No. Most inflation in developing countries is external inflation…inflation that is imported when food or energy are brought into a country from elsewhere because of some structural deficiencies within the country that prevent production at home.

Importing food or energy leaves these countries with a trade deficit each year. To pay for these goods, they either have to borrow dollars or euros, or they don’t borrow, and their exchange rate is going to depreciate over time. If they try not to borrow, they’ll be paying higher and higher prices of their own currency over time. So they’re importing the US’s inflation into their own economy by being energy or food dependent.

The US forces these countries to be food dependent by subsidizing US agriculture and exporting surplus food abroad. By creating food dependence with cheap products that undermine those countries’ productivity, the US is able to offload its own inflation onto them.

Great data. What a delight for the mortgage industry to siphon off greater and greater percentages of the peoples’ income.

Empowered by the promise of government bailouts, lowers property taxes, and lower long-term interest rates, banks are willing to lend more on property, leading to asset price inflation and putting most people in a forever state of debt servitude.

Understanding the lessons of “Wall Street, 1987”

https://michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/04866134211011770.pdf

“The illusion has become real. And the more real it becomes, the more desperate they want it. Capitalism at its finest.”

– Gordon Gekko, on the death of industrial capitalism and its benefits, and its replacement with the parasitic finance capitalism that rules the world around us

“The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest.”

Gordon Gekko

On the disaster that is finance capitalism

“Stop going for the easy buck and produce something with your life. Create, instead of living off of the buying and selling of others”

Carl Fox. Wall Street

Stop using tax money to subsidize corn. We subsidize farming to grow more than we need, to export it to third world countries, to stop them from farming, to force them to be food-dependent, to export our inflation.

Injustice.

You are free do so and say what you would like within the bounds of your constitutional rights, so long as what you do and say do not impede the ability for someone wealthier than you to make even more money. There end rights end.

That is our society’s commitment to profit at the expense of all.

I agree. To be a Bitcoin Maxi in the sense that you believe it to be the only viable permission-less money system, that’s one thing. And I am of this ilk.

But if Bitcoin Maxi means a philosophy that attributes all social problems to the dollar and all solutions to Bitcoin, that drastically overlooks the complexities of social inequality and its solutions.

The dollar is a symptom. The Fed is a symptom. The greater structure is one that is committed to profit over social good and culture.

That’s better, but now I want to watch Lion King

“Bitcoin Fixes This” is not helpful if we cannot define what “this” is.

This is the end point of capitalism, and this is why governments are necessary to prevent monopoly formation. Our government participation is built on a neoconservative philosophy of enabling monopolies and preventing competition.

Bitcoin helps to fix this, but we must be able to define the problem that we are trying to fix.

A few years ago, Wilson NC wanted to create its own internet company because Time Warner was price-gouging everyone. Time Warner had a monopoly in the area, and people couldn’t afford internet. The town council decided to make their own internet service to provide cheap intent. They built the company, then Time Warner sued them. There was a massive legal battle and in the end, Wilson got to keep the internet company but it became illegal for any other town in the State to provide cheap internet to their citizens if it meant competing with established monopolies. This is what Adam Smith warned us about. This is what the neoconservative defense of “free markets” gets wrong.

There is no free market. Neoconservatives would have us believe that a free market is one wherein there is no government regulation. They say that, but they use government regulations to prevent competition, protect their own monopolities, provide bailouts for themselves, and create favorable tax cuts for their industries.

The concept of “free market” has been co-opted and turned 180 degrees from what a Adam Smith taught us. Smith was a proponent of government regulation, and said that government was necessary to prevent monopolies so that all could play fairly. That was the concept of a free market.

That’s a great article. It describes all the tragedies of the privatization of medicine in the US.

“Who are the overlords? They are the politicians, bankers, Wall Streeters, pharmaceutical executives, health insurance executives, hospital administrators, etc., who suck value from the system that should have been directed towards patients and actual healthcare workers.

These rent seekers profit from various forms of taxation, and ultimately from an inefficient system that must continue to accelerate money printing to avoid grinding to a halt.”

The important conclusion is that a wealth of inefficiencies come when private corporations insert themselves between providers and end-users (patients). Every other first world country has some level of nationalized healthcare to prevent these problems, and for that reason healthcare in the US is suffering. People will recognize these issues and at the same time defend capitalism and attack any mention of socialized medicine, without recognizing that these problems are exactly what we get with capitalism. This is exactly the end point of a system that pursues profit and assigns some sort of morality to profit over social value. This is not a Bitcoin issue. It’s an issue of having a financial system that extracts value because the people have been successfully convinced that privatization of everything is good. Privatization of social social programs is the reason we are all here looking for a solution.

You are inclined to blame the people for their ignorance. Their ignorance is by design…sent down from the top to diminish any possibility of resistance

“The people have no voice because they have no information.”

Gore Vidal.

Book recommendation: The Last Empire, Gore Vidal

At the end of the civil war, the propertied class purposefully fomented distain between poor blacks and poor whites. By diverting blame for miserable conditions felt by the most affected classes, the masses were kept ignorant about the real causes for economic disparities: predatory lending, wage slavery, debt servitude, awful industrial conditions. These causes continued to serve the banking and landed interests, and we have a century of fossil racism to deal with.

The Banking Class: controlling the conversation and diverting blame since 1865.

Welcome Brother 😎

Bitcoin has indeed been used to buy property, but I only know of anecdotes. I am not in the position to cite any numbers; no doubt someone on nostr is in a better position to speak to this question.

I think people would pay for what they value. People don’t care to be taxed because they recognize that they are born into a tax contract with the government that they can neither read, sign, nor consent to. They also recognize that their dollars are going to things with which they do not agree. In my case, I am very much aware that 51% of my taxes go to the militarism. I can do the math and figure out exactly how much of my labor today went to killing people on the other side of the world…people with whom I have no conflict.

In a voluntary tax program, I think people would allow themselves to be taxed only for things that they find useful for the betterment of society. People generally recognize that safe infrastructure is valuable. They recognize that providing basic support for those in need betters conditions for all. They recognize that support of judicial systems is important for the maintenance of rights. There are lots of things that reasonable people recognize as being necessary for a society’s maintenance, and they recognize them as being within the purview of a government.

In a Bitcoin world, wherein many hold large amounts of value that is somewhat private and certainly cannot be confiscated, taxes would still be mandatory but would be voluntary insofar as BTC could not be seized from accounts. Voluntary taxes could potentially force governments to behave better…to select for end-uses of citizens’ funds that pleased the citizens rather than pleasing the oligarchy. Do my friends and family care to sponsor the six current wars? Do you care to maintain a war in Afghanistan for 18 years? The goals of those wars are the goals of the corporations…the rich…the politicians that depend on donations from government contractors.

Amazon will not let the government raise rates on their earnings, and Raytheon will not let the government spend less on airplanes. That’s because this is what the hyper-wealthy demand.

A GoFund tax system would be exciting and is a wild idea. Governments will tax the way they’re told to tax by the people who pull the strings.