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The Political Thread

Started by The Legendary Shark, 09 April, 2010, 03:59:03 PM

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The Legendary Shark

Quote from: JPMaybe on 25 April, 2017, 01:06:10 PM
Holy shit. Yes, I too think social money creation would work without expropriation of private wealth and the absence of a state. Private capital wouldn't then *be* effectively a state (without even the pretense of representation) or anything. State oppression is thethe only oppression that exists.

Also, wage labour and capital accumulation is Good, and my child's education quality being utterly dependent on the munificence of private donors is also Good.

Also, everybody wants to have to pull out a slide-rule and spreadsheet to get their bins collected. Everybody else is as monomaniacally obsessed with contracts and (capital-L) Law as I am. This isn't a living nightmare where everyone's a cash obsessed, petit-bourgeois monad.

Heh. Thanks, JPM. I always find your frothing straw men most amusing :D
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The Legendary Shark

Quote from: JPMaybe on 25 April, 2017, 01:06:10 PM
Holy shit. Yes, I too think social money creation would work without expropriation of private wealth and the absence of a state. Private capital wouldn't then *be* effectively a state (without even the pretense of representation) or anything. State oppression is thethe only oppression that exists.

Also, wage labour and capital accumulation is Good, and my child's education quality being utterly dependent on the munificence of private donors is also Good.

Also, everybody wants to have to pull out a slide-rule and spreadsheet to get their bins collected. Everybody else is as monomaniacally obsessed with contracts and (capital-L) Law as I am. This isn't a living nightmare where everyone's a cash obsessed, petit-bourgeois monad.

Heh. Thanks, JPM. I always find your frothing straw men most amusing. This thread can be very dry and a good laugh is always welcome! :D
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IndigoPrime

Quote from: The Legendary Shark on 25 April, 2017, 11:43:13 AMHow can you be against this government when...
I'm not against the principle of government. I'm against the actions of this government. I'm also in favour or representative voting, which we do not have here. In countries that do, the lurching nature of government is generally much softened.

QuoteThen there's the tax thing...
OK, so here's what I don't understand about your system.

QuoteIn this model, voluntary taxation is a luxury, not a necessity. The icing on the cake, the cherry on top. The flour, eggs, butter, oven and baker are already paid for but you might want to throw a few bob at your local school so it can have extra things; things it doesn't need but would be nice to have.
So where does the rest of the money come from? How does a school meet its running costs? How does a new school get built? In your system, there is no centralised taxation, and so where does the money for basic services and amenities come from?

QuoteAs I've said before, many times, returning the right to create and control the money supply to public hands would go a very long way indeed to paying for all the things our society needs, even those things currently funded by voluntary donations like cancer research and air ambulances which, according to what you seem to believe, are only supported by people who have cancer or are bleeding to death in a remote field somewhere.
That's not at all what I said. My point was that people in general rarely give up money they don't have to. Right now, we have – to take medical – a system in the UK where everyone chips in (via, in your thinking, coercion), and that covers the majority of citizens for the majority of conditions. In other words, if I break a limb or get cancer, the state will take care of me, on the basis of this national insurance.

If we head over to the USA, the system is not nationalised for the most part. Instead, you pay insurers, and the net result causes all kinds of problems. Many cannot afford insurance. Even when people can, they often end up bankrupted because of doctors showing up who are outside of their plan.

If such taxation happened to be voluntary, how would you end up with something not unlike the US system? How would you get it closer to the British system, where you can enter a hospital anywhere in the country and rapidly receive treatment for a serious problem, safe in the knowledge you won't end up losing everything you own in order to pay for that?

JPMaybe

You're right dude, people's credits would totally be able to compete with Virgin Crowns and not be undercut, loss-led, and undermined instantly, through positive thinking or The Secret or something
Quote from: Butch on 17 January, 2015, 04:47:33 PM
Judge Death is a serial killer who got turned into a zombie when he met two witches in the woods one day...Judge Death is his real name.
-Butch on Judge Death's powers of helmet generation

Theblazeuk


JayzusB.Christ

Well, that's the thing.  It looks egalitarian at first glance but I can't see how it couldn't end in out-of-control, dog-eat-dog capitalism, with the poor and disenfranchised getting crushed as is normal*.  Catalonians established a fairly functional, if short-lived, anarcho-socialist society, but that's a different thing entirely.

*I'm not saying the normal system of crushing them is good either.
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

Leigh S

Chancellor: "we have 400 Billion for the NHS"

PM:"great!!!"

C:"aaaand... £5.70 for everything else"

PM: "Oh... Well if we let people get to the point where they need medical treatment for starvation, we can give some food out as medical supplies... - Could the nurses investigate the A&E GBH cases?"

