Here’s my synthesis of
@Saifedean Ammous from the beginning of my Bitcoin journey lol:
Everything in a civilization is downstream of money. Money is one half of every exchange. It’s not some collective hallucination or social construct, it’s a technology with certain characteristics that make it desirable as a money. The best money is a hard money. The polar opposite of soft money, hard money maintains its value over time and space by making itself as scarce as possible. This process becomes self-fulfilling as individuals expect it to best retain value. With a reputation for retaining its purchasing power, individuals forego present satisfaction to save in that money. The more individuals save, the more they value the future.
For millennia, gold’s hardness made it the best money to hold across time. If governments misbehaved, gold would flow out of government coffers and inflict proportional economic damage on their subjects. However, because gold is too expensive to audit and authenticate, too expensive, slow, and dangerous to move, and easy to confiscate as a physical bearer instrument, individuals who own gold often custody it with a third party, making the third party a honeypot for thieves. Since the Romans, governments have nationalized mints and inflated the supply of gold by filling gold with tungsten or instituting centralized gold derivative pools like the London Bullion Market Association. Things went from bad to worse when governments monopolized advances in 20th century telecommunication technology to substitute government-issued paper receipts for gold.
The further abstraction of this soft money to wiring IOUs across a global payment network was faster and cheaper than transporting gold. In the fiat system, there are 200 central banks around the world that merely add and subtract digital ledger entries to support the shenanigans of banks, settle international trade, buy government bonds, and back the local currency.
Only the Federal Reserve (“Fed”) has the authority to validate the additions and subtractions. The Fed has its origins in measure number 5 of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. This measure requires centralized control of money to aggress on private property rights.
Insecure private property rights result in an uncertain future, conflict, and a deterioration of economic goods and natural resources. Without private property rights, individuals have no other rights. According to Ayn Rand: “the right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation.” Secure property rights are necessary for peaceful cooperation among individuals.
These rights ignite the process of civilization. Individuals start to see the value in working, saving, investing, accumulating and deploying capital, specializing, contributing to the division of labor, boosting productivity, creating better, faster, and cheaper technology, and increasing the standard of living for themselves and society. Barter blooms into sophisticated markets, culminating in the stock market. The stock market opens avenues for individuals to freely own and trade capital. The act of individuals engaging in consensual exchange with a hard money under scarce conditions translates into prices that reflect actual conditions and thus the most effective combination of factors of production. Every individual in an economy must express their preferences in market-driven price discovery to be able to project profits and losses and satisfy desires of consumers or else economic calculation, and in turn civilization, breaks down.
Civilization has been breaking down since at least the revolutionary era. When American colonists killed their King, they ended up with many kings fighting over who would rule them. They learned that a King with a multigenerational interest in their rule and a respect for hard money is preferable to a revolving door of jockeying 4-year forever term kings who get while the getting is good and leave us holding the bag. These kings, better known as reactionaries, transferred the locus of government power away from a more accountable state or local level by using a military to bind non-signatories to an all-devouring constitution.
Reactionaries exploited their newfound power to spin up the first and second national banks. These banks caused boom and bust cycles culminating in the panics of 1819 and 1837. Later, socialist President Lincoln ran the same playbook usingpromises to siphon off the South’s productivity and emancipate slaves as cover. He encouraged the Legal Tender Act of 1862, which allowed banks to redeem private bank notes for greenbacks instead of hard money like precious metals. Soft money sapped information flows and distorted price signals to reveal the deafening noise of complications underlying anindustrialized economy. The chaos led to runaway credit expansion, rampant price increases, and the gradual nationalization of state banks into the hands of wall street banks.
It was only when the U.S. went back on the gold standard in the 1870s that the money supply contracted, innovation and economic output took off to deliver modern marvels such as the lightbulb, automobile, and plane, and prices dropped. There was no such thing as government funding science. Instead, there were entrepreneurs. For example, John D. Rockefeller brought cheap and efficient petroleum-based products to virtually every home and industry in the country. Contrast Elon Musk, who survives on government handouts, child labor, and ecological devastation to build 19th century technology vehicles, launch swarms of spy satellites into orbit, implant mind controlling devices, and restrict free speech on Twitter.
Elon Musk and the rest of the counterfeit class use unbacked credit to consume more than they produce. Some of the biggest debtors are central bank shareholders: commercial banks. They work the Fed like a sock puppet to steal money.
