
Money as a System of Control (2017) - TheDistillery
https://thedistillery.pub/money-as-a-system-of-control-andreas-m-antonopoulos-video-transcript
======
ydnaclementine
Not sure if he needs this intro on HN, but the speaker in the video, Andreas
Antonopoulos, is the author of two very technical books detailing everything
about bitcoin and ethereum (Mastering Bitcoin/Ethereum).

Even if you think crypto is a fad, stupid, or whatever, I think they're still
great reads explaining the why of the decisions, how of the implementations,
and the challenges for these two technologies. If this video is your first
impression of him, the books are much less abrasive(?).

~~~
geekpowa
What would explain why he completely overlooked a key primary function of
money, something that decentralized crypto cannot, by design, satisfy : money
is transferable debt.

Crypto currency view of money is that money is a store of value. Money is far
more subtle and interesting than that. Money is has always has been a system
of control. Those that can issue money, wield incredible power of the economy,
and have done so since monies inception.

~~~
lawn
The view that money is just a store of value is only held by BTC maximalists,
because BTC is too unreliable expensive to be a good medium of exchange. When
they say store of value what they really mean is investment vehicle.

~~~
lambertsimnel
Can anything store value without having another use, even if its supply is
fixed? Would the demand for precious metals and precious metal money as a
store of value disappear without the industrial, cosmetic and artistic demand
for precious metals?

~~~
corodra
That's kind of what value means, being useful. Random hash algorithms are not
inherently useful, thus, have no value. At least I could wipe my ass with a
dollar bill or use the bill as kindling for a fire. I'm all for a currency
system based on beans or corn. Especially corn. Corn has loads of value in
multiple ways. Food. Fuel. Fertilizer. But oh, it decays, thus, you better use
it before it goes bad and is useless.

Not in the case for gold. The reason gold was used so much has a long term
storage was due to it's stability. Gold doesn't decay in generational
lifetimes. Doesn't really rust and reacts with very few chemicals. Silver was
actually used as an everyday currency more than gold. But gold was the main
body.

The use of precious metals as a form of currency was not an accident. Yea, it
has value largely based on "faith". Any currency will. No cryptocoin is immune
from that. You have to have faith that it has value. I find it weird that
people just say "crypto has inherent value unlike fiat currency". Yea, what
value? If you want to argue "Well, gold has no real value, so bitcoin is no
different from that. They both lack real value. Why can't bitcoin be a
currency?" Good question! That's a good point! We're getting somewhere!

It peeves me when people take a shit on thousands of years worth of social
trial and error and dismiss it all because they watch a youtube cartoon about
"the truth behind money".

------
simplecomplex
I’ve experienced it first hand. One day my card was declined while paying for
dinner. I paid cash and thought something was wrong with their card reader.

I checked my bank account, and it had $30k in it (my life savings at the
time). So I thought nothing was wrong and went to bed.

Next morning I try to pay for groceries and my card is again declined. I call
my bank. They say my account has been flagged and it’s frozen. They can’t tell
me why, or how to appeal.

I go into the bank. I ask why I wasn’t notified my account was frozen. They
said they “oh sorry someone should have called you”. I ask what I did to get
my account frozen. They said they don’t know, it’s part of some social
security electronic audit. They say it’s all automated and because it’s the
government it was out of their control. I ask how long will it take to
unfreeze they say they don’t know. They tell me to call an 800 number, and
that nobody in the physical branch has any power over really anything.

I tell them my rent check is going to bounce, they said “we’re sorry”.

Long story short: 2 weeks later my account is unfrozen for no reason. I was
never given a reason. I missed rent. I couldn’t buy food.

I committed no crime, and was never accused of committing any crime. This was
a personal account not involved in any business. I deposited paychecks into it
and bought food and paid my rent. That’s mostly it.

Just FYI money in the bank is not yours. If the government wants to freeze it
for no reason they can, despite all the people who say otherwise. It happened
to me. This was at Chase bank in US. I now keep thousands in cash hidden in
various places, and bought some bitcoin as well. At least if the thugs in the
federal government want it they’ll have to fucking physically take it.

~~~
princeb
> Long story short: 2 weeks later my account is unfrozen for no reason. I was
> never given a reason.

it is illegal for the bank to inform you of any AML investigation undertaken
whether internally or the FBI or fincen or any of the other federal bodies. if
you don't like the way this is done, i suggest you take it up to your
congressmen.

~~~
hakfoo
That seems like absence of explanation is an explanation in and of itself.

