Fred's father Harry was born to a comfortable Texas family and was himself a fairly successful businessman who founded several small companies, one of them a newspaper, in which he wrote fervent editorials against trade unions, pensions, bank regulation, and FDR's New Deal. Harry died in 1942, by which point it should have been obvious that he'd been wrong about everything. Koch is a fairly common German name--there are several other companies named Koch, none evidently related. (In this version, Koch rhymes with Coke--either the drink or the refined coal product)
Fred Chase Koch, born 23 Sept 1900, went to MIT where he got a degree in chemical engineering. He managed to take control of an existing petroleum engineering firm in 1925, and this became the core of Koch Industries. In 1927 he invented a cheaper method of separating gasoline from crude oil, which allowed small companies like his own to compete. The big companies spent several years in the courts trying to prevent him from doing business in the US, and succeeded for several years until he managed to prevail in the courts. The people suing him were horribly dishonest (one bribed a judge) and he learned that winning sometimes requires lying, cheating and stealing. While he was fighting in court, he began to sell the process in the Soviet Union. While there, he found that it was a land of "hunger, misery and terror" and came to despise Joe Stalin.
What he didn't realize is that Russia had always been a land of hunger, misery and terror, long before the communist takeover, and that was why the revolution had succeeded. Stalin was just exploiting the preexisting conditions and chose to not change that aspect. Communism made the life of most Russians considerably better than it had been. Better leaders could have made it better yet, but they didn't. Extreme policies are inherently unstable--whether they are extremely capitalistic or extremely communistic, and only through brutal force can they be kept in place. This reinforced his ideas about winning and power: to win, you need to be able to fight as dirty as necessary, and you need to be more powerful than your opponents, be they unions or the government itself.
When Koch's legal troubles were finally settled just before WWII, Koch began expanding his company. It soon became a conglomerate, mostly in the oil business, including pipelines, drilling equipment and refining equipment, acquiring some, and growing some.
In 1958, Koch and 11 other extremely conservative businessmen, led by Robert Welch, founded the John Birch Society to promote their extreme agenda. This was very similar to the agenda pushed by Fred's father--opposition to trade unions, pensions, bank regulation, etc. By 1958, it was pretty obvious that these things that they wanted to destroy had all worked, spectacularly well. They had not harmed America's prosperity or world power at all, rather they had helped, and where they had been adopted in Europe, Japan and Australia, they were beginning to work as well. The Birch Society added opposition to the Civil Rights Act and immigration, and were particularly outspoken about (mostly imaginary) communist infiltrators. More reasonable conservatives, such as Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley were quite outspoken about the Birchers and warned that such fringe movements would damage the credibility of the conservative movement as a whole, and the John Birch Society subsided to the ranks of loonies and pamphleteers.
Fred died in 1967, just as his political movement was reaching its nadir. The company he'd founded had become quite large and powerful though, and unlike most, had never felt the urge to go public--all the profits went exactly where Fred and his heirs wanted. Consequently its doings remain largely a secret. He left it to his sons, Fred Jr., Charles, and twins David and Bill. Fred Jr was never interested in the business and Bill, not as right wing as Dave and Charles but still very conservative, had a falling out with the others in the 1990s, but Charles and David still run Koch Industries and are the leading exponents of their father's political movement. They are the 4th and 5th richest people in America and 6th and 7th in the world. Together, the Kochs are the second richest non-royal family in the world, behind only Sam Walton's descendants. They have given more to right wing political causes than anyone else in history, including being the sponsors of the movie and advertising campaign that led to the Citizens United decision--which has allowed them to keep the vast majority of their political spending secret.
Fred and his boys may not understand this, but what they are advocating is restoring Feudalism. They think they are advocates of Laissez-Faire, but without oppressive force, such systems are totally unstable. There are always a few cheaters, and the moment somebody is allowed to get ahead by cheating, soon everybody else needs to cheat in order to compete. Regulation is an attempt to keep markets fair, and public institutions like schools, pensions, and so forth allow everybody, including the disenfranchised, to participate in the market. What the Kochs are striving for is a market where only the cheaters can prosper.
