I’ve seen a number of proposals like this. Essentially a public bank run by some entity like the Post office. This article is about the UK, but I know I can find someone proposing pretty much the same for the US.
I don’t think most people understand how important crypto would be for the implementation of ideas like this. There are other public use cases for this stuff, CH mentions some in the Emurgo livestream. I hate to bring it up with respect to voting ID systems because of what a divisive issue it has become. The 50 cent ID cards could be hard to get if not decentralized, but shouldn’t be a barrier if it is both optional and inclusive (say pretty much anyone could issue them, or more to the point initialize an identity on one) it should help lower barriers to voting.
I love when Charles gets more into his thinking about governance, that part of the livestream was really good. Maybe this is a good post to also ask about Holacracy and whether anyone else is interested this sort of concept and in general “DAO governance” to coin a spur of the moment phrase for it?
I have only recently been reading up on their processes and trying out their software. My connection to Holacracy is that one of two founders of the OS project the I’ve also done much work on is working at HolacracyOne on their GlassFrog product. A lot of my interest in Cardano is related to my interest in governance in general and related ideas.
I think there is huge potential for all of it together and independently, and I will continue to try to understand and contribute to that end.
Public (political) banking is VERY dangerous and is just one step away from communism - I have no doubt it’s coming eventually before the west collapses completely and a new cycle begins.
As of right now, banks are half-public already (which has led to a lot of disaster and a unhealthy banking system)
Regulations interfering with banks behavior + the bank deposit insurance which interferes with customer behavior creating moral hazards and unintended consequences. Going the full path of Government banking will remove any working component, as you now have political incentived banking. I have no doubt we will eventually get there, since we have already taken many steps in that direction.
I have a suspicion the next crisis (which is around the corner) it is going to be brutal, could be used as an excuse to nationalize banks.
But it will be the last and final step before complete destruction.
And it all started with Government bank deposit insurance, that is where it all went wrong. This mechanic destroyed free market self-regulation.
I know this is all done by low intelligence and misguided individuals who just wants to help and do good, but it is really painful to watch from a distance and see it all play out completely predictable time and time again.
Jb glad to see you are active on the forums again. I appriciate most of your posts greatly.
However:
What you are saying here is so generalized and cannot possible be correct. I can show you intelligence is distributed fairly equal along political opinions as it is distributed in a nominal curve along the population in general as well.
I mentioned nothing about the political spectrum, many free market guys just happen to be on the right side of the truth on certain issue, it is not that they necessarily understand why, in most cases they don’t at all. Economic and psychology facts has nothing to do with politics.
But yes you are actually right, IQ exist in a sort of vacuum, it is useless without a rational and scientific framework for it to be put to proper use. Though what is true is to understand the complexity of the underlying issue does require intelligence. But yes Intelligence alone does not guarantee you arrive at the correct conclusion - but I would say there is a correlation of a higher likelihood you do.
Keynesianism is a great example, there are a lot of intelligent people who has fallen for this. Yeah they might have spend years understanding the theories and complexities of that school of thought, but that does not make it true. Their intelligence is being put to use explaining the world with faulty theories, it is their own intelligent craftsmanship that ends up fooling them. Also the last point would be specialization, we can’t specialize in everything which means we end up relying on others for our beliefs and thoughts on certain issues.
Al though to your other point, I do believe I read some studies mentioning libertarians come in at the average highest IQ, it doesn’t surprise me. But I wouldn’t put much stock in that, it was just you mentioned it yourself.
Yes well said it exists in sort of a vacuum. Yes its only fairly evenly distributed thats why I worded myself the way I did. Just wanted to point out this small logical disconnect as your posts in general are very intelligent and valuable.
I appreciate the discussion, let’s try to stay on track here, this is deeply contested territory. I’d like to keep the general idea of this type of institution separate from how it should be organized and run.
The key phrase “free markets” can be a signal of market fundamentalism. You are right that IQ and the capacity to grasp the essentials of a complex situation are not always correlated. Can we discuss this in terms of “modes of production” (see Benkler ref. to Coase, firms and markets and now commons based)?
Free in the sense that Cardano and any crypto currency are expressing new possibilities of freedom with financial tools, yes 100 percent on that. Free markets as is preached by the market fundamentalists, not for me. That freedom is a freedom to oppress and enslave. Freedom to defraud and steal if crypto remains the wild west where Mt. Gox becomes just one of many bad outcomes where the perpetrators are protected by the system.
Ultimately, we also have to make our political systems work well because that’s the day to day reality of people. The country and legal system you live under is where your personal freedom starts. If you don’t have basic freedoms, then it will be hard to have financial freedom. To be sure, crypto can actually help route around bad political regimes.
Do you have a better proposal for how to organize basic services like the post? In the U.S. it still works in spite of political attempts to make it impossible to manage financially. Could it work better, yes. Could it be “privatized”? Sure, and that would make it worse and more expensive than it is now.
Despite having to compete with a public and money-losing mail service in the US, there are two private companies Fedex and UPS that are doing just fine.
The private market would door to door letter service just fine. But with mail I do not have the biggest of issues by it being public as it could be seen as public infrastructure. At least in the days where letters were used for primary official communication. Today not so much as tech. has replaced a lot of lettering. But here is the thing, mail is so trivial, that it really doesn’t matter.
Destroy and corrupt the financial system, and you have starvation and widespread poverty.
