Topic: Money is an imaginary concept, but humanity is enslaved by it - page 9. (Read 17723 times)

Not really, some people die at 20 some people die at 90. Should we have a "time welfare" where we would take out the "life energy" of 50 year olds who could live till 90, and let them die at 50, and give it to the 20 year old that would die in 20 just to live till 50, is that moral?

Time socialism?

Good lord that "life energy" can't be robbed from you by the governments, otherwise this would be the first thing to legislate.

Unfortunately Money can be robbed from you by the government! So there is a fundamental difference!!!  

In fact time has almost equal value to everyone. Each person owns about the same amount of time during his entire life. But unfortunately, time can not be transferred

Im just hoping when Bitcoin starts becoming more mainstream the concept of "becoming your own bank" arises and starts making banking as we know it effectively obsolete. Once we can store everything we need at home and all over the internet safely and decentralized, then who the hell is going to handle their stuff to others? I guess there will always be people that want that but a big % of people don't want to, but they don't know any better.

To be totally blunt, modern banking is essentially fraudulent.

Bank profits are treated as fruits of private labor, but bank failures are shouldered by the public sector.

The reason this is legal, beyond the payoffs to politicians (a minor factor in the big scheme of things) is that the political elite have an enduring partnership with finance to jointly extract wealth from everyone else via issuing their respective financial assets.

It's true that banks *are* too big to fail, but this wouldn't be the case if banks were not backed by the public in the first place (ie everybody would be more careful when lending to a bank.)

Read the new book "Fragile by Design" and it becomes clear.

The reason for central banks to intervene by providing funds for bailout is always done in the interest of preventing a chain of collapse. Most of these financial institutions are inter-related to each other controlled by the same bunch of corrupt people and I wouldn't be surprised if they actually lend the money to each other to cover their own a**es. So you can imagine if one of it go down, it will pull the rest of it together.

Banks don't necessarily need to be bailed out. It is only the small depositors who are protected by insurance. Large depositors and equity holders take a hit when banks close down.
It is only the large banks which are systemically important that the government considers supporting. If most banks are at risk, then the government has to step in because failure of these banks would result in chaos.

i would gladly switch to crypto completely, but i do realise that its impossible. atleast for now.

I agree that this is possible, but only living "off the grid", in nature, with a sustainable hunter/gatherer tribal type of lifestyle.  However living without FIAT is not possible in urban areas.  Just from a taxation perspective, everyone is liable for paying taxes and only FIAT an acceptable form of payment.

Banks don't need to be bailed out.  If deposits weren't government backed via bailout, then depositors would be much more interested in understanding the risk and solvency of the bank, and choose stable vs. risky/speculative banks.  With government backed banks in the event of bankruptcy, banks are able to take considerably more risk because either it goes well and they profit huge, or they go bust and get bailed out.  In a free market, the shitty banks would fail, depositors would lose money, but taxpayers would not and better banks would be created in their place.

It really shouldn't be treated much differently than any other business that fails.  If I create a business that can't stay profitable, why is it the problem of the taxpayer to keep my business afloat?  Furthermore, could those resources be reallocated to someone else who could do a better job of running the business?

Failing is a healthy part of the economy; it gets rid of the parts that couldn't adapt to change and lose relevancy.  To start taking resources from productive parts of the economy to subsidize the failing parts is foolish.

Enslavement is the right word.  The first line of the Internationale says, stand up, you who don't want to be enslaved.  (The lyrics have a footnote that the Party is an exception.)

Money is necessary in any society beyond bartering (which would be horrible.)  As soon as you have money, you're introducing something which may not have intrinsic value, but represents real value in the world.  As long as everyone agrees on the standard, there should be no problem, and there hasn't been for millennia.

The value of each unit of money, until states and banks learned how to manipulate it, always fluctuated with market forces, and humanity lived fine.  In fact, the economy thrived under this system during the Italian Renaissance and under the Scottish "free banking" system in the 18th and early 19th centuries.  (Scottish per-capita GNP went from half to equal of England's during this time.)

Bank failures would not be horrible at all, systemically speaking, if every "depositor" was fully aware of what they were getting into.  The real trouble is the implicit (if partial) government guarantee that gave "depositors" a false sense of security to begin with.

It's a fiction of modern elite-inspired economics that the value of money must be managed or all hell will break loose.  The truth is the opposite.

There's definitely more paper gold, much more, than the physical stuff that's supposed to be backing it.  Leveraging is what banks do.  For citizens of the world like you and me, avoid paper gold.  The worst of both worlds.

When you're faced with a Herculean task, you have the choice, to fight the fight, or say it's hopeless.

Regardless of the merits of each choice, what we have are just theories, when it comes to the difficulty of the battle.  With this much complexity and uncertainty, every theory looks about right.  We don't even know for sure the market pressures the elites are really facing.  For all these reasons, I'm not throwing in the towel.

Technically, this slavery is self-imposed. If people can live without using fiat currency, then there will be no slavery. But it seems they'd rather have a unit of value and become the slave instead. In fact the slavery also comes from the fact that they are desperately dependent on the banks, so when banks failed, all their deposits will be gone, so banks must be bailed out

In a planned economy system like Soviet Union, the resources are allocated to each person equally without the need for money, thus this kind of slavery is not possible. But you have other kind of slavery from the communist governors, and you really don't know how much of your work went to the government, since most of your income are not salary but equally allocated food/residence/cloth. However, under such a system there is no motivation to improve, you get equally allocated resources no matter how hard you work

Is it possible to have a type of money without being enslaved?

