This is one area where I just feel like I’m in such a minority within the bitcoin world. Like, at the end of the day, debt is a time preference arbitrage. The arguments that people make against it, for example, that fractional reserve banking is fraudulent, is an NORMATIVE STATEMENT.

Some will go further and try to connect back to natural rights theories, such as that of Rothbard and Hoppe. These arguments are trying to argue there’s a universal ethical truth about the immorality of such arrangements, and seem to believe that everyone will one day come to realize this.

I think natural rights theories like this are completely out-to-lunch. If these natural laws were operative at all, then why doesn’t it seem to inform human behavior, in aggregate *at all*?

We’ve been arbitraging time preference for thousands of years. It’s been banned in religion, such as in Abrahamic religions and their orthodox prohibitions on usury. But this just proves my point: these things are normative statements. People want to do it, and authority structures, either in the form of religion or in the form of states are required to prohibit the behavior, that incentives tend to tilt heavily towards doing.

People just say these things out loud, and people cheer and nod along, as if these things are self-evident truths that can tell us about the shape of the world to come.