If the bank can give you a straight answer, it's clearly not AML. If they
start giving you no answer, it's presumably that. Id' expect if you were
seriously in that game, that's one of the clear signs something's awry and
you'd better start activating panic measures.

I'm also sort of confused about the concept of freezing accounts _during_ an
investigation. If it was late stage and they were saying "okay, shut it down,
we'll be sending over the cops with the arrest warrant within an hour", that's
one thing, but any sudden movement on accounts is likely to change the
behaviour you're trying to monitor and document. The darkweb market seizures
seemed smarter in that regard-- they let some of them run with no obvious
changes so they could gather data, only taking it down once the case was
completely built.

~~~
simplecomplex
I don’t even know what agency in the government did this. Or that I was part
of an investigation. Or anything. Different people at different positions in
the bank would say the same thing “the computer says your account is flagged”
“the system says your social security number is flagged” etc. When I would ask
what “flagged” means they would just repeat nonsensical shit. All they would
really tell me is that they had no control because a government system had
flagged it.

------
Arnt
Was rhetoric always like that, or are people stretching their points harder
nowadays?

For example: Monday "can be confiscated at whim, frozen by any banker at any
point in time". Oh really? Any banker can confiscate any customer's money on a
whim?

There's more. I find it very annoying.

"How many Greeks do you think had insurance on their bank accounts? All of
them. What happened to that? Poof, in one afternoon. Vanished. 20% haircut."
He makes it sound as if deposit insurance is supposed to insure against a tax
claim by the state (in this case a rather sudden, surprising tax).

It's admirable, in a way, how some people manage to make weird things sound
reasonable.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
You're negating your own point. The "claim by the state" was the justification
used to confiscate the money. The confiscation was demanded by bankers, and
the state was acting as their enforcer.

There are other examples. Such as the foreclosure mills set up around 2008
which literally stole some people's houses - even if they didn't have a
mortgage.

And in the UK the banks make a lot of their profits from excessive "overdraft
fees", which they claim - on a whim, just because they can - unless
legislation is passed to prevent them.

And in times of financial stress, banks have the option to prevent withdrawals
of customer funds. That's not a permanent confiscation, but it's a very bad
thing if you need to buy food and have no idea why your card isn't working.

These can all be fought through the courts, but most individuals have neither
the time nor the resources to fight them.

The bottom line is that banks like an unofficial branch of government. From
the Fed down, they control the money supply - and since there is no such thing
as "money" in any tangible sense that isn't symbolic of political power,
that's identical to being able to exercise immense power over people's lives
with no political accountability.

~~~
corodra
No, banks do not have the legal right to withhold a customer's funds with an
account freeze if they don't have a warrant signed by a judge. It's still
"your money" on loan to the bank. The silliness of being scared of a big-bad
bank needs to end.

If a bank does this to you, you call up (in the USA) the OCC (Office of the
Comptroller of the Currency). They do a check on you to make sure no law
enforcement agency considers you a terrorist. Once cleared, they tell the bank
to release the funds. No court needed. This literally happened to me after
depositing a check for my business.

I agree, banks, especially the top 5, can be cunts. But don't go all tin foil
hat about it. Don't watch 10 minute youtube cartoons about "how money really
works because the lizard Illuminati actually control it". It's bad for your
mental health.

~~~
rwmurrayVT
Is there a time delay where the OCC can't in fact make them release funds?
Several major banks have deposit limits of 5-days or even 30-days for funds
inside of a new bank account to prevent check fraud.

~~~
corodra
From what I understand, most verifications are done because the OCC regulated
them to do so. Maybe an agency here and there added other stuff. But at the
end, the OCC is the one who knocks if a bank fucks up on information due
diligence.

But 30 day is still beyond me as to where that comes from. 3 to 5 day. Sure.
But 30 makes zero sense. My situation was a bit unique due to the account
being frozen out of the blue.

------
sokoloff
> How many people in this room are accredited investors? What a lovely bunch.
> That puts you in the one-tenth of one-tenth of one-tenth percentile of the
> world.

No, it doesn't. Accredited investor (by the meaning the author most likely
intended) is $1MM net worth (ex residence) or $200K in income for each of the
last two years and an expectation for that to continue. There are 42 million
millionaires or about 0.55% of the world population. There is an additional
population who have the income but not the net worth to qualify, so it's
possible that nearly 1% of the world adults would be accredited investors.