I know you were using the article as reference to Cardano systems. I was just commenting on the article itself, and the idea of government banking.
If they are also required to provide the basic public service of delivering mail to everyone, then sure, but they don’t. This is a straw man argument. The U.S. Postal Service has be hobbled by making them pre-pay pensions. What a big plum that would be if they were to “privatize” the service. This would be just one more case of financial pirates raiding the retirement funds of so many people.
Most of the people who this has been done to don’t understand the complexities of this con and how they have been victimized by it. They are taught to blame the victims of other cons.
This is exactly what I want to stay away from in this discussion unless we have a clear definition of terms. Governance is always political, but is it good politics where people get to have their voice heard, or bad politics where the fix is in. I maintain that whether you have one vs. the other is a matter of how your political structures actually work.
If this institution were set up as a “public trust” and organized to serve a public purpose, how would you run it? That’s the question that new institutions like the Cardano foundation face, and the answers are not at all obvious. Would this be better than having it “run by the government”.
And it would not need to be “one bank”, it could be a network of privately organized public trusts. Maybe regional, certainly to address different legal jurisdictions as an international network.
Governance is not always political - ex. governance of a private bank is all about making money - it is all about risk adjusted returns, financial health etc. If it is making money, it is doing good for the economy. There are no ideological or ulterior social motives under normal circumstances. It is very pure and sustainable. Anything unsustainable goes bankrupt and has consequences that are generally isolated to the actors involved.
Do you know what a public / gov. controlled financial system would look like?
Lets just do loans. Financial feasibility and merit of loans will go out the window. They will be done on the basis of political connections, popularity, towards political projects, they might even be done on gender, it might be done based race (affirmative action) it might be done on things like “intersectionality” and on and on… It will be one giant corrupt mess. Politicians will make promises to channel funds to this and that, forgiving loans, lowering interest rates… Just imagine.
It is obvious this will happen, there is already precedence for all of it, it is already being done today.
Here is the issue. We can afford to bail out smaller things like the post office, as there are profits elsewhere to do it with, but no one can bail out the entire system itself. It will completely implode, and it won’t take long.
Private profit seeking entities do serve the public, in fact that is all they do, that is how they make money.
Now Cardano foundation is not a bank or a profit seeking entity (indirectly they are) - they are there to promote and facilitate Cardano on the sidelines. They have no direct power and have to be funded voluntarily - so I do not see the comparisons.
You don’t have to be a genius to know that the economy pretty much everywhere could use some injection of cash at the bottom. We are approaching an economic state that is like the end of a Monopoly ™ game where one person has all the cash and property. In a game, you call the winner and start over, but the economy is a living system with billions of components.
Whether you call any injection of cash at the bottom Keynesianism or give it another name, the contention is we need more cash flow in the economy and increasing the share (broadly) of bottom, however you do it, is a good thing for everyone. Wage stagnation has been a reality for all of us, and it is crippling for the whole economy.
Unfortunately you are wrong, this is Keynism and pretty much everything you said is completely flawed. I know this is what it looks like from the surface for the untrained eye, but it works nothing like this. The reason you derive to this conclusion is you don’t understand what “money” is, and what function it has, that is where it all goes wrong and why the economy still remains such a mystery to many people.
The truth is what it is, I did not invent it. I would expand on it, but we have to go too deep for a couple of posts on a message board. I know that is cop-out, and I usually want to dive in on these topics, but It is rather time consuming. But I know what you said is wrong, It doesn’t matter to me if you believe it. They are not ungrounded, you just don’t have all of the pieces at display.
In fact I have made plenty of posts on money
The only thing I need to know is how you referenced “cash” as something people can hoard and sit on, and there isn’t enough to go around. It works NOTHING like a monopoly game, because unlike a monopoly game, the economy is not a closed system. The monopoly environment does not respond to supply and demand since everything in the system is fixed. The only reason you would say something like this, is you have no clue what “cash” or “money” actually is and what function it serves.
and it’s unfortunate because it leads you to false-solutions like what you just mentioned, because you misdiagnosed the problem.
Isn’t it a bit arrogant to suggest you know more about money than the people reading this forum? I know a lot about what money is but I’m not going to make any claims. Demonstrate knowledge with good argument. Refer to known research and conceptual systems. If you have something really new to offer, there is no evidence of that here.
I never suggested that, there are lots of things in life I have no clue about.
Money itself is not one of them.
I just stated you were wrong and you don’t know what money is, is it arrogant? I don’t know, that means nothing to me, I don’t operate in that world. You are right about referencing, and putting down arguments. I should be doing that, and yeah without, it is just cheap-shots. I apologize for that but it does not change the facts. Unfortunately there is no easy-reference or we would even be in this predicament in the first place. But I should work on putting something together one final piece on money, as this will be recurrent issue from now and probably forever. It is not even that complicated when untangled, but the issue is it takes many individual pieces of a larger puzzle to make it out.
It is not naturally intuitive, like a monopoly game is.
My point is that you don’t know what I do or do not know about money. You are making the claim without evidence. I’m not making a claim, except to say that you have only demonstrated your ideological biases in your use of language. You continue to use contentious words that make assumptions about my ideology without actually saying so. I’m trying to keep this discussion about ideas and not personalities, but you have offered precious few ideas here.
I do, when you referenced monopoly and the way you referenced cash. That is your current paradigm, conclusion and claim. You said this. That’s why I know where you are coming from.