Taxes...

[sagerage]

Instead of taxes, why can't the government just print its own money?

[DFBatosee]

well...it goes like this

if the gov makes money it costs money
say you make one million in ten-thousand dollar bills....well you have to have enough of the other bills to cover it...meaning you need 1million ones 100k tens blah blah blah....ok not to mention the more money you make the less its worth...so the price of stuff would shoot up.... makes sense?

[daybrown]

well...it goes like this

if the gov makes money it costs money
say you make one million in ten-thousand dollar bills....well you have to have enough of the other bills to cover it...meaning you need 1million ones 100k tens blah blah blah....ok not to mention the more money you make the less its worth...so the price of stuff would shoot up.... makes sense?

But it dont even havta print it any more. Its all digital. The fed makes something out of nothing. magic!

[brad walker]

The government both taxes and creates fiat currency to extract maximal wealth without enough people catching onto the scam to end it. If the government only creates money everyone quickly sees through its ruse. If the government taxes too much the citizens revolt. Instead the government levies taxes lower than the true rate and creates money to transfer the rest of their cut. It's classic misdirection--most don't know the true tax.

[sagerage]

DFBatosee,

.... makes sense?

Kinda...

if the gov makes money it costs money

So, the process of making money costs more then the actual worth of that money?

not to mention the more money you make the less its worth

How's that?

...so the price of stuff would shoot up

I don't get it.

[daybrown]

You are not spozta get it. There's too many ways of looking at it, but I'd start with the fact that the FED quit publishing the "M3", which was the total amount of 'liquidity' (digital money) they fronted to banks, brokerages, and commodity houses to "stabilize the prices" during times of high volume.

Course only the Power Elite insiders are going to know when this will happen. So- they wait until the prices fall, buy in, then the "liquidity" from the M3 is used to buy into the market to drive the prices back up again. After its gone up a ways, then they sell out, the price starts falling, and the FED lets it go down, but only to a certain point. The kind of dramatic price falls seen in 1929 and 1987 are no longer possible.

Ever since stock markets were formed a few hundred years ago, worried people sold stock and used the money to buy gold. Then sold gold when investments looked good again. But in recent years we see that both precious metals prices and paper investments rise. Where does the money come from?

When prices fall, or when economic difficulties hit small investors, they sell out. The friends of the power elite who run the pension funds have also helped out in this, so that despite the general run up in the markets, the net share of pension funds has shrunk. The upshot is that increasing portions are now owned by the Power Elite, who are also friends of, or politicians. Thus, those who run the government are the same people as those who own the markets. We have a word for this:"Fascism".

[DHodges]

Thus, those who run the government are the same people as those who own the markets. We have a word for this:"Fascism".

I might argue that this should be called socialism, rather than fascism. Under socialism, "the people" are supposed to control the means of production - and hence, markets. Of course, "the people" can not run things directly, but through representatives (government).

In the end, it's kind of a fine point, because (IMO) socialism tends to naturally devolve into fascism, human nature being what it is. Concentration of power into the hands of a few always leads to the same result.

As for why the government doesn't just continually print more money, there are some historical cases where governments did just that. You can study those cases and see what happens.

[Alex Jacob]

I don't mean to change the subject, but I am curious, Mr Hodges, as you seem to keep aware of markets and such and have investments and seem to have a handle on current affairs, as to where you think the economy is going, or what looms ahead? Also, in your view, what are the best investments? (If we have to create another thread I wouldn't mind).

[daybrown]

Funny that Wiki didnt mention China, which invented paper money. Its interesting to note as well that the Nordic nations have been able to run socialist systems with competitive capitalism within them for a century or whatever.

What's the diff? You need a smarter population. Dumb fucks will support demagogues who promise more than the system can sustainably deliver. Some of them are having problems right now, seeing that their system of socialism does not work with Islamic immigrants.

We've known that American schools have not kept up the same academic standards as the Nordic schools for decades, so why would we now expect the voters to be able to select competent honest leadership? Our Seniors, who vote religiously, do that out of their own religious beliefs, and the instinct to get as much as possible from the system while they are here to enjoy it. What will be left for you to retire with is your problem.

They wanted to reduce the taxes on capital gains cause they had lotsa assets. So, its socialism for them, but fascism for everyone else. Between the taxes, the downsizing, and outsourcing, the real net incomes for young men have fallen so far that they cant afford to support families. Smart Young women further see that that welfare and social safety net, what capitalists call socialism, has been reduced, so they quite naturally have chosen not to bear babies. They dont see any way to provide the money to properly raise a child. The stupid airheads cant figure this out, so they breed anyway, and even tho the per/capital support per welfare queen may go down, they keep having more kids.

You'd think the smart capitalists who are so up on business models and accounting would figure it out.