To avoid slavery, this money must be created by a cost close to its face value, but then you have to keep the cost at a constant level to use this money as a universal standard of value. Since the productivity is always increasing, the cost tends to go down over time, to compensate for that, the supply should also shrink over time. From this point of view, the bitcoin design is on the right track

As soon as the "financial system" breaks down, which would actually break (you/me) the citiciens of the world down and not the "power-holding organizations", we ll face horrific scenarios... It would actually be one of "their goals" and it would rise their power. Democrazy isn't what we think/hope it might be. Did you know: The global financial institutions and exchanges are trading more gold than the world holds in reserves.... ?? So virtually theres more gold in existence than in realities existence... "funny" enough. as i said: Sad truth.

Would love to!

IMO the ultimate, final, real problem is... us.  The "system" is actually a partnership between the financial and political elites; one couldn't survive long in current form without the other.  The political elite gain "free" political capital by issuing public debt (and often money too) but they need an innovative financial sector to dream up and issue financial assets that people will believe in (at least temporarily,) to suck up the money supply, or else the extra money and public debt would fuel inflation and expose their theft.  (One of the old classic innovations was the bank account -- when your money was earning interest as a "deposit," it's not out chasing goods and inflating prices.)

How does the government get very smart people to engage in the risky activity of banking (including the risk of being abandoned by the government when the going really gets tough?)  Offer them a share of the loot in the form of some kind of public guarantee of their debt, lax regulation (given the guarantees,) etc.  This is fundamentally why private banks end up profiting from taxpayer guarantees.

Since, in the West, we vote in the political elite, nothing will really change unless we wake up.  We could bump into some good policies by luck, but the elites would always get their pound of flesh eventually.  That is, unless we finally become aware, and add monetary management to the list of post-Enlightenment prohibitions against the state.

How about freedom? I know its a really untrendy stuff nowadays, but c'mon let's just try it once, i promise nobody will hate it once you get a taste of it.

How about we stop paying global banking maffia that print away our wealth, and governments that rob us with all these ever increasing taxes?

It's really time to try freedom too

The Western authorities have been trying to get demand up for almost 7 years now, without much success.  The real reason they can't just keep applying and intensifying their stimulative tools (say, more "quantitative easing" or tax cuts or public spending) is that confidence in the money and debt they issue is already fragile.  Once confidence collapses (as these propped up assets tend to be stable, until they're not!) the authorities will lose a lot of their power.

Low consumer price inflation is helping them walk this tight rope.  Confidence in money and debt would be almost impossible to maintain otherwise.  Low inflation comes from global and Western domestic inequality.  Inequality deprives poorer countries and poorer people of money, so their desire for money makes them want to do a lot of work for low prices or at artificially low exchange rates.

But inequality feeds on itself.  Inequality means many people will work on frivolous products and services to serve the whims of rich countries and rich people.  Once there is any wind of another financial bust (as the system is financially unstable), the rich will readily cut back consumption, and many people will get poorer.  So the cycle continues.  Since this is socially unstable, some kind of seismic shift has to occur, one way or another, eventually.

The last time around, that seismic shift was World War II.  Now that major countries all have nuclear weapons, I don't know what will happen.

Things are not this bleak (or at least I hope!)  There are multiple ways this system can break down.  The system is inherently unstable, due to the incentives for the elites to maximize the issue of money and debt.

When it does break down, like a poker player in a large pot holding cards not good enough for the pot, the authorities can choose to bet big and hope others will fold, or fold.  Betting means eventually using political repression to supplement the financial repression, and has its problems in established democracies.  Folding means, probably, pegging currency to gold at a very high price (since gold is what central banks have.)  They would have suffered humiliation but they would at least keep their power and get their stability back.

Another potential problem of betting is that the world is getting more multi-polar compared to the Anglo-American centuries.  Will the rising powers continue to submit to the old system?  Henry Kissinger is supposed to have just written a "pessimistic" book on this topic.

The interesting thing is: As long as people unconsciously use domestic currency to measure value, there will not be inflation. Inflation does not rise following more money supply, more money supply will just make people work more and produce more. This is because in today's society, productivity is almost unlimited, only demand limit the production. When demand was artificially raised by the banks, the production will immediately increase to a point that even more goods than demanded are produced

Imagine that an enterprise suddenly received a large order from government/banks, he would happily expand his production and hire more people to produce more. It is very unlikely that he would keep his production scale and raise the price instead. And if he really did, the order would just fly to someone else. Unless all the merchant in the branch raise the price at the same time, they usually accept the order without change the price, in reality they even give discount to large orders

The only thing's price that can rise quickly are those with limited supply, like land. But anything with limited supply is usually regarded as asset thus not included in inflation statistics

Indeed, the problem is it's an accepted scam.
Bitcoin is far superior to our lovely fiat system, and here's why:

http://antonopoulos.com/2014/03/02/failure-is-an-option/

So bitcoin is our savior 

But I get the concept money though, cause years ago we used to have something called "barter" where you traded something for mine.

The reason we do have money, is to resolve this issue. Its why most people dont barter and now spend something that they want, and not have endless arguments that my watch is worth more then whatever you have as an example.

Fiatmoney is the biggest scamcurrency ever. "Somebody" said: "Give me control of a nation's money
and I care not who makes the laws."

OP you re right. We are enslaved by it. Our economy, society and politic is designed to make the avg. joe always to strive for more and more (money)... for a handfull of people money is just a means to an end.. just digital(virtual) numbers.. Something non-existent in "reality"... But its too late now to change it... We can have interesting discussions and brainwaves, and the so called "aha-effect".. many of us might check whats happening behind the curtains.. But we won't ever be able to change anything... They control to much now. FED, EZB, the house of sauds, and the other mighty six.... They knew how to make it... sad truth. They placed the foundation stone to the world we are living in today... we are all just small gear wheels in a complex system. And they ARE the system......