~1% is a _lot_ more than ~0.001%, a thousand times more in fact.

~~~
chias
I think you misunderstand what "percentile" means here, though it is indeed
worded obtusely. When you say you're in the "tenth percentile", that means
you're in the top 10%, not the top 0.1%. As such, when the author states "one-
tenth of one-tenth of one-tenth percentile of the world" he's referencing the
top 0.1%, not the top 0.001%.

By your reckoning, he's admittedly still off by a factor of 10, but not by a
factor of 1000.

(note: the phrasing is made needlessly confusing by his use of "one-tenth
percentile" instead of just "tenth percentile" \- I suspect this is merely a
transcription error, as there seem to be a number of these)

~~~
chongli
_When you say you 're in the "tenth percentile", that means you're in the top
10%_

The tenth percentile is actually the bottom 10%. The top 10% is the ninetieth
percentile.

~~~
chias
While technically correct, this distinction is often muddied in colloquial
speech when saying that a particular point is "in" an Xth percentile. I
suppose it might also depend on which direction you orient your scale on the
axis ;)

------
petjuh
Money is a system of control in a more generic way - it allows you to make
people do things for you and give you resources.

It can make a plane come for you to take you to a different city where a room
will be waiting for you, people will give you food etc.

It's downright magic if you ask me. Without the magic of money, nobody would
lift their finger to help you unless they're a friend or a relative

~~~
nabla9
You don't need money to have have property and wealth or power over others
generated by it.

You don't need money to have prices either. It's just convenient.

Money is just extremely convenient, it has no magical properties.

~~~
llamaz
Money as a medium of exchange has no magical properties. But you need to think
about what money represents - how it ties different people together. Some
people make money, then spend it on their own subsistence. Others are able to
use money to make more money.

If you can stop working for 8 years and not end up on the streets, then you're
ultimately working for someone who _can_ stop working for 8 years. This is why
less than 10 people own more collective wealth than the poor half of the world
population. This is not even considering monopolies, corruption, state
intervention, etc.

As for what we can do about it, I don't think redistributing wealth is a great
idea. Instead I think we should encourage an entrepreneurial spirit, i.e.
encourage people to do what so many in Silicon valley have done: start their
own business in their garage. I suspect people find entrepreneurship to be
worthwhile despite the risk because their work can translate to profits
directly, and they're able to use e.g. LISP instead of Java, make an entire
system instead of just writing the tests.

~~~
nabla9
> Others are able to use money to make more money.

They don't make more money. They make more wealth.

You are confusing metaphorical use of world money as synonym of wealth to what
actually happens.

~~~
llamaz
I’m not sure what wealth is. Let’s use the term value i.e. when raw materials
(eg ones and zeros) are transformed to a useful form (eg a computer program).
The programmers at amazon create value and then use most of their wage on
subsistence eg supporting their family. The board of directors buy, ultimately
through a chain of command, workers who are able to make more value than they
consume in wages (otherwise no one would hire her). They also use money for
subsistence, but they consume part of their accumulated value on creating more
value. The programmer takes risks in agreeing to work, because if he is layed
off then he won’t be able to provide for her family. So how can the programmer
also use value to create more value? Entrepreneurship, ie being paid based on
the profits she generates, rather than what the board of directors is willing
to let go of. Or perhaps investment, which ultimately means profiting off the
value creating labour of others in a indirect way.

~~~
nabla9
Wealth is what you own.

Jeff Bezos is not owning much money. Warren Buffet id not owning money.
Neither is Bill Gates. Money is just one asset you can own and most people
hold very little of it.

