Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Cynical Fantasies
Cynical Fantasies
One thing that happens when you try to have a rational discussion of Bitcoin, gold, and/or other libertarian causes is that you get a lot of cynical remarks about government (which is one of the clues that this is, to an important extent, about politics.) You say that there’s nothing putting a floor under Bitcoin’s value? Well, how do you know that the government won’t debase the dollar to nothing? Huh? Huh?
Well, there’s an answer to that: governments care about their reputations, and even, to some extent, about the welfare of their citizens. I can hear the jeering already. We know better, don’t we? Don’t governments with the power of the printing press universally abuse that power? Well, no. That sounds like cynical realism, but it’s actually cynical fantasy.
Yes, Weimar. Also Zimbabwe. And, in recent decades, who else? Actually, nobody. The real track record of fiat currencies is that most of them are run responsibly except in the aftermath of political chaos. If you look at the actual facts, you discover that episodes of high inflation have become quite rare, even though nobody is on the gold standard or (except in the euro area) anything like it.
So, again, the notion that governments can’t be trusted with the printing press sounds cynical and realistic, but it’s actually a fantasy, probably brought on by reading Ayn Rand instead of Tolkien.
It’s similar, by the way, to another cynical and supposedly realist notion, which is that fiscal stimulus never goes away, that programs instituted to fight a slump inevitably become permanent. This is also totally untrue — it’s a right-wing fantasy, not a description of anything that has actually happened....
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/cynical-fantasies/
One thing that happens when you try to have a rational discussion of Bitcoin, gold, and/or other libertarian causes is that you get a lot of cynical remarks about government (which is one of the clues that this is, to an important extent, about politics.) You say that there’s nothing putting a floor under Bitcoin’s value? Well, how do you know that the government won’t debase the dollar to nothing? Huh? Huh?
Well, there’s an answer to that: governments care about their reputations, and even, to some extent, about the welfare of their citizens. I can hear the jeering already. We know better, don’t we? Don’t governments with the power of the printing press universally abuse that power? Well, no. That sounds like cynical realism, but it’s actually cynical fantasy.
Yes, Weimar. Also Zimbabwe. And, in recent decades, who else? Actually, nobody. The real track record of fiat currencies is that most of them are run responsibly except in the aftermath of political chaos. If you look at the actual facts, you discover that episodes of high inflation have become quite rare, even though nobody is on the gold standard or (except in the euro area) anything like it.
So, again, the notion that governments can’t be trusted with the printing press sounds cynical and realistic, but it’s actually a fantasy, probably brought on by reading Ayn Rand instead of Tolkien.
It’s similar, by the way, to another cynical and supposedly realist notion, which is that fiscal stimulus never goes away, that programs instituted to fight a slump inevitably become permanent. This is also totally untrue — it’s a right-wing fantasy, not a description of anything that has actually happened....
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/cynical-fantasies/
