The things you post on the Internet are forever
April 19, 2015 § 52 Comments
I’ve been banned from the W4 thread on fractional reserve banking now, so to the relief of many I can get back to my blogging vacation. But for the record, I’ve preserved my two (additional) comments which were deleted. I leave interpretation of events in the thread to readers. I have all versions of the thread saved (up to the point of being banned) to prevent the “memory hole” effect, in case the thread is further “edited”, mainly because I wanted to preserve what I actually said. I’ll just post the full unedited thread somewhere here if more bits of it start disappearing there.
While the combative stuff may be amusing in a juvenile sort of way, the thread does contain quite a few comments from me explaining my perspective on fiat money, inflation, fractional reserve banking, and the like. So if you find those subjects of interest you might want to check it out.
Here are the two deleted comments, for the record:
Tony:
The government has no special obligation to look after the welfare of citizens …
It is the government’s play thing to destroy as it wishes – as long as it does not engage in usury!
We should play a drinking game where every time Tony puts words in someone else’s mouth, everyone takes a drink. Except we’d all die of alcohol poisoning. Just from his last comment.
Posted by Zippy | April 19, 2015 5:54 PM
In which I do a little cyber gophering
April 6, 2015 § 14 Comments
I’m not back, but I didn’t manage to get fully away, as I felt it would be inappropriate to just ignore the discussion in my friend Paul Cella’s kind review of my usury ebook. The discussion there may be of interest to readers of this blog.
Have a wonderful Easter season, y’all!
UPDATE: The discussion (seemingly inevitably) wandered into the domain of currencies, bank deposits, commodities, and the like, despite the irrelevance of theories about those kinds of things to the usury doctrine. My final comment on that (orthogonal to usury) subject is here (discussion starts in the original ebook review and spills over into that thread).
Note again that (even though I am right, hah!) one need not understand those subjects the way I do at all in order to understand what usury is and why usury is both morally wrong and economically destructive.
UPDATE 2: My comments in the second W4 thread are being edited. That is their perogative, but here are the last two in full, for the record:
Tony:
When the Bible and early Church teachers denounce usury on loans of money, they could not well be talking about charging usurious interest on government-issued vouchers, since that did not exist yet.
And that isn’t relevant, for reasons I leave as an exercise (hint: question 35).
The problem with any attempt to have a discussion with you – well, one of them at any rate – is that you cannot seem to keep more than one simple concept in your mind at a time, so every discussion becomes an endless, tedious game of whack-a-mole. If we talk about A, B, and C, by the time we’ve gotten to C you have forgotten everything already discussed in A. By the time A is re-clarified for the seventh or eighth time, you have forgotten everything about C. This happens even when you are having a conversation with yourself about your own ideas, which is why your posts and comments are characterized by (among other things) a certain, shall we say, lack of pith.
I used to think that you were a liar, who would constantly misrepresent my views, pretending not to grasp things I had already addressed many times and imputing things to me that I had not said. I thought that for quite a long time. But I think I was (in a sense) giving you too much credit.
At this point I really am convinced that it is just a cognitive deficit on your part. That is a problem that no amount of clarifying words from me (or anyone else) can cure. I’ve had no great difficulties explaining usury to everyone from children, to octogenarians with no financial background, to financial experts. And I’ve had discussions with people who clearly wanted to obfuscate the subject for ideological reasons. I don’t think you fall into that second category. I just think that any attempt at discussion with you specifically on pretty much any subject, is – for whatever underlying reason – a pointless and endless game of squirrel-chasing characterized primarily by endless hashing and rehashing of manifest irrelevancies which, for whatever reason, you are convinced are significant.
And by the way, on the use of the term “money” your beef isn’t with me.
My position all along – which in typical fashion you respond to as if you were talking to someone else with a different position – is that commodity, coin, fiat money, deposits and other call options, etc are essentiallydifferent things (none of which are licit to lend under a mutuum for gain, since it isn’t licit to lend anything at all under a mutuum for gain), despite economists’ sloppy conflation of them all into one category which they label “money” and despite their contingent historical entanglements. If you have a semantic beef about the label “money” it is with economists, not with me. This is typical Tony-projection-onto-Zippy, yet again.
I couldn’t care less what labels people settle on to use for these things, and other things besides (e.g. non recourse vs full recourse loans), as long as they are treated as the very different things that they are — something you fail to do in the OP, by the way.
BI:
I should suppose that the kings coined their money to pay their dues, to soldiers’ pay or to military suppliers, traders etc and not that the subjects could pay their taxes. How in the world would people have access to these newly minted coins? Would the king just distribute them so that people could pay him back in taxes?
It is surreal to me that you don’t see yourself answering your own question.
The sovereign creates official fungible currency and spends it on all the things that governments do. It circulates, and is in demand qua sovereign currency – has value to those the government pays with it – precisely because the sovereign uses it as his measurement units for public commerce, keeps its supply limited (lest it become worthless, like the stock of a company which issues too many shares), and because everyone needs access to some to settle their tax liabilities. This is entirely independent of the medium in which the sovereign issues his currency – gold, zinc, copper, paper, or mere ledger entries in a computer file.
This is similar to (but distinct from) banks issuing deposits. Banks issue deposit accounts as a zero-strike perpetual option to exercise against their assets. Sovereigns issue currency as an option/voucher to settle tax liabilities. Entanglement of the latter with portable commodities of intrinsic value (e.g. gold) is an accident of history, and that entanglement (as I have pointed out many times) actually reduces the transparency of what is taking place.
The deposit accounts issued by banks (and measured in units of sovereign currency) are backed by the bank’s assets: the various properties of varying liquidity in which it holds a stake. Actual currency issued by the sovereign (some of which is held in reserve by banks, to meet the demands of depositors) is backed by his power to tax.
That certain kinds of otherwise normally intelligent people are simply incapable of grasping this – not immediately perhaps, but after actually grappling with finance and trying to grasp what is actually taking place – is really quite puzzling, at least to me.
Zippy Catholic 
Lydia:
As always I say things as I really see them, and don’t much care how that strikes other people. Some people love it, others hate it, some love it when I agree with them and hate it when I don’t, and many attribute all sorts of things to me that I did not say; and I am willing to let the chips fall where they may. But what you see when you read my words is my actual thoughts expressed as clearly as my capacities allow. If someone else wants to package these concepts up in a way that modern entitled morally bankrupt people find less offensive, I’ll leave that to those with a more ‘pastoral’ bent.
And it isn’t exactly a new theme for me that people need to take a hard look at themselves and own their own choices, rather than blaming society or the government for the consequences of their free acts.
Posted by Zippy | April 19, 2015 3:50 PM