Only if I get to collect interest.
One-tenth percent daily compound, starting now.
Because money is created in computers and have no real value. Its a virtual limitation humans have created. The banks “print” more when they get instructed to.
This is kind of a half-truth, and kind of a misunderstanding, and kind of "babby's first grasp of fiscal policy". It's a surface-level understanding at best. Yes, the money is effectively valueless in itself - or rather, the money has only the value that society ascribes to it. Money (or currency) actually works best this way because it only needs to function as an abstract placeholder for value - it's just a stand-in to exchange for goods or services. If the money itself has more value when held than it does when exchanged, you get stagnation and then societal collapse.
Money isn't just "printed" - in order for the US government to create new dollars it has to issue government bonds which are purchased by the reserve banks. The money doesn't just pop into existence from nowhere - the government sells future debt (bonds) to the banks in exchange for money to spend now. The amount owed on bond payouts is the national debt.
Rather than being based on nothing, what this effectively does is tie the value of the US dollar to general confidence in the productivity of the US economy. As long as the economy is productive, the US government will continue to collect taxes and will be able to continue paying on the bond debts. If the bond payments cannot be made and the government has to default on its loans, that kills the confidence in the sale of future bonds which means the government will have trouble selling them, which devalues the dollar in the short term. (if the government can't pay off the bond as agreed, why would anybody buy the bond?)
I think it's worth pointing out here that Trump talking about the US refusing to pay its loans is one of the stupidest fucking things any US government official has ever said in history. Even suggesting that that might happen damaged the value of the US dollar, which literally hurts every single person living in the US. The US is one of the very few national governments that can claim to have never defaulted on its loans, which is a big part of why the US dollar is still the global reserve currency even with all of the other nonsense going on - people who work in international finance consider it to be reliable. The ability to pay off debt is the value of the US dollar. Not paying the debt breaks everything.
Yes it's a cycle, kind of a shell game. In theory as long as the economy continues to increase in productivity, the increase in tax income will outrun the growth of the debt (especially as the relative value of the debt drops over time due to inflation). Whether this works long-term is... indeterminate at this point. It's unstable right now, but it hasn't actually failed yet. There is certainly a lot of valid criticism, and it hasn't prevented wealth concentration. It may have essentially turned the entire economy into a pressure cooker.
None of any of that has anything to do with the rampant speculation represented in the one graph I picked out. The futures trading in that graph is primarily speculation on the future value of company stocks, not currency trading or government bonds.
(X) Doubt
Yikes... this one right here:
(about halfway down)
my economics education is admittedly limited, but that seems terrifying... that says that the entire economy is a speculative bubble, since long before I was born... and this graph ends before the internet, before the dotcom bubble, before the accelerating cycles of VC tech speculation that have happened since... I have to imagine an updated version of this would look much worse.
My only complaint is that I think a lot of these graphs should be on logarithmic scales.
er, what's the alternative?
Ooh, threats of violence now. Classy.
You are a very angry person, aren't you?
In reality there's no practical difference. For instance, the head surgeon of a hospital's surgery department makes control decisions every day - what supplies to requisition and when and how much, what equipment to acquire, what staff to hire with what qualifications and how many... this is a position of power. But that head surgeon is also part of the surgical team, they're part of the infrastructure, they're part of the service. They are an essential part of the proper functioning and organization of the surgery department.
They are the buereacracy. They make decisions that directly affect the lives of patients, decisions which those patients have no say in. They are inseparable from the whole. Their decision-making cannot be replaced by a committee of unqualified individuals, it cannot be farmed out to a public vote, and it cannot be left to a government official no matter how well-intentioned. The authority for those decisions - the power - is necessarily concentrated in the hands of the person most qualified.
People in roles like that are "the system", or the control, or the power, or whatever you want to call it.
Those are social services, not the system. "The system" specifically refers to economic and political power structures.
You do realize that there's no real separation between these thing, right? We assign terms to them so that we can talk about them, but in practice a logistics system is an economy and is also a governance organization (or requires one to maintain balance and adequate flow of resources from one place to another), and politics is inevitable when people are involved in complex administrative work. It doesn't matter if "the system" is capitalist or socialist or feudal or whatever, someone somewhere has to make decisions about which needs get met with which resources at what time and how to get them there, otherwise nothing happens.
Any modern society can and necessarily must have these things, so they're not an argument in favor of one system over another except in the sense of which system provides the best access to them.
I'm not arguing in favor of any particular system, I'm pointing out that there are real people's lives that are actively dependent on the current system and that changing the system will have a drastic human cost that most armchair rebels never think about. I'm pointing out that if you're actually serious about building a better society then you should start with figuring out the details of how to provide care for people who are unable to provide it for themselves.
If your plan doesn't account for the weakest, the poorest, the most vulnerable, people who are laying in hospital beds on life support, people who are going to the emergency room because they can't afford regular health care, children with cancer... from the outset, right now, before you even talk about tearing down the current system, then it will be just as bad as any other system that has come before, no matter what label you apply to it, because your priorities are completely fucked.
Yes, and also no one that has responded to me so far has actually responded to what I said, fundamentally, in my first comment.
I have gotten a fair amount of ad hominem though. Always impressive to see that, definitely a sign of emotionally mature people with well thought out ideas.
the economy is made up.
Of course it's "made up", that does not make it irrelevant or inconsequential. All of human language is "made up" too. That's some real "Im14andthisisdeep" shit right there.
you're so brainwashed by capitalism, that you think it's the system that's keeping those things running, and not the labor of the working class.
I didn't say a damn thing about capitalism. Don't project, and don't put words in my mouth.
I'm talking about logistics, administration and coordination, things that require "the system", or at least a system of some sort in order to function properly.
Of course it's labor that makes it happen, but when it comes down to it a hospital does not and will not manufacture its own resources (exam gloves, IV bags, water, electricity, etc). Those things must be produced somewhere else and brought to the hospital when needed, which means someone has to do the administrative work of deciding how much and how often, and how to get it from point A to point B. That administration is "the system" that you're so keen to break, without a plan to support the needs that are currently sustained by it.
I don't care if you listen to me or not, just stay out of our fucking way, bootlicker.
If you can't bring yourself to address the pragmatic details of your ideas then they belong in the bin alongside the venture capitalists. No amount of name calling on your part will change that.
Ah ah, no modifying the terms after the initial statement.
Besides, @Stern@lemmy.world 's early prototype crossbow won't do them much good unless they have the upper body strength to draw it, which basically required lifelong training to do effectively.
Same goes for the spear - not much good if you don't have the strength to push it through the ribcage into the heart. Anything else is just going to make the bear angrier.