[cryptica]

It's such a financially convenient line of thinking. It's absolute nonsense. Both at face value and once you dig into it. Mainstream media is feeding us constant lies which work against our interests, destroy our ability to trust institutions and the government. Big Tech is clearly the biggest threat to our democracy.

Before Big Tech, we did not have such problems. This new narrative is pure self-serving propaganda, a figment of the imagination of corporate-funded lobbyists.

Free-market capitalism with freedom of speech is the recipe for economic prosperity. Has been for hundreds of years.

Some people will point to China as an attempt to show a counter-example ("Look at China, they're totalitarian and their economy has been booming.") but they conveniently forget the fact that China's growth has been happening during a time of general loosening of policies. The past 20 years in China have overall been characterized by an increasing tolerance for free-market capitalism and more freedom of speech compared to what it was before.

China came out of an extreme form of communism. Of course, any loosening would yield huge improvements! Also, they have over 1 billion people, of course any small improvement to even a small fraction of their population would have an impact globally.

The problem with the US and the west is not freedom of speech or the free market, it's our debt-based monetary system which is now based on soft money. The decline started in 1971 when USD became detached from the gold standard. It's no longer backed by anything; also, the growth in the currency supply has become unconstrained and the distribution mechanisms for all newly issued currency have been partially hijacked to serve corporate interests. The effects of this were not felt immediately. It's only in recent years that the negative effects of our soft-money system have become difficult to ignore.

The important thing to note is that no fiat system has ever survived more than a few hundred years. A monetary system which is founded on the endless debasement of its own currency is doomed to fail sooner or later. There has been hundreds of such monetary systems over thousands of years; not one which remains to this day. It has never worked and will never work in the long run. They're just pyramid schemes.

[candiddevmike]

Before big tech, there wasn't a race to the bottom for eyeballs and journalism was well funded enough to provide quality reporting.

[cryptica]

This intense competition over eyeballs is driven by the monetary system. Money printing creates a supply side economy (demand-constrained, as opposed to supply-constrained).

All companies just produce as many goods and services as they can using all the financing which is available to them. The biggest challenge in a supply side economy is finding customers to buy the goods which the company produced or plans to produce. It increases competition on the customer-acquisition side and reduces competition on the production side (I.e. quality goes down). It makes it almost impossible for small companies to compete.

The money printing acts as a kind of subsidy for big corporations (and regular citizens end up paying via inflation). Companies which are not subsidized cannot compete no matter how good their products are or how efficient they are at producing them. They can never get the same profit margins as big corporations due to the lack of subsidies. Subsidies from the money printer can come in the form of government grants, overly generous government contracts or from banks in the form of very low interest loans. It's an asymmetric playing field.

[spamizbad]

Yes there was. That trend started long before big tech. In the aughts there was a lot of constrination around news rooms being gutted, with less and less investigative journalism — replaced with “soft news”.

Those criticizing this and were called snobs and elitists; the market - the people - wanted soft news stories!

Interestingly the same ideological coterie that cheered news room gutting (because of a perceived ideological slant) and welcomed the soft news trend is now complaining about click-bait internet journalism.

[aaronsimpson]

But these points completely undermine the original OP - how can you blame media companies for pushing things that are "against our interests" when market forces overwhelmingly demonstrate that it's what we want?

If the media is showing these "alarmist" or "biased" stories, it's because it's what people want. People don't want honest journalism, otherwise C-SPAN would be the most popular outlet in America.

If you don't want media showing you clickbait and garbage, don't click on it. Simple as that.

[JKCalhoun]

I agree. There were always of course "tabloids" but we all knew what they were and we knew wrasslin' was fake.

[Aunche]

>The problem with the US and the west is not freedom of speech or the free market, it's our debt-based monetary system which is now based on soft money. The decline started in 1971 when USD became detached from the gold standard.

You have it backwards. We didn't end Bretton Woods because the government wanted to print money. The government was printing money, so they had to end Bretton Woods or else hyperinflation would occur. Right after WWII, Europe and Japan were desperate for capital to rebuild, so they were willing to exchange physical gold with made up paper, so it was free money while it lasted. If there were any real interest in maintaining a fiscal responsibility, they would have allowed investors to buy gold at the same price.

[cryptica]

The Bretton Woods system never fully ended in reality. Bretton Woods just ensured that all foreign fiat currencies would be pegged to the US dollar which at the time was pegged to gold. It was intended as a mechanism to allow all global currencies to be indirectly pegged to gold via the USD.

When Nixon abandoned the gold standard in 1971, the fiat currencies of all countries around the world were still pegged to the USD. This aspect of the Bretton Woods agreement remained in place... The USD started losing value but this did not cause the USD to hyperinflate relative to other currencies because all countries were still trying to maintain a stable exchange rate relative to the USD. It became currency manipulation on a global scale. Economies became increasingly detached from real value.

You should watch 'Hidden Secrets of Money' - One of the episodes does a really good job at explaining how this occurred.

[Aunche]

>The Bretton Woods system never fully ended in reality

Sure, we still have the IMF, but I'm specifically referring to part referring to the "gold standard". Again, it wasn't really a gold standard because the deal only extended to governments that happened to be desperate for capital. Regular people couldn't even own significant quantities of gold at the time.

>the fiat currencies of all countries around the world were still pegged to the USD.

This isn't true. Otherwise, exchange rates wouldn't be changing every second. Countries were allowed to choose how their currency was exchanged, and most of the major players allowed their currency to float freely.

>USD to hyperinflate relative to other currencies because all countries were still trying to maintain a stable exchange rate relative to the USD.

