Topic: Martin Armstrong Discussion - page 233. (Read 647183 times)

You cannot successfully top-down ban usury. The only was to eliminate it is to get people to voluntarily refuse to participate both as borrower or lender despite the fact that doing so is potentially profitable.

That's probably not going to happen in our lifetimes and it is not even possible without an alternative currency that can be used for day to day transactions one that does not have usury at its core.

This is where BTC comes in and is one of the reasons I am interested in it.

@ Lateralus - Fractional reserve banking. Your earlier post covered quite a bit of ground,
and I won't claim to have the answer to everything economic, but just for the laughs, lets
suppose we are fractional reserve bankers. I'm the Bank of England and I have £1 in gold,
and that means I can lend you £10. You are the Federal Reserve Bank, so if we have £:$
parity, you can lend me $100. With that as a reserve .... you can see where this is going.
:-)

To have fractional reserve banking, you need to be working on a Gold Standard, or a near
equivalent. That's not how todays banks work. So what constrains bank lending?
Risk. More precisely, Perceived Risk. Which is why I wrote up the thread
"Unlimited Banking and Problem Banking" which got too long, but you may want to skim
through it.

I'm trying to put together something on Banning Usury, but for the moment that solution
looks worse than the problem that needs fixed, so no rush to finish there.

I agree that technological progress is based on knowledge derived by sciences in general and individual scientists specifically. But that's not your original point. Basically, you claimed that slavery had been banned due to rising morals in human societies, broadly speaking, and that was the primary driver independent of technological advances. As to me, this is debatable. I'm more inclined to think that the higher morals were themselves a result of higher living standards, but these improvements had evidently been due to economic factors...

And the latter also worked toward universal abolition of slavery (since it got in the way), though it is not evident

Deisik I agree that it is best to use clear terms. Under the the definition of chattel slavery my prior description of the structure of ancient Egypt was overly broad.

We do not know with certainty how much "chattel slave" labor went into the pyramids. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote in 450 B.C. that they were built by slaves but that was long while after their construction.  Some more recent archaeological evidence points to workers slightly higher up the social ladder.

http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2010/01/12/egypt-new-find-shows-slaves-didnt-build-pyramids

All of this is largely irrelevant to our prior discussion and we should not lose sight of the forest for the trees. I agree with you that slavery is economically inefficient and attempting to train educated slaves is even more economically inefficient. Our disagreement (if any) are entirely over the fundamental nature of the forces that lead to the end of slavery.  

Your argument was that technological progress that helped end slavery and I also agree with that. However, technological progress is simply a function of applied knowledge.

If you want to argue that increased technology led to the end of slavery you must next examine the factors that allow knowledge to increase. In Knowledge, Entropy and Freedom I addressed what I believe to be the fundamental driver of knowledge creation.

Unfortunately due to time constraints I do not have time to continue this conversation further so I will give you the last word on the matter.

You seem to be missing the whole point of what slavery actually is

In short, slaves are waste material, it makes no sense economically to raise them with no guaranteed result. After all, how do you know that exactly this child slave would be a good engineer or mathematician? At max and en masse, you can only expect them to effectively fulfill only simple tasks. Basically, you would be wasting resources raising and teaching slaves if you aim at something more than that. If you want skilled labor, your best option is hire, just like pharaohs did in the same Egypt when they built their pyramids (and here you are obviously trying to get away by excessive extension of the concept). Slaves are captured as human trophies and quickly disposed of. Indeed, if you happen to enslave someone highly skillful, it would make sense to provide him decent existence and enjoy free labor. But you would likely get better results if you just freed that slave and then hired him as a free man


I would prefer to stay with the narrow definition of slavery as chattel slavery

I already showed why it's a scam with my previous post.  You gain yield on assets that don't exist.  You might be able to claim this is OK if participants enter this scheme knowingly signing their life away as unsecured creditors to the banks for a meager reward where they gain more than you do, except for the fact that the banks are backstopped by the government which screws people who don't even willingly submit to this ponzi scheme.  Also the fact that they make it illegal to even tell people not use banks (run on the banks) or to use different currency the govt/bank cartel don't approve of.  The act of trying to ban cash also forces you into them as well.

