I have a different idea: get rid of the Federal reserve bank, of the IRS, of income based taxes, of FDIC, FHA and all other moral hazards where the government is 'insuring' something, anything. Let the people decide what they want to use for money, cash, digital, whatever. Try actual freedom again, maybe you will end up with a better economy and will actually improve your standard of living and won't worry too much about coins.
People started companies, built products, invented services and they did so in HOPE that they could TRADE with others for what the others produce, and that's not a 4000 year old idea, that's today. Everybody who goes to work and does something productive, does so to get the means to exchange for the goods/services that somebody else provides. That's what trade is all about.
Without trade we only live on what we can manage to make/gather/grow/find ourselves for ourselves, that's called being a hunter-gatherer or a subsistence farmer. You can also steal of-course, but stealing comes in many different forms.
One form of theft is to make NOTHING yet to get your hands on some money (taxes, printing, borrowing without any hope of returning it) that somebody else made by doing something useful and then use that stolen money to buy legitimate goods. That's the USA economy today.
Without production nobody trades, nobody exchanges anything. If literally there are 2 people on the planet and one fishes and the other one grows wheat, all you can do is trade fish for wheat. There is nothing else that is produced.
If a third person appears and sees your whet/fish trade, he may come up with a new product, for example tomatoes to cultivate and grow to exchange for your wheat and fish. He *CREATED* the new product and this product is something he could consume himself and because he knows he can consume it, he knows you can consume it. Since you didn't have tomatoes before, you only had wheat and fish, you would very likely want to trade for tomatoes.
However if a fourth guy came in and used a gun he had to take your fish and the wheat and tomatoes, he didn't provide you with anything, he just took your stuff. If instead of a gun he printed some paper money and convinced you to trade paper money for your fish, for the wheat, for the tomatoes, you would have that paper money. You could store the paper money, you could later come back to that guy and ask him for something useful back for that paper money.
He would just offer you other bills in exchange for the bills that he gave you earlier. What did you gain from that transaction? You can't eat paper money. Maybe you can use it as decoration or burn it, but it wouldn't be very good fuel.
If the third guy didn't come up with tomatoes you would just eat fish and wheat. But if tomatoes are introduced into the system, then you can consume them, not before they actually exist there. So consumption is a *TRIVIAL* consequence of that production and the reason you can enjoy those tomatoes is because you produce something that is of value for trade (fish).
This is as simple as it gets, it's not more complicated than that in the actual human economy today. Sure, we have more instruments, we have insurance, we want to hedge our bets, we have means of storage and accounting and exchange (money). But just creating money in itself is not something that creates value, money is a measurement of value, it is a way to exchange actual goods and services and it is a way to account for the exchanged amounts.
Money is unit of account, store of value and means of exchange. People don't trade for money, they trade for goods and services. Until somebody saves and creates those goods and services you cannot consume them. You have a *poorer* choice, that's all.
Walking is not a substitute for a car because cars can go hundreds of miles a day and they can carry a ton of useful weight. You can't replace that with walking.
Consumption is a trivial consequence of production. I can point at every business that was started with an idea for a product or a service, somebody put up their savings as investment and before the first sale ever took place money and time was spent to build the product or service.
Without somebody doing all of that there is nothing to consume at all. Yes, these things are done with the idea that once you provide them people would buy and the business makes money, but ability to consume comes from ability to produce.
2 parties exchange goods and services, not goods or services from one side and printed / taxed / borrowed paper from another (not for long). That's because the expectation is that there is *trade*, not charity. If a guy builds a car, he expects to sell it to people who build something else in return and he can consume it as well, otherwise building car is useful for the guy only in the sense that he can build that car for himself but not for anybody else, who expects to live on charity.
All economics is supply side or more correctly production economics. Consumptions economics is nonsense, everything that is consumed has to be produced first. Those who don't get it need to get a 1,000,000 dollars and a year vacation on a rock in the middle of an ocean somewhere without any productive land, without anything. Then see how you survive with a million bucks and nothing to buy for them.
1911 - Sherman act is applied to Standard Oil, one of the most successful companies on the planet, producing the richest person in history. Rockefeller started with nothing but was worth over 600,000,000,000 inflation adjusted dollars. Private property rights took a gigantic hit.
1913 - IRS is set up. Income taxes are now collected by the government instead of Constitutional capitation, excise, import, duty taxes. Not only private property rights are destroyed but basically self determination and self ownership is destroyed at this moment in time.
1913 - Federal reserve bank is set up. A supposedly private institution to print US dollar but at the time by law the Fed actually would have a higher reserve of gold per dollar printed than other banks.
1917 - Federal reserve bank is allowed by Congress to monetize USA Treasury debt. This begins the inflation that destroyed the USA economy over the next 100 years.
1920 - a depression happens during Harding, the government didn't participate, didn't create any new policies, didn't create new debt, didn't infuse money into the economy. The depression is over in about a year.
1925 - Federal reserve bank starts monetizing UK debt that USA buys from the French. Over the next 4 years this policy inflates a bubble in agricultural stocks that blows up in 1929.
