Meh, fashion is largely arbitrary. What's wrong with wearing a toga as opposed to a tie, and would the ancient Greeks agree?
But still - sandals are supposed to show your feet (possibly signalling something about accepting some discomfort), and you're defeating that. Also, you shouldn't show your socks much. (Formal suits have long, rigid pant legs that entirely hide the part not hidden by the shoe.)
sandals are supposed to show your feet
I read once that men should generally avoid showing their feet, because said feet are likely to be uglier than socks or shoes. (Or even Vibram Fivefingers).
If you consider only cash and laptops, then it looks reasonable to call cash deflationary, but if you consider the economy as a whole, then it's more accurate to say that laptops are inflationary.
What makes the deflation of bitcoins an "overall" deflation, as opposed to the deflation of one good?
The implied context of all this is: what if Bitcoin (or something similar) became a/the dominant currency, that paychecks, debts, etc. are denominated in?
If it doesn't then it doesn't really matter, societally, if it inflates, deflates, mutates, or defenestrates (other than to the people who invest in it...) It'd just be another good, as you say.
Your argument seems to imply that the existence of even one deflationary good is sufficient to destroy an entire economy. Surely if this were the case then the law of large numbers would have killed us by now.
My understanding is that one good wouldn't do it, but persistent, overall deflation would in fact devastate the economy.
Sure, right now you can stick money under a mattress for 6 months and buy more Core 2 laptops than you could today. But that doesn't seem the same as "getting richer".
Where's the line? Good question. Obviously if you could buy more of anything that would be getting richer without investing the money. Or if you could buy more (houses or food or cars or Internet access or electricity or sex or drugs or rock n' roll).
None of the attributions to me sound like anything I've said, and your counterarguments are just parroting the mainstream view that I'm well aware of and criticized very specifically.
I've not been very coherent, and I think my once-debilitating fear of the Invisible Hand has not gone away enough. So I'm not making a lot of sense, even to myself.
So, umm, never mind. Sorry for polluting the thread.
Belief that there's some Platonic ideal of "value" against which currencies should be measured
I find it funny how fans of mainstream economics mock goldbugs about this, while at the same time basing a large part of their own theories on a far more extreme Platonic concept of "real" values calculated using price indexes.
Can you expand? Here's the difference as I see it:
Which is more or less useful, and why?
As popular as libertarianism and goldbuggism seem to be, it wouldn't surprise me if much Bitcoin advocacy did derive from those beliefs. And it seems those beliefs are at least as misguided as theism (and we have no trouble being dismissive of them). Is there a nice way to discuss that?
Sure, just discuss the particular problems with the (best versions of) propositions put forth by such people, and how their conclusions don't follow, and what specific pieces of evidence weigh heavily against them. (Note the lack of smearing them as racists in this method.)
OTOH, if all you have is, "these people are weird and I don't like them but I don't specifically know what error they're making, they just seem like aristocratic Southern racists", you're best off keeping that to yourself.
Sure, just discuss the particular problems with the (best versions of) propositions put forth by such people [goldbugs and libertarians], and how their conclusions don't follow, and what specific pieces of evidence weight heavily against them. (Note the lack of smearing them as racists in this method.)
OK. Libertarianism I can leave to others (I don't think I have anything new to say about it). As for hard-money advocacy, usually one sees the following errors:
As far as I can tell, the only of those I've seen from you in particular is the last one, and that's another subthread.
There is a new one, from you, in this discussion though: the idea that "too much" economic activity is happening now, and it would be better to defer some of that economic activity until later. High unemployment refutes this. [If you'll claim current unemployment is structural in nature, then what is the industry that lacks labor, and is thusly currently experiencing increasing real wages?]
Investing in the productive economy hasn't yielded a positive return for the last ten years, and yes, it's fair to expect the market to compensate you for deferring consumption because society is decidedly not indifferent between whether you consume resources now or later. It would be one thing if investment opportunities did this while cash could not, but that is not where we are today.
