If Libertarianism is so great, why has no country anywhere in the world ever tried it?
Yes. It was a scam.
Tip, Mr. Nothaus: If you want to create a metal-based currency you don’t express the values in “dollars,” you express them in ounces (or grams if you’re some kinda Commie). A coin containing one ounce of silver is worth one ounce of silver, simple; meaning its purchasing power is determined by today’s market-value of silver, which fluctuates daily, but so do all currencies, and that metal-value relationship is the whole point of a metal-based currency, isn’t it?
Yes, it is. Every so often someone come up with an alternative currency and at most it’s never anything but a niche market, like bitcoin. You are offering something that the vast majority of people simply do not want. Do you intend to force it on them at gunpoint?
:dubious: Federal currency is also taxed, unless you want a visit from the IRS.
Precisely. Some of the things Der Trihs says seem to display almost a knee jerk reaction against any sort of logic or linear thought process regarding objective historical reality.
The fantasy that without our wise overlords at the Federal Government we would all be corporate slaves making 10 cents an hour, working 72 hour work weeks, getting our limbs blown off by exploding computer monitors and so forth is simply taking unsubstantiated hyperbolic propaganda to an absurd level.
Some of these concepts I am presenting take only a little logical thought to understand. Corporations would not have the power to enslave all of society if there was no government to prevent the entrepreneur from competing with the existing power structure. Also to say that the free economy requires the State is abjectly ahistorical as well. Governments rise and fall and yet people continue to engage in transactions with each other. What are we to make of the underground economy that continues to exist outside of government laws and regulations?
I am completely fine with fair criticism of the free market and a case can certainly be made for some regulation by government, but the absurd hyperbole of Der Trihs is not helpful in furthering debate.
The emphasis of mine I added above is the key, from what I can tell. Those who love the gold standard always say how UNarbitrary gold’s INTRINSIC, UNCHANGING value is.
It’s nonsense, of course, but that’s how they see it.
The story you’re linking is light on detail and from 2007 so… no, not really. I had to do some follow-up research, i.e. go to wikipedia:
Huh. I wouldn’t have thought that was a crime, in and of itself. I kinda hope SCOTUS eventually tosses out the convictions, though I can imagine legislation that requires all private currencies to be prominently labeled as such, or carry phrasing like “no cash value”, to make entirely certain there be no confusion with Federal legal tender, confusion the Feds are claiming von Nothaus tried to cultivate and exploit.
Or else based on observation of countries where they don’t have an accountable democratic nanny-state government, and what happens to workers there is often far worse than what you describe.
See post #82.
“Bartering using silver rounds is legal (some of the more radical anarcho-capitalist fringe do this) . . .” The point of a metallic currency, ISTM, is to make all transactions just that, bartering with silver rounds (or financial instruments representing same – in ounces, not dollars). Don’t try to get cute with it. Nothaus tried to get cute with it.
No; actually that’s being optimistic and assuming that we wouldn’t be either slaves or dead.
Who would stop them? Your fetishized independent, government-free individual would get crushed like an ant.
:rolleyes: You are actually holding up the black market as your idea of a free market? So, your libertarian paradise includes human trafficking and the murder of competitors?
So, no interest in addressing this? Thusfar you’ve presented a lot of rather lofty generalities; it would be nice to hear a few specifics before I commit to the revolution.
Welcome. Holy Shit. Post something shorter, and I’ll read it.
Why would you desire sound money? For one thing, you might consider the unchecked expansion of State power without limits to be a dangerous proposition.
If all you care about is the fastest expansion of government power, you would want paper money with no restraints.
But let me ask this question in all seriousness. The Federal Reserve has printed nearly twenty trillion dollars and passed it out in secret since the crises of 2008. Does that bother you at all? The growth of the national debt and the rate of monetary inflation are expanding exponentially. Where do you suppose it all ends? Is this the way to a progressive future? A secret central banking printing trillions and causing inflation?
You still seem to ignore that our dollar was linked to gold until 1971. Look at our national debt before that year. Look at the health of the middle class. Look at the abuse of the corporate state before 1971 versus after.
Why is college tuition and medical care so expensive when it was so affordable prior to 1971? Why does it take two or three jobs to make ends meet for families now whereas a family could do quite well with one income before 1971?
Leaving aside government debt, do you think it is good for American families to have huge amounts of debt? Or would you prefer that families could get by on savings and not accrue huge sums of debt to pay their bills?
Well, if we had sound money where inflation is held in check, then people can save and the money will maintain its value. Savings becomes encouraged and debt becomes far less tempting.
Don’t you care about those on fixed incomes? What about the value of their savings being destroyed through debasement of the monetary units?
There are many reasons to support a sound monetary system. It remains to be seen whether or not you actually care about those vulnerable citizens who are devastated by this inflationary monetary system however.
The gold standard isn’t “sound money”. Going to the gold standard would destroy the American economy, plunge it into a depression that would be irrecoverable until we got rid of it. No one would do business with us and most of the American money now existing would vanish. There would be starvation and chaos in the streets.
