FBI bypassed for antiterror measures

Distancing from the source of the comment, it’s a terrifying and historically true statement. States will use all means of cannibalism to fund their insanity, up until the very last moment when they can only afford police to stabilize any revolts against their cannibalism, shortly followed by state level suicide or getting robbed, enslaved, murdered by foreigners.

Run out of money? They’ll print more. Inflation? Print even more. This causes problems? Confiscate what your inflated currency cannot buy. Then print more to reward your political backers.

Well eventually they hit the Zimbabwe/Venezuala/Mid 20s Weimar stage of currency debasement where people do not want to bother with the worthless local currency… its odd that those governments still manage to stay in power after that sometimes though.

Zimbabwe is run by negroes. Venezuela, I know too little about to comment on (if you’d fill me in or point me toward a credible source, I’d appreciate it). Mid 20s Weimar owed reparations in gold.

Setting aside the Venezuelan example for the moment, the United States lacks the specific problems Zimbabwe and Weimar had. You have not mentioned Greece but, if you had, the same answer would apply there, too.

Run out of money? They’ll print more. Inflation? Print even more. This causes problems? Confiscate what your inflated currency cannot buy. Then print more to reward your political backers.

Corruption is bad but is a separate issue. As to inflation, you are right in a way, but inflation does not work quite as most intelligent, broadly informed citizens think. If it did, then the United States would have hyperinflated to bankruptcy 30 years ago.

Would you agree that inflation is chiefly caused by too much money in circulation? If so, and if too much is in circulation, and if you’d entertain a Socratic question, then how does the federal government remove the excess money from circulation?

D.S.: I think that you are engaging in a debate with someone who is not present. I gather that you do not care for my style, but I am not your foil.

Would you agree that inflation is chiefly caused by too much money in circulation? If so, and if too much is in circulation, and if you’d entertain a Socratic question, then how does the federal government remove the excess money from circulation?

For the “Socratic question,” the answer is “They don’t, generally.” These things usually have a one-way ratchet effect.

A note: The link to the M1 measure of money in this quote (I didn’t embed the link when I blockquoted it) could be misleading. M1 went through a definitional change right where it rockets upward (May 2020) and that accounts for the rocketing. This is noted in the data description at the link; just scroll down. In saying this I am not denying that the Fed has been printing up money hand over fist since at least the housing recession of 2008. They did, it was excessive, and we eventually saw an increase in inflation.

But it didn’t print $11.4 trillion in one month. (From $4.8 trillion in April 2020 to $16.2 trillion in May 2020.)

for your own good

Really now… is that concern I hear? Are you concerned about my reputation?

Of course you back off ever so slightly in the face of irrefutable evidence that your claims of productivity are wildly off-base. But will it cause you to reexamine any single one of your preconceptions for even a microsecond?

No, because you’re here with a script. And that script is: debt spending is not a big deal, inflation doesn’t matter, devaluation doesn’t matter, fiscal discipline isn’t important, we can just ignore the empty words of Hayek and Rothbard and the like, because in the long run we’re all dead. It’s the standard KFM/Post-Keynesian script, the standard (modern) Socialism script. We’ve all read it a thousand times and we all recognize it on sight, despite the attempts at deflection and rhetorical sleight of hand.

You think I should lay off, and that we’d get along fine in a hypothetical bar? Okay, then show us you can deviate from your script. For example, you could respond to any of my points or Jim’s points on why socialism (or money printing, or borrowing, or any other form of excessive seigniorage, or however else you want to narrow it down) doesn’t work in the long run, in such a way that actually acknowledges we made the argument, even if you disagree with the conclusion.

>Compare what is built now in the west with what was built during the sixties and seventies.
>And compare with what is built outside the west

Relevant cope.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22778499

One reads that, up through the Great Depression, we used to have terrible depressions in the United States with 20 percent unemployment or more

Yes, and now we euphemistically refer to them as “reductions in the labor force”. We are nearly always running at far higher than 20% unemployment, but have mastered the art of obfuscating it behind paperwork. Recessions and depressions used to come and go, were somewhat local, and were considered no big deal in the long run; it was only after women got the vote and FDR came into power that depressions got dragged out for years and years and became all-encompassing national crises requiring desperate “intervention”.

not everything is falling apart today

Killer argument, right there. “It could be worse, you know.”