1929 - The bubble inflated by the Federal reserve bank blows up, this restructures the debts, companies fail, stocks go down. (Hayek, Andreson, Harwood predict this depression, Keynes actually loses money in it.)
1929 - 1939 - a series of gigantic interventionist policies is implemented. Billions of dollars are printed and spent into the economy, even on such amazing feats of government nonsensical Keynesian bullshit like buying productive output from farmers and ploughing it into the ground to prevent prices from going down (trying to prevent the deflation during a recession, when deflation and falling prices are actually super helpful for people who lost their jobs). The nonsensical 'New Deal' is introduced. SS is started, minimum wage is introduced, etc.etc., all the things that governments promise to do to provide something for nothing. This something obviously to be paid for by huge taxes, printing, borrowing.
1945 - the end of WWII, USA lowers its taxes by 30%, lowers spending by 60%. This allows very fast transition from war to post war economy. USA economy booms even though it is faced with competition from other markets with much lower labour costs.
1950s through 1970s - hot wars, cold war, space race, 'war on poverty' and all the other unnecessary and expensive crap that could not be paid for lead to 1971, when Nixon defaults on the gold dollar because of all the outstanding debts that cannot be paid for. The French asked for their gold and were denied, the dollar default coupled with all the impossible and unsustainable programs lead to the stagnation of 1970s. Huge inflation and huge unemployment, something that Keynes wouldn't believe to be possible.
1981 - Paul Volcker takes interest rates to about 20% to stop inflation. This succeeds in stopping the inflation, causes a housing market bubble crash. Government started coming up with ideas on how to under report inflation, under report unemployment and over report GDP.
Oh, more nonsense by Marxist/Leninist/Keyneisianist.
Consumption is a trivial consequence of production. People have to produce first before anything at all can be consumed. Production requires investments. Investments come from savings. Even Keynes knew that even though his ideas on agreggate demand and government role in it were garbage, but even he advocated for deficit spending during bad years but then during the good years he advocated for rebuilding savings. USA never rebuilt any savings since the creation of the Federal reserve bank and the act of 1917 allowing the Fed to monetise US Treasury debt.
-------- What strangled the economy was printing all the dollars and Nixon defaulting on the gold dollar once the USA government printed all that money that it could never back with the gold it had. There is always enough gold, the only question is the relative price of gold to things, including to currencies.
Keynes was not an economist, he did not understand the economy, but he was correctly observing that increase of productivity leads to shorter working week, since that is what happened when switching from mostly agrarian economy to the industrial one. Keynes had the idea that government needed to intervene to create 'aggregate demand' when people slowed down consumption. Of course that is garbage economics, people slowing down consumption is necessary to rebuild their dwindling savings and restructure debts. Businesses should be restructured, that is what recession part of the business cycle does. Government increasing consumption via either taxation, borrowing or printing is negating the necessary effect of forcing the restructuring and deepening the problem that led to recession in the first place. Governments based on Keynesian garbage 'economics' prevent restructuring, deepen the problem of resource misallocation and lengthen and deepen the business cycle. Once no savings are left, no credit is available the only thing that a government can do to follow these garbage 'economics' is print fiat. Eventually the value of fiat drops enough that operating in it is meaningless. Getting off the gold allows this printing to continue unchecked.
The mistake in this story is multiple fold. First of all 35% of people who could be working in the USA are not working. Yet they survive, that is the welfare state effects but it shows that the productivity is not distributed evenly. SOME people are productive SOMEWHERE to give Americans all these goods in exchange for the printed dollar that 35% of them don't even have to work while the rest of them are not producing enough to feed the country, which is more than obvious after 20 years of 500,000,000,000 a year trade deficits and close to 200,000,000,000,000 dollars of debt on all levels, federal, state, municipal, private. Printing, borrowing, taxing is taking productivity of those, who are still trading with the USA in exchange for the printed paper and IOUs for more printed paper.
Economy is production. Consumption is a trivial consequence of production, not the other way around. Money that is printed and spent to support failing economies makes the problem worse with each new dollar, that is spent on foreign goods, increasing the trade deficits and debts.
Keynes was not an economist but a charlatan, but the governments love his garbage 'economics' because it gives them power. Ability to print money is the ultimate power and it is the wrong thing tondo, to give governments that power over the people's economies.
Productivity is increasing and people are working less. Only these are the people in China and other places, where former peasants are now factory, office and service sector employees instead of being subsistence farmers.
Productivity of business owners is increasing as they use their savings to automate processes that used to require manual work. Productivity of an average American is *negative* as they are consuming without producing enough even to offset what they are consuming. But this is the problem of
What strangled the economy was printing all the dollars and Nixon defaulting on the gold dollar once the USA government printed all that money that it could never back with the gold it had. There is always enough gold, the only question is the relative price of gold to things, including to currencies.
I am replying to your comment but I also will reply to the rest of the stinky nonsense that is in the comments to this story, I only have 2 comments I can make in 24hours on this site, so...