14 September 2014
28 August 2014
The President's Analyst--the Missing Scene
One of my favorite movies is 1967's The President's Analyst, starring James Coburn as Dr. Sidney Schaefer. For some reason, an important scene was cut out, and since the early '70s, it seems to have vanished. The scene goes like this:
Dr. Schaefer has just learned that he's been selected to be the President's psychoanalyst, and is thrilled at the opportunity. Since he'll be moving to Washington, he takes one last walk around his beloved New York City, to the catchy tune of Lalo Schifrin's "Look Up". Just as the song ends, he finds himself in front of an artsy movie theater playing a title that interests him, so he goes in. There's only one open seat, next to a beautiful girl, so giving that James Coburn grin, he takes it. The movie begins almost immediately, and within just a few minutes, the other moviegoers are disgusted by what they're seeing. But Dr. Schaefer and the girl are enjoying it thoroughly. By the time the movie ends, the theater is empty except for them. They introduce themselves to each other as they walk out. She's named "Nan" and is a "$90,000 a year model." The median wage in 1967 was $5200, so in today's money, she was making about a $million a year, and would be one of the highest paid models in the world, comparable to Twiggy or Jean Shrimpton. They soon are his apartment. They've already found, from their reactions to the movie, that they are both very liberal sexually and she invites him to bed.
The scene is cut from just before he sees the theater marquee, to Sidney and Nan rolling around in bed. I suppose it reflects a level of sexual liberalism that offended some people. But it was shown on prime time TV many times in the '60s and early '70s. The fact that he'd just met Nan is important to the plot later on, but as it's shown she just comes out of nowhere.
I hope there's a copy of the scene somewhere. The movie revels in the most progressive attitudes of the '60s--free love, drugs, hippie communes, abstract art, even a few hints of nudity, as well as the growing skepticism of corporate and bureaucratic power.
Dr. Schaefer has just learned that he's been selected to be the President's psychoanalyst, and is thrilled at the opportunity. Since he'll be moving to Washington, he takes one last walk around his beloved New York City, to the catchy tune of Lalo Schifrin's "Look Up". Just as the song ends, he finds himself in front of an artsy movie theater playing a title that interests him, so he goes in. There's only one open seat, next to a beautiful girl, so giving that James Coburn grin, he takes it. The movie begins almost immediately, and within just a few minutes, the other moviegoers are disgusted by what they're seeing. But Dr. Schaefer and the girl are enjoying it thoroughly. By the time the movie ends, the theater is empty except for them. They introduce themselves to each other as they walk out. She's named "Nan" and is a "$90,000 a year model." The median wage in 1967 was $5200, so in today's money, she was making about a $million a year, and would be one of the highest paid models in the world, comparable to Twiggy or Jean Shrimpton. They soon are his apartment. They've already found, from their reactions to the movie, that they are both very liberal sexually and she invites him to bed.
The scene is cut from just before he sees the theater marquee, to Sidney and Nan rolling around in bed. I suppose it reflects a level of sexual liberalism that offended some people. But it was shown on prime time TV many times in the '60s and early '70s. The fact that he'd just met Nan is important to the plot later on, but as it's shown she just comes out of nowhere.
I hope there's a copy of the scene somewhere. The movie revels in the most progressive attitudes of the '60s--free love, drugs, hippie communes, abstract art, even a few hints of nudity, as well as the growing skepticism of corporate and bureaucratic power.
21 August 2014
Killing Someone in Ferguson
There aren't many reasons for killing someone, I think. Basically, if you have extremely good reason to believe that the someone is so likely to commit an act of severe violence, so imminently that this is the last opportunity to stop them. So, let's say you're a cop and a very large, strong guy reaches into your car and tries to take your weapon from you. It's certainly plausible that the large guy will try to kill you with the gun once he's got it, so using deadly force in such a struggle might be justified--depending a lot on how the struggle arose and how it seems to be going. Once the strong guy has given up the fight and is trying to get away, the justification for deadly force is completely gone, although shooting him in the leg or something to try to arrest him may make sense. No matter what he's done before, shooting a guy that's 35 feet away, has several of your bullets in him already and has his hands up and is saying "don't shoot" as several witnesses have said, is murder. Since it was in the heat of action, maybe only second degree murder, but murder it was. If there's any evidence that the cop paused for a moment during his barrage of shots, even if it was to get out of the car to get a better angle, then it's first degree.
Essentially, this question boils down to "self defense". Self defense is always a justification for killing someone and it extends to protection of loved ones or others under your protection--the whole community in the case of a cop. But there's that whole thing about imminent threat: if you think there will be a good chance to stop the bad guy in some non-lethal way before he does his violent thing, then deadly force is not appropriate.
One of the things for which deadly force is the most inappropriate is if you are trying to get someone to convert to your religion. If you find yourself or someone else thinking it might be necessary, then you really need to question the validity of such a religion. Such conversions under duress can never be credible. There's a subtle but important difference between defeating an enemy in battle and them seeing the light and converting, and simply forcing. I'm against both things, but one makes a little more sense than the other.
