The French revolution happened because real wealth was basically left untaxed, leaving an enormous tax burden on everyone that wasn't nobility. The situation was not unlike what Piketty described to win his nobel prize.
That is also one of the many causes of the French Revolution, but on its own isn't enough to explain why it went down exactly how and when it did.
Had the runway to bankruptcy been longer, a more decisive king than Louis 16th might have managed to successfully reform the state without it being shattered.
Perhaps the crisis wouldn't have landed at the same time as weather-driven economic downturn.
Maybe if it had been a few years later, different people would have gotten into power and Brissot wouldn't have started a disastrous war with Austria that spiraled everything out of anyone's control.
What will Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel's wealth look like when the us dollar isn't the main transfer currency, the world sees the biggest financial crisis in the last couple centuries and everyone wants to cash out on their US bonds because all of a sudden there's 0 trust in the US government?
That's what we're headed towards. The 'dark enlightenment' fascists think they can accelerate a switch of global banking moving towards cryptocurrency. Good fucking luck trading a bitcoin when normal finance is blowing up, grocery stores are going to struggle with stocking their shelves.
The thing that crypto correlated the most with so far has been tech stocks, the most exposed ones. So I don't think crypto will hold much longer than those and will crash earlier than the rest if your scenario was to be true.
Also, if crypto would be to become any money, then it would not produce any yield in average. So it would not be interesting to hold, the whole scenario makes no sense.
They don't have to care because there is so much wealth to acquire in the short term. Trump alone will enrich himself with billions in bribes from foreign companies. The DOGE/Project2025 annihilation of government programs will result in drastic privatization with all of the billionaire class benefitting immediately.
All of the dark outcomes you describe are possible while a certain class has profitted already so much they don't care and will happily retreat into their bunker.
Most first nations at first contact had 0 conception of ownership, rather seeing it as some sort of stewardship (or if you put it in modern terms you could use the marxist notion of personal property where it's 'use it or lose it') as well as low enough populations that they figured there was enough to go around to share the land with settlers.
Some of the nations were large, such as the Aztec. And at least a few of them understood right by conquest. They also had extensive trade routes across the continent, seeming to disprove the lack of ownership.
You seem to be confusing the concept of "ownership" with that of "private property" (on immovables, especially). The "Marxist notion" of personal property still requires the concept of ownership.
And if there happened to be people on the land they “wanted” well then there’s guns and smallpox blankets to take care of those pesky details.
“The people there didn’t have the concept of ownership” but some pioneers sure as hell made sure to enlighten them by laying claim to that same land and then threatening anyone for encroaching on it.
genocide is an intentional act. Smallpox did 90% of the work and nobody lifted a finger, at the time nobody could have forseen the effect of smallpox on the native population.
After smallpox when the population of the Americas had been reduced by something like 90% they most certainly didn't need all the land.
If the settlers had done what the first thousand or so invading cultures did and just exterminated the natives, they would have been able to cast them in whatever light they chose. Instead they gave them rather a lot of autonomous territory relative to their population, along with legal monopolies designed to prevent them from being forced into wage slavery.
> at the time nobody could have forseen the effect of smallpox on the native population
Are you really unaware that the colonials intentionally spread smallpox to the natives? This is not some obscure detail - it's in approximately all of the history textbooks in a fair bit of detail.
The few references to potentially intentionally spreading disease, all well after they were spreading in the Americas, are unlikely to be the cause of more than a tiny sliver of deaths due to disease. The timelines simply do not match.
I can't say I fully agree with the premise, but suppose we run with it.
If someone acted with clear intent to commit genocide, but the mass deaths would have happened anyway, does that clear them of the charge?
Put another way, if I stab someone, the knife goes in and all, but as I'm doing it a car also runs over him, am I no longer guilty of murder? Seems pretty questionable to me.
The people who committed genocide (or simply murder without cause) are clearly to blame for those they killed, directly and in many cases, indirectly.
As for your example, that's a bit convoluted. Perhaps clearer would be if you intend to genocide say, a town and meteor hits killing everyone before you get there as well as the neighboring town, it would be difficult to argue you're to blame for their deaths. That doesn't mean you're a nice person and we'd generally still lock you up for attempted genocide of the town you attempted to murder, but not of the town you didn't.
The meteor in real life was disease. By some estimates, 90% of the population in the Americas died from diseases the Spanish accidentally introduced by 1600, most the Spanish did not know existed.
It was an intentional act. They wrote about it being an intentional act. The violence was not an accidental nor rare event either, it was an intentional act too.
The east expansion took a lot of time, involved quite a few massacres and invonluntary relocations.
American debt is lucrative as long as you don't alienate the whole world by behaving completely irrationally. The USD being the world's transfer currency means that you can finance debt at the lowest interest rate on the planet and use that debt on more productive investments, which is what the USA's government is doing. There's a reason why the US still has a stellar credit rating.
American debt is lucrative and you morons are fucking up your cash cow because you don't understand banking and are willing to let a handful of crypto bros try to accelerate the international monetary system's downfall so that they can try to replace it by some bullshit rug pull coin that doesn't even have the technology to function as global currency.
Honoré de Balzac has a great bit about cashiers in Melmoth reconciled, basically explaining that it's a useless job that stems from a lack of trust (meanwhile the cashier becomes a trustee, which is ironic as if he had ambition he could just leave with the money). I have no idea how good the english translation is, but there's much better literature about bullshit jobs than this.
You mean the Silk Road which exposed the real IP of the web server due to misconfiguration? Tor can be compromised (run a bunch of exit nodes and do traffic correlation) but Silk Road made pretty basic mistakes.
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