[Skybird]

Quote Skybird: Needless to say: we do not have that kind of money anymore, it got intentionally destroyed by states to expose citizens in greater helplessness and vulnerability to the state. More on that later.

Quote Oberon:I would say that this varies, there is still a market for barter through private means, ebay for example, and although it is a very competative market, there is a market for intellectual labour too. If there was not then people like Mark Zuckerberg would not have amassed a great fortune.
The opportunities are still there, but the competition is so great that many people are unable to get into the market. Is this the fault of the states or the inevitable result of a free market? But yes, we will cover this later.

I am clueless where you come from here, it seems to me you were replying to something that I did not say or mean, or that you misunderstood. I meant the way in which money basing on the gold standard was replaced with the gold derivates, and the gold derivates then was replaced with paper money. Could you elaborate on why you gave that answer of yours? I am in loss over it'S context.

Also do not know where to sort your mentioning of Ebay and Facebook.

Quote Skybird: As I hinted above, the reason for the rise of civilizations is: trade. Help it and foster. Hinder it, see it declining, and see civilization decline and empires fall. And then again the complex productivity cycle, specialisation, all what I said above. If I understand you correctly in what you say, then I think you are misled there in so far as that you seem to misidentify or misinterpret the solid material factors that enable empires and civilizations to blossom. Where there is plenty of ground and population to be supplied with food and stuff, there is needed an infrastructure, a transport of food and water and items and goods and services, there needs to be information traffic for coordination. All this needs specialisation by the individuals, and specialised individuals forming huge communities depend on means and a system of making all these quantities and items “inter-changeable”, so that you could compare their valuer: economic management, fiscal cost-effect calculations. Just having a government, no matter which kind, saying it should be like this or that, does not work. And this is one of the most devastating criticism you can aim at today's tyranny of government-printed FIAT paper-”money” and fiscal regulation by the state: that both prevent everybody joining the market as producer or customer to form such value comparisons and fiscal cost-effect calculations by eroding the basis on which such comaprsions could be run. For that, a free value-determination of money by the market is inevitably a precondition. But that is what politicians desperately try to prevent.

Quote Oberon: I am not entirely sure where you are coming from in this respect. I agree that the growth of a civilisation requires the networking of food, water and services...but where it falls apart is when you start mentioning about the prevention of everybody joining the market as producer of customer. Surely we are all in a market of some nature as a producer or consumer. For example, I produce security and cleanliness during my night-shift, for this I am paid and this money then goes into the purchase and consumption of both leisure and necessary items. Therefore at the most basic level I am a producer and consumer. Of course, there are people who are unable to produce, and some who are simply unwilling, and the latter spoil the life of the former by prejudicing the general public and government against them, but that is a rant for another topic completely.

No, what I mean is that you depend on money – true money – as a currency that does not get manipulated by the state in its “prescribed” value, but whose value gets negotiated by the market, because money is nothing special but is just like any other object category that gets freely traded. That seems to be something that many people do not see, and government reject it anyway, since it would threaten the very basis of their power and spending. Obviously, which is my argument, FIAT money does not represent market's assessment of the value of a given currency, it is not money like a gold-standard-money. You can see it today how distorted the relative values of the international currencies to each other are, and in the eurozone you cannot even speak of any market-based measurement of the value of the Euro it all, it is a completely political item now, it gets massively manipulated by governments, by low interest policy decisions, and by changing the ammount of printing money. Also, there is the problem of competitive and uncompetitive economies, with the latter no longer being able to compensate by devaluing their currency, which enforces a currency that is disconnected from their economic potency and competitiveness.

So what I mean is if you want to participate in the market, you depend on making calculations that compare costs versus effects, investments versus profits, items versus services, and so on. You need a commonly agreed standardised value for that, like you need an agreement on which numerical system to use in order to talk with somebody else about math. If the one bases on the decimal system and the other on the hexadecimal system and they are not aware of it, they run into problems. FIAT money is not value scaling that the market agrees on and that the market negotiates. It is government-made and -wanted, the value gets planned by planners, and if reality does not meet that in the real economy, than hectic efforts break out in order to manage the currency, to regulate the currency even more, to implement monetarian management, and so on and on and on – everything that politicians are so great in.

Money, correctly understood and left in its original format, does not need any monetarian policy or fiscal management, not at all! That is only needed if politicians want to manipulate money on behalf of their interest. It always is a distortion of money.

Also, FIAT money is different than a gold coin. A gold coin you ´can take to a trader, and you will always get the market price for gold for it. The currency not only represents a value, it IS a value. Cannot be said of a banknote. Imagine a currency collapses. If it was gold-based, then no mater the number on the coin you still can sell it as an item of gold. A banknote is just a worthless piece of paper if the printed number on it is no longer agreed to represent any mandatory service by the other whom you wan to pay with it for something, service or material item.

