4 ms·

Being able to trade arbitrarily-devaluable IOUs from a future America for real goods today is a fantastic deal. Putting it in the kid terms that seem to be nece

Being able to trade arbitrarily-devaluable IOUs from a future America for real goods today is a fantastic deal. Putting it in the kid terms that seem to be necessary for this dynamic of endless "questioning" - if Bobby can get ice cream treats from the corner store by giving them pieces of paper with his picture on them, that's pretty awesome for Bobby. In the bigger picture - the reserve currency dynamic has allowed many things to grow detached from reality, and those things are in dire need of reform (eg the everything bubble). But that the destroy-America-first platform can include condemning the whole dynamic is itself just another symptom of that detachment and entitlement. Talk about wanting to kill the goose that lays golden eggs because you don't understand it, and don't want to spend any effort trying to understand it.

rayiner 2y ago
> In the bigger picture - the reserve currency dynamic has allowed many things to grow detached from reality, and those things are in dire need of reform (eg the everything bubble) It seems like you don’t even disagree about the problem, you just think we should chip away at the symptoms instead of getting at root causes. Free ice cream is bad! Bobby is going to not learn how to work for a living, and he’s going to get diabetes on top of that.
- mindslight 2y ago
  The root causes are stability and general wealth. Working to "fix" those is abjectly retarded. If letting our industrial base wither is a problem, then spend some of the resources we get for merely exporting our currency on explicitly building it back up. Those IOU's can be traded for machine tools just as easily as disposable "fast fashion". If the all-asset bubble is a problem, then stop letting the Federal Reserve drop interest rates to the point that wild or highly-leveraged speculation makes sense. If the churn of cheap non-repairable throwaway crap is a problem, then ban it and/or mandate repairability outright. If the proliferation of do-nothing middle managers in government/academic/industry is a problem, then figure out how to increase accountability, actual meritocracy, and general nimbleness. Turning the financial and authoritarian screws mostly hurts people who are focused on doing their jobs rather than focused on keeping them. Humans are not wild animals. Free ice cream is an unequivocally good thing - it can always not be eaten. If little Bobby is eating unhealthy amounts of ice cream, then his parents should stop him from doing that independent of financial constraints. If little Bobby is not developing a work ethic, then teach him to work hard directly and teach him how to save his money for larger goals. Certainly don't think that teaching him to live hand to mouth for ice cream treats is doing him some kind of service. These are all problems of abundance. The destructionist movement seems to be based on wanting to revert to some idyllic version of the past with a struggle we understood. Whereas we really need to be solving the new problems we face. As it stands, the destructionist approach is going to leave us without financial wealth or industrial wealth. Tariffs and allowing increased corporate externalities are basically the economic equivalent of "thoughts and prayers" .

rayiner 2y ago

> In the bigger picture - the reserve currency dynamic has allowed many things to grow detached from reality, and those things are in dire need of reform (eg the everything bubble) It seems like you don’t even disagree about the problem, you just think we should chip away at the symptoms instead of getting at root causes. Free ice cream is bad! Bobby is going to not learn how to work for a living, and he’s going to get diabetes on top of that.

mindslight 2y ago
The root causes are stability and general wealth. Working to "fix" those is abjectly retarded. If letting our industrial base wither is a problem, then spend some of the resources we get for merely exporting our currency on explicitly building it back up. Those IOU's can be traded for machine tools just as easily as disposable "fast fashion". If the all-asset bubble is a problem, then stop letting the Federal Reserve drop interest rates to the point that wild or highly-leveraged speculation makes sense. If the churn of cheap non-repairable throwaway crap is a problem, then ban it and/or mandate repairability outright. If the proliferation of do-nothing middle managers in government/academic/industry is a problem, then figure out how to increase accountability, actual meritocracy, and general nimbleness. Turning the financial and authoritarian screws mostly hurts people who are focused on doing their jobs rather than focused on keeping them. Humans are not wild animals. Free ice cream is an unequivocally good thing - it can always not be eaten. If little Bobby is eating unhealthy amounts of ice cream, then his parents should stop him from doing that independent of financial constraints. If little Bobby is not developing a work ethic, then teach him to work hard directly and teach him how to save his money for larger goals. Certainly don't think that teaching him to live hand to mouth for ice cream treats is doing him some kind of service. These are all problems of abundance. The destructionist movement seems to be based on wanting to revert to some idyllic version of the past with a struggle we understood. Whereas we really need to be solving the new problems we face. As it stands, the destructionist approach is going to leave us without financial wealth or industrial wealth. Tariffs and allowing increased corporate externalities are basically the economic equivalent of "thoughts and prayers" .