This rips

Yup!

“Never Attained Anything” mini-rendition. Fully fleshed version on Spotify and

Another glorious 1-2 punch about how abstract money gives government overnight access to citizen’s savings from page 102 of Broken Money: Inness (1914): “What is a monetary unit? What is a dollar? We do not know. All we do know for certain — and I wish to reiterate and emphasize the fact that on this point the evidence which in these articles I have only been able briefly to indicate, is clear and conclusive — all, I say, that we do know is that the dollar is a measure of the value of all commodities, but is not itself a commodity, nor can it be embodied in any commodity. It is intangible, immaterial, abstract. It is a measure in terms of credit and debt.” Lyn Alden, Broken Money: “Some economists such as Saifedean Ammous have argued that from a monetary perspective, World War I never really ended once it began in 1914. In prior wars throughout history, wars had to be funded with savings of taxes or very slow debasement of coinage. Physical coinage held by citizens could usually only be debased by their government gradually rather than diluted instantaneously, because a government couldn’t just magically change the properties of the coins that were held by households; it could only debase them over time by taxing purer coins, issuing various decrees to try to pull some of those purer coins in, and spending debased coins back out into the economy (and convincing initial recipients to accept them at the same prior value, despite the lesser precious metal content, which would only work for a time and might not even be noticed at first). However, with the widespread holding of centrally issued banknotes and bank deposits that were redeemable for specific amounts of gold, governments could change the redemptive value with the stroke of a pen or eliminate redemption all together. This gave governments the power to instantaneously devalue a substantial part of their citizens’ savings, literally overnight, and funnel that purchasing power toward war or other government expenditures whenever they determine that the situation calls for it.”

Another beauty from Lyn: In 1970, Congress passed the Bank Secrecy Act, which made banks file reports to the government whenever their customers do more than $10,000 in transactions within a day. Back then, this dollar amount was worth more than the median annual income, and reporting therefore happened rather infrequently. However, the Bank Secrecy Act was not adjusted for inflation, and so over the course of five decades the government has automatically reduced the threshold for necessary reporting and has therefore continually expanded their surveillance mandate each year without further legislation. The combination of restricting the number of physical banknotes in circulation, making it undesirable to hold physical banknotes for long periods of time due to inflation without interest, and surveilling bank deposits, has been an effective surveillance and control combination.

A beautifully put foundational insight by Lyn Alden at the end of chapter 6 in Broken Money: “Overall, it’s the combination of the banks and the government that have power over the ledger that most people use as money in any banking system. For a gold-backed banking system, the only part of the ledger that individual users have control of is the precious metal coins that they retain in their own custody, and for that they rely on the properties of nature to maintain the integrity of the ledger. Once they surrender coins over to the banking system, they have begun to rely on a hierarchy of other people to control their money.”

$131,050

A mini rendition of a song from the album ‘Cranky’ I released last month. This one is called Ride My Steed. (You can find in Wavlake, bandcamp and lots of other places)

I LOVE boardwalks!

Reading Broken Money by Lyn Alden for the first time. This passage that links inflation and war’s likelihood is so important and close to the heart of why I care about Bitcoin. “The ability to debase money contributes to the likelihood of war and several other forms of damaged productivity occurring in the first place. The temptation for a ruler to debase coinage is too great to overcome, because it’s usually the path of least resistance when faced with a problem. If the king knows that paying for a war by outright raising taxes would likely lead to revolution, but that paying for the war via gradual debasement of coinage will not, he can justify paying for his war by relying on that second method. If he and his potential war opponent were both stuck with the first method of paying for a war with extra taxes rather than debasement, the war might not happen because their subjects might revolt if it did. The costs of the war would be more transparent and unpopular right away. In contrast to this, the ability to debase coinage to pay for a war allows the war to happen first and the costs to be partially delayed, which increases the probability of war happening and increases the scale to which it may occur. If debasement can occur, it eventually will occur for any number of reasons. The possibility for debasement exists, always and everywhere and invitingly so, as something a government can turn to whenever it can’t spend transparently on what it wants to. Aside from examples of unusually corrupt or mentally ill rulers, a king does not generally wake up one day and whimsically decide to devalue his realm’s coinage with cheaper metal for no reason. War, plagues, and other destroyers of productivity are indeed at the root of why kings usually end up debasing their money. To remain in power, rulers seek to strengthen their political position, placate their subjects, and smooth over problems that inevitably arise throughout their reign. Currency devaluation is a method that a king can resort to so that he can make increased payments without having to increase taxes for those payments, and therefore the cost instead gets pushed, over time, onto those who accept the newly devalued coins at their old face value despite not having the same metal content or supply scarcity that they used to have.” It is a bit long and taken out of its full context. I seek ways to make this easier to understand. Currently it requires a fair bit of explaining to communicate it well enough. #philosophy