[roenxi]

The governments of the world are one of the driving forces behind the pathologies. The reason asset prices are crazy is because the government has figured out that if they print money and give it to asset holders then they get stock market growth but are still able to call inflation low.

If they didn't have their thumb on the scale, interest rates would be higher and boring, stodgy savers would be in control of the money instead of the sort of people who think Bitcoin looks like a good idea.

If they don't want people putting money into insanely risky ventures they should stop punishing people who invest in low risk ventures.

[reader_mode]

I don't disagree, but I can see why they want high growth. But if you choose that path you need to actively manage the pathological cases, especially the ones you create.

[roenxi]

Picking on a few governments:

* If the US Congress were capable of identifying pathological cases, would the government go through the ceremony of shutting down every couple of years just to remind everyone they can't balance budget?

* If the Chinese government could identify pathological cases, would we have error bars of +- 15 million deaths around their 60s-era economic policies when they tried to rush improvements through central planning?

Those are my top two favourites, but there are others. The approach the government has to climate change also springs to mind. You're calling for something that we have fairly solid evidence that they can't reliably and safely do. They can kill off things that are novel, sure. They aren't reliable at making sweeping judgements about what technological changes are good or bad. Government's are very marginally competent at identifying value for money.

It is far safer to let something like Bitcoin run than risk, eg, a government nipping the next internet in the bud because people are using it to look at dirty photos. The only thing to complain about here is that they've disabled the extremely reliable capitalist incentive structure that would stop people doing things they know to be a waste of time and money.

[native_samples]

The problem is, stock market and asset price bubbles aren't the right kind of growth.