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There are a lot of micro-currency in Western Europe. Personally I believe it's a step back because it reeks of protectionism but it's all the rage among my left
by johnchristopher 8y ago
There are a lot of micro-currency in Western Europe. Personally I believe it's a step back because it reeks of protectionism but it's all the rage among my leftist friends (am a leftist too, but not pro micro-currency).
- benj111 8y agoInteresting, I'd have thought it would be a more conservative thing. Keeping money local, protecting local businesses. Maybe that's why they're moderately popular? They cross the political divide.
- mercacona 8y agoLooking forward to a sustainable economy requires some protectionism against globalism. That's how the left became protectionist in many European countries.
- lumberjack 8y agoWhen were leftists NOT protectionists? Protectionism is anti-liberal and anti-free-market? It was always left-wing.
- riffraff 8y agoactual communism and socialism was internationalist at its core.
- lumberjack 8y agoInternationalist yes, but not pro-free-trade. And in practice it was always almost always the opposite of that. In Europe all the hard-left parties were anti-EU precisely because they were opposed to free trade and wanted to protect the local markets.
- labster 8y agoCurrently in the United States the liberal party is the party of free trade while the right-wing president calls himself the Tarriff Man.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lumberjack 8y ago1. The Democrats are not leftists. Liberals are not leftists. 2. Ideologically speaking both US Republicans and US Democrats are Liberals and pro-free trade, Trump is an exception.
- learc83 8y agoLanguage changes, and in American English at least, the definition of liberal has changed. If you use the word liberal to describe what we might refer to as "classical liberal", you will needlessly confuse people.
- wallace_f 8y agoKind of an outlier, though, because the Republicans typically cheer free trade (but then put tarrifs on shoes, cheese, tires, etc, etc, and of course subsidize big agribusineess, Wall St., etc).
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> the Republicans typically cheer free trade These affinities have shifted many times in American political history. For example, Lincoln was a Republican.
- village-idiot 8y agoThere are plenty of examples of leftists not being protectionist. The Girondins of revolutionary France were very pro free market, something that lost them a lot of support among the starving sans culottes. The more radical Mountain factions appear to have mostly supported protectionist measures, namely maximum prices, largely out of the need to stop the mobs of Paris from literally storming the legislative halls. The moment the parisians believed that the maximum didn’t work, they were dropped.
- wallace_f 8y agoHere I am hoping anyone still cares about federated, democratized powers and people having the right to control their own money supply. The Fed can print 4 trillion dollars for Wall St and people don't care. That's getting pretty close to half of GDP for one year (at the time). Hundreds of millions of people's work product... If they're going to print money like that at least inject it into the economy by buying stuff like free healthcare or education.
- Nasrudith 8y agoCan you tell me when people have been able to control their own money supply at any point in history and have it be worth anything? It has always been in the hands of a mint of some sort of shackled to the base metal if done by weight.
- wallace_f 8y agoLincoln authorized congress to do it and it proved to be a success and improvement. It helped the North win the war.
- Nasrudith 8y agoIt is 'cozy' and 'underdog' in a way that fits the memetic zeitgeist essentially - not something sensible in itself. Like 'buy local', food miles, and other fallacies that disregard production efficiency entirely.
- username223 8y agoNot just protectionism, but a sort of micro-nationalism that Americans haven't seen, because we don't have much history. For example, Spain calls itself a nation, but Catalonia recently tried to secede, and if you visit, you'll hear most people speaking Catalan. The Basques were recently blowing things up (ETA). And Leon resents Castile enough that you will see road signs spray-painted with "solo Leon" (only Leon), because "Castilla y Leon" was made into a single province. Europe is an old place, for better and worse. I question this stuff, but I won't judge it.
- tokai 8y ago>micro-nationalism Isn't that called regionalism?
- cbnotfromthere 8y agoNo, because these are nations.
- saool 8y agoIt is, but in Spain's case it is sometimes nationalism too, as the Spanish Crown rules over several different old independent kingdoms which have cultural differences and languages that stem directly from Latin (ex. Euskera). I don't know where academics put the bar, but in my mind any area that has its own non-dialect language or was once an independent entity for a good while can claim to be a nation. Though not sure what the claim would mean in practice. That said, I'd rather see all these things die down and have a strong EU of federated states of whichever size helps democratic and economic progress. Tall order, I know.
- learc83 8y ago>languages that stem directly from Latin (ex. Euskera). Euskara is a language isolate. It is is unrelated to any other known living language. >in my mind any area that has its own non-dialect language or was once an independent entity for a good while can claim to be a nation. Dialect vs language is often a political decision, so even that criteria is subjective.
- imtringued 8y agoCurrencies are a simple market based solution to the problem of trade imbalances. The appreciation/depreciation mechanism automatically makes it cheaper to import from countries that import a lot more than they export and expensive to import from countries that export a lot more than they import. This allows poorer countries to grow faster than richer countries because it is cheaper to invest there. If you have a single currency over a single large economy then you have to do correct these imbalances manually via transfer payments that manually redistribute the wealth from the wealthiest regions to the poorest. There are a lot of things that can go wrong here. The size of the transfer payments may not be large enough to have any effect and it is not politically acceptable to increase it. (One of many small reasons for Brexit) Of course they are right because it is their wealth but this kind of solidarity is necessary to reduce inequality between countries that share the same currency. Then you need to make the decision which countries receive the transfer payments and which countries pay them. Again this is a problem that could be easily avoided by having multiple currencies.