I am in agreement with the progress of the dissection of the issues by Impaler and CoinCube. I will add my thoughts to hopefully attain a higher-level agreement.
Mint: If your arguing that hard money will be rejected by the people and can only be forcefully imposed by government that is indeed a more nuanced position then I had originally though you had. But I would still disagree.
I believe that individuals DO crave hard money, everyone knows that if they possess a harder form of money then everyone else they will be advantaged. It's like the classic prisoners-dilemma where you win by betraying your partner, hard money is when everyone is betraying everyone. This is why people (particularly 'libertarian' types who view other people only as means to their own ends) are attracted to things like BTC, their is a natural greedy response to acquire hard money like a 'sweet tooth' that makes us eat too much sugar, the systemic effects are terrible but most people do not think systemically so we end up stuck in a sub-optimal situation. Basically I see a logical bottom-up explanation for how we got here so I don't attribute it to a top-down cabal, I always turn to the conspiratorial theories LAST.
Please consider that the truth is neither either or. There is a symbiosis of bottom-up and top-down which is operating in waves cascading effects from one to the other throughout history.
Indeed the people individually want the hard money advantage for themself, yet they hate the collective outcome and since they don't see that the source of the problem is their individual desires, they have only one possible way to cash in on their grievances-- government redistribution. So the bottom-up is driving the top-down, yet the top-down is also driving the bottom-up as I will explain below. There is no conspiracy theory, it is just the way it works systemically.
It is really a sad state-of-humanity at this point.
Their are certainly instances in history were central authority forces hard money onto the populous (usually by taking away soft-money) but we can see from the rabid BTC zealots that exist that the imposition of hard money will be meet with Cheers and Applause by large swaths of the masses. Thus is it not JUST a problem of government, and particularly now that so much inertia is built up behind it. Most people only know our current money system which is harder then it should be (BTC is hyper-hard by comparison). Given the existence of gold as an easily mined, easily traded commodity it is very easy to see how it became money all over the world, no central authority is necessary to do that. Most negative government action has been in the form of suppression of alternatives to hard money (or the softening of the money standard ) rather then to create the norm of hard money in the first place.
Very insightful how you've noticed that the top-down controllers would at times prefer the money to be harder not softer. And they do this not only by limiting the expansion of the money supply at times, but also by overexpanding it when they are concentrating into their own pockets as with the current QE.
There is
no mathematical correlation of expansion of the money supply and inflation in the Quantity Theory of Money. That recently popular notion appears to be propaganda fed to the hard-on money bugs in order to encourage them to destroy themselves and foster the hamster wheel for society.
...
It instead focused on Free-market which were never the problem, such markets are such an engine of wealth creation that people living under interest AND Free-markets ended up materially wealthier even with the vast 'sucking up' of their productivity to elites. Meanwhile the political elite in a Centrally planned economies skim wealth in a much more obvious fashion and were soon seen to be parasitic with no benefits. In the 'Capitalist' nations the Free-markets benefits are never distinguished from the parasitic interest system, so most people think of the Capitalist economy as one monolithic system and defend parasitic interest payments as a necessary part of free-markets, indeed if Hard-money is a hidden axiom then interest IS indeed necessary for any investment and growth.
Indeed the masses conflate everything. IQ is a bell curve, and even high IQ doesn't distribute uniformly on each issue. So as one of the elite said, "only one in a million can" see the truth.
And the top-control profiteers have every incentive to continue feeding them propaganda and educating them in state-schools where they can form their minds.
And while I consider myself a Socialist in the broader sense, I have always preferred Taxation for the creation of public-good available without means testing to all members of society over crude wealth-redistribution. Redistribution tends to be favored by the financial elites for acts to reinforce class distinction between 'net tax payers' and 'net recipients', where as public goods erase class distinctions.
But taxation can never be fair because as you see above, the bottom-up demands a top-down. And Mancur Olsen's
The Logic Of Collective Action explains that the top-down will always privatize the profits and socialize the losses.
I believe that if we eliminated the hidden wealth pumping of interest then we would no longer even entertain wealth-redistribution as a solution to the remaining wealth disparities. But we would sill desire Public-goods and hopefully create them in optimum amounts.
But surely you must realize that human nature will never allow this to be true, because as you've identified upthread, the masses will always love hard money and they don't correlate this with the negative collective (systemic) effects. And you never teach them otherwise because IQ is not uniform and not even uniform on each issue for the high IQ.
Thus government will always fill that power vacuum of the incapability of the masses to comprehend.
The only possible solution would be a technological one that eliminates the ability of the masses to harm themselves with their own ignorance.
My question for you Mint is what makes you confident that starving governments via an anonymous coin would necessarily improve things. I agree with your underlying premise that we appear to be in a cycle of boom and bust based on finance/fractional banking/debt -> collectivism -> collapse -> gold standard -> restart cycle again. However at the end of each cycle so far knowledge has advanced and passive capital has declined compared to the same point in the cycle before it aka progress.
Removing the governments ability to tax will create other problems such as the inability to regulate and prevent tragedy of the commons type situations that require collective action.
It is impossible for an anonymous coin to make brick and mortal transactions anonymous. The government will always be able to tax the industrial age economy.
My effort is targeted at the
new virtual economy I see coming, wherein a recent Oxford study predicts 47% of all existing jobs will be replaced with computerization automation by 2033 (the year Martin Armstrong's Pi model and thus I expect the sovereign debt crisis to have ended).
I see we the hitech knowledge workers taking over the world over the next 20 years. That is sufficient time to ramp up the new currency.
So let the government and the masses have their old world economy. They will have plenty of time to fade away slowly and/or adjust and migrate to the new economy.
Government can become privatized. We don't need government for anything, not for roads, not for schools, nothing. I am a minanarchist.
Give me an example of something we need government for and I will explain why I think it can be done better by private enterprise and competition.
Impaler pointed out that the masses conflate the free market with the failure that the masses causes on themselves with hard money and government. The free market is not the problem, rather it is the solution.
Edit: see the new
flying car that already has a working prototype.
No fair!