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Central Banking has been one of the most powerful and liberating achievements of civilization. And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your employer,

Central Banking has been one of the most powerful and liberating achievements of civilization. And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your employer, women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job, you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about 5% did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost anything in life. And what 'freedoms' have you lost? Well, there's more taxation. And you have to sell your car to a Black man if he wants to buy it from you. And you have to prove drugs work before selling them. You have to pay workers a minimum wage, and make sure they don't die on the job. What other 'freedoms' were are you keen to regain?

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
It would be nice if the cost of rungs in the social later (housing, education, etc) wasn't so high that only certain kinds of people could achieve them. Many of the "your not allowed to do that"s of the past are still in place for entire neighborhoods, only the words changed.
- jollybean 5y ago
  In 1922 only 5% of people went to University - now 50% go on to post secondary which is largely due to cost and opportunity. Only about 50% finished HS - now it's 95%. Doctors were not very affordable by anyone - now it's >90%. Most people didn't have running water and electricity yet now it's almost 100%. The only thing that's not as nice as 'real estate' - housing was cheap, but the houses were crap, and often you were isolated. If you want to go out of major US urban area, and build a small home to 1925 standards, then it's affordable. But if you are young, then I am actually sympathetic to you: education and housing costs are 'worse' now than in then 1990's. Those are the two things I will say Gen Z 'has it hard' with. That, and having to grow up where everyone has social media, which is not a social benefit, it's dystopian if you ask me.
  - mbg721 5y ago
    I would argue, as many would, that a high-school graduate now is much worse off now than a high-school dropout a century ago. Jobs are much more specialized, you can't rely on working on "the family farm", and the prestige of a high-school diploma has tanked to "You don't have this, what's wrong with you??"
  - scottLobster 5y ago
    All of those facts are meaningless without context. Higher education is far more necessary for even a middle class existence than it was in 1922, and the middle class is getting less and less affordable. One of my grandfathers worked a family farm. My dad was able to grind his way out of the lower classes by working at Friendly's and other odd jobs to pay for college (up to and including his PhD). My father in law's uncle was a high school dropout who started showing people around at the local hardware store and was such a good salesperson the owner hired him after a few weeks. None of those are possible for most Americans these days (good luck pulling the leave-it-to-beaver "prove my value to the local store owner" at Home Depot or Walmart). US citizens are now regularly advised to take Uber to the hospital if they can survive the trip, as it avoids the cost of an ambulance, which is often over a thousand dollars in a country where most can't afford a $500 emergency. I'm not sure how that qualifies as "affordable", and certainly not affordable to 90%+. Granted this is primarily an American issue. More important to me than the quality of the house is the quality of the school district that it's in (see previous remarks about the modern necessity of education). I can fix/improve a house, I can't fix/improve schooling short of private school, which would probably be more expensive than fixing a house over the long term. Good look finding an affordable house in a good school district near any major metropolitan area with jobs.
    - elhudy 5y ago
      Further, healthcare costs are only “affordable” insofar as we are adding them to our country’s growing debt via medicare.
    - Retric 5y ago
      A 1922s “middle class” experience is affordable for a most Americans today. As in shelter with heat, phone service, and electric lights but no appliances, no car, minimal access to effective healthcare etc. Upward mobility is still available and just as rare. The health, intelligence, and drive that allowed someone in 1922 to better themselves are the same things that still allow someone to better themselves in 2022. It’s not easy, but it was never easy. Just look at how many people in 1922 where held back by the color of their skin. As to getting a job at Walmart, have you ever actually applied? Their standards are incredibly lax.
  - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
    All of these improvements, numerically speaking, and yet my wife regularly has classes of 40 where none of the students have parents that went to college, a quarter of them need glasses that they can't afford, and an eighth is homeless. The size of the group that benefits from modernization is indeed growing, as your numbers point out, but if you're not in that group you're just as stuck as you've ever been.
didericis 5y ago
Can you explain why the freedoms you mention are the result primarily of central banking and not social and technological change? The key freedom lost via central banking (at least irresponsible central banking) is the freedom of those in the future to do anything other than meet debt obligations. Debt and credit is obviously necessary, and making money easily accessible and keeping markets liquid is a good thing, but if debt obligations grow too large, people increasingly forfeit their future productivity and the future of their children’s productivity to paying interest. No one can enjoy increased freedoms if they are spending all their time paying off individual and collective interest.
- imtringued 5y ago
  The problem, the reason why we don't have a free market economy, is that the saver gets to decide how much debt there is. The saver gets to decide whether to lend out his money, to spend it or to simply keep it forever. The money is no longer circulating within the economy, which means someone, usually the government, is forced to borrow the money back into the economy at an interest rate that is simply not sustainable.
- md_ 5y ago
  I’m confused. If you mean public debt, doesn’t central banking free the public from meeting debt obligations when those obligations are denominated in the national currency? Countries can and do issue public debt in other currencies. If we all used gold or bitcoin, there’s no reason to think public debt would be lower. But the obligation to pay it back would, in a sense, be harder to dodge. It’s worth noting, as an aside, that the trend line on cost of servicing public debt in the US has been downward (though I would expect this to change): https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/us-debt-has-increased-burden-servicing-it-has-fallen https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/us-debt-has-increa....
  - User23 5y ago
    The primary purposes of central banking are to privatize seigniorage[1] revenue and increase bankers' ability to control politicians. The former is achieved through the Primary Dealer system and the latter should be self-explanatory. Needless to say, since most spending is electronic transactions, the seigniorage revenue is very nearly the entire face value of the created instrument. It's a blatantly undemocratic power grab, effectively allowing a consortium of private banks to limit Congress's power of the purse. Or at least that was the theory. As we're seeing now, that one putative upside is nonexistent and the Fed is happy to cooperate with Treasury to spend trillions a year. The rentier class appears to be consoling itself with massive asset inflation, while still banking the seigniorage. The United States could just as easily once again fund all of its spending by creating new U.S. Notes[2] (perhaps without the public debt clause) and then control inflation by extinguishing those liabilities through taxation. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/seigniorage.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/seigniorage.asp [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Note https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Note