The Legendary Shark

IP, simply by voting, paying taxes and believing in the right of MPs to rule the country, you are supporting the actions of this government. There is no way around this. You can't support and not support at the same time. You can either follow the leaders you believe in and ignore the ones you don't, which is the kind of thing anarchists promote, or follow all the leaders installed under the system you believe in (in this case democratic majority rule) whether you agree with them or not. If you believe in a government's right to rule, then you must believe in a government's right to enforce its rule by any means necessary. This is fundamental to the statist belief. I believe that following the instructions of government, especially in what are supposed to be free countries, can only ever be optional. The statist believes that all government instructions must be obeyed. One cannot just be a statist when one agrees with the state or only follow the statist rules one likes because that's not statism, it's anarchy. I'm not sure if it's possible to be an anarcho-statist but you seem to be giving it a good go! :)

Anyway, on to the taxation thing again - let me try and explain the way I see it and help you to understand where I'm coming from. I'll try and keep it clear and simple but not simplistic. If I fail, allow me to apologise in advance, for it is not my intention to insult anyone's intelligence or, conversely, baffle with bullshit.

As you know, the money creation business is probably the most profitable business on the planet. It was appropriated by private concerns hundreds of years ago. The Bank of England, for example, was set up by a consortium of private businessmen who purchased their shares with BoE money (created out of nothing) to buy them with, amongst other tricks. (Imagine how many things you could buy if you could create your own money and con kings and ministers and peasants into accepting it as real! Imagine how hard you'd fight to keep that ability, especially if it's been the "family business" for generations...)

The thing to keep in mind about modern money is that it is illusory - the only thing backing it is faith. It's worth something only because people believe it is worth something. I can spend, and indeed have spent, many hours and many words explaining this in detail and so I'm not going to do that again. All you have to remember when it comes to an alternative to general and widespread taxation is that modern money is not real.

This unreality is seen by some as a flaw and a fundamental weakness, which it is. It is also a great opportunity.

It costs a private bank virtually nothing to create any amount of money from nothing, say £1M for easy reckoning, and lend it into society. Society then must pay back the £1M plus interest. (The original million is generally "destroyed" upon being paid back but the interest remains "real" and acts as the bank's profit.) As you can see, this is a great way to make a fortune.

Now, imagine taking that right away from the private banks and returning it to either a nationalised central bank, myriad smaller public banks or a combination of the two. Money is created and lent in the same way but, as these banks are public, profits are used to support public services and infrastructure instead of being wasted on private yachts and stock market speculation.

Public money can also be created and spent into society, going directly to nurses, doctors, civil servants etc. as all or part of their wages or used to purchase equipment, supplies, buildings, etc.

But that's just one part of it.

Private banks could still play an important and profitable role, of both a lending and speculative kind. Private lending banks would not be permitted to create money as they do now*. They would have to purchase money created by public banks and trade it as trade in all commodities is undertaken. If they invest it and lose it, they lose it and don't get bailed out - there's no need, the money the private bank loses has already been paid for so the public banks are shielded from taking a loss. If they make a profit they make a profit and can afford to purchase more money from public banks and invest more in private enterprises. If they do well in their investments they will become a rich bank which, like any successful business, is good for society. If they continually make bad investments they will eventually run out of capital, be unable to purchase more money and fail without bringing down the rest of the system or being bailed out - an end to quantitative easing, which is basically throwing money into a black hole. A private bank will also no longer be able to lend its way out of trouble, shifting its debts into the public sector in order to survive.

Just these few aspects of a reformed monetary creation and banking system would buy us all the hospitals, roads, schools and whatever else we need. How that system is to be organised is not an especially complex question. I expect government will cling on to its power for some time before eventually dying a natural and hopefully peaceful death and so it could, and probably will be the initial organiser of this new system, much as it sticks in my craw to say. This would constitute the minimum required change, which is usually the safest way to go.

Even JPM's "Virgin Crowns" would be perfectly acceptable as a currency as they would have to be backed by money purchased from public sources or representative of fractions of Virgin's worth, like stocks and shares. Owning Virgin Crowns would be like owning investment bonds, the value of which could go up or down without drastically affecting the public pound.

With the monetary system now supporting society (instead of the other way around, which is the situation we find ourselves in today), personal taxes would be unnecessary** as any shortfall would be made up through low business taxes, but only as required. If, however, a person wanted to donate money to a local school or hospital, or to fund research or infrastructure projects, they could do so or not according to their own personal choice with zero risk of tanking the NHS.

There are, of course, technicalities to be addressed and the construction of a public money creation and control system would not be quite as straightforward as I've made it sound but it is entirely doable.

