Topic: A Resource Based Economy - page 89. (Read 288375 times)

I'm totally serious. Check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism

You can't be serious. Being close to death, in continuos pain and despair is not objectively worse than feeling fit?

Morally acceptable to who? To me, no.


Define well being. Do you mean having a pulse? Do mean some internal feeling of happiness on their part? If it's the former, I can easily check a pulse. If it's the latter, only that person knows how they feel.

I'll point you to the case of Armin Meiwes & Bernd Jürgen Brandes which I find horrifying but also a good example.

Apparently, being tortured and murdered increased Brandes' well being, if you define it as his feeling of happiness.

It depends on the moral framework.
Is it bad to eat people? Not for cannibals.

No, not objectively.

So, your answers to my questions would be:

Is it morally acceptable to rape and torture somebody until they die?
It depends.

Can't you tell if that objectively increases or decreases well being?
No, you can't.

Am I interpreting you correctly?

There are no moral facts, only moral opinions, and opinions aren't the kinds of things that are true or false.

You seem to confuse objective with universal and immutable. Something can be objective, yet very different with different conditions. You also seem to have a very simplistic and narrow vision of science.

For example, is a particular substance toxic? It depends. On some patients you might require less, more, not at all if that causes an allergic reaction... yet, we know how to differentiate and treat this scenario objectively.

OK, simple question then.

Is it morally acceptable to rape and torture somebody until they die? Can't you tell if that objectively increases or decreases well being?

All I'm saying is that morals and well being is subjective, not everything.
Yes, you can distinguish food from poison, but if you can't order objectively the foods between them, if you haven't an objective measure of flavor, you can't know what foods need to be produced.
If you think morals are objective, that's clearly the source of our disagreement. I'm sorry if you don't like philosophy, but the "needs of humanity" is a philosophical problem and not a technical one as you pretend.
If you don't trust me when I tell you you haven't convinced me and think that I just keep on arguing knowing I'm wrong, then maybe you are the one with an ego problem. You can't understand why I disagree with you and your only explanation is that "I know I'm wrong". Well, that's pretty pretentious.

I'm really sorry you are still stuck in your reasoning, and you can't see past what you already think you know.

As I explained in the video, and everybody seems to get it beside you, even though some things might still be blurry and undecided, there are things that we know are objectively better than others.

Putting up a philosophical argument about moral relativism just degrades the discussion into nothing, because your line of reasoning is this: if you don't
know everything, then you can't talk about anything!

That's bullshit, and you know it. You just want to say you are right, even though you know you are not. I understand that, everybody has an ego problem. If you didn't see the argument as "against you", but you were just an external observer, you would recognise the fact the the reasoning is correct.

Notice that the fact that the concept of health is open, genuinely open for revision does not make it vacuous. The distinction between a healthy person and a dead one is about as clear and consequential as any we make in science. Another thing to notice is that there may be many peaks on the moral landscape: There may be equivalent ways to thrive; there may be equivalent ways to organize a human society so as to maximize human flourishing.

Now, why wouldn't this undermine an objective morality? Well think of how we talk about food: I would never be tempted to argue to you that there must be one right food to eat. There is clearly a range of materials that constitute healthy food. But there is nevertheless a clear distinction between food and poison. The fact that there are many right answers to the question, "What is food?" does not tempt us to say that there are no truths to be known about human nutrition. Many people worry that that a universal morality would require moral precepts that admit of no exceptions.

What you are saying is: "Everything is subjective, being dead or alive is the same! You can't say that being raped, beaten to death is worse and have a nice and nurturing upbringing, it's all subjective!"

Please, stop this nonsense.

Well, you have put it in video now, but you're still wrong.
The line you draw in your example is not objective. To make science from that, you should be able to order the whole humanity in this well being scale. But that scale is not objective. Common sense is not science !!
For example, I might think that prostitution would remove my dignity, but a 100€/hour prostitute may think that she's better positioned than me, coding for 6€/hour.
Can you order by "well being" all the people on earth as you can do by say height? No.
Then well being is not objective, period. With written arguments or videos.

The whole reason people trade with each other is to meet their respective needs.

Trade relations are social relations.

Edit: I want to add that they can be, and often are, completely impersonal.  Money is only necessary for societies that scale well beyond the point where trade becomes largely impersonal.

As resources become more scarce, their prices rise, incentivizing conservation and the discovery of alternatives.

Some monies are better than others.

Where, in all of the preceding circular, self referential economics discussion is human need addressed? Or human social relations? Or environmental dependence and sustainability? How does tracking money value sequences have anything to do with the human condition?

In response to jtimon.

The science of well being

Help with translations and subtitles
http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/ywxINQQqJq2V (please fix timing before translating)
http://federicopistono.org/video

Sources cited
Democracy, technocracy, the free market or the scientific method for social concern? http://youtu.be/83LAk3BT7no
Does the world produce enough food to feed everyone? http://goo.gl/tGF64

Music
2 Ghost I - Nine Inch Nails
8 Ghost I - Nine Inch Nails

The only limit is what creditors think debtors can pay back. And creditors are not necessarily lenders, they can be suppliers not being paid when they deliver. Creditors can provide any good or service and ask for any good or service (including money) in return in the future.