I'm against the death penalty. It has never been applied equitably, and I'm pretty sure that under our present social order and legal system, it can't be--not to mention the rather alarming rate at which DNA evidence has exonerated convicted death row inmates. It's certainly not a cost saving: housing and trying death capital cases costs the state between 4 and 20 times what life without parole cases do. Over the last few years virtually every advanced country except ours has come out firmly against it. Essentially all physicians refuse to take part: they regard participating as a violation of their Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. This includes those physicians involved in the manufacture of the anesthetics used to do "lethal injection". Consequently all such drugs are unavailable and those who would continue to use lethal injection have been experimenting, without competence, with other things. We need to cut it out and join the civilized world.
There's one case other than self defense where killing someone is appropriate, and that is if the victim has decided that it's the right thing to do. For example, if someone has a painful, debilitating, incurable terminal disease, they may decide that there's no point in continuing to suffer. Painless euthanasia is clearly better than months or years of insoluble misery--as long as it's up to the victim, with no coercion. Death row inmates may take a similar position, Gary Gilmore and Ted Bundy both did this: they decided that the best solution was ending a life which had become intolerable to them. They went about it in different ways. I think this ok. I would prefer to try to cure them, or at least find out what made them tick. but they have the right to make such decisions about their own lives. Gilmore chose the drama of a firing squad, Bundy chose to trap himself where he'd be given the electric chair.
There is a group of people who think that all abortion is murder. Legally and biologically this is not correct. The courts have consistently ruled that if the fetus is not viable then it is not murder, although several states have used Roe v Wade's latitude to decide that non-viable second trimester fetuses are protected too. The court also determined that severe medical risk to the mother is also cause for abortion, even if the fetus is viable. Basically this is the same as the self defense argument. It would be nice if there were no unwanted pregnancies, but that is not the world we live in. There is a large societal need which will be met, whether it is legal or not. Thousands used to die every year from illegal abortions and many still do in the places they are hard to obtain. Legal medical abortion is a simple, fairly safe procedure. There are very few people seeking abortions who have not weighed it very, very seriously. Anybody who thinks otherwise does not have a credible opinion--very much like the people forcing religious conversion through violence. Such people are terrorists, pure and simple. The sidewalk outside an abortion clinic is not the place to provide such information, especially wrong information, as such people are wont to provide. The doctor or social worker inside is a much better resource.
Essentially, this question boils down to "self defense". Self defense is always a justification for killing someone and it extends to protection of loved ones or others under your protection--the whole community in the case of a cop. But there's that whole thing about imminent threat: if you think there will be a good chance to stop the bad guy in some non-lethal way before he does his violent thing, then deadly force is not appropriate.
One of the things for which deadly force is the most inappropriate is if you are trying to get someone to convert to your religion. If you find yourself or someone else thinking it might be necessary, then you really need to question the validity of such a religion. Such conversions under duress can never be credible. There's a subtle but important difference between defeating an enemy in battle and them seeing the light and converting, and simply forcing. I'm against both things, but one makes a little more sense than the other.
I'm against the death penalty. It has never been applied equitably, and I'm pretty sure that under our present social order and legal system, it can't be--not to mention the rather alarming rate at which DNA evidence has exonerated convicted death row inmates. It's certainly not a cost saving: housing and trying death capital cases costs the state between 4 and 20 times what life without parole cases do. Over the last few years virtually every advanced country except ours has come out firmly against it. Essentially all physicians refuse to take part: they regard participating as a violation of their Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. This includes those physicians involved in the manufacture of the anesthetics used to do "lethal injection". Consequently all such drugs are unavailable and those who would continue to use lethal injection have been experimenting, without competence, with other things. We need to cut it out and join the civilized world.
There's one case other than self defense where killing someone is appropriate, and that is if the victim has decided that it's the right thing to do. For example, if someone has a painful, debilitating, incurable terminal disease, they may decide that there's no point in continuing to suffer. Painless euthanasia is clearly better than months or years of insoluble misery--as long as it's up to the victim, with no coercion. Death row inmates may take a similar position, Gary Gilmore and Ted Bundy both did this: they decided that the best solution was ending a life which had become intolerable to them. They went about it in different ways. I think this ok. I would prefer to try to cure them, or at least find out what made them tick. but they have the right to make such decisions about their own lives. Gilmore chose the drama of a firing squad, Bundy chose to trap himself where he'd be given the electric chair.