San Francisco sucks. She used to have charm. The hard left has wrecked it.

“The hard left” is a revealing phrase here. None of us have used the “hard” qualifier for a long time, going back to at least 2016, when it became obvious that the Antifa and BLM rioters were being protected by those claiming to be moderates, and the non-physically-violent moderates were happy to wage endless lawfare and other “process is punishment” bureaucratic war on the flimsiest of pretexts. Of course, that goes back much farther than 2016, but 2016 is when everybody got to see it out in the open, and 2020 was when even the most hardened skeptic could no longer deny it.

And yet here you are, once again claiming that it’s just a tiny part of the left that somehow ruined SF all on its lonesome. The rest of the progressive left (i.e. you) bears no responsibility.

Consequently, I want a new income tax bracket on incomes over $2 million

I’ll bet you do. And since you have already expressly stated that “the government does not need your money”, and are no doubt already aware how little impact that tax would have on revenue even if it did need your money, the only possible reason why you would want such a thing is because you hate the productive classes and want to see them suffer.

Left-wing blather about “income equality” or “wealth distribution” doesn’t fool us anymore. The people who are really acquiring wealth unethically and really hoarding it unfairly are not the ones who are acquiring it through normal business channels or reporting it as taxable income. They are politically-connected leftists who get paid to do nothing, or worse, get paid to destroy what other people have built, and find themselves largely exempt from income taxes either through straight-up criminal conduct or elaborate legal loopholes created specially for them. They are the ones allowed to break the rules with impunity, and adding new rules just means they’ll be allowed to break those ones too.

How will people manage [holding less fiat] when (a) they are assessed a capital-gains tax on appreciation with respect to fiat of whatever alternate currency they use and (b) they must acquire fiat to pay taxes?

Are you stupid, or are you just fishing for a confession that you or your supervisors can use in an upcoming prosecution?

@Neurotoxin:

I detect more than a hint of “Modern Monetary Theory”

Understatement of the century there. This guy might literally be a fed, not in the “FBI” sense but in the sense of being directly employed by the federal government or one of its cutouts. If not, he surely works for one of those special accounting or law firms blessed by the fed to do its dirty work.

Where else could you find someone who knows all the ins and outs of MMT but not a scrap of classical, literary or Austrian economics, who admits to working with government-issued figures all day and trusts them completely, who is absolutely positive that reality operates exactly like the theory says it should, and whose seething hatred of the people who do real work is always carefully concealed behind a mask of concern and low-energy snark?

Only other possibility would be a university, but his prose isn’t quite rarefied enough to present as an academic.

If productivity and production have increased, why did we get Freedom Tower in place of the Two Towers, and why are we seeing learned analyses that it just not physically possible to build as many nuclear reactors as we once did?

I do not know.

For anyone else who’s feeling the bile on the tip of their tongue from all this credulous discussion of KFM/MMT nonsense, here is some classic Moldbug to wash it down:

De gustibus non computandum: or, economics needs a divorce

Written nearly 20 years ago, at the peak of the Great Minority Mortgage Meltdown, although based on a lot of source material that was published decades earlier.

I’m sure that the Vapid Kike won’t read it, or even acknowledge that it exists, but it should be required reading for anyone wanting to discuss economics in this space. (Except for the wonks already directly familiar with the Austrian School’s seminal works; they get a pass if they want to skip the executive summary.)

The love of inflation has never been coherently justified.
[…]
One should invest for a return, not because they are going to lose their savings if they do not.

Indeed, even if one believes the government’s make-believe inflation figures without reservation, one is still compelled to ask: why, exactly, is the “ideal” inflation rate set at 2-3%, and not zero?

After all, if productivity is increasing, and the amount of money in circulation remains the same, then you have the same amount of money being spent on more goods, or better goods; the currency is thus worth more, relative to the goods being purchased. That is deflationary.

