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by Eisenstein 611 days ago
> I think everyone agrees that the US economy developed in a qualitatively better way from 01918 to 01971 than from 01971 to today

I don't think everyone agrees on that. There was a huge crash which posed an existential threat to capitalism in the middle of the first one.

> Most of these seem like things you'd naïvely expect to reduce domestic economic inequality, though, however detrimental they might have been to the residents of Taipei and especially My Lai. So why did it skyrocket instead?

What does any of this have to do with currency policy?

> But a plausible alternative explanation is that fiat money rewards elites in nonobvious ways, enabling them to concentrate ownership of the economic base in a smaller and smaller subset of the population.

Even more plausible than 'post-WWII cold war politics and domestic upheaval due to civil rights, the rise of the middle class, birth control and women getting control over their own lives caused society to shift in unexpected ways and gained reactions from all segments of society which shape our modern world'?

> It's not a widely accepted theory today, more associated with crackpots actually, but it certainly isn't new.

Yet you are doing that thing where it is obvious that you believe this but won't say it openly.

1 comments

I think it's a worthwhile idea to explore, but most worthwhile ideas to explore are still actually wrong. You can't know which until you explore them, which I haven't done in this case.

Probably you would benefit from learning to engage with people capable of seriously considering ideas without embracing them, because it seems like you're looking for some kind of partisan struggle instead.

Anyone interested in exploration might do well to take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor#Proposed_revival

(I'm not going to, because currency arguments existed well before 1971; eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_silver#Climax . But if any of you all find anything, I'm all ears...)

I'd forgotten about the bancor, thanks!