Keynes was not an economist, he did not understand the economy, but he was correctly observing that increase of productivity leads to shorter working week, since that is what happened when switching from mostly agrarian economy to the industrial one. Keynes had the idea that government needed to intervene to create 'aggregate demand' when people slowed down consumption. Of course that is garbage economics, people slowing down consumption is necessary to rebuild their dwindling savings and restructure debts. Businesses should be restructured, that is what recession part of the business cycle does. Government increasing consumption via either taxation, borrowing or printing is negating the necessary effect of forcing the restructuring and deepening the problem that led to recession in the first place. Governments based on Keynesian garbage 'economics' prevent restructuring, deepen the problem of resource misallocation and lengthen and deepen the business cycle. Once no savings are left, no credit is available the only thing that a government can do to follow these garbage 'economics' is print fiat. Eventually the value of fiat drops enough that operating in it is meaningless. Getting off the gold allows this printing to continue unchecked.
The mistake in this story is multiple fold. First of all 35% of people who could be working in the USA are not working. Yet they survive, that is the welfare state effects but it shows that the productivity is not distributed evenly. SOME people are productive SOMEWHERE to give Americans all these goods in exchange for the printed dollar that 35% of them don't even have to work while the rest of them are not producing enough to feed the country, which is more than obvious after 20 years of 500,000,000,000 a year trade deficits and close to 200,000,000,000,000 dollars of debt on all levels, federal, state, municipal, private. Printing, borrowing, taxing is taking productivity of those, who are still trading with the USA in exchange for the printed paper and IOUs for more printed paper.
Economy is production. Consumption is a trivial consequence of production, not the other way around. Money that is printed and spent to support failing economies makes the problem worse with each new dollar, that is spent on foreign goods, increasing the trade deficits and debts.
Keynes was not an economist but a charlatan, but the governments love his garbage 'economics' because it gives them power. Ability to print money is the ultimate power and it is the wrong thing tondo, to give governments that power over the people's economies.
Productivity is increasing and people are working less. Only these are the people in China and other places, where former peasants are now factory, office and service sector employees instead of being subsistence farmers.
Productivity of business owners is increasing as they use their savings to automate processes that used to require manual work. Productivity of an average American is *negative* as they are consuming without producing enough even to offset what they are consuming. But this is the problem of collectivism, central planning, Keynesianism and fake money not blacked by anything.
Even Keynes was not this stupid, he proposed deficit spending during recessions but he also proposed rebuilding the rainy day fund during economic boom. USA never rebuilt its savings, it deficit spent always, it has no rainy day fund at all, it only has the rain.
"Thank you." Fourmyle dosed the platinum Hunter. "My address is Old St. Patrick's, New York. There's one thing to be said for the outlawed religions... At least they built churches big enough to house a circus."
It's not different from people advocating for higher rate of taxation on those, who are richer than they themselves. I of-course, find all levels of taxation abhorrent and I find all NSA spying abhorrent as well. I find governments abhorrent and I would never advocate for any form of government. I think individual freedom supersedes all other concerns, especially collectivist concerns. AFAIC freedom of an individual is more important than existence of the species.
Money monopolization by government is an artefact of oppression inherit in government systems. People decided what money is forever, governments usurped the power, so I completely reject your assertion that any form of government oppression is necessary to figure out what money is.
Exactly the same thing applies to contracts. Contract law is a private matter, not a government one. As to transportation, government only creates barriers to transportation. Phone networks are a business, same with ISPs and all other forms of communications, Internet based or otherwise.
I built a *company* from scratch, the framework that I work within is based on oppression and violence that you decide is necessary and I reject that notion, it is not necessary, it is counter productive and immoral.
Are you so obtuse that you cannot fathom how a bridge can be built (and is often built) without government but still with management by the private interest driven by the market need? No, you are pretending to be that obtuse. No, we don't need any government to exist at all but we do need projects to be managed, which is why people running private companies understand the need for project management.
I built my own company and I understand what project management is, but it has nothing to do with government, it has to do with legitimate market need that I fulfil where other people are willing to pay me to use my products and services. What a surprise, a company is a system built by an individual (or individuals), it uses project management and instead of stealing money through violence of taxation and violence of counterfeiting currency it sells its services and products to willing participants without any coercion whatsoever.
/. is an editorial. I agree with the summary, the point of government programs is to grow government programs, spending and power. Why else would a government spend at all if not to perpetuate itself?
Government exists because it exists. It exists because everybody is used to it existing. It is 'legitimate' because everybody is used to it being known as 'legitimate'.
Government exists because it has the most guns, not for any other reason at all. It is the biggest thing with the most guns and it never hesitates to use those guns to threaten, imprison and murder, be it in external wars (military occupations) it starts or internal wars (police state) it nurtures into existence.
- for the same reason you cannot be trusted to do anything on your own under your own initiative in the Collectivist States of America. You are not allowed to be an individual, you are not allowed to save for your own retirement (the Fed makes sure you are not and SS gives you an impression that you don't need to, all of this is a sham of-course).
You are not allowed to choose what you will eat, how you will get from point A to point B on your own, what you want to use for medication, for recreation. If you are a woman you don't even own your body, the State controls it with 'anti-prostitution' nonsense and the religious right tries to control it with the 'anti-abortion' nonsense while the collectivists want to control what you make, how you negotiate, what you are paid in, etc.
