Well the Fiat system is what’s ensuring governments can’t meet their pension obligations and needing to raise the retirement age. So in a way, people are protesting the Fiat system, it’s just that they may not know about it.
Discussion
You’re saying “if people knew what I knew” they will come to agree with me. But there’s plenty of people who understand things like the natural of fractional reserve banking, credit multipliers, the Cantillon effect in the financial system and the more broader wealth effects, and they don’t come to the same conclusion. They choose other policy approaches, such as wealth taxes, things like the Volcker Rule, taxes on stock trades.
The idea that everyone would be a capitalism maximalist “if they only knew the truth” is completely and utter nonsense, and it’s a huge distraction to the narrative of bitcoin, quite frankly.
No that’s not what I’m saying. I agree with you that not everyone wants a neo libertarian world of individualism and self reliance.
However, everyone is realizing in different ways that the current system is bursting at the seams.
The system is changing. It’s always been changing. It will change again. And then it will change again. Our world looks nothing like it did 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago. The idea we’re ossified into a rigid, broken system, rather one that is simply evolving and renegotiating relationships and connections between subsystems within the greater whole is a form of misleading vividness that too many people suffer from. It causes them to predict scenarios that underestimate recursion effects, threshold effects and self-limiting feedback loops within the broader systems.
Good point and one Bitcoin maxis need to hear and digest.
While the system is constantly changing and is more dynamic than many assume, I do think there is a point to be made about long term debt cycles and societies/cultures reaching points of no return, where one paradigm is broken “forever” and a new paradigm begins. Do you think the long term debt cycle theory is overstated?
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.
When we say fractional reserve is fraudulent, I think most mean in the context of a fiat system with arbitrary bailouts
It’s still all normative. Nothing you said changes my point in the slightest.
Not really, banks are using the entity will the monopoly on violence to implicitly break the debt contracts they entered into - that's fraud
Yes, the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. The point of this is to create dispute resolutions that do not require everyone resort to physical violence.