Absolutely. Speculation on the stock market used to be illegal until the 80’s, meaning that investments had to be based on a company’s tangible performance. No options (until 1973), no stock buybacks (until 1982), even the rules for short selling were different.
Investments put your money to work by recirculating it through the economy in a productive fashion (theoretically anyway — I share your skepticism about the usefulness of the modern stock market). Investing in a company provides for the operating cost of that business. Putting cash under the mattress is not an investment. It’s just your savings.
The disappearance of crypto would have no downsides is what I meant. People could then invest their savings into something other than a pyramid scheme. Such investments would be good for the economy.
You’re absolutely right, and I have no idea. Maybe wait another 100,000 years for the 30% of humanity that lacks abstract moral reasoning to exit the gene pool.
The person rejecting reason is you. Turning the other cheek is not rational. My conclusions are grounded in first principles, whereas your stance is closer to a religion.
Again, this is incorrect. The reason dollars are not “backed by gold” (an arbitrary metric since gold is kind of useless — guns or bread or even puppies would make more sense) is that the US dollar is a currency, an IOU, not some sort of finite resource.
Dollars represent public trust in the power of the US government to extract taxes from its citizens. That’s tangible.
Bitcoin represents nothing; or if I’m being generous, I could say that bitcoin’s value represents people’s faith that the game of musical chairs won’t end tomorrow.
Buddy, we are just animals trying to survive. The wealthy lack every transcendental value that makes humans special. They’re more like orcs. You want me to say please and thank you as they destroy my world and poison my family?
No one forces you to accept an IOU, but that’s how “money” is created.
If you want a beer and have nothing suitable to offer in exchange, you might give me an IOU, which I then hand off to someone else in exchange for goods and services, until one day someone asks you for goods and services in exchange for the same IOU that you had used to buy a beer months ago.
I guarantee you that if the shooter had the power to do that then he would have
You don’t know that. Killing the rich is ethical; torturing them is not. And since the shooter has better ethics than you do, I doubt he’d violate such a basic principle.
That’s not how money works. Fiat currency is just IOU’s, literally, which are discharged when the promissory note returns to its originator (in the case of dollars, the US treasury). Check out Debt the First 5000 Years for an anthropological look at the origins of money.
Whereas I would prefer to live in a moneyless (i.e., debtless) post-scarcity anarchist society, which is how small tribes and communities were organized for tens of thousands of years before the rise of nations, fiat currencies are used to maintain the modern (unimaginably huge) marketplace, whose ostensible purpose is to allocate scarce resources.
Personal debt is risky. If I issue an IOU, I might die before I can fulfill that promise. Governments are more permanent, which removes the speculative aspect of currency (at least for most purposes, though Forex trading is a thing).
A central bank can balance inflation and employment numbers to ameliorate the natural volatility of the market (with good regulation lol).
Fiat currency can be synchronized with economic productivity, avoiding the deflationary pressure that is anathema to any currency.
Dollars represent faith in the power of the US government to extract taxes from its population.
Crypto represents nothing. It stands for nothing. “Coins” come and go, and if you’re the last one standing in the zero-sum game of musical chairs, you lose your savings. For that to happen with dollars, the US government would have to implode, which is unlikely.
Crypto is, quite possibly, the purest form of speculative trading (gambling) we have ever concocted. The only reason I don’t think it should be illegal is that I have no interest in saving people from their own cupidity and greed.
Thanks for the reply. This is a genuinely tricky question, because most of us acknowledge that revenge under some circumstances isn’t just permissible but desirable, yet the devil is in the details. Consider revenge
For practical reasons such as a deterrent to future transgressors. Or
To ameliorate some tiny fraction of the hurt inflicted by the transgressor.
For instance, it would be devastating to lose a loved one, but it would hurt even more if those who killed her were out there enjoying themselves consequence free.
Killing is a fast and easy solution… being able to look beyond killing is one of the few privileges our intelligence gives us
Sure.
We are all animals (some more than others). And we have learned the hard way that to instantiate more of the transcendental values that humans occasionally exhibit as rational creatures — to bring more courage, wisdom, and meaning into this world — we should preserve life whenever possible. But there’s nothing fundamentally sacred about life… We kill all the time. Literally non-stop. Billions of animals, just like us, sentient and desperate to live, butchered for your use and pleasure. So unless you’re a vegan, you do not get to discuss “the sanctity of life.” It’s gibberish.
From an ethical perspective, killing is often justifiable. We’ve been trained like monkeys in a cage to respond aversely to death, but that reaction is grounded in a social contract that is only conditionally valid.
That’s not the point. The US has the power to extract rents; it doesn’t have to use it.