When everything is centrally planned nobody is allowed to be free.
Oh, it is the moderation of dissent into oblivion, the consolidation of all forums into FB, G+ and Twitter, the pussification (feminization) - sjw, the consumption based on debt, which leads to depedency and complacency within the system, the globalization of the effort to silence all opposition by every government out there. The bread and circuses mentality took over. The big economic crash will shake people out of this trance but since people do not learn from history I expect totalitarian 'solutions' to the problems created by the collectivists.
A Nazi? A nationalist (ethnicity or territory or custom based collectivist), socialist (anti individual - collectivist), democrat (rule of the mob - collectivist)? You are much closer to that definition, I am certain of it. I am as anti Nazi as one can get. You, on the other hand, are advocating theft, oppression, dependency, destruction of individual freedoms and slavery with the pro welfare ideology.
Numbers instead of user names and 3 failed password attempts leading to a daily suspension of the account for anything, including 'welfare payment'? I have an idea how to terminate the horrendous practice of a welfare state. This includes a 'for' loop counting into millions with another 'for' loop inside it that only does 3 iterations...
As always this is a case of "do what I say, not what I do" by a government agency. Will they finally shut down deceptive political ads, campaigns and promises that are delivered not only on the web but also in print, on the radio and on the TV? Didn't think so. The most outrageous lies are coming out of mouths of the politicians, not companies trying to sell you yet another ice cream, a car or a pair of shoes.
Precisely. Eventually it will become apparent that regulation can never catch up and is standing in the way of human progress, the faster we create new technologies, the more obvious it is. The only thing that government can do in this situation is prohibit everything new by default and then take a thousand years to sift through everything, but it will not sift through anything, the prohibitions will not work and eventually the governments will be obvious for what they are: outdated systems of governance.
People do not need global and federal governments, people need to be able to live with each other where they are at that moment in time. Technology will replace governments in that regard and the only role that governments will hold onto will be militaristic and maintaining monopolies for the donors. I think technology will deal with that as well over time and I am against national governments having weapons that individuals cannot fight against. I think governments need to be disarmed, not individuals. Governments can and do murder millions at a time once again, at the behest of the donors.
It is time to disarm the donors by disarming the governments. The only way to stop corruption and oppression is to remove the legitimacy of any government to oppress.
Bullshit! It's like saying to any inmate (and most in the USA are imprisoned for non-violent drug offences that shouldn't even be 'offences') -Out you go, here is the door, be on your way now. Then running after them (years later actually) and saying: aaah, back in you go, our mistake.
It's interesting that Donald Trump was criticised for voicing his position on halting any new Muslims from coming to the country and yet apparently it's happening already with the current USA administration. I guess the difference is that... they are not promising to do it, they are just doing it. Of-course they are not stopping all new Muslims yet, but once you have the precedent of stopping some Muslims from even visiting the country who is to say that stopping all Muslims is the boundary that the government will not cross? Camel's nose under the tent (or was it his toe?)
Nice Orwellian doublespeak. What you are calling for is childish, collectivism is childish, not self reliance. By the way, as an employer I would not tolerate a union at my work place, I already have my development team spread around the world of-course as this is a good cost saving strategy, but it is also a useful strategy against these types of incidents. I can close down any particular shop in any one location should it try a stunt like that and continue with the rest.
Actually merchants are constantly hit with all sorts of client fraud. people are using stolen credit cards, stolen PayPal accounts, stolen everything. Weather it is hosted checkout (what you are talking about) or an API call to a payment processor, the merchant can get a payment token back (a pseudo random string with the last 4 digits being the last four digits of the credit card). The reason for this is to be able to identify a transaction for a refund or for fraud investigation. As a merchant I avoid storing any user information that I do not need specifically because I want to limit liability. Storing a transaction token, client name, payment amount, payment date and also expiry date on the card and address is useful for fraud investigation and this happens constantly - there are millions of thieves out there and if you don't do anything to protect yourself the payment processors and the banks will hang it all on you and as a small business, a merchant or a service provider you will be hit with back charges and various fines for each transaction that the bank claims was fraudulent. So if a thief uses your service and then the real credit card owner complaints, as a business you are out of money for the service / product and you will be paying a fairly large amount to the payment processor per transaction (on the order of 50USD per transaction that is reversed). If you don't store any information at all, you are fucked.
One of the payment processors we use (FirstData) started enforcing no TLS1.0 over half a year ago now. This broke compatibility with quite a few browsers, including some on a bunch of android devices.
However where it comes to PCI compliance it was always a joke and it never had any credibility in the first place. It's been a rubber stamp since the beginning. Even the enforcement I am talking about is fictitious, we only have to ensure that during the scan we are 'compliant' but not in the time between the scans. Besides, all you have to do to certify is answer 'yes', 'yes', 'yes' or 'no', 'no', 'no' to a few hundred questions, pass an online scan and you are done.
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I have a different idea: get rid of the Federal reserve bank, of the IRS, of income based taxes, of FDIC, FHA and all other moral hazards where the government is 'insuring' something, anything. Let the people decide what they want to use for money, cash, digital, whatever. Try actual freedom again, maybe you will end up with a better economy and will actually improve your standard of living and won't worry too much about coins.