toolz 5y ago
> What other 'freedoms' were are you keen to regain? For me I'd like to not pay money for the "privilege" of having a central organization constantly and unapologetically spy on me.
mwint 5y ago
> And you have to sell your car to a Black man if he wants to buy it from you. Never thought about this before: Suppose I’m Black, respond to a Craigslist ad for a $10k car for sale by owner, and am refused for my skin color. What law do I or the state prosecute the seller under? Most of the anti-discrimination laws I know of apply to companies, usually companies with more than N employees.
- tlholaday 5y ago
  > What law do I or the state prosecute the seller under? Start your research with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
  - mwint 5y ago
    https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-1964 https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-196... - looks like this is all about employment, and even then only applies to those employing more than N employees: > The term "employer" means a person engaged in an industry affecting commerce who has fifteen or more employees [...] I suppose the root of my question is this: Where is the law stating that an individual cannot act with prejudice against another individual, outside of an employment context? I've always assumed such a law exists, but never asked exactly where it is.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  Probably more relevant to dealerships
atlgator 5y ago
Has Central Banking been liberating or do we only perceive it as such because it has historically aligned with American business and political interests? Would a small South American country being forced to sell it's natural resources or lose it's borrowing power agree? Would Middle Eastern countries that tried to form the petro dollar and were met with endless wars agree?
CryptoPunk 5y ago
There is absolutely nothing liberating about central banking. It is a monopoly on money creation, and that monopoly is enforced through an apparatus of violence (police, courts and prisons, used to compel compliance). It leads to a small elite being in control of trillions of dollars in national capital allocations every year, with virtually no democratic oversight. It leads to financial institutions capturing 42% of corporate profits since 1973, with all of the growth in wealth inequality that goes along with that. It leads to gigantic corporate welfare programs, like the government mortgage guarantee program, where financial institutions buy $1.5 trillion worth of government guaranteed mortgage backed securities - where profits are 100% privatized, and risk is 100% socialized - every year. >>And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your employer, You always had that freedom. Now you have the power to get the state to force the employer to keep you employed, and not replace you, while you strike. This power has given public sector unions total control over public finances. For example, New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year: https://archive.md/JnJQY https://archive.md/JnJQY In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year. California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers. That is where all the social welfare spending is going. >>Well, there's more taxation. Yes, the state now forces you, under pain of imprisonment, to work 40% of the year to pay a bloated bureaucracy. >>And you have to sell your car to a Black man if he wants to buy it from you. And every one has to suffer higher costs, and less advancement, as a specialized caste of anti-discrimination lawyers extract billions of dollars per year from corporations for their failure to comply with impossible-to-comply-with anti-discrimination laws [1] while forcing the private sector to 1. spend billions more in "anti-racism" training, that includes lessons on the supposed omnipresence of "white privilege" [2] and 2. institute affirmative action programs, that waste resources and lead to less competent work forces, respectively. >>And you have to prove drugs work before selling them. Yes, you need the approval of a centralized regulatory gatekeeper, which is often incompetent, and prevents people from accessing life-saving medical products/services in a timely manner [3][4] or denies people access to a vaccine due to a risk from side effects that is orders of magnitude lower than the risk the vaccine mitigates. [5] >>women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job, Women had jobs back then. The jobs available to women have improved due to the cultural impact of much higher per capita productivity, which makes people far more independent and assertive. >>you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about 5% did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost anything in life. That is entirely due to higher per capita productivity, which enables more people to be supported through their post-secondary schooling years. The massive per capita productivity growth seen since 1922 could soon be a thing of the past in the advanced economies, as the growing repressiveness of the state has steadily reduced per capita GDP growth rates over the last several decades, and this trend sees no signs of abatement or reversal. [1] https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-the-case https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-sta... [2] https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-why-coca-cola-is-being-called-anti-white-after-a-diversity-training-seminar-7204703/ https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-why-co... [3] https://www.propublica.org/article/this-scientist-created-a-rapid-test-just-weeks-into-the-pandemic-heres-why-you-still-cant-get-it https://www.propublica.org/article/this-scientist-created-a-... [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-delays.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de... [5] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/us/politics/johnson-johnson-vaccine-blood-clots-fda-cdc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/us/politics/johnson-johns...
pjbk 5y ago
Interesting to see how sacrificing some freedoms to give more freedom to others in the short term, eventually enhances your same former freedoms in the medium or long term.
thegrimmest 5y ago
I'd be keen to be able to employ people without the government intervening in negotiations (minimum wage, various employment laws, etc.). I don't think the government has any place deciding what I can and can't offer. I also would like to be able to use my own judgement when hiring people, without having to worry about proving (the negative) that I'm not being discriminatory. Workers have always had the freedom to strike. And employers should have the freedom to terminate striking employees. I don't see the need for regulation here. The "freedom" to attend college has created a mountain of student debt and an overeducated workforce. I fail to see the benefit. All in all, directly, I'd like to live in a society where people are entitled to only what they can negotiate for, not more. And one that does not strive to protect people from the consequences of their own misfortune or inadequacy.