------
mempko
What Andreas gets wrong is that he thinks that money being a system of control
is a new thing. Emperors have long understood how to use money as a system of
control. They would take slaves and have them mine gold or silver. They would
then stamp their face on coins and hand them to soldiers. The soldiers would
conquer people and institute a tax requiring the conquered people to return
those same coins back to the empire. Why make this game? Now the local
populations start doing things for the soldiers and the empire. Markets form.
And suddenly, people who were free are now under the control of the empire.
Money has always been a system of control. Money is a carrot, taxes are the
stick.

~~~
buboard
Control was more with knives than with money back then. Empires worked with
many different coins , different metals etc. The taxman was happy to take
whatever was deemed worthy in the area. Those people weren’t free, they were
just subjects of another ruler

------
DoreenMichele
We do a poor job of being inclusive. I think most of that is not intentional.

If it's written in English, it's not because the author seeks to exclude
people who speak something else. It's because I the author knows English.

Getting anything to work at all is hard. It's made harder in a highly
multicultural world of billions.

If you think only of your culture, you get a colonial system. Europeans came
to the US and saw _wilderness_. They did not recognize lands actively managed
by a mobile society with a completely alien culture.

Trappers would show up first. Natives felt there was enough to share and saw
no reason to forbid their activities or kill them. The trappers operated much
like the Natives.

Settlers followed. Settlers did not operate like Natives. They laid claim to
specific plots of land, usually the best plots. They often showed up while
there was no current presence of people. When Natives returned to the area, as
they tended to do seasonally, the settlers saw them as trespassers. They
didn't recognize that they were the trespassers.

Agricultural societies can readily outcompete hunter-gatherer societies. You
produce more per acre if you cultivate the land. So the conflict was probably
inevitable.

I don't know the solution here. But I don't think that seeing the exclusion of
the masses as intentional despotism is particularly helpful.

Everyone decries the downside of regulation when they have it. They fail to
recognize the benefits.

Before we had regulation, fire fighters from neighboring towns couldn't help
in a serious emergency because their equipment wasn't compatible. They would
show up, then find they couldn't connect their hoses because it was a
different size.

When I was a child, the Swiss were famous for their neutrality during WW2.
That was seen as virtue. At some point, that narrative changed and I began
seeing stories about how the Swiss were guilty of being Nazi collaborators due
to their neutrality.

Most things are a two-edged sword. We laud them when we can see how it
benefits us. We attack them when we are the ones getting hurt.

Designing good systems that work well for everyone is tough. It's made all the
tougher when you want it to serve billions.

That's not nefarious intent. That's just how it is.

~~~
sifar
>> But I don't think that seeing the exclusion of the masses as intentional
despotism is particularly helpful.

This may be true of the examples you cited for the more distant era. However
post WW2, with the invention of technologies of mass control, this has really
become a default case now.

>> Designing good systems that work well for everyone is tough. It's made all
the tougher when you want it to serve billions.

If one is aware of this then one should factor that into the systems to
minimize the harm or refrain from building such systems. We don't see any
evidence for that.

~~~
DoreenMichele
It's extremely challenging to envision the path not taken. Even in cases where
you can, it's more challenging still to effectively communicate the other path
and that you are, in fact, correct.

I don't know that the world would be a better place had we not done x, y or z.
When people decry a thing, they routinely focus on the harm it has done
without accounting for the good it did.

Maybe the path not taken is far worse than the problems we currently struggle
with.

They built wells in India and Bangladesh, iirc. The intent was to stop a
quarter of a million deaths annually from contaminated surface waters, such as
collected rainwater.

Some of the wells caused arsenic poisoning. The scale of this new disaster was
compared to Chernobyl and pronounced worse than that.

This comparison largely ignored the millions of lives already saved by the
wells.

We solve a problem. We find some new bug in the system. We iterate.

That's how progress works.

~~~
sifar
Yes we cannot re-simulate the world or do A/B testing with different versions
of it. It is what it is.

I find Progress to be a nebulous/relative term. Defining it depends whether on
you can measure things. Things that cannot be measured are outside its
purview. For all our pervasive data gathering capability we lack intuitive
understanding of how the complex interconnected adaptive system, that is the
real world, works. Some change one would consider minor or harmless might
balloon into a crisis years down the line, because the conditions have changed
or we didn't consider feedback or were not even aware of it.

I agree with you that whether to act or not is indeed a dilemma. But when we
do, the question is, are we acting with this humbling awareness, or are we
just arrogantly tinkering with it. In hindsight, we find it has been mostly
the latter, at least for the last 500 years.

And you are right, that is just how it is.

~~~
sifar
Sorry to bring this up again but this is more as a note for posterity.

Often we don't measure what we have lost, except may be weight or net worth.

------
bernardlunn
The comments on this tell me that the HN system is broken. All the top
comments are about % and percentile. They ignore what the talk is about. At
best this is clickbait. If the comments were described as “debate about % and
percentile” I would not have clicked

~~~
atian
No one on HN actually reads the the article. It actually works because you get
to signal how you think, and that’s what everyone cares about.

~~~
friendlybus
Discussing in generalities can be more fun anyway

------
29athrowaway
China built an alternative to SWIFT (China International Payments System,
CIPS). Russia joined that network.

I think the system has no other purpose but to circumvent sanctions.

~~~
ur-whale
> China built an alternative to SWIFT

Competition is a good thing.

The day the US dollar loses its reserve currency status will be a very bright
day for the world.