So no, it is not a legit institution and of course it's a scam.   These people are literally devils stealing the wealth of old, geriatric people in wheelchairs via indirect means.  Take into account the idea of compound interest.  The fact they're gaining compound interest on assets that don't even exist means they quickly overtake everyone else and the endgame is like a game of monopoly where one player owns all pieces on the board and everyone else has no option but walk away from the table with the game ending.  In a centrally controlled system they can also manipulate interest rates then front run the market with insider info at leverage to accelerate this process even faster.

The bank doesn't actually win in this case, it just means the monetary system collapses since it has no value if only one person owns it all.  This is how we ended up at the "zero bound" of interest rates now and why they talk about helicopter money and even negative rates.  They're just attempted workarounds to the problem they don't want to address that the bank actually has to give the money back for the system to continue.  Negative interest rates and QE are entirely useless in this context, though.  Neither of those mechanisms effectively re-monetizes the base.

This is why helicopter money is the Jewish banking plan of last resort, but all it really does is just prolong the collapse a little longer.  It is clear you do not understand any of these issues and why things like fractional reserve are always simultaneous scams and time bombs waiting to go off.  Either that or you're some type of banking shill yourself.  The fact that we saw QE being done already, which is pretty close to helicopter money, means this thing is coming down like the Hindenburg very soon.

I'll be honest I really only come to this site because it's the only english forum that I know of where people discuss Armstrong's work. So my understanding of cryptocurrency is extremely limited, it's just one of those things that I have on my "to study" list.

In my mind in a theoretical free banking market of competing currencies, I'm wondering if it's possible there would be no need of "mining" in the first place.

If we set cryptocurrency aside for a second, and look at what a free banking market of competing paper currencies would look like, I imagine it is actually fractional reserve banking itself that automatically regulates the supply of money and interest rates. As the demand for money grows (due to increased economic confidence & desire from entrepreneurs and established businesses to take on risk), banks would then also be more willing to take on risk because those businesses would be more willing to pay higher interest rates. But the banks can't simply create as much money as they want (as the gold bug types would suggest), because they must manage the amount of leverage they are using with depositors funds (the fractional reserve rate). Too much leverage (too low reserves), would mean too much risk, and of course there would naturally develop an industry for third party auditing which tracks the reserve rates of each currency in the various banks. We could see high risk (relatively speaking) currencies, and low risk currencies develop. Maybe even currencies for use specific industries, as well as separate consumer level currencies. Who knows really.

So looking at cryptocurrency, I'm wondering if this whole concept of digital "mining" is nothing but an unnecessary roadblock to establishing a truly successful cryptocurrency. I'm wondering if Satoshi was one of these "gold bug" types who mistook the flaws of government monopolization of currency creation (and thus the banking industry itself) as a flaw of paper currencies themselves. Like Armstrong I don't see gold as "sound money", but merely a commodity which people have used to hedge against the inevitable failures of government. On the contrary I see paper currency as this miraculous thing that never had a chance to truly thrive in a free banking market, as no free banking market has ever been allowed to exist for long enough to stabilize. Cryptocurrency is obviously likely to be even more miraculous, and thus maybe we're just in the process of skipping past ever seeing an era of such free market paper currencies as I described. Still, I feel that thinking about how such free market paper currencies might work is an invaluable thought experiment.

Again maybe I am completely misunderstanding the purpose of mining in cryptocurrencies, but it seems to be nothing other than a product of this fallacious belief in fixed money supplies and unfounded fears of hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is really a product of governments trying to preserve their power by ordering banks to continue to operate on the state currency despite the irresponsible amount of state debt which is denominated in the currency. Hyperinflation is merely what happens when corrupt societies attempt to rapidly liquidate their holdings of state debt in a panic, as they subconsciously or consciously realize they've bet their life savings on something which is essentially a giant cult ponzi scheme.

That is what modern countries are to me, giant cult ponzi schemes. Or in the words of Bastiat "Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

Right and the increase in supply needs to be publically auditable and linked to a public metric which demands more or less supply. That would be ideal. Frb today causes rates to drop indefinetily and ultimately fail as it enslaves debt holders.
In my design coins are inflated based on demand and deflated if velocity falls under some threshold. You can read my mechanism design about it here:

Syscoin.org/whitepaper.pdf

I find it funny the people who think FRB is a scam also think inflation shouldn't exist.

