Brought to you by the UAE, already profiting $12,000,000 A DAY off their oil reserves - but no idea what they're going to do if you stop buying.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Krugman asks a great question: what problem is Bitcoin trying to fix? He's totally talked me out of it.
I'm pretty sure the UAE is generating more than $12 Million a day (I assume you're missing 3 zeros).
So it's interesting that the free-market, no regulation side of the RP house is against (as Krugman says) lubricants to commerce. Money costs money...taxpayer money. $1 and $2 bills cost 4.9 cents per note to make, while $5 cost 10.9 cents, $10 cost 10.3 cents, both $20 and $50 bills cost 10.5 cents, and $100 bills cost 12.3 cents. Think of how much money we could save if we didn't print cash! The 2023 budget for The Bureau of Engraving and Printing was over $2B!
The same people who destroyed the post office (one of Trump's great accomplishments...), now want to hold on for dear life to paper money?
I know I've posted here before... but about 8 years ago a coworker was attempting to talk me into buying Ethereum. It was trading at 7 cents. I had just sold a few things and was sitting with $11k that I was toying with investing, and started the process of setting up a wallet to buy. Ether went to 11 cents, so I figured a near 50% jump was telling me I missed the boat. In theory, that $11k is worth $315M this morning. I'm confident it would have been stolen years ago given the wallet process back them.
Funny how this s#$t been going on throughout history, but only recently making headlines...and of course, everyone is lining up to pick a side (because they've been brainwashed?)
It will be even easier for them to do this now that the undesirables are being weeded out of our healthcare and military institutions replaced by the compliant who will just follow orders. It is always for our own good, for public safety:
In the covid-19 crisis, politicians have systematically amplified fear and hysteria. This was no accident and is unsurprising, for the state builds its raison d'être on the argument that it protects the population from internal and external dangers. The state is built upon fear. The narrative is that without the help of the state, the citizen would be defenseless against hunger, poverty, accidents, war, terrorism, disease, natural disasters, and pandemics. It is, therefore, in the state's interest to instill fear of possible dangers, which it then pretends to resolve, expanding its power in the process. A relatively recentexample is the restriction of civil liberties in the US in response to the threat of terrorism after the 9-11 attacks and the second Iraq war. Similarly, it was in the interest of governments to purposefully instill fear and portray covid-19 as a unique killer virus in order to expand state power to an extent unknown in peacetime at the expense of citizens' fundamental rights.
That hammering—the arguing over what we are entitled to from each other—is the central problem of moral philosophy, and implementing it ought to be the central problem of governance, so we may not be as far apart as you seem to think. Just pondering how any of this translates to abolishing government.
Morning (a cold grey day here for mid-summer - got my hiking boots out of the cellar for a four-day jaunt in the alps.. can't wait).
Ok, I'm happy to cede the point that I overstated your position and that "pare back government" is not the same as "abolish government".
My point was more that we all (the universal collective we) tend to concentrate too much on the structure of government and overlook the cultural factors that make a government (of whatever form) "good" or not.
Our discussion was in the context of my line, "the government you deserve" (the collective plural) and you stating you got the government that "panicked mobs deem minimally acceptable". My point is that, even if you were to pare government back to mere protection of its citizens rights, you would still have those panicked mobs defining those rights to mean something like "freedom from immigrants streaming across the southern border and the right not to get vaccinated and the right not to wear a mask in the middle of a deadly pandemic so I can spit in your face".
Consequently, we need to reach out to these mobs (your point at the outset) and hammer out what rights and duties we actually have and why they don't need to be so damn afraid about everything.
So yeah, I guess we are perhaps not too far removed from each other in our line of reasoning, at least at this point.
Funny how this s#$t been going on throughout history, but only recently making headlines...and of course, everyone is lining up to pick a side (because they've been brainwashed?)
