If we drop the labels and the isms, I think what Jeff is saying is that what we have been calling a free market isn't one.

You are right to point out that the government and regulations on one side and corporations and bankers on the other is a false choice. Heads they win, tails we lose. It's all the same machine.

So what's actually wrong and how can we get free of it?

The usual Bitcoiner perspective is that the problem is fiat. Inflationary money perverts both business and government.. and individual behavior too.

I'd strongly agree with that, but it's also a deep rabbit hole and I have come to down it in gradually myself.

At first you just see, yeah they are stealing from us. That sucks. But then all the ways that creates evil incentives all over the place, and it starts to become clear that a lot of things are really deeply twisted by that. It twists politics, food, medicine, education, relationships...

Look back at weimar to see it on fast forward. Gambling, addiction, exploitation, crime... Just every kind of corruption goes crazy as inflation heats up.

Money affects people very deeply. It turns the knob on our incentives and our motivation and it changes us psychologically, even morally.

But if it's so deep, is it really just a government running a money printer? That seems wrong, but also kind of shallow. It must be something deeper, right? I think maybe I am detecting that question between the lines of what you are saying. Either way, it was a question I had.

It made me ask: what really is "fiat"? Is it something older, more universal, deeper in human nature and life?

The old word is "usury". The great wisdom traditions and the builders of the greatest civilization knew all about this.

Fiat means "declaration". It's not just "the state" decreeing money. It's claiming the value of something that doesn't exist, no matter who does it.

When I looked harder, I realized that "the state" did not create fiat. Fiat created the state. Usury created the state to enforce and collect on debt.

When you give a loan at interest, you are "pulling forward" the value of work that has not been done yet (or claiming to). To try to make that real, you need enforcement. Then you can but and sell that "bond" (bondage) today, backed up by the enforced ability to control what others will do in the future. You can claim the value today of the work that someone else will have to do in the future.

So now you are ammassing "wealth" (power over others, actually, the claimed value of the bonds of others) and it's a feedback loop and a game that gets bigger and more elaborate as it goes.

Pretty soon you are making loans to princes, and they had better take it too, because you will be making a loan to his neighbor, to raise an army, because he needs to do some pillaging, because he already owes you money. And if he doesnt pay, you will loan even more to some other prince to conquer him and collect the debt.

And now you have the state, controlling and extracting it's people, making wars, enforcing and collecting on all the debts. "Regulations", bailouts, money printing, crazy taxes, snake oil drugs, propaganda, social breakdown... Etc etc

The whole thing keeps growing and enslaving and conquering and extracting, faster and faster. Because it can't stop. Because the weakness is, power over all the real value is moved by the sucking force of the lie.

There is no value from future work. The fruit of future work does not exist yet. You can't eat next year's grain. So you always need new bag holder, trading his something for your nothing. And the hole just grows and grows. If the music ever stops, the whole thing comes crashing down. (Sorry for the mixed metaphors.)

Bitcoin doesnt just fix money in the superficial sense of stopping the money printer. It breaks the whole model of the debt-based world. The whole thing breaks. Which is scary. But so is letting this continue.

Bitcoin anchors value in time. Deflation makes borrowing and lending impractical. It breaks the incentive of the state to act as guarantor and enforcer of debt. Value accrues to the one who works and provides real value now and drains away from rent seekers and bond holders.

A free market under those conditions will be a totally different animal. I don't think we can know what that will be like, but it sort of destroys our ideas about "capitalism" and "socialism" as we mean those things today.

Anyway, I think that's what it means. I hope that helps.