Mises.org Daily Article RPM Feed
- Rastafarianism's Antistate Beginnings: It's More Than Just Bob Marley's Music
- Private Property and Customer Safety: Starbucks Learns a Hard Lesson
- The Fed Is Making It Up as It Goes, So It Ditched Forward Guidance
- Emil Kauder as an Austrian Dehomogenizer
- Green Myths and Hard Realities: Sri Lanka as a Warning
First, everything Tatiana said about stuff was awesome, and she makes my life better in so many versions of mainly just one way.
But second, you guys can’t just say that having a set number of things to use in indirect exchange creates coordination. Why is that, in your view? What is the number of things *doing* with respect to your individual preferences?
For the record, once again, it is my position that non-commodity money (such as FRNs and bitcoins) necessarily cause DIScoordination, not coordination, and the only reason Americans are able to enjoy such a high standard of living under our current structures of production is because wealth is being stolen from other countries on our behalf (through counterfeiting, and exporting our inflation), even as our government does the same to American citizens for the benefit of the banks and Wall Street (there’s nothing wrong with banking or the profit motive, btw).
Money has to convey the profit you expect in return for your sale (of goods or of labor), otherwise it’s not functioning as money. And arbitrarily valued paper or digits cannot logically do that.
Even LK understands that to say that an arbitrarily valued “digital currency” – whether valued freely or not – can create economic coordination, is also to say that FRNs, or any other state-imposed “money” can create it, and would be a justification for fiat money and even coercive stimulus.
Because whether or not the “money” is valued freely, it is arbitrarily valued – it has no link to use-value, anyway, so there can’t be a distortion caused by the coercive nature of its use.
Distortion?? Distortion of what? That would imply the existence of some objective stantard being used for comparison. But arbitrarily valued things don’t have objective standards, so you can’t distort them.
Ask the guy: LK understands the acceptance of bitcoins as an acceptance of FRNs. The logic that justifies bitcoins’ use as money also justifies the use of FRNs – imposed or otherwise.
Bob, you losing weight? No kidding.