People started companies, built products, invented services and they did so in HOPE that they could TRADE with others for what the others produce, and that's not a 4000 year old idea, that's today. Everybody who goes to work and does something productive, does so to get the means to exchange for the goods/services that somebody else provides. That's what trade is all about.
Without trade we only live on what we can manage to make/gather/grow/find ourselves for ourselves, that's called being a hunter-gatherer or a subsistence farmer. You can also steal of-course, but stealing comes in many different forms.
One form of theft is to make NOTHING yet to get your hands on some money (taxes, printing, borrowing without any hope of returning it) that somebody else made by doing something useful and then use that stolen money to buy legitimate goods. That's the USA economy today.
Without production nobody trades, nobody exchanges anything. If literally there are 2 people on the planet and one fishes and the other one grows wheat, all you can do is trade fish for wheat. There is nothing else that is produced.
If a third person appears and sees your whet/fish trade, he may come up with a new product, for example tomatoes to cultivate and grow to exchange for your wheat and fish. He *CREATED* the new product and this product is something he could consume himself and because he knows he can consume it, he knows you can consume it. Since you didn't have tomatoes before, you only had wheat and fish, you would very likely want to trade for tomatoes.
However if a fourth guy came in and used a gun he had to take your fish and the wheat and tomatoes, he didn't provide you with anything, he just took your stuff. If instead of a gun he printed some paper money and convinced you to trade paper money for your fish, for the wheat, for the tomatoes, you would have that paper money. You could store the paper money, you could later come back to that guy and ask him for something useful back for that paper money.
He would just offer you other bills in exchange for the bills that he gave you earlier. What did you gain from that transaction? You can't eat paper money. Maybe you can use it as decoration or burn it, but it wouldn't be very good fuel.
If the third guy didn't come up with tomatoes you would just eat fish and wheat. But if tomatoes are introduced into the system, then you can consume them, not before they actually exist there. So consumption is a *TRIVIAL* consequence of that production and the reason you can enjoy those tomatoes is because you produce something that is of value for trade (fish).
This is as simple as it gets, it's not more complicated than that in the actual human economy today. Sure, we have more instruments, we have insurance, we want to hedge our bets, we have means of storage and accounting and exchange (money). But just creating money in itself is not something that creates value, money is a measurement of value, it is a way to exchange actual goods and services and it is a way to account for the exchanged amounts.
Money is unit of account, store of value and means of exchange. People don't trade for money, they trade for goods and services. Until somebody saves and creates those goods and services you cannot consume them. You have a *poorer* choice, that's all.
Walking is not a substitute for a car because cars can go hundreds of miles a day and they can carry a ton of useful weight. You can't replace that with walking.
Consumption is a trivial consequence of production. I can point at every business that was started with an idea for a product or a service, somebody put up their savings as investment and before the first sale ever took place money and time was spent to build the product or service.
Without somebody doing all of that there is nothing to consume at all. Yes, these things are done with the idea that once you provide them people would buy and the business makes money, but ability to consume comes from ability to produce.
2 parties exchange goods and services, not goods or services from one side and printed / taxed / borrowed paper from another (not for long). That's because the expectation is that there is *trade*, not charity. If a guy builds a car, he expects to sell it to people who build something else in return and he can consume it as well, otherwise building car is useful for the guy only in the sense that he can build that car for himself but not for anybody else, who expects to live on charity.
USD is the world reserve currency. In 1971 Nixon took the world PFF the gold.
For the people who actually do care to learn something about the Great Depression that they are not generally taught in schools (normally they are taught nonsensical government version of it).
All economics is supply side or more correctly production economics. Consumptions economics is nonsense, everything that is consumed has to be produced first. Those who don't get it need to get a 1,000,000 dollars and a year vacation on a rock in the middle of an ocean somewhere without any productive land, without anything. Then see how you survive with a million bucks and nothing to buy for them.
1911 - Sherman act is applied to Standard Oil, one of the most successful companies on the planet, producing the richest person in history. Rockefeller started with nothing but was worth over 600,000,000,000 inflation adjusted dollars. Private property rights took a gigantic hit.
1913 - IRS is set up. Income taxes are now collected by the government instead of Constitutional capitation, excise, import, duty taxes. Not only private property rights are destroyed but basically self determination and self ownership is destroyed at this moment in time.
1913 - Federal reserve bank is set up. A supposedly private institution to print US dollar but at the time by law the Fed actually would have a higher reserve of gold per dollar printed than other banks.
1917 - Federal reserve bank is allowed by Congress to monetize USA Treasury debt. This begins the inflation that destroyed the USA economy over the next 100 years.
1920 - a depression happens during Harding, the government didn't participate, didn't create any new policies, didn't create new debt, didn't infuse money into the economy. The depression is over in about a year.
1925 - Federal reserve bank starts monetizing UK debt that USA buys from the French. Over the next 4 years this policy inflates a bubble in agricultural stocks that blows up in 1929.
1929 - The bubble inflated by the Federal reserve bank blows up, this restructures the debts, companies fail, stocks go down. (Hayek, Andreson, Harwood predict this depression, Keynes actually loses money in it.)