(It's fine if you want to toss out the concept of deservingness [though less so if you want to paint me as a racist], but you can't get around how rewarded behavior will tend to happen more and less rewarded behavior, less. So unless you want all behavior to shift toward consuming all real resources immediately, including "seed corn", you have just as much an interest in seeing an economy strike a balance between present an future consumption, no matter how much you hate rich people or deem them racist.)
And getting people to invest in productive enterprises under threat of their money withering away is pure Machiavellianism, not a system you'd come up with after careful consideration of how to best reach a Pareto optimum. It would be one thing if the market did compensate people for deferral of consumption (through positive real after-tax interest rates), in a magnitude that reflects society's current willingness to move their purchases forward, but "noble" (and very non-secret, conspiracy-theory-not-required) manipulations of financial markets have prevented this from happening.
It is not an obviously superior economic system when people have to make haphazard, ill-considered loans just to have a chance at preserving purchasing power.
And finally, an inflationary currency doesn't solve the problem of investors requiring positive real expected return; it just rearranges the problem. Nor is it some kind of boon to have exporters that are advantaged by cheap local currency. If that's so great, why not debase the currency to nothing? We have a name for working for others for nothing, and it's not something we generally aim for.
Now to get to the actual economics:
Investing in the productive economy hasn't yielded a positive return for the last ten years
Given stock price trends I can't see how this is true. Can you elaborate? Even Treasuries are yielding 3-odd percent in the face of 2-odd percent inflation.
unless you want all behavior to shift toward consuming all real resources immediately, including "seed corn", you have just as much an interest in seeing an economy strike a balance between present an future consumption
The wealth of a nation is not some fixed quantity; it's its aggregate production of goods and services. There's not anything we can "run out of" that's required for people to trade, barter, etc. Am I missing something?
Sure, there are finite resources we could run out of, like oil. But attempting to restrict the total size of the economy in an effort to conserve those particular resources seems awfully suboptimal. (It also seems doomed to fail in an economy consisting of humans). Better to attack those particular resource usages through taxation, policy, subsidizing alternatives, etc.
Try to bear with me; and I will try to remember where I am. This is the first time I've met a hard-money advocate on the Internet who also [presumably, given our venue] cares about map-territory correspondence.
Investing in the productive economy hasn't yielded a positive return for the last ten years, and yes, it's fair to expect the market to compensate you for deferring consumption because society is decidedly not indifferent between whether you consume resources now or later. It would be one thing if investment opportunities did this while cash could not, but that is not where we are today.
(It's fine if you want to toss out the concept of deservingness [though less so if you want to paint me as a racist], but you can't get around how rewarded behavior will tend to happen more and less rewarded behavior, less. So unless you want all behavior to shift toward consuming all real resources immediately, including "seed corn", you have just as much an interest in seeing an economy strike a balance between present an future consumption, no matter how much you hate rich people or deem them racist.)
And getting people to invest in productive enterprises under threat of their money withering away is pure Machiavellianism, not a system you'd come up with after careful consideration of how to best reach a Pareto optimum. It would be one thing if the market did compensate people for deferral of consumption (through positive real after-tax interest rates), in a magnitude that reflects society's current willingness to move their purchases forward, but "noble" (and very non-secret, conspiracy-theory-not-required) manipulations of financial markets have prevented this from happening.
It is not an obviously superior economic system when people have to make haphazard, ill-considered loans just to have a chance at preserving purchasing power.
And finally, an inflationary currency doesn't solve the problem of investors requiring positive real expected return; it just rearranges the problem. Nor is it some kind of boon to have exporters that are advantaged by cheap local currency. If that's so great, why not debase the currency to nothing? We have a name for working for others for nothing, and it's not something we generally aim for.
you hate rich people
I do, and this probably clouds my judgement.
The venue: Noodles & Co, at this Durham location
Agenda:
C'mon... all your friends are doing it...
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By attempting genocide.