[sagerage]

The more money there is, the more that money loses its value. How does that work? (Ex. 20 bucks is always gonna be worth 20 bucks, no matter how much money you have. Of course prices can go up making that money worth less, but why would that happen when there's more money?)

daybrown,

You are not spozta get it. There's too many ways of looking at it

How complicated can it be.

DHodges,

As for why the government doesn't just continually print more money, there are some historical cases where governments did just that. You can study those cases and see what happens.

Thanks, I'll take a look at those. When you say: "the government did just that" - do you mean - they eliminated taxes and were printing their own money? Also, how can a country like America have such a huge financial problem - I read somewhere that they owe trillions of dollars... What would happen if they just printed it?

I once asked my law teacher this same question and he told me that money has a value behind it, but once it's printed, it loses that value... That's all he said.

[Tomas]

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Mises on Money

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/mom2.html

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[brad walker]

Also, how can a country like America have such a huge financial problem - I read somewhere that they owe trillions of dollars...

A wakeup call from the US Comptroller

[Shahrazad]

Printing money out of thin air is about the most stupid thing I can think of.

Sagerage, to understand why money can't be printed randomly, think about what makes money valuable. Is it the paper that is worthy, or is it what it can acquire? Imagine that today, every person in your country printed 1 million dollars and we all agreed to accept them. Tomorrow we all go out and try to spend it. How much in goods do you think you'd get for your new money? I think you'd be lucky if that million dollars was worth 10 dollars.

Money is just a tool we use to measure the value of tradable stuff, and to make trade easy (I'd rather carry paper in my wallet than 10 cows, for ex.). It represents wealth, but some people like you make the mistake of thinking that the green bills themselves are wealth. They only have value if they're backed up by real production.

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[sagerage]

Shahrazad,

Printing money out of thin air is about the most stupid thing I can think of.

Not to mention impossible.

It represents wealth, but some people like you make the mistake of thinking that the green bills themselves are wealth.

I still think that they are. Print $10 bucks and try to buy something with it - what happens?

Is it the paper that is worthy, or what it can acquire?

I see no difference.

Imagine that today, every person in your country printed 1 million dollars and we all agreed to accept them.

That's not what my question means. (Q-Instead of paying taxes for road repair, let's have the government print money to pay those workers.)

How much in goods do you think you'd get for your new money?I think you'd be lucky if that million dollars was worth 10 dollars.

Why does the value of goods have to go up?

[brad walker]

How much in goods do you think you'd get for your new money?I think you'd be lucky if that million dollars was worth 10 dollars.

Why does the value of goods have to go up?

The goods' value doesn't change, the currency's value drops. Currencies are commodities and supply and demand determine their value.

[sagerage]

Brad,

The goods' value doesn't change, the currency's value drops.

I see no difference.

So, the reason why this wouldn't work is because people are pigs and wouldn't be able to control themselves with all that money (extra money - no tax).

[daybrown]

Brad,

The goods' value doesn't change, the currency's value drops.

I see no difference.

So, the reason why this wouldn't work is because people are pigs and wouldn't be able to control themselves with all that money (extra money - no tax).

Bingo. SO- the Fed dont even bother printing money any more. All they do, is with the M3 money supply, extend the credit of the major brokerage houses, commodity dealers, and banks so that they can buy in to prevent prices from dropping to far, too fast. Last year, they quit telling us how much the M3 adds up to.

So all right. Now, somebody sold something to the above buyers, and took that line of credit- to do what? What did *they* do with the money? Well for one thing, they kept buying up mortgages that would never have been made because the original borrower didnt have the resources to meet the terms. And that money was used to fuel the housing boom.

They also used the M3 money to buy foreign stocks, driving up all those other markets. Note that neither the houses nor the stocks are actually worth any more, dont produce any more tangible wealth, its just that the numbers are higher. Now, in my neck of Ozark woods, some of the money has gone into hobby farms. They'll build the house, sure. But also cut the timber, sell the logs, bulldoze the flats and make pastures or fields. Put in orchards, berry patches, or various kinds of livestock. Which currently dont reallly have much market value, but at least it does produce something tangible.

The Census bureau seems to have a new class for this, the "x-urbs", perhaps because its former early retiree urbanites. It seems that whereas the suburbs usta end at agribusiness, now in some areas there's a transitional zone of these hobby 'truck farms' or whatever just beyond the suburban sprawl.

[Shahrazad]

Sagerage,

I don't think you understand the concept of money well. If you really think that money has value in itself, and that it would still have value if everybody stopped working tomorrow, I don't see how I can help you. I may try explaining it in a million different ways, and you may never get it. This is kind of like philosophy -- you're going to have to think about it and figure it out on your own. You seem to have a mental block right now.