1929 - 1939 - a series of gigantic interventionist policies is implemented. Billions of dollars are printed and spent into the economy, even on such amazing feats of government nonsensical Keynesian bullshit like buying productive output from farmers and ploughing it into the ground to prevent prices from going down (trying to prevent the deflation during a recession, when deflation and falling prices are actually super helpful for people who lost their jobs). The nonsensical 'New Deal' is introduced. SS is started, minimum wage is introduced, etc.etc., all the things that governments promise to do to provide something for nothing. This something obviously to be paid for by huge taxes, printing, borrowing.
1945 - the end of WWII, USA lowers its taxes by 30%, lowers spending by 60%. This allows very fast transition from war to post war economy. USA economy booms even though it is faced with competition from other markets with much lower labour costs.
1950s through 1970s - hot wars, cold war, space race, 'war on poverty' and all the other unnecessary and expensive crap that could not be paid for lead to 1971, when Nixon defaults on the gold dollar because of all the outstanding debts that cannot be paid for. The French asked for their gold and were denied, the dollar default coupled with all the impossible and unsustainable programs lead to the stagnation of 1970s. Huge inflation and huge unemployment, something that Keynes wouldn't believe to be possible.
1981 - Paul Volcker takes interest rates to about 20% to stop inflation. This succeeds in stopping the inflation, causes a housing market bubble crash. Government started coming up with ideas on how to under report inflation, under report unemployment and over report GDP.
1982-1987 - the Fed starts
Oh, more nonsense by Marxist/Leninist/Keyneisianist.
Consumption is a trivial consequence of production. People have to produce first before anything at all can be consumed. Production requires investments. Investments come from savings. Even Keynes knew that even though his ideas on agreggate demand and government role in it were garbage, but even he advocated for deficit spending during bad years but then during the good years he advocated for rebuilding savings. USA never rebuilt any savings since the creation of the Federal reserve bank and the act of 1917 allowing the Fed to monetise US Treasury debt.
--------
What strangled the economy was printing all the dollars and Nixon defaulting on the gold dollar once the USA government printed all that money that it could never back with the gold it had. There is always enough gold, the only question is the relative price of gold to things, including to currencies.
Keynes was not an economist, he did not understand the economy, but he was correctly observing that increase of productivity leads to shorter working week, since that is what happened when switching from mostly agrarian economy to the industrial one. Keynes had the idea that government needed to intervene to create 'aggregate demand' when people slowed down consumption. Of course that is garbage economics, people slowing down consumption is necessary to rebuild their dwindling savings and restructure debts. Businesses should be restructured, that is what recession part of the business cycle does. Government increasing consumption via either taxation, borrowing or printing is negating the necessary effect of forcing the restructuring and deepening the problem that led to recession in the first place. Governments based on Keynesian garbage 'economics' prevent restructuring, deepen the problem of resource misallocation and lengthen and deepen the business cycle. Once no savings are left, no credit is available the only thing that a government can do to follow these garbage 'economics' is print fiat. Eventually the value of fiat drops enough that operating in it is meaningless. Getting off the gold allows this printing to continue unchecked.
The mistake in this story is multiple fold. First of all 35% of people who could be working in the USA are not working. Yet they survive, that is the welfare state effects but it shows that the productivity is not distributed evenly. SOME people are productive SOMEWHERE to give Americans all these goods in exchange for the printed dollar that 35% of them don't even have to work while the rest of them are not producing enough to feed the country, which is more than obvious after 20 years of 500,000,000,000 a year trade deficits and close to 200,000,000,000,000 dollars of debt on all levels, federal, state, municipal, private. Printing, borrowing, taxing is taking productivity of those, who are still trading with the USA in exchange for the printed paper and IOUs for more printed paper.
Economy is production. Consumption is a trivial consequence of production, not the other way around. Money that is printed and spent to support failing economies makes the problem worse with each new dollar, that is spent on foreign goods, increasing the trade deficits and debts.
Keynes was not an economist but a charlatan, but the governments love his garbage 'economics' because it gives them power. Ability to print money is the ultimate power and it is the wrong thing tondo, to give governments that power over the people's economies.
Productivity is increasing and people are working less. Only these are the people in China and other places, where former peasants are now factory, office and service sector employees instead of being subsistence farmers.
Productivity of business owners is increasing as they use their savings to automate processes that used to require manual work. Productivity of an average American is *negative* as they are consuming without producing enough even to offset what they are consuming. But this is the problem of
What strangled the economy was printing all the dollars and Nixon defaulting on the gold dollar once the USA government printed all that money that it could never back with the gold it had. There is always enough gold, the only question is the relative price of gold to things, including to currencies.
I am replying to your comment but I also will reply to the rest of the stinky nonsense that is in the comments to this story, I only have 2 comments I can make in 24hours on this site, so...