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago

It would be nice if the cost of rungs in the social later (housing, education, etc) wasn't so high that only certain kinds of people could achieve them. Many of the "your not allowed to do that"s of the past are still in place for entire neighborhoods, only the words changed.

jollybean 5y ago
In 1922 only 5% of people went to University - now 50% go on to post secondary which is largely due to cost and opportunity. Only about 50% finished HS - now it's 95%. Doctors were not very affordable by anyone - now it's >90%. Most people didn't have running water and electricity yet now it's almost 100%. The only thing that's not as nice as 'real estate' - housing was cheap, but the houses were crap, and often you were isolated. If you want to go out of major US urban area, and build a small home to 1925 standards, then it's affordable. But if you are young, then I am actually sympathetic to you: education and housing costs are 'worse' now than in then 1990's. Those are the two things I will say Gen Z 'has it hard' with. That, and having to grow up where everyone has social media, which is not a social benefit, it's dystopian if you ask me.
- mbg721 5y ago
  I would argue, as many would, that a high-school graduate now is much worse off now than a high-school dropout a century ago. Jobs are much more specialized, you can't rely on working on "the family farm", and the prestige of a high-school diploma has tanked to "You don't have this, what's wrong with you??"
- scottLobster 5y ago
  All of those facts are meaningless without context. Higher education is far more necessary for even a middle class existence than it was in 1922, and the middle class is getting less and less affordable. One of my grandfathers worked a family farm. My dad was able to grind his way out of the lower classes by working at Friendly's and other odd jobs to pay for college (up to and including his PhD). My father in law's uncle was a high school dropout who started showing people around at the local hardware store and was such a good salesperson the owner hired him after a few weeks. None of those are possible for most Americans these days (good luck pulling the leave-it-to-beaver "prove my value to the local store owner" at Home Depot or Walmart). US citizens are now regularly advised to take Uber to the hospital if they can survive the trip, as it avoids the cost of an ambulance, which is often over a thousand dollars in a country where most can't afford a $500 emergency. I'm not sure how that qualifies as "affordable", and certainly not affordable to 90%+. Granted this is primarily an American issue. More important to me than the quality of the house is the quality of the school district that it's in (see previous remarks about the modern necessity of education). I can fix/improve a house, I can't fix/improve schooling short of private school, which would probably be more expensive than fixing a house over the long term. Good look finding an affordable house in a good school district near any major metropolitan area with jobs.
  - elhudy 5y ago
    Further, healthcare costs are only “affordable” insofar as we are adding them to our country’s growing debt via medicare.
  - Retric 5y ago
    A 1922s “middle class” experience is affordable for a most Americans today. As in shelter with heat, phone service, and electric lights but no appliances, no car, minimal access to effective healthcare etc. Upward mobility is still available and just as rare. The health, intelligence, and drive that allowed someone in 1922 to better themselves are the same things that still allow someone to better themselves in 2022. It’s not easy, but it was never easy. Just look at how many people in 1922 where held back by the color of their skin. As to getting a job at Walmart, have you ever actually applied? Their standards are incredibly lax.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  All of these improvements, numerically speaking, and yet my wife regularly has classes of 40 where none of the students have parents that went to college, a quarter of them need glasses that they can't afford, and an eighth is homeless. The size of the group that benefits from modernization is indeed growing, as your numbers point out, but if you're not in that group you're just as stuck as you've ever been.