And this deflation, at least in a very local sense, is what it often looks like to the consumer when productivity is visibly and provably rising; goods and services actually get cheaper, as during the peak of the Moore’s Law years when personal computers went from costing thousands of dollars for gen-X hardware to mere hundreds for gen-(X+n) hardware a decade later. Better and cheaper. So too with mobile communication, at least until the smartphone era, which we could argue was really an entirely new product.

Or if anyone is tempted to declare silicon tech as an aberration, consider the decline in airfare costs after the 1978 deregulation, and the fact that the average cost of any length of flight (domestic, transatlantic or transpacific) today is still about the same today as it was in 1980 in actual dollars–not “inflation adjusted” dollars, I mean that a fare costing $300 in 1980s dollars is still about $300 today, give or take. Notwithstanding the much more recent problems at Boeing etc., air travel up to 2010 or so was another visible example of productivity going up, or at least not going down very much.

When tuition fees balloon from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands over a few decades, or hospital bills balloon from thousands to millions, that is the aberration. We are all conditioned to view it instinctively as the norm instead: of course something that cost ten cents in the 1950s will cost ten dollars now, why wouldn’t it? But that is not normal at all, and would be a serious and terrifying problem if it were not being cushioned by the USD’s dominance as a global reserve.

It is actually absurd how well all of us, myself included, are conditioned to think this way; when was the last time you heard or read about some historical price and didn’t wonder “but what is that in today’s dollars?” Breaking that conditioning is very, very hard.

There is only one rational way to understand a 2-3% “target” inflation rate, and Jim already gave that answer implicitly in another post: it’s a tax, specifically a type of seigniorage, and 2-3% represents what the sovereign believes is the Laffer limit for that tax, before people start to panic and switch to other currencies (or plain old bartering) in significant numbers.

But the fact that nobody really wants to hold dollars, nobody stuffs dollar bills under the mattress anymore, everybody feels the need to “invest” their money even if they have no understanding of what that means or where to invest, and all that despite the fact that bank and treasury rates are still much higher than the declared inflation rate, very strongly suggests that either the arbitrary target is already far in excess of the Laffer limit, or that actual real-world economic behavior of real people does not track the reported figure at all.

Of course the tax collector is going to claim that inflation is low and actually good for us, just as the tax collector will claim that income tax or sales tax is no burden at all and is actually good for us. What the tax collector means is that it’s good for him and whomever else gets the proceeds, and that you and I should shut up about it because we don’t have a choice in the matter. Which is all well and good, and we are all normal rational law-abiding citizens who pay our taxes. But surely none of us are dumb enough to believe the tax collector; we don’t pay because taxes are wonderful, we pay because it keeps us out of jail.

P.S. anyone who can do simple math can easily show that even 50 years of price inflation at 2% does not yield a hundred-fold or even a tenfold increase in price. It is roughly a tripling or quadrupling. You can almost (not quite) twist an “average” 2-3% inflation to explain how a Big Mac went from 50 cents in 1960 to $4 in 2010 (a 700% rise), but not how the median home price rose from $12,000 to over $400,000 (a 3300% rise). Yet somehow, year after year, the official figures always say that it is exactly between 2 and 3%. It’s a stone cold mystery.

Fidelis: As I said to Neurotoxin, I am pretty sure that the subject will be discussed again. We need not resolve all points today and, meanwhile, I should resist the temptation to beat the subject into the ground, so to speak. Your last point is worthwhile and can stand without further argument by me.

Once again, the hatred of monetary value rising is not sufficiently explained. The conventional answer I get is always some version of “but what if people just hold on to their money forever.”

Maybe, but you didn’t hear this explanation from me.

Marshall is no authority of great stature but I thought his explanation pretty good on this particular question. His original is better than any answer I am likely to give.

Maybe, but you didn’t hear this explanation from me.

And there it is, the first flagrant, open lie. And I quote:

The conventional macroeconomic wisdom is that inflation needs to be just high enough to forestall the price-induced idling of productive resources. As far as I know, the conventional macroeconomic wisdom is correct in this.

You people can never keep your stories straight.

This is not particularly responsive.