Keynes was not an economist, he did not understand the economy, but he was correctly observing that increase of productivity leads to shorter working week, since that is what happened when switching from mostly agrarian economy to the industrial one. Keynes had the idea that government needed to intervene to create 'aggregate demand' when people slowed down consumption. Of course that is garbage economics, people slowing down consumption is necessary to rebuild their dwindling savings and restructure debts. Businesses should be restructured, that is what recession part of the business cycle does. Government increasing consumption via either taxation, borrowing or printing is negating the necessary effect of forcing the restructuring and deepening the problem that led to recession in the first place. Governments based on Keynesian garbage 'economics' prevent restructuring, deepen the problem of resource misallocation and lengthen and deepen the business cycle. Once no savings are left, no credit is available the only thing that a government can do to follow these garbage 'economics' is print fiat. Eventually the value of fiat drops enough that operating in it is meaningless. Getting off the gold allows this printing to continue unchecked.
The mistake in this story is multiple fold. First of all 35% of people who could be working in the USA are not working. Yet they survive, that is the welfare state effects but it shows that the productivity is not distributed evenly. SOME people are productive SOMEWHERE to give Americans all these goods in exchange for the printed dollar that 35% of them don't even have to work while the rest of them are not producing enough to feed the country, which is more than obvious after 20 years of 500,000,000,000 a year trade deficits and close to 200,000,000,000,000 dollars of debt on all levels, federal, state, municipal, private. Printing, borrowing, taxing is taking productivity of those, who are still trading with the USA in exchange for the printed paper and IOUs for more printed paper.
Economy is production. Consumption is a trivial consequence of production, not the other way around. Money that is printed and spent to support failing economies makes the problem worse with each new dollar, that is spent on foreign goods, increasing the trade deficits and debts.
Keynes was not an economist but a charlatan, but the governments love his garbage 'economics' because it gives them power. Ability to print money is the ultimate power and it is the wrong thing tondo, to give governments that power over the people's economies.
Productivity is increasing and people are working less. Only these are the people in China and other places, where former peasants are now factory, office and service sector employees instead of being subsistence farmers.
Productivity of business owners is increasing as they use their savings to automate processes that used to require manual work. Productivity of an average American is *negative* as they are consuming without producing enough even to offset what they are consuming. But this is the problem of collectivism, central planning, Keynesianism and fake money not blacked by anything.
Even Keynes was not this stupid, he proposed deficit spending during recessions but he also proposed rebuilding the rainy day fund during economic boom. USA never rebuilt its savings, it deficit spent always, it has no rainy day fund at all, it only has the rain.
This reminded me of a quote from The Stars My Destination (which I read under the title Tiger! Tiger!)
"Thank you." Fourmyle dosed the platinum Hunter. "My address is Old St. Patrick's, New York. There's one thing to be said for the outlawed religions ... At least they built churches big enough to house a circus."
Why driverless?
It's not different from people advocating for higher rate of taxation on those, who are richer than they themselves. I of-course, find all levels of taxation abhorrent and I find all NSA spying abhorrent as well. I find governments abhorrent and I would never advocate for any form of government. I think individual freedom supersedes all other concerns, especially collectivist concerns. AFAIC freedom of an individual is more important than existence of the species.
Money monopolization by government is an artefact of oppression inherit in government systems. People decided what money is forever, governments usurped the power, so I completely reject your assertion that any form of government oppression is necessary to figure out what money is.
Exactly the same thing applies to contracts. Contract law is a private matter, not a government one. As to transportation, government only creates barriers to transportation. Phone networks are a business, same with ISPs and all other forms of communications, Internet based or otherwise.
I built a *company* from scratch, the framework that I work within is based on oppression and violence that you decide is necessary and I reject that notion, it is not necessary, it is counter productive and immoral.
Are you so obtuse that you cannot fathom how a bridge can be built (and is often built) without government but still with management by the private interest driven by the market need? No, you are pretending to be that obtuse. No, we don't need any government to exist at all but we do need projects to be managed, which is why people running private companies understand the need for project management.
I built my own company and I understand what project management is, but it has nothing to do with government, it has to do with legitimate market need that I fulfil where other people are willing to pay me to use my products and services. What a surprise, a company is a system built by an individual (or individuals), it uses project management and instead of stealing money through violence of taxation and violence of counterfeiting currency it sells its services and products to willing participants without any coercion whatsoever.
/. is an editorial. I agree with the summary, the point of government programs is to grow government programs, spending and power. Why else would a government spend at all if not to perpetuate itself?
Government exists because it exists. It exists because everybody is used to it existing. It is 'legitimate' because everybody is used to it being known as 'legitimate'.
Government exists because it has the most guns, not for any other reason at all. It is the biggest thing with the most guns and it never hesitates to use those guns to threaten, imprison and murder, be it in external wars (military occupations) it starts or internal wars (police state) it nurtures into existence.
Why can't I travel anonymously?
- for the same reason you cannot be trusted to do anything on your own under your own initiative in the Collectivist States of America. You are not allowed to be an individual, you are not allowed to save for your own retirement (the Fed makes sure you are not and SS gives you an impression that you don't need to, all of this is a sham of-course).
You are not allowed to choose what you will eat, how you will get from point A to point B on your own, what you want to use for medication, for recreation. If you are a woman you don't even own your body, the State controls it with 'anti-prostitution' nonsense and the religious right tries to control it with the 'anti-abortion' nonsense while the collectivists want to control what you make, how you negotiate, what you are paid in, etc.