If it was actually happening, yes. Since it isn’t, no. Nor does having a gold standard restrain the government, except as far as it’ll be collapsing like everything else.
Well all sorts of things some consider to be “vices”, smoking pot, gambling, prostitution, buying certain kinds of food and drinks, etc for a few quick examples.
But my point is not that we prevented from interacting peacefully in ways we want on a day to day basis, but that we are subject to coercive violence from the State apparatus for no just reason. That is the problem.
I am saying that the ways in which we feel we need the State to violate the non aggression principle, we instead merely substitute the peaceful cooperation that we use in every other aspect of our lives.
Which we use because the government protects us from the threat of force by others. Eliminating the government like you want means that society degenerates into rule by brutality. Whomever is willing and able to apply the most force gets what they want, whether it’s your property or your girlfriend.
I’d say OPEC was a more likely explanation than going off the gold standard. OPEC called its first oil embargo in 1973 and the price of crude oil began rising. Check the record of oil prices by year. And when the price of oil rises, the cost of everything related to oil (which is pretty much everything) rises with it.
Could you give some examples of this happening? I, for one, haven’t been subjected to coercive violence from the State apparatus so far this year, much less on a day to day basis. Maybe it’s just because I’m a sheep. But what things is it that free-spirited rebels are doing that gets them beat up on a daily basis?
I might, indeed. I don’t see how a gold standard would prevent it, though.
So paper money with restraints is okay, then?
At a quick glance here, the U.S. inflation rate hasn’t topped 10% since 1981. I don’t know what the basis is for your claims of secret money printing, but the rate of monetary inflation (at least, as the term is generally used) is certainly not growing exponentially.
Inflation rate in January of 1971: 5.3%
Inflation rate in January of 2013: 1.6%
Assuming the national debt, middle-class health and abuse of the corporate state are all massively worse than before 1971, shouldn’t inflation also be, y’know… worse?
It’s unclear to me how going back to gold standard would help any of these. Rather, I expect they’d get significantly worse.
Well, why is gold “sound”? It’s a shiny metal. It only has what arbitrary value we assign it. If someone discovers a large gold mine and begins mining it aggressively, the value of gold drops, doesn’t it, even if the people who already own gold are working just as hard as they always did.
If you think a gold standard is immune to inflation and panics and crashes… you need to read more about gold standards.
Spot on mate, first thing I do is get a big gun, round up all my martial arts and police mates, take/steal a nice defend-able fort and well bring on liberty.
Assuming I am smarter and can apply well directed force, life would be OK for me. If you are not as smart and weak then you deserve to get shafted.
Hello again, jayarod7. A question I like to ask about proposed political systems which seem untenable is: What real-world example country comes closest to your ideal? I ask you this question. Please come up with something; even a poor approximation would be better than no example at all. (Some proposed “libertarian” societies seem impossible unless the idea is that everyone would have a brain implant that changes human nature.)
I do agree with parts of your OP, but draw almost completely opposite conclusions. I would agree with you that the U.S. government has been corrupted to support oligarchs rather than the common people, but see the key problem as de-regulation, not regulation. The antique thinkers you approve of weren’t arguing for anarchy; they were arguing for republics. To call them advocates of laissez-faire capitalism is at best misleading; John Stuart Mill actually went so far as to espouse “the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.”
I do see that you have utilitarian ideals, and are probably annoyed to be lumped with other “libertarians.” What real-world example country comes closest to your ideal? I doubt if yours would be the Friedmanist examples like Pinochet’s Chile or Cheney’s Iraq. Another Libertarian Doper presented medieval Ireland as a paradigm, though later retracted it. When I mention lawless Somalia as a libertarian utopia, I’m not being sarcastic: it’s very hard to imagine a society without law enforcers, lawlessness, or brain implants.
But where you really lose much of your audience is in blaming the Federal Reserve and fiat money. You’ve latched on to a fringe conspiracy theory that has nothing to do with your other ideals.
I am amazed that people blame America’s social and economic problems on inflation. First of all, there’s been little U.S. inflation except during the 1970’s oil shock. I do hope you’re well read enough to know that economists consider inflation of 2% or so to be better (more stimulative) than zero inflation. Use of gold as money would be deflationary due to the metal’s finitude.
I’m not sure what you mean by “printed nearly twenty trillion dollars and passed it out in secret,” unless you’ve bought in to a Rothschild-Illuminati theory. I’m not happy about mounting government debt, if that’s what you’re referring to, but that can be blamed on credit crises prompted by de-regulation, and America’s peculiar love affair with Tea Party idiots. True, U.S. governments would have less to spend on schools, food safety, etc. if its employees and suppliers stopped accepting paper as payment and insisted on gold bullion. Do you really think that would be an improvement?
In many ways, your ideals seem opposite to those of the Greed is Good, Market is God, Property over People fanatics. It strikes me as bizarre you’ve bought into the same fantasies about fiat money as those thinkers.