*They would be allowed to create their own money (see JPM's "Virgin Crowns") but it would have to be*** backed by already purchased public money or fractions of the creating body's worth.

**This is not entirely true. Taxes would still exist but serve a completely different purpose. The amount of money in an economy determines its worth, the more there is the less it's worth and vice versa. Taxation in this system would act as a kind of "pressure valve," rising to mitigate the effects of too much money in the system and falling to counteract the effects of too little. (Incidentally, as the private banks today create far more money (in the form of debt) than is destroyed, the value of money is constantly declining. This is the real cause of inflation and a horribly vicious circle - the more money is created, the less it's worth and the less money is worth, the more needs to be created. A public money system, properly managed, would have the natural side-effect benefit of ending inflation.)

***This does not require legislation or government enforcement (although I have few problems with one artificial entity (government) enforcing rules on another artificial entity (corporations), even to the point of "executing" a corporation for causing damage to society) as common or natural law covers what is and is not lawful and any humans caught causing loss, harm or damage or dishonouring contracts or bills or acting dishonestly are open to prosecution - only they won't be able to use government debt and the threat of torpedoing the economy as a shield to avoid justice.
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The Legendary Shark

An essay by Leonard Read explaining the complexity of human interactions, economics, freedom and the ultimate pointlessness of coercive government based upon one of the simplest objects you possess, the humble pencil.

Go here to download I, Pencil in pdf, epub, mp3 or html format.
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JPMaybe

It's like, I dunno, trying to explain to an anime nerd that you don't want to think about Dragon Ball Z at all, and they write a 3000 word footnoted thesis about how you'd be able to cosplay as Super Saiyan Goku OR Son Gohan in their ideal society and how could you not want that?
Quote from: Butch on 17 January, 2015, 04:47:33 PM
Judge Death is a serial killer who got turned into a zombie when he met two witches in the woods one day...Judge Death is his real name.
-Butch on Judge Death's powers of helmet generation

Hawkmumbler

Quote from: JPMaybe on 26 April, 2017, 10:01:19 AM
It's like, I dunno, trying to explain to an anime nerd that you don't want to think about Dragon Ball Z at all, and they write a 3000 word footnoted thesis about how you'd be able to cosplay as Super Saiyan Goku OR Son Gohan in their ideal society and how could you not want that?
A surreal analogy, but bloody hell it's an ancurate one.

The Legendary Shark

My reply was to IP.

The I, Pencil essay link was for anyone who might be interested.

Sorry if that was unclear.
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IndigoPrime

Quote from: The Legendary Shark on 25 April, 2017, 04:53:55 PMAnyway, on to the taxation thing again
To break this down, then, you suggest:

- Creating a 'public' banking system that is more localised, and has to utilise profits to fund public services.
- Forcing the 'private' banking system to stand on its own.

in the latter case, you therefore greatly increase risk for investors of all stripes (including basic savers), who no longer have any guarantee in cases of banking collapse. In the former case, you're relying on local (or perhaps national – you weren't clear) banking profits to essentially pay for everything that's currently funded out of taxation, bar income from people willing to 'top up' local services on the basis of their generosity.

Is that the gist of it?

Jim_Campbell

Quote from: IndigoPrime on 26 April, 2017, 10:35:48 AM
in the latter case, you therefore greatly increase risk for investors of all stripes (including basic savers), who no longer have any guarantee in cases of banking collapse. In the former case, you're relying on local (or perhaps national – you weren't clear) banking profits to essentially pay for everything that's currently funded out of taxation, bar income from people willing to 'top up' local services on the basis of their generosity.

Is that the gist of it?

Total UK bank profits for 2016 = ~£12.4bn. Let's say they don't have to shell out £55bn in future years on PPI refunds, giving us a pot of £67.4bn. Total government expenditure for 2016 = ~£784bn, leaving us with only a 91% funding shortfall under this splendid scheme.
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The Legendary Shark

Not exactly.

Public banks would be the safest as the creators of money. The ordinary members of society could store their savings here safely as these would not be risky investment banks. As well as offering safe savings accounts and services for the ordinary person, these banks would also be the source of all money (think of it as a gold mine) which can be used to fund public services and infrastructure, sold or lent to private banks at a profit and lent to ordinary people at very low to zero interest rates.

The private banks would be the main speculative investment banks which would offer a higher return for a greater risk - a risk the public banks would be effectively shielded from as the only money they can risk is their own, that money already borrowed or purchased from the public system.

The public BoE could be national and have branches all over. Private banks could be national or local. There could also be local public banks, which could act similarly to private banks but, being public (run by the equivalent of local councils and along the same lines as the Bank of North Dakota, for example) they would not indulge in risky investments.

The goal is to make the banks work for society.

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