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Found 5 results

  1. A thought I’ve been “chewing” on is the application of the Floating Abstraction Fallacy. I would like some critical feedback on a theory I’ve been working on. First, just as a reminder, from the wiki in Fallacy of the Floating Abstraction: The fallacy of the "floating abstraction" is Ayn Rand's term for concepts detached from existents, concepts that a person takes over from other men without knowing what specific units the concepts denote. I’d add only for purposes of this discussion that any value the Floating Abstraction does have in a discussion is due to the pervasiveness (authority) of the speaker and the willingness of the listener to accept it. This will be important in a moment. Now economics and money: The gold standard is… well the gold standard of money discussion in several theories, including Oism. As a commodity it is a real value connected to wealth creation, or daily work and trade. It isn’t the actually work, like corn or a forged plow, but due to having a universally recognized value can be traded for such stuff. From there you get into pricing theory which is beyond where I want to go. What is important is that gold (or any other similar commodity) is a universal value that represents specific values in the market place. Gold as money is a universal value representing real items created or earned. Fiat Money however can be printed ad hoc and manipulated since it is not connected to any standard. There is no actual connection to real wealth in the market place, which is why it is popular as this allows it to be printed on demand. Money is a universal value which developed attached to existents in the market place, but frequently today is not attached to existents so it can be manipulated by the issuer. It is printed and has value based solely on the promise of the issuing authority and the willingness of the recipients to accept its value. You can say that Inflation is simply the process of Money returning to the intristic value of what it is printed on. That leads me to an observation: Fiat Money is the economic equivalent of a Floating Abstraction. It is detached from its existents and taken over by a Government which doesn’t know or cares about the specific concepts it denotes and came. Critical thoughts are welcome
  2. http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2013/04/15/amid-gold-slaughter-1300-even-1200-seen-as-lines-in-the-sand/ I think Paul Krugman set off the final panic (all of the smart money left a few months ago when Goldman announced their departure from the market): http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/gold-does-not-glitter/ Krugman makes the point that I've made here many times: that gold's run-up is based on Fox News-fed irrational and baseless fears of a financial apocalypse ("and now a word our sponsors at the Gold Industry"). How much you wanna bet Rupert Murdoch already cashed out three months ago? Rationalism kills.
  3. Steve Forbes: Link dollar to gold or face Great Depression II "[The Fed's] vastly misguided monetary policies are now setting the stage for a new economic and social catastrophe — one that could rival the financial crisis and horrors of the 1930s,” he wrote in the book co-authored by Elizabeth Ames. <snips> The book is extremely critical of the Fed, especially former Chairman Ben Bernanke and current Chairwoman Janet Yellen. "The Federal Reserve must stop trying to run the banking system and the economy." This may be an plug for his book disguised as an artilce but the closing paragraph should be worth its weight in gold. Instead, the power of the Fed should be restrained, he said. "In an ideal world the head of the Federal Reserve would be no more important than the director of the Office of Weights and Measures inside the Department of Commerce."
  4. Article: Ron Paul: Bitcoin could 'destroy the dollar' First of all, a caveat: I'm not a Bitcoin believer. I think they have a gimmick that's capturing a lot of people's imagination, and they've walked into the limelight, but I see the hype of Bitcoin tapering off at some point. I could be wrong, but I just don't see it. Maybe they will spawn into something else, or they might find an application for their technology and do alright, but I don't see it as "the next big thing". However, Bitcoin is serving a valuable purpose in the discussion about currency and economics. It's going to change people's minds. It appears to have already changed the mind of Ron Paul. How? It's finally putting to rest a conspiracy theory that many libertarians have held for years: that the Fed secretly controls all trade by controlling The Currency, and it maintains a government-protected monopoly, the conspiracy theorists say, over anything that one could call "money". Never mind the fact that barter in various forms (including complex financial instruments) has been both legal and ubiquitous in the USA since the country began, and that the Fed no more has a "monopoly" over US citizen's transfer of wealth than the mint of Paraguay does. No, the conspiracy--stemming directly from the old Illuminati stuff from the 50s--is still with us in cruddy old corners of Libertarian thought, even overlapping into so-called Objectivists. So today's story is a bit of a celebration for me. Ron Paul has been perhaps the leading warrior in the USA banging the drum about the various Federal Reserve Conspiracies for decades. Now he's in a logical pickle: if Bitcoin could "destroy" the power of the Fed and US dollars--and they are perfectly free to do so--then he's just knocked the teeth out of his own argument. In other words, we're left to say to Ron Paul, "Ron, if a tiny group of eggheads can invent a better product than the US mint and eliminate them in the free marketplace, then why again are we supposed to live in fear of their unassailable power again?". It would appear that the only "conspiracy" the US dollar is a part of is its relative stability and practical usefulness. Take those away and it turns to dust, just like any other product in the free market. I daresay that with that choice of words, Ron is projecting what is in his own mind right now: that Bitcoin has "destroyed" is many of his own long-held beliefs about the power of the Federal Reserve.
  5. There is a new internet pyramid scheme called MMM-2011. The website is e-mmm.com and it is appears to be completely in Russian with no English option. I know Russian so I could read it. Here it is in a nutshell. People deposit money expecting a return of 20% to 60% percent per year. It is working while new members join, since there is a large inflow of money into the system. It is the same thing as a bank, only it is structured as a pyramid, where each person begins to be a new bank branch. The system can grow until it will take all of the people in the world. In 9 month since its inception it has 5 million people and large sums of money. The money is distributed, and not stored in a central account. It can not be shut down. The previous attempt was in 1994, where in half a year MMM had 15 million people. It was shut down by the government because all the money was in a central location. The creator claims that we already live in a pyramid, the pyramid of ever increasing credit. We pay old debts by taking a larger credit at a lower percentage. His goal is to destroy the financial market as it is today, by launching his pyramid against the current one. According to the modern definition of money -- anonymous tokens -- a pyramid seems to make clear a paradox inherent in its definition. Such pyramid will destroy both corruption as well as means to have a proper capitalist society, since it is destroying money. I have translated some of the arguments found on e-mmm.com site from Russian to English, on my blog: http://rarden.blogsp...apocalypse.html Will MMM take over the world? If yes, what will happen afterwards. How could we define money to stop pyramids from being created again?
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