Did you expect otherwise? This “debate” has all the features of a pre-2008 socialist lecture, before the progressive left went all in on intersectionality, but long after they stopped listening to anything the other side had to say. It comes off as more polite than the SJW version, “I don’t have time to educate you”, but it is fundamentally the same substance.

VK: “Productivity is fine and getting better.”
Us: “Productivity is in the toilet and getting worse, here are half a dozen industry examples and several studies showing it, including some from government/academic sources you would consider trustworthy.”
VK: “Meh, don’t care. [Pretends that the debate never happened.]”

VK: “Conventional macroeconomics [actually KFM] says inflation is good.”
Us: “Inflation is a tax and an economic drag, here are several reasons why and sources explaining why the KFM theory is wrong and nonsensical.”
VK: “You just don’t understand economics, here is what the theory says.”
Us: “We know what the theory says; the theory is trash, and doesn’t play out in reality.”
VK: “[Posts more inane KFM jargon, ignoring objections]”

I don’t know–we (well, you guys) are treating this as if it’s coming from some normie/boomer con who’s just accustomed to thinking in KFM terms from a lifetime of habit, and with some effort could be brought around. Maybe you are right. What I see is someone whose income literally depends on it–and the one and only thing I’ll give him credit for is admitting that fact outright–and who is absolutely true-believing progressive left, does not have a single right-wing bone in his body or thought in his head, has no discernible reason to want to be here, introduced himself as “national socialist” because he thinks it’s “socialism for right-wingers”, and has no intention of budging one inch on any of these issues.

I don’t see any responsive replies, I see replies that pretend to be responsive in the way all leftists used to do it before the woke era, replies that duly acknowledge the literal words you spoke/wrote but ignore all of their substance, and instead use it as a jumping-off point to tell you more of their opinion or just spray squid ink.

All the replies adopt the frame that that we are uneducated rubes who aren’t aware of simple instruments like T-bills (despite adopting the shopworn “but I’m no expert” cliche, which masks condescension as humility), as opposed to people who learned all that stuff twenty or thirty years ago and eventually arrived at the conclusion that it was all a crock of shit.

Reminder, he said this:

…federal spending […] is hard to pare down when most of the money goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, ACA subsidies, highway construction and defense. Yes, I’d like the government to spend less, but on what, exactly? So if you want to contain inflation, you need higher tax rates and more robust IRS enforcement.

Count the lies and misdirections here. Have we been rendered so complacent by the jeet-shills that we can’t recognize this for what it is?

Fidelis, you have asked a question about IBM and Apple. The question is noted and so is your view regarding it, and for all I know you are right.

During the 20th century I had a general concept of what IBM did for a living: typewriters; then big computers; then small computers. During the 21st century, I lack a general concept, so can no longer intelligently compare IBM to Apple.

I guess that someone owns IBM stock and that someone works in IBM’s employ, but I do not. The company is a mystery to me.

Jim, by design, I don’t do money internationally, not even to Canada. I even avoid traveling internationally when I can (which is most of the time). The U.S. has been sanctioning foreigners so flagrantly that, as a U.S. citizen, I fear the blowback.

Therefore, I had never given much thought to the basic, international use case of crypto you describe.

You already did “high-quality nazi sneaks into the community,” though. But sure, go ahead.

😉

Humungus has noted that Mossad-Nick and Kunning Druger share a similar wit and style. No doubt because they are both avid fans of Mouldbug. Impossible they are one and the same.

Hey Jim, sometime when you have time: is there a way to estimate the proper expected market capitalization of Bitcoin or Jimcoin or whatever the dominant crypto turns out to be, based solely on the one, indispensable use case you have outlined? I mean, international transactions that need to avoid the banking system, for which practical factors bar the use of dollars, euros and yuan.

I suppose that one would arrive at the estimate by dividing the expected volume of such transactions by the expected velocity of money. Or maybe there’s a better way. Or maybe I have posed the question incorrectly.

Eventually, one might need to discount the estimate for anti-crypto state taxation/enforcement (which might in turn require a guess at crypto’s relevant price elasticity), but even without a discount, I’d still be curious how big a demand the use case in question has for crypto.

If you’ve already done this work in an old post, a pointer would suffice.

At long last, the true meaning of the term “Alt Right” has been discovered!