Nearly all money in the global economy is issued by commercial banks via loans. The type of loans they issue is constrained only by how much risk the loans will create in the system. They manipulate the amount, duration, and price of loans to bankrupt small businesses and reserve cheap, long-term loans for their friends. The counterfeit class use these loans to steal a disturbingly large amount of the world’s assets, and use these assets to take out more loans to buy more assets, and so on. As they bid up asset prices, every new loan created eats away at the value of dollars over time so they can pay off the older loans with fewer dollars.
The productive class disproportionally bears the brunt of this grift since they are limited in their access to credit or save their wealth in a devaluing dollar. The average wage worker lives paycheck to paycheck and, if they’re lucky, is left with the option of investing what’s left in rigged, risky assets alongside the counterfeit class in the hope of covering the rising costs of living. They usually come up empty handed as their investment positions are margin called, stomped out, or rugged by the counterfeit class.
This evil scheme will continue so long as the counterfeit class is willing to lend to themselves or until their borrowing triggers price increases sufficient for civil unrest. To keep the game going, the counterfeit class limits price increases by balancing the money they create for themselves with the orchestrated destruction of the money—in the form of loan payments and defaults—belonging to the productive class.
Volatility in the money supply creates boom and bust economic cycles. When individuals think they have more money than they really do (boom), they employ means of sustenance to service low priority goods, and these malinvestments cause prices of goods and services crash (bust).
There are two standard reactions in the bust phases, and both make future busts worse. First, government stimulus throws soft money at the productive class. The productive class use this money to chase real goods and services and drive prices higher. Second, banks cause economic apartheid by issuing just the right amount of loans tothe counterfeit class to qualify for bailouts without triggering risks that could break the system. They mitigate risks by lending primarily to the counterfeit class, which hold the legal monopolies required to steal enough stuff to pay them back.
Both reactions cause a system with too much debt and not enough dollars to service the debt to spin into a death spiral as the market continually reprices the issuer’s credit risk and the issuer is forced to attach ever higher interest on the debt. Afterall the banks have gone bust, the Fed becomes judge, jury, and executioner of a global financial system. Similar to the Soviet Union’s Gosbank, it will centralize all assets in the system into one ledger, giving themselves a central bank digital currency to freely lend and micromanage transactions.
Supranational organizations serve to accelerate the death spiral. The IMF and World Bank use the U.S. dollar to sell exploitation as development. Despite the holier than thou hand waving around both agencies, they merely replaced the imperialist sword with inescapable debt. Member states and their proxies stir up crises, install a dictator willing to accept predatory loans and structural adjustments, and extract these evil demands from the masses. The game is repeated to hook billions of people on foreign aid, devalue the local population’s currency, and drop export prices to turn the economy into a monoculture exclusively serving the global north.
At home, the difficulty of saving money for the future incentivizes individuals to value the present over the future.Individuals come to realize the futility of saving a failing dollar for future generations, so they spend it. Financial distress forces both parents to work soul crushing jobs or divorce. Without the structure and discipline of a nuclear family for support, young family members wander down harmful paths to find meaning and belonging.
These individuals are first tyrannized by a deterministic fiat education system. This system seeks to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority, create conformity, and sort individuals into different classes. Top-down edicts are counterproductive and expensive. The cost to send a student to a crime and drug ridden public school is far more than sending that student to a private school. Public schools churn out individuals like Carl Panzram, whereas private schools keep financial costs down and standards high in response to feedback from competitive market forces.
Universities are immune from these market forces as most of the money they receive comes from government research grants or federal loans for student tuition. Universities subscribe to prestigious journals, pressure faculty to submit studies supporting the conclusion that more research is needed, andcollect grant money for more research. Publishers take universities’ work, stick it behind a paywall, charge it back to universities at exorbitant amounts, and universities pass the costs along to students. There’s not a cost to being wrong, there’s only a cost to not publishing and improving the school’s rank. Unfortunately, education is not the only place where ideas live or die according to its ability to generate and secure funding.
For example, intellectual property rights give well capitalized and connected right holders access to thegovernment’s monopoly on violence to dictate how others can use their property. The counterfeit class declares ownership over the minds of individuals to establish property rights over an idea. This results not only in a subtle form of slavery but also disastrous economic consequences like endless litigation, stifled innovation, and monopoly prices. Another incoherent patchwork quilt of special interests designed to consolidate economic power in the counterfeit class is energy markets.
Economic growth tends to accelerate as energy consumption increases. Cost effective, high power, on-demand, continuous energy sources like natural gas and coal form the foundation of an extended market order of machines automating conditions for every individual to survive and flourish. Thesesources are battle tested to command a nature that’s dynamic, deficient, and dangerous. The proliferation of subsidized, unreliable, dilute intermittent flows of renewable power generation sources like solar and wind are the counterfeit class’s Malthusian plan to depopulate expensive, energy hungry humans behind the pretense of protecting Mother Gaia against climate change. The rollout of renewables is a ploy to impair individuals’ ability to channel energy across time.
