Next book - Broken Money: Why Our
Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better
By nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a
Very excited to start this. Thanks for writing it Lyn 🤙
Time is running short. We face a toxic mix of high-time preference junkie politicians and central bankers who are only too willing to provide the fix. We are depleting capital and borrowing against the future. We consistently display high time preference, both as individuals and as a society. This cannot end well for our children and grandchildren.
It is past time for all of us to demand better money, not better monetary "policy." It is time for money to comport with human nature and reward the saving impulse. It is time for us to reconsider our bequest to future generations and make their lives better and more prosperous than ours.
Jeff Deist
The saver-investor initiates a "process of civilization." In generating a tendency toward a fall in the rate of time preference, he - and everyone directly or indirectly connected to him through a network of exchanges - matures from childhood to adulthood and from barbarism to civilization.
Hans Herman Hoppe
This is the perversity of our times: with inflation rates higher than savings rates, the overwhelming incentive is to spend and borrow rather than produce and save.
Bitcoiners already understand the problem. The simple economic concept of time preference explains so much: some people are more than willing to forego consumption today to reap a larger reward later-even if that "later" is beyond their lifetimes. Time preference is the only way to make sense of interest rates and their critical function in society; interest rates reflect the relative preferences of borrowers and savers. Manipulation of interest rates by central banks severs this critical mechanism, allowing bubbles to occur in the form of new credit without new saving.
Without interest rates determined by time preference, society's signals become mixed up. We all understand, axiomatically, why humans prefer something today (certain) over something in the future (uncertain). We may die unexpectedly, our financial positions could change radically due to unforeseen events, or external conditions could influence our desires. We all understand borrowing money to buy a dream home at age forty instead of paying cash at age ninety. We all understand why lenders, given the uncertainty and forbearance that goes with lending, want to be paid interest for their risk.
It is a matter of time.
Jeff Deist
Does cheap money and credit make us richer? Does more money and credit create more stuff, or better stuff? Do they make us happier and more productive? Or do these twin forces actually distort the economy, misallocate resources, and degrade us as people?
These are fundamental questions in an age of monetary hedonism. It is time we began to ask and answer them. Millions of people across the West increasingly recognize the limits of monetary policy, understanding that more money and credit in society do not magically create more goods and services. Production precedes consumption. Capital accumulation is made possible only through profit, which is generated by higher productivity, thanks to earlier capital investment. At the heart of all of it is hard work and human ingenuity. We don't get rich by legislative edict.
Jeff Deist
The essence of Austrian economics may be defined, then, as the structure of economic theorems that is arrived at through the process of praxeological deduction, that is, through logical deduction from the reality-based action axiom.
Joe Salerno
Thanks nostr:npub1r7psmkr4zv93xnal8un6d8hvmpsn5jvhfzn3kk38rfcel6awznks7znspg 🤙
...wen zaps?
Honestly, I'd have to do some research on that 😅
We absolutely need some form of covenants for the scaling direction we have gone in to really work in the long term.
There is no way around that, either we accept the limitations of Bitcoin as it is now, or we improve it to address those limitations.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/youll-activate-the-covenants-and-youll-like-it
Liberty, in the political sense, is not an ideology which you impose on other people; it's the absence of ideology. It's what happens when you leave people alone, when civil society and marketplaces are allowed to function and flourish. It doesn't need to be imposed on anyone - it's the state which is the imposer - and of course it's the natural condition of social cooperation. Mises almost called his book Human Action, his magnum opus, Social Cooperation. He says it's the only way you can organize society peacefully. But we have no choice, all of us here today, but to recognize that millions of Americans, millions upon millions of Americans - maybe a majority of Americans - simply don't see the world the way we do. That's a fact. So, the goal of this national psychosis, which they produce and impose on us every four years, is of course demoralization, more than anything. Don't let that happen.
Jeff Deist
"Rome's collapse meant staggering loss. People forgot how to read, how to farm, how to govern themselves, how to build houses, how to trade, and even what it had once meant to be a human being." - Rod Dreher
Has the world fallen so far into reflexive statism that we have forgotten how to be free? Are we living, like Dreher says, on the edge of a new dark age? Or is a revolution, a radically decentralized Hoppean "bottom up" revolution brewing? Is the pushback we see all around the world-against central states and their cobbled together borders, against political elites, against the UN and the IMF, against the euro, against taxpayer bailouts, against cronyism, against PC, against manufactured migration, and against drug laws, a last gasp? Or the sign of worldwide movement toward political decentralization?
Finally, let us remember that every society worth having, every advanced liberal society, was built by people with long time horizons. Horizons beyond their own lives. And generally those societies were built under very difficult circumstances and conditions of material hardship far beyond what we're likely to face. So let's appeal to our better natures and turn "What Must be Done" from a question into a declaration.
Jeff Deist
CONCEIVED IN LIBERTY with nostr:npub15dqlghlewk84wz3pkqqvzl2w2w36f97g89ljds8x6c094nlu02vqjllm5m & Patrick Newman on Murray Rothbard
nostr:npub1gdu7w6l6w65qhrdeaf6eyywepwe7v7ezqtugsrxy7hl7ypjsvxksd76nak 🤙
Part I
https://fountain.fm/episode/fcyY7D13OhUoFja4o9Cg
Part II
Just as a man can evade reality and act on the blind whim of any given moment, but can achieve nothing save progressive self-destruction—so a society can evade reality and establish a system ruled by the blind whims of its members or its leader, by the majority gang of any given moment, by the current demagogue or by a permanent dictator. But such a society can achieve nothing save the rule of brute force and a state of progressive self-destruction.
Ayn Rand
Creating real value for others is the foundation for society and individual prosperity.
Never stop reflecting.
Never stop learning.
This is the Way.
But if once public opinion is convinced that the increase in the quantity of money will continue and never come to an end, and that consequently the prices of all commodities and services will not cease to rise, everybody becomes eager to buy as much as possible and to restrict his cash holding to a minimum size. For under these circumstances the regular costs incurred by holding cash are increased by the losses caused by the progressive fall in purchasing power. The advantages of holding cash must be paid for by sacrifices which are deemed unreasonably burdensome.
This phenomenon was, in the great European inflations of the '20s, called flight into real goods (Flucht in die Sachwerte) or crack-up boom (Katastrophenhausse). The mathematical economists are at a loss to comprehend the causal relation between the increase in the quantity of money and what they call "velocity of circulation."
The characteristic mark of the phenomenon is that the increase in the quantity of money causes a fall in the demand for money. The tendency toward a fall in purchasing power as generated by the increased supply of money is intensified by the general propensity to restrict cash holdings which it brings about. Eventually a point is reached where the prices at which people would be prepared to part with "real" goods discount to such an extent the expected progress in the fall of purchasing power that nobody has a sufficient amount of cash at hand to pay them.
The monetary system breaks down; all transactions in the money concerned cease; a panic makes its purchasing power vanish altogether. People return either to barter or to the use of another kind of money.
Mises