I didn't say lending to the same borrower until the end of time, but keep always lending the capital and the gains, maybe to more and more borrowers with time.
The point is that the total debt owed to him is growing exponentially.


Sorry, I thought you had agreed on that. My logic says deflation discourages real capital accumulation. Please point out the errors in my reasoning.
I'm not saying that deflation always lead to recession, just that it discourages investing and lending. Thanks for the link though.


For the financial market to keep functioning. The "profit opportunities out there" is the potential growth interest demands. But while the profits tend to zero by competition, capital yields tend to the interest rate which is always positive because money doesn't rot.
If a type of capital yields exactly the interest rate, financing a new capital of the same type will make all the capitals of the type yield less, which will be corrected by the financial market by not financing further investment of the same type.
Interest time protects the special type of profit called capital yield by blocking competition. At the same time it demands profits to fund new capital accumulation and to be used as a medium of exchange.
Being everlasting (maintaining your liquidity doesn't cost you nothing per unit of time, but you're gaining from the assurance it represents), money receives its share of the deal or doesn't move the wares. If it doesn't receive an equivalent share when funding investments, the investments are not made.
So every investment that requires funding becomes capital and is protected from competition by interest.
After paying interest as the cost it is, the profits of an investment are received in cash and distributed among the investors.
But when there's losses, all the costs have been paid with either cash or credit. As interest is the last cost to pay, it is paid with credit: the losses become a new debt that wasn't planned and that will grow exponentially if at least its interest is not paid.
If the next time everything is done right and all goes as planned, you still need a surplus to pay the debt, and fast if the debt has interest (which may not be the case if you owe to your suppliers instead of your lenders).
The losses make debt grow. And interest make debts grow by themselves without any further losses. Still you can say here that debt doesn't have to grow if is paid fast enough by a later profit, and you would be right. The point is that debt with interest grows exponentially when left alone. It's debt's tendency.
And debts are credit and its growth creates inflation.
Eventually the rises in interest rates produced by inflation and the amount of the debts themselves force a chain liquidation that can produce strong deflation, which would accelerate the liquidation process, but with side effects.
If the growth in debt wasn't exponential, the liquidations would be steady rather than cyclical. And we wouldn't have other deflation than the one produced by growth.

Practically speaking, there are definitely limits that, ideally, kick in smoothly with rising interest rates.
And if he does this, it means he's not demanding any interest payments, and effectively continuing to lend to this person.  He can keep doing this forever and diminish the real value of the bond to zero*, sure.  But so what?  It's his problem for being a stupid lender.  It doesn't matter what the nominal value of the bond is.  I could write you a bond right now for 100 trillion USD.  Obviously worthless to you, and wouldn't cause the slightest problem for the economy.

* Edit: The "real value" of the bond is the portion that the borrower will end up paying back in a bankruptcy proceeding.  Not necessarily zero.
I'll grant you that deflation discourages some borrowing, but I would argue only that for frivolous consumption and investments that can't keep up with the overall long-term growth rate of the economy (plus interest and various risk and volatility factors).  It does not discourage pure saving (hoarding), which benefits those competing for the goods in the economy whose prices borrowers would have been bidding up, had they been loaned the hoarded money.  So to me it's not clear from pure reasoning if deflation is a net bad, good, or neutral for the economy.  You need data.
Reality doesn't agree.  For the data, I'll drop this paper on you again: http://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedmsr/331.html.
Requires growth for what?  To avoid bankruptcies?  I think you're thinking too much in terms of averages, and it's clouding what could be a clearer picture.  Ignoring consumer lending for now, as long as there are profit opportunities out there, and lenders smart enough to recognize them and avoid lending to losing businesses, then bankruptcies can in principle be avoided completely.  So since the total amount of issued credit can and should be expected to vary with the total amount of visible profit opportunities, I think we can conclude that the bankruptcy rate is solely a function of the foresight of lenders.

And besides, not all businesses are burdened by debt, so your averaged picture is wrong right away - these businesses could be operating at losses great enough to outweigh the gains made by a bankruptcy-free debt-burdened sector, resulting in an overal negative growth rate without any need for systematic bankruptcies.

Mutual credit systems aren't barter.
There's no socializing of bad lending decisions in Ripple, every node takes full responsability of any IOU he issues or accepts. It's just more resilient because the financial network is not hierarchical like the one we have today.

So you agree that expocoin would be as bad as the current system, but you still think expocoin and freicoin would be the same thing.


Why building a factory that doesn't yields like capital but covers all its costs over its lifetime shouuld be considered an economical loss?


I didn't say it's evil.
But the fact that liquidity is a service that the money holder get for free from all the money users, enables a "liquidity yield", and interest rates and capital yields must compete with it.
This "liquidity yield" prevents further investments when capital yields drop below it.
Demurrage charges directly for liquidity, but the money holder can dodge inflation as he see it diluting from certain parts of the economy.
This is why demurrage pushes capital yields and basic interest down to zero and inflation doesn't.


The best way to change the current monetary system is relying on it as less as posible rather than going out to the squares in my opinion.