An additive drag on individuals’ productivity stems from what individuals eat. Most of our food is supplied by large-scale industrial farmers monocropping huge swaths of agricultural land that mechanically, chemically, and physically destroys cover crops and root structures housing innumerable living organisms and feeding many more. A nutrient starved soil requires the continuous introduction of biocides, toxic industrial byproducts like seed oils which release polyunsaturated fatty acids in our bodies that deplete our ability to control oxygen and cause inflammation and chronic diseases like cancer, as well as genetic modifications and other harmful adulterations into our food supply to maximize short-term yields.
Farmers get roped into short turnaround times because they must reinvest in the next yield before they drown in continuously rising input costs. However, when farmers used hard money, they had enough financial runway to rotate longer-lived cattle and other ruminants around their natural habitat to graze grasses and shrubs down, till and fertilize the land, and reignite robust carbon, nitrogen, water cycling to reverse desertification, jumpstart a diverse ecosystem, and maximize long-term, healthy livestock and crop yields.
Using soft money, individuals are fed a steady diet of subsidized sugar, corn, and soy repackaged into highly addictive, poisonous, and palatable junk. This junk forms the basis of national dietary guidelines, which pervade advice from doctors and dieticians, cafeteria menus in hospitals and schools, and the military. Eating refined sugars build up fat around an individual’s organs, insulin resistance, and elevated levels of insulin which allow cancer cells to metastasize in an oxygen starved environment. A diet of predominantly plants, like corn and soy, over red meat yields humans that are generally shorter, weaker, and more prone to sickness.
When more people get sick and stay sick, more dollars pour into insurance, hospital, and pharmaceutical companies. The U.S. healthcare system is a quarter of the economy. Since the 1970s, the ratio of administrators to providers has ballooned roughly 1000x to brace their monopoly. Roughly half of the costs individuals pay go to paying for administrative staff. Providers, pharmaceutical companies, and hospitals spend most of their time maximizing billing and battling insurance companies instead of providing us with quality care. Insurers fight back because what they don’t pay on an individual’s behalf is their profit. In the end, patients are stuck with health andfinancial stressors that feed on one another until they die or file for bankruptcy.
The only interest group with more influence than healthcare over the dollar is the Zionist-backed military industrial complex. Henry Kissinger, a Zionist behind U.S. land grabs, said the quiet part out loud: “if you control the money, you control the world.”Since at least the beginning of the 20th century, the socialist Zionist movement spread convoluted Talmud interpretations and Rabbi zealotry to fuel international wars and steal money.
As WWI spread, European governments started to sendtheir gold to the U.S. for safekeeping. The Bank of England took this opportunity to circumvent weak domestic demand for war bonds by trading inflatable gold receipts for Treasury issued war bonds. Other European governments followed suit and financedwar expenses with this kind of soft money to keep up with Europe’s raging war machine.
In the death throes of WWI, the bill came due for the financially distressed British. Britain appealed to influential Zionists, particularly Lord Rothschild in the Balfour declaration, to dupe the strongest and richest remaining nation-state, theU.S., into joining the war. In exchange, Britain promised to give the Zionists Palestine to fulfill their ethnonationalist aspirations. Britain followed up on their promise in the 1930s by disarming the Palestinians while Chaim Weizmann raised a Zionist military to infiltrate Palestine. Military operations increased the land holdings in Palestine for Zionists from ~5% in 1945 to over ~90% today in the Israeli government’s land authority.
For millennia, Muslims, Christians, and Jews peacefully coexisted in Palestine with equal access to property rights under Muslim rule. However, American banking houses, owned and operated primarily by Zionists, controlled industrial juggernauts like GM, GE, Dupont, and Standard Oil, all of whom profited handsomely from a recurring cycle of more conflict, more attention, and more money. These banking houses bankrolled the likes of genocidal narcissists Trotsky and Hitler with the support of the New York banking fraternity. The fraternity included the Roosevelts and J.P Morgan, who touted more government intervention through the New Deal to aid and abet self-serving legal monopolies manifest in the concentrated industries of today.
Thus, the fiat system was a temporary measure to finance war at the turn of the 20th century gone awry. It became a permanent fixture when governments realized they couldn’t fulfill their financial obligations. Too many individuals had a vested interest in a system where they could get something for nothing.