------
tunesmith
What is the deal with being an accredited investor, anyway? What kind of
advantage does it give you if you're just trying to Bogle your way into buying
mutual funds until retirement? Should you be trying to become "accredited" as
soon as you can prove your net worth / revenue is high enough?

~~~
hadlock
Accredited investor effectively means you can invest directly into a company
as an angel investor. To legally do this you need a certain level of assets or
income. As a result it locks a lot of people out of the high risk/high reward
investment market. Kickstarter et all try and get around this, but early
donations in Kickstarters like the Oculus DK1 don't get paid when the company
gets bought by Facebook for a billion dollars. Accredited investors can invest
$1000 and then get money back out of the deal if/when the company is bought

~~~
Danieru
> Accredited investors can invest $1000 and then get money back out of the
> deal if/when the company is bought

Scale is off though, any startup worth investing in will want investment lots
10x to 1000x larger than that. Any investment willing to accept $1000 would be
a large red flag. Thus the accredited system IMHO is super reasonable. Anyone
with enough capital that investments of 10kUSD to 100kUSD into high risk
investments makes sense must have significant other capital. Meanwhile it
saves the regular Joe from getting scammed out of his $1000 emergency fund.

~~~
jachee
Sounds a lot like a system for controlling Regular Joe.

~~~
sokoloff
I think it's more a system to protect Regular Joes from having small amounts
of money stolen from them by shysters hawking get rich quick investment
schemes. Many of those are now federal crimes, making the risk-reward
unappealing.

The assumption is accredited investors are more capable of doing their own
diligence and better able to weather the loss of a $50K angel investment than
Regular Joe.

------
nosuchthing
It’s true, that’s why cryptocurrency advocates attempt to sell you the money
they minted and then gimp the mint so no one else can produce the supply for
the same work energy.

Anytime someone advocates cryptocurrency x, ask them if you’re allowed to mint
the money for the same amount of work as they (the sellers, speculators,
advocates) are/did.

Presumably people wouldn't want a cryptocurrency as plutocratic and
centralized as Bitcoin has become. Some lessons were learned with BTC as an
experiment, and as we can see there's evolution taking place and plenty of
more advanced alternatives are making prior software like bitcoin obsolete.
It's especially troubling how centralized the minting and mining has become.
And it's easy to forget there's the problem with energy consumption related to
the PoW algorithm eating almost 1% of the entire world's energy simply for an
accounting database. The major reason you don't see payment processors dealing
with cryptocurrencies is because the major usecase for most cryptocurrencies
like Bitcoin, Monereo, and Ethereum is money laundering. One important point:
if we actually include all 7 billion people on the earth, most of whom have
zero BTC or Ethereum, the Gini coefficient is essentially 0.99+. And if we
just include all balances, we include many dust balances which would again put
the Gini coefficient at 0.99+. Thus, we need some kind of threshold here. The
imperfect threshold we picked was the Gini coefficient among accounts with
≥185 BTC per address, and ≥2477 ETH per address. So this is the distribution
of ownership among the Bitcoin and Ethereum rich with $500k as of July 2017.

    
    
      In what kind of situation would a thresholded metric like 
      this be interesting? Perhaps in a scenario similar to the 
      ongoing IRS Coinbase issue, where the IRS is seeking 
      information on all holders with balances >$20,000. 
      Conceptualized in terms of an attack, a high Gini 
      coefficient would mean that a government would only need 
      to round up a few large holders in order to acquire a 
      large percentage of outstanding cryptocurrency — and with 
      it the ability to tank the price.
    
      With that said, two points. First, while one would not 
      want a Gini coefficient of exactly 1.0 for BTC or ETH (as 
      then only one person would have all of the digital 
      currency, and no one would have an incentive to help boost 
      the network), in practice it appears that a very high 
      level of wealth centralization is still compatible with 
      the operation of a decentralized protocol. Second, as we 
      show below, we think the Nakamoto coefficient is a better 
      metric than the Gini coefficient for measuring holder 
      concentration in particular as it obviates the issue of 
      arbitrarily choosing a threshold.
    
    
      ...However, the maximum Gini coefficient has one obvious 
      issue: while a high value tracks with our intuitive notion 
      of a “more centralized” system, the fact that each Gini 
      coefficient is restricted to a 0–1 scale means that it 
      does not directly measure the number of individuals or 
      entities required to compromise a system.
    
    
      Specifically, for a given blockchain suppose you have a 
      subsystem of exchanges with 1000 actors with a Gini 
      coefficient of 0.8, and another subsystem of 10 miners 
      with a Gini coefficient of 0.7. It may turn out that 
      compromising only 3 miners rather than 57 exchanges may be 
      sufficient to compromise this system, which would mean the 
      maximum Gini coefficient would have pointed to exchanges 
      rather than miners as the decentralization bottleneck.
    
