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It is certainly so, yet how is your explanation that money is not broken different from me saying that anything at all is not broken given that it serves someone else's agenda in its current otherwise disfunctional state?

To propose a tangible example: a car works as intended when it goes from A to B efficiently. Somebody very powerful who doesn't want to me to go from A to B removes the driving seat and makes the steering wheel very hard to handle. I can still go from A to B, albeit with great discomfort and at my own peril.

Money in its current form serves the cartel known as central banking and government first. It works for them. Yet I'd like to argue that it's broken, since we can think of an ideal form of money and the qualities that it would have, and we can clearly see that fiat money doesn't possess any of those. Why would you argue that's not broken?

Neal 3mo ago

Aristole was one of the first to recognize the truth that economics are a product of ethics.

This means before any macro, there are morals.

Meaning in order to understand the whole of economics we start from the ethics.

When we start from ethics, we have an objective moral substrate to hang economics on.

that means we do not have a relativistic moral framework.

We don’t get to say “good for them, bad for me”

fiat and bitcoin both fulfill all the functions of money. they store value, are exchanged for value, and price value.

they both fulfill money’s final end of forming the bonds between humans socially at scale.

They both work as money.

one is evil, one is just

fiat doesn’t “lose value” like a leaky bucket.

Fiat extracts value out of monetary objects and redistributes it to the ones debasing the money.

That’s what it does structurally by design.

It doesn’t just happen passively, each of us actively participates by using fiat. We are both the abused and enablers of the abuse.

“broken” factors out the moral necessity

“broken” assumes a speculative fantasy about man’s relation to reality and one another.

that’s a fiat philosophical framework that is logically invalid

hope that makes sense or is useful.

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epsql 3mo ago

Thank you for the detailed reply, it's always useful to have a debate of this kind. I can see where you come from and this reply you've just left helps to integrate my understanding of your original post.

I can also see where we might disagree. Your point on ethics is very interesting for example:

> This means before any macro, there are morals.

Meaning in order to understand the whole of economics we start from the ethics.

I have no direct knowledge of Aristotelian thought, so I might not grasp this statement in full, and when I think of economics I find the Austrian school to be the most "objective". This is what Rothbard states at the end of "Man, Economy, and State", which directly contradicts the point on ethics:

> The major function of praxeology—of economics—is to

bring to the world the knowledge of these indirect, these hidden, consequences of the different forms of human action.

> Praxeology cannot, by itself, pass ethical judgment or make policy decisions.

> ... praxeology retires from the scene; and it is up to the

citizen—the ethicist—to choose his political course according

to the values that he holds dear

I'm informed by this view when I think about money, so in my understanding money emerges naturally in a free market and, absent coercive action by any group of individuals, it evolves to serve the purposes of means of exchange, unit of account, and store of value.

What emerges on the free market as money cannot in my opinion therefore be placed in the same category as what as been co-opted by the government and the banking system into a tool of wealth extraction. These are not the same thing anymore, even though they share the same origin.

Would you agree that there is distinction here?

Neal 3mo ago

I’m with you, I love debating and pushing on ideas with oppositional thoughts. It’s this reciprocal cognition that we gain fidelity of understanding.

You and I are using words, natural language to communicate.

This language is an emergent phenomenon of our human relation to each other, to reality.

Money is an emergent phenomenon in the same way, just instead of individual to individual, it communicates value at a societal scale.

I love praxeology and its keying in on human action. that is the only origin of coherent thought. it’s correct because it anchors itself into metaphysical bedrock.

if we say money emerges from a free market, we have already assumed a metaphysics, what it means to be, an anthropology, what it means to be human, an epistemology, what it means to know, and an ethical framework, what the good is.

all of those ingredients go into economics. fuck any one up, and the economics do not address reality as it is, but rather reality as we have thought it to be.

So when someone says money isn’t moral, or we don’t need ethics to explain the economics, I know with certainty they are trying to bake a cake without flour. it’s missing something necessary.

“broken” is a non-moral term

if people think it’s broken, but i’m not an economist so hopefully someone can repair it.

evil is a moral term.

if they understand fiat is evil, they know they are a moral agent, and are more likely to think, “i can’t stand for this, I must do something about it”

some thoughts

🫡

Neal 3mo ago

long way of saying no, i don’t think that distinction delineates the function of money and whether it’s broken or not; it delineates good and evil