FBXL Social

This whole conversation is very strange... "Capitalist" this, "Capitalist" that, but then "Money printer"

The capitalist can't really print money. They can print disney dollars or tokens in your favorite monetized video game, but those things aren't really currency, just pre-purchased merchandise, an agreement between you and one other vendor. The only entity that can print money That's the state, which is not part of a capitalist system by definition.

Even when the state "participates in capitalism", it's like a planet or a sun -- it warps the space around it, becoming a gravity well. It becomes a new point of reference sucking in and modifying everything around it.

Now you might argue that banks print money because of fractional reserve banking.

Who do you think allows such a strange system to exist? Who made it the basis of the whole monetary system?

That isn't to say that totally hands off capitalism would be utopian or perfect, but very often I see people blaming capitalism for an omnipresent state which intervenes in markets constantly such that you can always feel the pull of its gravity well.

I realized recently that bitcoin's fundamental design is broken, and it will never become the universal money standard people think it will. its fixed volume is part of the problem. If you'll only ever have 21 million of a thing (split up into satoshis), then eventually all the bitcoin that have ever existed will exist, and every time more things can be bought with bitcoin (compared to the basically nothing you can buy now other than fiat currency) each satoshi becomes more and more valuable, so where the problem with the money printer is that it pulls value out of the currency that exists and puts it elsewhere (usually in the state's hands because gravity well), in the case of bitcoin it pulls the value out of the things being bought and put it in the existing currency, so as the economy grows the value of your satoshis grow, and you have ultimately the same problem except instead of the money printers having disproportionate buying power, it's the money havers having disproportionate buying power.

That said, I think crypto could nonetheless be the answer. The ideal would be to have some sort of intelligent daemon who would look at the things being bought and sold with the currency you have and exactly shrink or grow the money supply to keep the relative value of each unit the same. What better daemon than an algorithm everyone agrees upon by downloading a piece of open source software?

So how do you solve the second problem? I think it's by being careful about where the new money supply goes or is taken from. I'm imagining that during times of market cap growth the miners and the users (those who are buying and selling with the currency, not just holding it) would get a little bonus, not a huge amount per transaction but enough to grow the overall supply. When the market cap of the currency falls, you'd have fees go up a bit and the extra be destroyed -- not a huge amount per transaction, but enough to shrink the overall supply.

Unfortunately, such a design has a major problem is it doesn't give people a chance to get insanely wealthy through just grabbing a thousand bitcoin back in 2008 for a few pennies, and it doesn't give the state the chance to get insanely wealthy through just printing so much money everyone becomes poor except them. Its strength as a currency would ultimately be why nobody would feel like championing it.

Capitalism is the private ownership and control of capital, free trade, lacking barriers. Once the state starts micro-managing, that's not capitalism anymore. It's something else. Maybe overall the market is more or less capitalist overall, but the state micro-managing markets is definitionally not capitalist.

You can laugh all you want, but it's an important distinction to make. Our problem today is an omnipresent state that is overbearing into every nanometer of our lives. If people get rich off of that, it's just the state rewarding its pawns.

As for the state enforcing property rights, that's part of the problem of pure capitalism, that it can't actually exist because at some point you need to enforce property rights or contracts and the state needs to step in, and every step away from the ideal puts you onto that spectrum. When you get to half the economy being the state and the other half being pawns of the state like we've got, you're well past capitalism, and you can laugh and laugh, but I'll still be correct. I'd be like saying the thing you hate most about fencing is getting shot. If you're getting shot then you're not fencing anymore. "Oh, but I always get shot while fencing, you just don't know what fencing is!"

You can't change something you don't understand, and you've systematically shown your lack of understanding of economics.

Here's a graph of state spending as % of gdp for several countries. knock yourself out.