Because interest is another disease that enables abuse and prevents capital accumulation that can be cured through demurrage but not with inflation.
If you think that inflation and demurrage are equivalent, either you don't believe demurrage can lower (real) interest rates or you think inflation can do it too.
I assume you know inflation rises nominal interest rates.
Say 5% inflation expocoin produces 10% nominal interest rates (5% real interest rates).
Say bitcoin produces 5% nominal interest rates (5% real interest rates).
You say 5% demurrage freicoin would produce 5% nominal interest rates (5% real interest rates).
Am I right?
Remember freicoin has a fixed monetary base and if in this example bitcoin has "stable prices", freicoin too.

If this is your claim, why lenders can demand the same interest when their money rots (freicoin) that when it doesn't (bitcoin)?


Yes, I totally agree. Gold is the best cash-money people could have in the past if they wanted to avoid abuse.
But we have bitcoin now, and chain coins don't need to be everlasting like gold. When cash-money is everlasting, interest is unavoidable. We can have cash non-manipulable money that rots.
We don't have to rely completely on credit money like ripple (which can never be as liquid as cash) if we want to avoid interest.
We need a free financial market, but the optimal interest level is 0%, that means that we have built all the "capital" that we should to fully satisfy the demand for the products of that capital.

The first article is quite good.  But money only had to be invented once, more or less.  That it started out as a way to standardize debt isn't really important, because eventually the gold -> paper -> bloodshed cycle took root.  The obvious examples are Rome, France (revolution era), and everyone on the planet today.

The second link less so.  I don't think that the author realizes that the system he is describing is almost identical to the system we have now.  The main differences that I see are that he proposes rolling back the whole specialization/division-of-labor thing that we've been working on for the last couple thousand years, at least in regards to creditworthiness assessment, and socializing the costs of bad lending decisions.  And shit, we've pretty much done the second part already.


Possibly.  I don't think that the situation could be fully analyzed in advance, it would really depend on a lot of details specific to the time and place.


Except that inflation and demurrage are different words for the exact same thing.  They both mean "money is worth less tomorrow than today".  The mechanism isn't important, unless you are talking about specific implementations rather than general concepts.  And if you are talking about specific implementations, I will agree that the one we use today sucks, but the sucking is political, and merely changing the name won't prevent the exact same thing from happening after you change the name.

Also, the thing that you call the basic interest rate is the lowest interest rate that people are willing to pay to finance good productive ventures.  Capital yields can't fall below that level by definition.  Or more accurately, if it does, it is an economic loss compared to what it should have been.

And finally, trade and speculation aren't evil.  They help capital find the right places to be.  They only look evil right now because the men with guns (government) are letting their friends abuse the system to do things that sorta look like trade and speculation, but are actually robbery.


I don't believe this for a second.  As long as the broken system is allowed to exist, it will seek (and find!) ways around obstacles.  The only way it could work is by taking power away from those that abuse it.  And if you've cured the disease (abuse), why replace one of the symptoms of abuse (inflation) with a synonym (demurrage)?


Sure gold money is flawed.  It is just much less flawed than anything else I've ever seen proposed.  Humanity always returns to gold after a bloody revolution because it can't be abused, which is important when the revolution was against those that had been abused the previous paper issue.

About the equation of exchange, yes, kjj formula is more accurate. And even if the original could be used for more than just theoretical reasoning, you can't have the exact measures of P, just estimates of dP. Within freicoin, I don't advocate for an elastic money supply to attain stable prices, but for a fixed monetary base (even more fixed than bitcoin's thanks to demurrage's destruction recycling of lost wallets).
Anyway, price inflation and deflation are still useful monetary concepts despite being abstract.

The history of money is more complex than that. Not that I agree with all the opinions expressed in the following links, but just take a look:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/08/what-is-debt-%E2%80%93-an-interview-with-economic-anthropologist-david-graeber.html
http://www.webisteme.com/blog/?p=384


Then we disagree here. If we assume there's no risk in the loan or the risk is properly factored in, the baker is better if he loan his bread instead of letting it perish.


Then you haven't understood my example. Demurrage allows capital yields to drop below the basic interest that you can extract from the liquidity itself. On the other hand, inflation increases the opportunities of making money out of trade and speculation.


I see this, but they act different when they are added at certain rate in time. They affect the financial market in that case.


This is key. Unlike inflation, demurrage affects every money holder equally and instantly.


My lack of faith in politics is what made me reject Gesell's freigeld for some time. While reading anarcho-capitalist literature, I realized that the money issuance must be taken away from the hands of the government.
I first focused in mutual credit systems like LETS as the only private way to make money without interest. The interest disappear here by removing its scarcity instead of its perfect durability.
Then I discovered bitcoin. And short after that, Ripple, the ultimate mutual credit tool. Unlike LETS, ripple is scalable.
With the block chain, the possibility of scarce money with demurrage out of the hands of the state becomes possible. That's why I advocate freicoin.
Although gold is better than the current system, Gesell convinced me that gold-money is flawed. This is the central point of our disagreement. 
I wrote a little story to show my point against capital-money.