Hi Patrick, is there any chance that you are asking questions to answers you perhaps already found ? ;) ... to incite us to think ? :) ... or to find out what we come up with ? you ask : *> So governments had the authority to issue currency for themselves,
but then gave it away to private corporations?*
My current short answer : There apparently have been different periods in the recent US history what concerns control over monetary creation, including times where central private banking was a big issue in political campaigns. ( if I remember properly, as seen on this video - the money masters<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936#>- ) Charters to a central bank have not always been renewed. for example : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Bank_of_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bank_of_the_United_States There is a big dependency of politicians in Governments towards money, so when money is centrally controlled by ( officially semi-public ) private banks, I di question : whom has control over whom ?
I've heard people say "It is to control inflation" as though those private corporations have more self-control than governments.
some economists say interest leads to inflation... around 5min30 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuBy3BzCXwg <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuBy3BzCXwg>----- What concerns me, is that in addition to this, there seem to be at least two parallel economies : - the real economy : in which people try to survive and purchase goods for survival, potentially investing in some needed infrastructure. - the speculative economy : in which investors try to maximize profits by creating speculative bubble economies, likely to be disconnected from the needs of people. When the speculative economy accelerates the bust of the real economy, or vampirizes it by sucking up money in circulation in the real economy, my perception is that it hurts, really badly. The current financial and monetary system may facilitate such speculative economy, as it requires exponential monetary growth. I imagine that such risk could also appear with other monetary architectures / any artificially scarce currencies ? ... Any markets allowing unlimited speculation ? But I do not believe all p2p currencies are fundamentally flawed... and anyway, I believe its worth a try... currency monopolies are, from my point of view, a big risk. Diversification can enable us to test out a variety of architectures, and choose the most suitable currency characteristics adapted to the contexts we may want to use them... On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 7:56 PM, Patrick Anderson <[email protected]>wrote:
Kevin Carson wrote:
The government, at least to the extent that bank licensing and legal tender laws are enforceable.
So governments had the authority to issue currency for themselves, but then gave it away to private corporations?
How funny.
I wonder why they did this. It must be for the best, right?
I've heard people say "It is to control inflation" as though those private corporations have more self-control than governments.
If this logic is true, does that mean all the P2P currencies are fundamentally flawed?
If this logic is false, does that mean our governments and the corporations that operate those governments are lying to us?
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