    
      Conversely, if one considers “number of distinct countries 
      with substantial mining capacity” an essential subsystem, 
      then the minimum Nakamoto coefficient for Bitcoin would 
      again be 1, as the compromise of China (in the sense of a 
      Chinese government crackdown on mining) would result in 
      >51% of mining being compromised.
      
      - Balaji S. Srinivasan (the CTO of Coinbase) 
    

-[https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c...](https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c28e)

------
Merrill
Money is not a system of control. Debt is a system of control.

When you take out a loan, you are now obligated to pay the money back with
interest at some time in the future. Some part of your future efforts are no
longer yours to do with as you choose, but have to be directed towards an
economically productive activity that will raise the money to pay the lender.

Debt is the real whip that drives the workforce in the capitalist system based
on hourly and salaried compensation. Ownership of slaves and physical whips
are no longer needed. The debt and employee system is more efficient, since
workers can be laid off and not supported when not needed.

Debt is also older than money.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years)

~~~
mempko
If you read Debt The First 5000 Years and don't think money is a system of
control, then you really haven't read that book. Also, Money IS Debt
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxJW7hl8oqM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxJW7hl8oqM)).

~~~
Merrill
David Graeber on basic income -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEb4Bda_06c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEb4Bda_06c)

David Graeber: "DEBT: The First 5,000 Years" | Talks at Google -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZIINXhGDcs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZIINXhGDcs)

------
devoply
> And what do millennials say to that? “Dude, I don’t have any fucking money.
> All I have is my creative potential, my spirit, my productivity, and I can
> sell that directly for Bitcoin without an exchange, without an on-ramp,
> without an off-ramp. And when I need to buy something, I’ll use my digital
> currency directly without reentering your system to which I was never
> invited. Shut down the on-ramps, shut down the off-ramps and I will stay on
> board. I will stay digital. I won’t touch your gilded cage anymore because I
> don’t need you. I exit.

Yeah in some fantasy Bitcoin world millennials say that. Who might say shit
like this is Venezuelans or the Iranians. Don't know if BTC is working for
them at all these days.

~~~
mandelbrotwurst
Ha, what? Haven't read the article yet, but yeah most millennials definitely
do not know how to obtain Bitcoin without going through an exchange and/or
anyone in their network who'd be willing to pay them in Bitcoin for the work
they typically do, and even if they did they also don't generally have the
ability to use it as a method of payment for most of the things they typically
purchase.

------
freejulian85
The fed has said that they use monetary policy to help “labor adjust to market
forces.” This is what inflation does. It weakens the buying power of wage
earners. Do it slowly enough and they won’t notice it happening. Our ancestors
who fought in the labor movement for significant concessions from the
capitalist class must be rolling in their grave at the state of the
proletariat today. Promoting globalization while not also requiring counties
we trade with have equivalent labor laws is just insane, yet people seem to
love the idea of globalization and inflation. All I can do is shake my head.

~~~
kovek
Why is this being downvoted? I can see discussion growing out of this comment,
and that's a good reason to not downvote.

~~~
freejulian85
People who support pro inflation monetary policy think they know more than
those of us who still value the Austrian school of economics. They treat
Keynes as settled fact.

~~~
eru
Oh, if you want to go that route, you shouldn't just rail against inflation.
You should demand proper deflation. See [https://mises.org/library/less-zero-
case-falling-price-level...](https://mises.org/library/less-zero-case-falling-
price-level-growing-economy-0)

You seem to hold a very curious combination of opinions? In favour of globally
regulating labour markets (and threatening trade restrictions to enforce
that), but also in favour of Austrian economics?

------
wrnr
Its often forgotten that it was the liberal consensus that grew during the
seventies out of an aversion for gunboat diplomacy, where the US as global
policeman was forced to enforce trade of resources vital to us all, that
instead should be replaced by a rule-based order agreed between government
elected by their people where market mechanics as information discovery inform
where resources have to go.

There is a storm coming, wether it is migration, climate change or some other
malthusian trap. We see these problems coming and direct resources to prevent
or alleviate these ill. The old problem of "who should do what, when, how and
why" is left be be decided. That is what politics is for. The self evident
truth that all men are created equal, and that human-rights do not stop at the
border. Where are the neocons now that we need them? To me all this talk about
monitory policy and therefor bitcoin is a side-show.