There is a group of people who think that all abortion is murder. Legally and biologically this is not correct. The courts have consistently ruled that if the fetus is not viable then it is not murder, although several states have used Roe v Wade's latitude to decide that non-viable second trimester fetuses are protected too. The court also determined that severe medical risk to the mother is also cause for abortion, even if the fetus is viable. Basically this is the same as the self defense argument. It would be nice if there were no unwanted pregnancies, but that is not the world we live in. There is a large societal need which will be met, whether it is legal or not. Thousands used to die every year from illegal abortions and many still do in the places they are hard to obtain. Legal medical abortion is a simple, fairly safe procedure. There are very few people seeking abortions who have not weighed it very, very seriously. Anybody who thinks otherwise does not have a credible opinion--very much like the people forcing religious conversion through violence. Such people are terrorists, pure and simple. The sidewalk outside an abortion clinic is not the place to provide such information, especially wrong information, as such people are wont to provide. The doctor or social worker inside is a much better resource.
19 August 2014
Fascism and the Tea Party
The typical supporter of the modern Tea Party movement thinks of themselves as fervently anti-government: skeptical that government or any other large institution can ever be competent, consequently they are fervently anti-tax and anti-regulation. But in fact, it is a deeply authoritarian movement, the most severely so since the fascists of the 1930 and 40s.
Fascism is about extreme devotion to a leader and the state, pretty much the opposite of what the tea party professes. But it is also about jingoism, the belief that might makes right, active support of big business, anti-socialism, ethnic scapegoating, and strong propaganda--all of which describes the tea party perfectly. All they need is a heroic-seeming national leader to unite behind--and there are lots of people trying to get that job. Perhaps the modern tea party will hold to its roots and reject such an authoritarian takeover, but I doubt it.
The tea party started as a reaction to the government bailouts at the start of the financial collapse of 2008-2009. The term seems to have come from a famous rant by Rick Santelli. But within days, the leaders of the anti-tax, anti government regulation movement had put itself in charge, attempting to re-label their own movement as the new one. To be sure, they share a lot. But the new leaders would like to end unions and collective bargaining, to lower or completely eliminate business regulation and taxes, to allow business almost absolute power in their communities and nationally. They're careful to avoid saying that in the presence of their Tea Party minions, but it's the simple truth.
One of the most important things that the new leaders recognized about the Tea Party is their willingness to follow a propagandist--Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Fox News in general. They will repeat whatever they are told, even if it's nonsensical, and shy away from their own analysis of this stuff. This tendency is called "authoritarianism". They receive "wisdom" from an authority and even when exposed to contradictions, they prefer the received wisdom to real wisdom.
The Nazis didn't really get power until big German businesses realized that through them they could accumulate more power for themselves. The same thing is happening with the Tea Party movement today. The most visible exponent are the Kochs--they know exactly what they are doing and are trying very hard to stay hidden. The big banks, insurers, oil companies and so forth are better at staying hidden.
This is fairly simple: There surely some business regulations that need to be rationalized, but if you believe that "freedom" and business deregulation are close to synonymous, then you are not a libertarian or "objectivist", you are an oligarchist: an advocate that the economy and government be run by a small cartel of very large businesses. And very likely a fascist.
Fascism is about extreme devotion to a leader and the state, pretty much the opposite of what the tea party professes. But it is also about jingoism, the belief that might makes right, active support of big business, anti-socialism, ethnic scapegoating, and strong propaganda--all of which describes the tea party perfectly. All they need is a heroic-seeming national leader to unite behind--and there are lots of people trying to get that job. Perhaps the modern tea party will hold to its roots and reject such an authoritarian takeover, but I doubt it.
The tea party started as a reaction to the government bailouts at the start of the financial collapse of 2008-2009. The term seems to have come from a famous rant by Rick Santelli. But within days, the leaders of the anti-tax, anti government regulation movement had put itself in charge, attempting to re-label their own movement as the new one. To be sure, they share a lot. But the new leaders would like to end unions and collective bargaining, to lower or completely eliminate business regulation and taxes, to allow business almost absolute power in their communities and nationally. They're careful to avoid saying that in the presence of their Tea Party minions, but it's the simple truth.
One of the most important things that the new leaders recognized about the Tea Party is their willingness to follow a propagandist--Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Fox News in general. They will repeat whatever they are told, even if it's nonsensical, and shy away from their own analysis of this stuff. This tendency is called "authoritarianism". They receive "wisdom" from an authority and even when exposed to contradictions, they prefer the received wisdom to real wisdom.
The Nazis didn't really get power until big German businesses realized that through them they could accumulate more power for themselves. The same thing is happening with the Tea Party movement today. The most visible exponent are the Kochs--they know exactly what they are doing and are trying very hard to stay hidden. The big banks, insurers, oil companies and so forth are better at staying hidden.