didericis 5y ago

Can you explain why the freedoms you mention are the result primarily of central banking and not social and technological change? The key freedom lost via central banking (at least irresponsible central banking) is the freedom of those in the future to do anything other than meet debt obligations. Debt and credit is obviously necessary, and making money easily accessible and keeping markets liquid is a good thing, but if debt obligations grow too large, people increasingly forfeit their future productivity and the future of their children’s productivity to paying interest. No one can enjoy increased freedoms if they are spending all their time paying off individual and collective interest.

imtringued 5y ago
The problem, the reason why we don't have a free market economy, is that the saver gets to decide how much debt there is. The saver gets to decide whether to lend out his money, to spend it or to simply keep it forever. The money is no longer circulating within the economy, which means someone, usually the government, is forced to borrow the money back into the economy at an interest rate that is simply not sustainable.
md_ 5y ago
I’m confused. If you mean public debt, doesn’t central banking free the public from meeting debt obligations when those obligations are denominated in the national currency? Countries can and do issue public debt in other currencies. If we all used gold or bitcoin, there’s no reason to think public debt would be lower. But the obligation to pay it back would, in a sense, be harder to dodge. It’s worth noting, as an aside, that the trend line on cost of servicing public debt in the US has been downward (though I would expect this to change): https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/us-debt-has-increased-burden-servicing-it-has-fallen https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/us-debt-has-increa....
- User23 5y ago
  The primary purposes of central banking are to privatize seigniorage[1] revenue and increase bankers' ability to control politicians. The former is achieved through the Primary Dealer system and the latter should be self-explanatory. Needless to say, since most spending is electronic transactions, the seigniorage revenue is very nearly the entire face value of the created instrument. It's a blatantly undemocratic power grab, effectively allowing a consortium of private banks to limit Congress's power of the purse. Or at least that was the theory. As we're seeing now, that one putative upside is nonexistent and the Fed is happy to cooperate with Treasury to spend trillions a year. The rentier class appears to be consoling itself with massive asset inflation, while still banking the seigniorage. The United States could just as easily once again fund all of its spending by creating new U.S. Notes[2] (perhaps without the public debt clause) and then control inflation by extinguishing those liabilities through taxation. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/seigniorage.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/seigniorage.asp [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Note https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Note

toolz 5y ago

> What other 'freedoms' were are you keen to regain? For me I'd like to not pay money for the "privilege" of having a central organization constantly and unapologetically spy on me.

mwint 5y ago

> And you have to sell your car to a Black man if he wants to buy it from you. Never thought about this before: Suppose I’m Black, respond to a Craigslist ad for a $10k car for sale by owner, and am refused for my skin color. What law do I or the state prosecute the seller under? Most of the anti-discrimination laws I know of apply to companies, usually companies with more than N employees.

tlholaday 5y ago
> What law do I or the state prosecute the seller under? Start your research with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
- mwint 5y ago
  https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-1964 https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-196... - looks like this is all about employment, and even then only applies to those employing more than N employees: > The term "employer" means a person engaged in an industry affecting commerce who has fifteen or more employees [...] I suppose the root of my question is this: Where is the law stating that an individual cannot act with prejudice against another individual, outside of an employment context? I've always assumed such a law exists, but never asked exactly where it is.
selimthegrim 5y ago
Probably more relevant to dealerships

atlgator 5y ago

Has Central Banking been liberating or do we only perceive it as such because it has historically aligned with American business and political interests? Would a small South American country being forced to sell it's natural resources or lose it's borrowing power agree? Would Middle Eastern countries that tried to form the petro dollar and were met with endless wars agree?

