is impossible. Only if in future we somehow manage to transition to different system (possibly post-scarcity economy) without major crisis the Great Depression would be fun when compared to, we could say it was good idea.

An alternate point of view is that we've expanded the economic standard to include a variety of goods and services, not just one scarce metal. It makes more sense if you think about it that way.

It would be nice if that would be true, but no: money are currently debt.

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56 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

It would be nice if that would be true, but no: money are currently debt.

Well, in a fiat currency system, there has to be some entity with the power to create money.

As long as that entity KEEPS the money, it does nobody any good. Not even the entity that created it.

So that entity can either:

(a) buy stuff - and eventually own everything, which idea has serious issues;

(b) lend the money out, presumably to entities expected to be able to repay it;

(c) give it away - and how does it decide how much to give to whom?

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23 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:
1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

It would be nice if that would be true, but no: money are currently debt.

Well, in a fiat currency system, there has to be some entity with the power to create money.

As long as that entity KEEPS the money, it does nobody any good. Not even the entity that created it.

So that entity can either:

(a) buy stuff - and eventually own everything, which idea has serious issues;

(b) lend the money out, presumably to entities expected to be able to repay it;

(c) give it away - and how does it decide how much to give to whom?

Actually, government already does a lot of deciding who should it give money. And there is specific fiscal politics instrument which basically means that central bank will print money and buy government iou's with it. So, it can be argued that option "c" would be better.

... that argument works very badly on anyone with any sort of experience of how badly governments work. Basically, in current system governments pay lot of money to banks just to get some sort of oversight and incentive to not be stupid (or, possibly, someone to blame when they realize that actually fulfilling campaign promises would be catastrophic.)

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