[p2p-research] What is the Origin of our Money Supply?

[Ryan Lanham]

Kevin,

You make good standard arguments that I respect...not just because you are
making them, but because they are standard and well known.  There are many
rebuttals and I have nothing new to say to them beyond those.

I would point out a few things:

1. All social contracts of any sort are fiats.  They are commons.  All
commons are fiat commons.  Money is an agreement.  No one forces you to use
it.  Indeed, in the Old US West many people tried to survive without it and
did so fairly well.  As far as I am concerned, money is a tool...a machine
that is a social machine...a social contract.

2. All contracts are machines that make value.

3. Value is the point of all existence.

4. Value is defined as those things/ideas/cultures/desires people choose.

5. Money is a means of transferring a large but not complete set of value.

6. People who hold differing political views often think money IS the value.
 It is not.  It is a machine for making value.  THAT is the moral conundrum.


R.

On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 7/16/10, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Lots of smart people in the past didn't understand money and banking.
>  They
> > said many things about it.  The questions were valid, but no longer are
> so.
> >  We understand exactly what is going on now.  There are many things
> > misunderstood or even not understood, but the creation and operation of
> > money is not one of them.
>
> I don't think the quotes reflect so much a misunderstanding of how
> central banking works as a difference over its moral significance.
>
> A lot of libertarians object, on principle, to the creation of money
> by a central bank.  My argument is that *if* you're going to have a
> central banking system issuing fiat money anyway, there's nothing any
> *less* statist about enabling banks to loan it into existence at
> interest by tweaking their reserve requirements or increasing their
> reserves through open market operations.
>
> If anything, it would be *less* statist to follow the Social Credit
> route of depositing the new money into existence in citizens' bank
> accounts, or the greenback route of spending into existence an amount
> of money equal to the Keynesian demand shortfall rather than selling
> bonds to cover the deficit.  I say it would be less statist because
> the exact same function would be performed, but without feeding an
> entire separate layer of rentiers at taxpayer expense.
>
> It's analogous to the kind of "libertarian" at venues like Heritage or
> the Adam Smith Institute who thinks it's "less statist" to "privatize"
> functions by outsourcing taxpayer-financed, state monopoly functions
> to nominally private entities.  If the function is protected from
> market competition by state regulations, and the people performing it
> have a state-guaranteed revenue stream, I don't see how their nominal
> "private" status makes things any less statist.  Their essence as a
> branch of the state is just concealed, and the REAL state includes
> another parastic layer of shareholders in addition to state
> bureaucrats.  But for the worst kind of right-wing market
> libertarians, the "free market" just means funnelling state loot to
> nominally private corporate entities like Halliburton.
> --
> Kevin Carson
> Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
> Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com
> The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
> http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
> Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
>
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-- 
Ryan Lanham
rlanham1963 at gmail.com
Facebook: Ryan_Lanham
P.O. Box 633
Grand Cayman, KY1-1303
Cayman Islands
(345) 916-1712
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