There is plenty of problems with FIAT money, and I would not even call it money, because it is not in the real meaning of the function that money had when it started to get used in the far away past. Value money is a value in itself, and real economy is linked to it and gets represented by it. FIAT money has no such value, but is an – legally not binding promise only, it is a debt bond. It is no value that goes beyond just a hoped-for value, and imagined value that is hoped to materialise in the future (FIAT: Latin: “it may become”, “it shall be” – the value shall still materialise in the future, but is not rere in the present). It is just a playing coin in a snowballing system where oyu place yoiur bet on debts. With real money that has nothing to do, nothing.

I recommend Detlev Schlichter: Paper Money Collapse. The Folly of Elastic Money, published 2011, and awarded with the Get Abstract International Book Award 2012: it's on the implications of FIAT money in today's present situation and why the collapse is not a question of If, but When; and again Rothbard's “What the state has done to our money”, which so nicely demonstrates why the states after WWI had such a huge self-interest to destroy value-money and replace it with paper-tokens and debt bonds instead. And that is exlcusively about accumulating power for the state, and making the citizens more dependent on the state, and exposing them to the state's claims in maximum weakness possible. Paying war bills after 1918, 1945 and 1971 has less to do with it than usually gets mentioned. I fell for that explanation myself in the past, but I had to realise that I was wrong there and that the explanation is too superficial

In an indeal world for a government, every member of society would produce work-hours and consume the result of the work-hours of other people. For example, my security and cleanliness enables people who stay at the hotel I work at to sleep in the knowledge that the place is unlikely to burn down around them and when they eat their breakfast in the morning it is unlikely to be shared by a cockroach or a rat. Equally, when I go to a shop, I am paying for the products of someone elses work, be it a person working on an assembly line, or a farmer growing the crops that I eat.
Obviously in todays market the person who grow the crops is likely to live on the other side of the planet, but aside from the fact that the entire world (well, most of it) is a market now, what is the difference between this and the world of six hundred years ago when democracies were rare and few and far between?

The two different moneys back then and today make the difference. The first cannot destroy the economic cycle. The latter can, and due to the inner dynamics of both FIAT money and a democratic system, it inevitably will.

A printed banknote saying “one dollar”, leaves oyu dpeending on the good willingness of the other whith whom you trade. One silver dollar however will always get you as far as one dollar reaches, you do not need the good willingness of the other.

In principle, every time you accept to get payed with FIAT money, you gamble on that the snowballing system will carry on.

But one day, it will no longer. And then only the one at the top wins. All others loose.

I forgot to mention another detail, although I explained it briefly in some other, older thread, I recall. That democracy see politicians making ever growing promises and voters demanding ever more, and that this in an unholy alliance between the two that leads always to the state spending more than it can afford, should have become clear by now. There is also another reason why states' elites love to print money. In a healthy economy, it does not matter whether there is more or less of items circulating that are being used as money, coins for example. If there is a shortage in gold coins, now rare gold becomes precious and prices for other items thus go down: you get more for your gold coin than before. If there get gold coins pumped into the market, gold becomes less valuable, and you have to give more coins for the same item like before, since prices go up. The market manages the money all by itself, no government intervention needed. Of course, the state must have the economic power to produce more gold coins, to buy the gold for minting, and so on. The state cannot just flood the market with goldcoins as he pleases, it is not possible (and that is why value-currencies basing on some form of gold (or other) standard are an insurance against criminal politicians as long as they cannot secure a minting monopoly for themselves and then replace part of the gold in a coin with bronze, silver with tin). It does not matter how much currency pieces are circulating. But today? Paper money allows the state to print money as he pleases, without any control and without any limitation, it does not represent actual real value anyway. The central bank decides to print money, the market gets flooded – and then it takes a while until the inflationary effect drips down from the top to the bottom level of the economic system. That means that for a short while those getting that fresh new money first in their hands, for a short time can buy items at the old, still not adapted price, and with money of which they have for some time more (in buying power), than before. Without doing anything for it, they have a temporary boost in buying power of theirs! Which makes a nice net profit – for nothing! Later, when time has passed and the fresh market got soaked up by all levels of the economy, prices have adapted and went up and you have to pay more of your paper tickets for one item now. That explains to you also what so often is wondered about, if you listen to the economic news: it explains why the injection of new money into the market almost always has no lasting effect and especially has no effect on most parts of an economy. The middle class business only rarely, if ever,. Benefits from such programs. It is always the big sharks, the top players who really are at the very top, who get the cream. The rest – is left with the consequences of growing inflation. Those who benefit from all this, are at the very top of the food chain, because they get their hands on the new money first, and then profit from the still non-adapted prices. Now you know why so many of the elites secretly or often even openly claim that it is in the state's interest to have a certain amount of inflation(which is nothing else but printing money and pumping it into the market), and why a certain amount of inflation is claimed top be desirable. Well, logic and reason has nothing to do with why it is desirable, so much is for certain. A wanted inflation the state cannot enforce with a gold standard currency. Before getting the card blanche for inflation policies, the state must destroy value currencies and must replace them with debt-based paper-tokens that are not linked to and do not represent real value or real economy treasury in a realistic proportion .

It's not a market but a planned economy from A to Z, in this regard. Damn planners. Has the WP economy not shown where that leads...