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[daybrown]

Sagerage,
I don't think you understand the concept of money well. If you really think that money has value in itself, and that it would still have value if everybody stopped working tomorrow, I don't see how I can help you. I may try explaining it in a million different ways, and you may never get it. This is kind of like philosophy -- you're going to have to think about it and figure it out on your own. You seem to have a mental block right now.-

Many of us live in the Untied States of Denial. I dont blame them, so many things are changing so much faster. Money has been thru a lotta changes too. Early in the bronze age, the Chinese started trading bronze knife blades, which became standardized with the amount of bronze in them. A hole in the tang allowed them to carried like a ring of keys. The Tocharians dispensed with the blade, just dealing in bronze, silver, and gold "washers", traded for the value of the base metal, know as "cash". i can see where we mite go back to cash because the power elites have monkeyed with the value of currency so much.

I read that the Sumerian tax collectors received sacks of grain and that they gave out a clay receipt, a token impressed with an official seal. Then these tokens themselves came to be traded. And of course, we have the brothel tokens. Even if the proverbial SHTF, those would be worth something.

[Shahrazad]

daybrown,

In biblical times, salt used to be used as currency. That may have been the first currency; you probably know if it was. The word "salary" was derived from the word salt.

An interesting anecdote: during the crisis that led to the Panama invasion of 1989, Panama's bank assets were all frozen (by order of an asshole named Ronald Reagan). Workers could not get paid and nobody had cash. As a result, people started going back to the old trading system of trading goods for goods. "I'll give you my watch for a cart full of groceries". Really cute.

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[daybrown]

daybrown,
In biblical times, salt used to be used as currency. That may have been the first currency; you probably know if it was. The word "salary" was derived from the word salt.

An interesting anecdote: during the crisis that led to the Panama invasion of 1989, Panama's bank assets were all frozen (by order of an asshole named Ronald Reagan). Workers could not get paid and nobody had cash. As a result, people started going back to the old trading system of trading goods for goods. "I'll give you my watch for a cart full of groceries". Really cute.-

I can see how, in the Internet age, we could all go back to some kind of barter system. A mainframe could keep track of all your assets, and you could trade any portion of them to anyone else for any portion of what they had, salt, watches, groceries, whatever. By the time Bush is done, we may be back to that.

I remember Carter's "American Malaise", which I now recognize is partly a decline in the reasoning power of the electorate. which is how Raygun got in office. We all know there's been a decline in academic performance, but its another symptom of the American malaise that we dont realize it is manifest in the election of demagogues. Freud spoke of the compartmentalization of the neurotic mind. Logic can only work within the limits of group think. Thus, it never occurred to the Neocons that the Laffer curve is not linear, and that we have therefore passed the point of diminishing returns from reducing taxes on the rich. They just do not get it.

I uploaded http://daybrown.org/gibbon/gibbon.html a week ago; Gibbon mentions how the soldiers were paid sometimes in salt. thus a man was 'worth his salt'. Only after I read it did I realize that the first volume of "The Declinee & Fall of the Roman Empire" came out in 1776, and was an immediate hit. The rest of it came out in the very era when the Founding Farmers were composing the Constitution, and you see phrases scattered thru Gibbon that remain in the American documents. But the leaders today hardly know who Gibbon was, much less having the attention span needed to actually read what he had to say.

I have discourses by Tacitus, Cicero, Seneca, Ceasar... who could go at length with a difficult issue like taxes. Lincoln and Douglas debated for hours, and today? Each candidate gets 30 seconds, or perhaps a minute. That's all the attention span of the American sheeple can handle today. The whole electorate suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder, and hence we have a deficit, severely aggrevated by Raygun, that nobody can deal with.

Its one of the reasons I bought 50 lb of salt last week. I've been investing in commodities for a while now. It'll be useful to deal with the ice on the deck, and besides, the salt will help keep the wood from rotting without using carcinogens.

[Shahrazad]

I can see how, in the Internet age, we could all go back to some kind of barter system. A mainframe could keep track of all your assets, and you could trade any portion of them to anyone else for any portion of what they had, salt, watches, groceries, whatever. By the time Bush is done, we may be back to that.

This is already happening, db. I used to belong to a translator website where service was exchanged for service. I got brownie points for uploading glossaries, answering other translators´questions, etc., and later I could exchange those points for getting my name closer to the top of the list when companies were looking for translators (in other words, marketing). Money did not need to exchange hands.

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[sagerage]

Is there an answer to the main question of this thread?

[brad walker]

Is there an answer to the main question of this thread?

This thread has many answers. Try this: Inflation tax

[Tomas]

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sagerage - Is there an answer to the main question of this thread?


Shaz said it best.

Are you some sort of a developmentally disabled retard or what?

Were you born yesterday?

How do you pay your internet bill?

Did jesus eat head lice?

Name the three chipmunks...

Did Columbo mimic Socrates?

Are UFOs powered by vegetarians?

How many black mirrors are hanging in your home? And have you questioned why Nostradamus gazed in black mirrors for his readings? People want to know..!

Do you splunk?

ps- change your hairstyle




Tomas (the tank)
Prince of Jerusalem
16 Degree
Scottish Rite Free Mason

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