When everything is centrally planned nobody is allowed to be free.
Oh, it is the moderation of dissent into oblivion, the consolidation of all forums into FB, G+ and Twitter, the pussification (feminization) - sjw, the consumption based on debt, which leads to depedency and complacency within the system, the globalization of the effort to silence all opposition by every government out there. The bread and circuses mentality took over. The big economic crash will shake people out of this trance but since people do not learn from history I expect totalitarian 'solutions' to the problems created by the collectivists.
A Nazi? A nationalist (ethnicity or territory or custom based collectivist), socialist (anti individual - collectivist), democrat (rule of the mob - collectivist)? You are much closer to that definition, I am certain of it. I am as anti Nazi as one can get.
You, on the other hand, are advocating theft, oppression, dependency, destruction of individual freedoms and slavery with the pro welfare ideology.
Wonderful.
Numbers instead of user names and 3 failed password attempts leading to a daily suspension of the account for anything, including 'welfare payment'? I have an idea how to terminate the horrendous practice of a welfare state. This includes a 'for' loop counting into millions with another 'for' loop inside it that only does 3 iterations...
As always this is a case of "do what I say, not what I do" by a government agency. Will they finally shut down deceptive political ads, campaigns and promises that are delivered not only on the web but also in print, on the radio and on the TV? Didn't think so. The most outrageous lies are coming out of mouths of the politicians, not companies trying to sell you yet another ice cream, a car or a pair of shoes.
Precisely. Eventually it will become apparent that regulation can never catch up and is standing in the way of human progress, the faster we create new technologies, the more obvious it is. The only thing that government can do in this situation is prohibit everything new by default and then take a thousand years to sift through everything, but it will not sift through anything, the prohibitions will not work and eventually the governments will be obvious for what they are: outdated systems of governance.
People do not need global and federal governments, people need to be able to live with each other where they are at that moment in time. Technology will replace governments in that regard and the only role that governments will hold onto will be militaristic and maintaining monopolies for the donors. I think technology will deal with that as well over time and I am against national governments having weapons that individuals cannot fight against. I think governments need to be disarmed, not individuals. Governments can and do murder millions at a time once again, at the behest of the donors.
It is time to disarm the donors by disarming the governments. The only way to stop corruption and oppression is to remove the legitimacy of any government to oppress.
FUCK YOU, you piece of shit. You wept over the fall of the country that I and millions of others were prisoners of? Fuck you, die.
Bullshit! It's like saying to any inmate (and most in the USA are imprisoned for non-violent drug offences that shouldn't even be 'offences') -Out you go, here is the door, be on your way now.
Then running after them (years later actually) and saying: aaah, back in you go, our mistake.
It's interesting that Donald Trump was criticised for voicing his position on halting any new Muslims from coming to the country and yet apparently it's happening already with the current USA administration. I guess the difference is that... they are not promising to do it, they are just doing it. Of-course they are not stopping all new Muslims yet, but once you have the precedent of stopping some Muslims from even visiting the country who is to say that stopping all Muslims is the boundary that the government will not cross? Camel's nose under the tent (or was it his toe?)
Nice Orwellian doublespeak. What you are calling for is childish, collectivism is childish, not self reliance. By the way, as an employer I would not tolerate a union at my work place, I already have my development team spread around the world of-course as this is a good cost saving strategy, but it is also a useful strategy against these types of incidents. I can close down any particular shop in any one location should it try a stunt like that and continue with the rest.
Actually merchants are constantly hit with all sorts of client fraud. people are using stolen credit cards, stolen PayPal accounts, stolen everything. Weather it is hosted checkout (what you are talking about) or an API call to a payment processor, the merchant can get a payment token back (a pseudo random string with the last 4 digits being the last four digits of the credit card). The reason for this is to be able to identify a transaction for a refund or for fraud investigation. As a merchant I avoid storing any user information that I do not need specifically because I want to limit liability. Storing a transaction token, client name, payment amount, payment date and also expiry date on the card and address is useful for fraud investigation and this happens constantly - there are millions of thieves out there and if you don't do anything to protect yourself the payment processors and the banks will hang it all on you and as a small business, a merchant or a service provider you will be hit with back charges and various fines for each transaction that the bank claims was fraudulent. So if a thief uses your service and then the real credit card owner complaints, as a business you are out of money for the service / product and you will be paying a fairly large amount to the payment processor per transaction (on the order of 50USD per transaction that is reversed). If you don't store any information at all, you are fucked.
One of the payment processors we use (FirstData) started enforcing no TLS1.0 over half a year ago now. This broke compatibility with quite a few browsers, including some on a bunch of android devices.
However where it comes to PCI compliance it was always a joke and it never had any credibility in the first place. It's been a rubber stamp since the beginning. Even the enforcement I am talking about is fictitious, we only have to ensure that during the scan we are 'compliant' but not in the time between the scans. Besides, all you have to do to certify is answer 'yes', 'yes', 'yes' or 'no', 'no', 'no' to a few hundred questions, pass an online scan and you are done.