CryptoPunk 5y ago

There is absolutely nothing liberating about central banking. It is a monopoly on money creation, and that monopoly is enforced through an apparatus of violence (police, courts and prisons, used to compel compliance). It leads to a small elite being in control of trillions of dollars in national capital allocations every year, with virtually no democratic oversight. It leads to financial institutions capturing 42% of corporate profits since 1973, with all of the growth in wealth inequality that goes along with that. It leads to gigantic corporate welfare programs, like the government mortgage guarantee program, where financial institutions buy $1.5 trillion worth of government guaranteed mortgage backed securities - where profits are 100% privatized, and risk is 100% socialized - every year. >>And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your employer, You always had that freedom. Now you have the power to get the state to force the employer to keep you employed, and not replace you, while you strike. This power has given public sector unions total control over public finances. For example, New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year: https://archive.md/JnJQY https://archive.md/JnJQY In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year. California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers. That is where all the social welfare spending is going. >>Well, there's more taxation. Yes, the state now forces you, under pain of imprisonment, to work 40% of the year to pay a bloated bureaucracy. >>And you have to sell your car to a Black man if he wants to buy it from you. And every one has to suffer higher costs, and less advancement, as a specialized caste of anti-discrimination lawyers extract billions of dollars per year from corporations for their failure to comply with impossible-to-comply-with anti-discrimination laws [1] while forcing the private sector to 1. spend billions more in "anti-racism" training, that includes lessons on the supposed omnipresence of "white privilege" [2] and 2. institute affirmative action programs, that waste resources and lead to less competent work forces, respectively. >>And you have to prove drugs work before selling them. Yes, you need the approval of a centralized regulatory gatekeeper, which is often incompetent, and prevents people from accessing life-saving medical products/services in a timely manner [3][4] or denies people access to a vaccine due to a risk from side effects that is orders of magnitude lower than the risk the vaccine mitigates. [5] >>women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job, Women had jobs back then. The jobs available to women have improved due to the cultural impact of much higher per capita productivity, which makes people far more independent and assertive. >>you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about 5% did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost anything in life. That is entirely due to higher per capita productivity, which enables more people to be supported through their post-secondary schooling years. The massive per capita productivity growth seen since 1922 could soon be a thing of the past in the advanced economies, as the growing repressiveness of the state has steadily reduced per capita GDP growth rates over the last several decades, and this trend sees no signs of abatement or reversal. [1] https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-the-case https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-sta... [2] https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-why-coca-cola-is-being-called-anti-white-after-a-diversity-training-seminar-7204703/ https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-why-co... [3] https://www.propublica.org/article/this-scientist-created-a-rapid-test-just-weeks-into-the-pandemic-heres-why-you-still-cant-get-it https://www.propublica.org/article/this-scientist-created-a-... [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-delays.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de... [5] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/us/politics/johnson-johnson-vaccine-blood-clots-fda-cdc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/us/politics/johnson-johns...

pjbk 5y ago

Interesting to see how sacrificing some freedoms to give more freedom to others in the short term, eventually enhances your same former freedoms in the medium or long term.

thegrimmest 5y ago

I'd be keen to be able to employ people without the government intervening in negotiations (minimum wage, various employment laws, etc.). I don't think the government has any place deciding what I can and can't offer. I also would like to be able to use my own judgement when hiring people, without having to worry about proving (the negative) that I'm not being discriminatory. Workers have always had the freedom to strike. And employers should have the freedom to terminate striking employees. I don't see the need for regulation here. The "freedom" to attend college has created a mountain of student debt and an overeducated workforce. I fail to see the benefit. All in all, directly, I'd like to live in a society where people are entitled to only what they can negotiate for, not more. And one that does not strive to protect people from the consequences of their own misfortune or inadequacy.