The USD never hyperinflated at all. I think the gist of what you're saying is true, like how Japan started to devalue its currency after the Yen started increasing in value. However, this precisely shows the problem with deflation. If your money grows just by sitting on it, there is little reason to invest in businesses, and it may be profitable to even downsize your business.

>You should watch 'Hidden Secrets of Money'

That was produced by the founder of goldsilver.com, so it's hardly an unbiased source. His business gains from sowing distrust in the financial system. I didn't watch this particular series, but I'm familiar with their arguments after I started investing in precious metals. I don't think their history is wrong, but IMO, they miss the entire point of money. Money isn't meant to be stored because it doesn't do any work. Money is something made up to facilitate trade as easily as possible. That's why it never makes any sense to artificially place constraints on it (e.g. pegging it to gold). This doesn't mean that we should abuse this freedom to print money on a whim either, but that's a completely separate problem.

[cryptica]

> This isn't true. Otherwise, exchange rates wouldn't be changing every second.

Prices fluctuate because people trade currencies on forex markets but those traders are not a significant force in the long run... Government reserve banks are the ones which keep exchange rates relatively stable by printing money. Traders just respond to and anticipate changes in the money supply caused by central banks.

If US Fed prints a lot of money (which puts downward pressure on the value of USD), all other central banks in the world will also start printing money to also devalue their currencies so that the exchange rate for their currency remains stable relative to USD (and therefore relative to all other currencies).

There is no major country in the world right now which has a free floating currency. Reserve banks are manipulating the global currency supply and enslaving the working population due to Cantillon effects.

The leader of any country which has tried to move out of this global monetary scheme has been overthrown and murdered by US military action (under some false pretext). For example, the real reason for the war in Libya is said to be that Gaddafi was trying to push Africa towards a gold based currency. Research the 'Libyan Gold Dinar'.

[JKCalhoun]

> Mainstream media is feeding us constant lies...

No one reporting that apparently.

I agree with some of your points but accusations like that without any room for nuance do not resonate with me.

> The problem with the US and the west is not freedom of speech or the free market, it's our debt-based monetary system which is now based on soft money.

And I've seen convincing arguments claiming the exact opposite: that debt has allowed large enterprises, investments that have gone on to create untold capital. I'm still on the fence.

> The decline started in 1971…

I have seen the "WTF Happened in 1971?" web site.

[cryptica]

> No one reporting that apparently.

Just some things that the mainstream media lied about:

- The NIH having funded gain of function research in Wuhan Labs.

- The mortality rate of COVID19 (they ignored obvious issues with data collection and flawed incentives which over-counted deaths and under-counted cases).

- The effectiveness of COVID19 vaccines (several outlets initially said that 1 dose would be enough to get 90% protection, now they're saying we need 4).

- Covering up the 2008 and 2020 bailouts of the stock market - These are considered crimes in the eyes of many people but mainstream media has been silent on the subject.

- The existence of Hunter Biden's laptop containing compromising data.

You can look up all of these things. It's only a tiny fraction of all the lies they told.

[aaronsimpson]

What sort of complete moron would consider the 2008 bank bailout (what I assume you're referring to) as a crime? How is TARP and the repurchasing of toxic bank assets for the stabilization of the US/global financial system, which was fully paid back to the taxpayer with interest, a crime? Unless you think we should've just let the financial system melt into oblivion?

It's this populist rhetoric of people being mad at shit they don't know anything about.

[bavell]

I don't consider the 2008 bailout a "crime" per se but it was definitely a govt handout and did not punish the bad actors who caused the issues in the first place.

It's interesting to me that you ignored the rest of the lies that were pointed out and focused only on one bullet to make your point. You seem to think people are mad when they shouldn't be? Is constantly being gaslit by cable news (just to give one example) acceptable to you?

[aaronsimpson]

People seem to think being "constantly gaslit by cable news" is something that news companies do of their own accord, rather than as market agents responding to market signals that we the people send off to them. Fundamentally, the blame lies with us. If you want to change what they show, change what you signal you want to consume. It's literally that simple. I'm not saying this interaction is one way, but people tend to focus on way too hard on only one half of the equation.

[cryptica]

Yes, the financial system should have been left to melt into oblivion and then people could have rebuilt it properly instead of allowing the crooks to keep doing what they've been doing and making the problem even worse. The financial system is an overcomplicated mess which has been hacked to pieces and is doing the opposite of what it was supposed to do. It hasn't worked for decades for value creators; it mostly works for crooks. What kind of moron cannot see what's going on with their own eyes?

If you need more proof that the financial system is destroying the economy, don't worry, there will be plenty more coming! Some people simply won't get it until they see mass starvation, mass protests and nukes blowing everything up... Heck they still won't get it, they'll blame the Bitcoin people, they'll blame some new virus, they'll blame some foreign politician... They'll blame everything except the fiat monetary system; the root of all incentives.

[euroderf]

It is more important to feel good than to think good !

[jf22]

What interest have they lied about and how has that impacted you?

I'm not trying to be snarky, I have a genuine interest in your perspective.

[arrosenberg]

> Free-market capitalism with freedom of speech is the recipe for economic prosperity. Has been for hundreds of years.

Economic prosperity for a handful of wealthy Brits you mean? Regulated capitalism created the middle class, free market capitalism is doing its damnedest to undo that outcome.

[cryptica]

We have more regulation now than ever before. Regulations are to blame for destroying the middle class. Corporate lobbyists are the ones who craft regulations. They're not working for the middle class.

Why do corporations pay lobbyists? They wouldn't pay them if they weren't delivering returns for those corporations.

[arrosenberg]

Corporations pay lobbyists so they can bend or ignore the regulations that would otherwise constrain them. Thank you for helping me make that point.