Money is nothing other than the lifeblood of society, and just as a human body grows in size and requires a larger volume of blood, the economy requires an increase in money supply in order to operate effeciently (hence the term "liquidity").

100% reserve banking is socialism because it leaves no legitimate way to expand the money supply, and a fixed money supply rewards people who sit on their ass, it treats money like it was a corporate share in the economy that should increase in value as time goes on. This is also why cryptocurrencies which are modeled on fixed money supplies are doomed to fail over the long term (or at least fail in the sense that they will always be relegated to niche uses, rather than becoming primary or world-leading currencies)

Roach you're just another luddite running your mouth about a world you haven't even begun to understand.

Ha ha I think that would be misunderstood.  
Does not mean it is not true. But the slavery issues is just a subset of a larger truth. Were I to make a bumper sticker that captured the heart of the matter it would be:

"Evil is Rational"

https://www.prageru.com/courses/religionphilosophy/evil-rational
 

You guys should get bumper stickers of that slogan for your cars.

i guess that depends just on how much the masters are willing to invest into the slaves. (e.g. humankind are slaves of the bankers etc. pp.)

Slightly higher ranking slaves who call themselves something other than slaves are still slaves.

What you are really saying in your comparison of industrialized Europe versus ancient Egypt is that slavery is not compatible with our current level of technological progress. This is true. Slavery reduces freedom of choice and thus destroys knowledge. It must be eliminated if we wish to progress.

See: Knowledge, Entropy and Freedom

However, as iamnotback noted slavery is natural thus it has required thousands of years of struggle for us to partially overcome it.

Do you know that Egyptian pyramids were built by the workforce primarily made up of farmers recruited from all Egypt, not slaves? This doesn't very well add up to your theory of raising skilled slaves, does it? And if we assume that they actually raised slaves, how they can be considered skilled if they, as you yourself say, weren't competitive? Nevertheless, we should take into account the level of industrial development of Ancient Egypt (or lack thereof) versus Europe after the 14th century (e.g. manufactories appearing in the early 18th century)...

Basically, you can't compare these skills

Yes that interpretation is wrong grasping onto tangential details while ignoring actual cause.

It is certainly possible to build a society that raises skilled slaves. This was the structure of ancient Egyptian society. What you cannot do is expected such a society to be competitive with one that frees its skilled labor.

I covered the relationship between freedom and morality in the following posts.

Religion and Progress
Freedom and God
Freedom is Approached not Achieved

I heard another interpretation

Namely, that it was actually the Black Death and its consequences that gave rise to capitalism and free hired labor. And the policy of abolitionism was only giving an official pretext for freeing hands required for industrial development. It is very similar to the process of Enclosure in England during the 18th century which created a landless working class that supplied free hands for the new industries quickly developing back then


The problem with slavery is that you can capture a highly skilled slave (though this alone assumes that you are invading a highly developed country) and he will likely work for you but you can't raise skilled slaves. Invasion is not an option when you need millions of skilled hands, and still more so if you are an industrialized nation. What's the use of a slave who can't even read, for the most part?

Slaves werent just plantation worker or concubines.

Through history slaves were usually made by invasion and oppression of foreign people and a part of them were highly skilled individuals (most prominent probaly the jews).

We had slaves for pretty much every type of work - from prostitutes over teachers to even kings.

The industrial revolution increased wealth and made it relatively less expensive to abolish slavery accelerating its decline but that was not the driver of the abolition movement.

Abolitionism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism

I tend to disagree, at least in part

It was an outrage from the rest of humanity that made some backward countries like Mauritania finally ban slavery, but the first impulse was purely economic as I get it. Slavery ended not for the lack of slaves obviously but simply because slave labor was crowded out by more efficient mechanized labor which required highly skilled workers (in comparison with what slaves are generally required to know and do), which is hardly compatible with slavery. The public hostility toward slavery was mostly a side effect which emerged later (cp. industrialized Union states vs agrarian Confederate states in the period of the American Civil War)

The institution where physical ownership of another human being was acknowledged as acceptable by society and ones "property rights" were enforced by the state is gone.

True change must happen from the bottom-up. It was not laws against slavery that ended slavery but moral outrage.

Man has the potential for infinite self improvement. However, we often seek out easy and false fixes to challenges because the true solution is too hard or too inconvenient.