This is fairly simple: There surely some business regulations that need to be rationalized, but if you believe that "freedom" and business deregulation are close to synonymous, then you are not a libertarian or "objectivist", you are an oligarchist: an advocate that the economy and government be run by a small cartel of very large businesses. And very likely a fascist.
14 August 2014
Secession
A Texas man fired on police Monday and declared that he was a sovereign citizen and had seceded from the United States, calling his sovereign state "Doug-i-stan." Much of human advancement and exploration has been driven by this instinct, from the first humans to leave east Africa a million years ago to the colonization of the New World and Australia just a few centuries ago. Doug is a crazy, but it's a type of crazy that is a major part of the human condition.
In the 1600s, crossing the Atlantic to come to America required a substantial investment...you had to buy space on a ship and convince that ship to cross a very dangerous ocean and go to a place that that was almost completely unexplored and was known to have large numbers of dangerous, inscrutable people living there. But a lot of people took the challenge. A lot of them sold themselves into a type of temporary slavery called "indentured service" to pay the fare. Many did not like the situation they were in: oppressive local leaders trying to take their profits or force them to behave or believe in ways they didn't like...But the realization that freedom could be obtained by simply moving into the next valley, or later on, to the next territory. It was harder and more dangerous than staying put but you had a better chance of controlling your own life.
As long as there was open, arable land available, these adventurous souls could try out whatever lifestyle they pleased, and the homestead act of 1862 made even more available. Violence, against natives, thieves, encroachment from other groups, animals, was commonplace and often necessary for survival, so guns, while terribly expensive, became an important part of many of these little cultures. Going out into the "back 40" to practice or hunt was not just a right, it was often necessary. But homesteading was far cheaper, and far more practical for the poor farm families of the 1870s than it was at any time before or since.
But today there is no more open land. Many of the descendants of the homesteaders lost their farms in the dust bowl and depression, but a lot are still there and still have the craving to be able to hunt on their own, to be able to graze on land that doesn't seem to be occupied at the moment (or steal it even if it is), to express themselves in whatever way comes to them. The homestead act had required that homesteaders not have been in rebellion to get the land; it had been a way to draw many potential confederate soldiers away from battle; but many of them were inclined to support the "states rights" cause even though they were far too poor to have owned slaves, and many of our rural areas still have this inclination very strongly. They haven't quite internalized the fact that not only is the homestead act over, the possibility of such a thing is over and trying to act in ways that were appropriate in the 1860s through'80s is just not possible in today's society.
In many ways this is regrettable. The homesteads of the future will be on the Moon, on Mars, perhaps on asteroids or O'Neill cylinders, or even on planets around undiscovered stars. It will take a much larger investment--of talent, of training, of treasure--to achieve these, and there won't be many openings for non-wealthy, poorly educated, but determined and hard working farmers. The craving to do whatever you please, even at the risk your own survival, is strong in the human race. But there is no space left for "sovereign citizens" like Doug, and if they shoot at people, they must be dealt with as criminals. I'd like to leave the Dougs and the Cliven Bundy's of the world alone, to find out just exactly how hard it is to live a truly "sovereign" life, but unfortunately they are our neighbors and we need to keep our other neighbors safe.
In the 1600s, crossing the Atlantic to come to America required a substantial investment...you had to buy space on a ship and convince that ship to cross a very dangerous ocean and go to a place that that was almost completely unexplored and was known to have large numbers of dangerous, inscrutable people living there. But a lot of people took the challenge. A lot of them sold themselves into a type of temporary slavery called "indentured service" to pay the fare. Many did not like the situation they were in: oppressive local leaders trying to take their profits or force them to behave or believe in ways they didn't like...But the realization that freedom could be obtained by simply moving into the next valley, or later on, to the next territory. It was harder and more dangerous than staying put but you had a better chance of controlling your own life.
As long as there was open, arable land available, these adventurous souls could try out whatever lifestyle they pleased, and the homestead act of 1862 made even more available. Violence, against natives, thieves, encroachment from other groups, animals, was commonplace and often necessary for survival, so guns, while terribly expensive, became an important part of many of these little cultures. Going out into the "back 40" to practice or hunt was not just a right, it was often necessary. But homesteading was far cheaper, and far more practical for the poor farm families of the 1870s than it was at any time before or since.
But today there is no more open land. Many of the descendants of the homesteaders lost their farms in the dust bowl and depression, but a lot are still there and still have the craving to be able to hunt on their own, to be able to graze on land that doesn't seem to be occupied at the moment (or steal it even if it is), to express themselves in whatever way comes to them. The homestead act had required that homesteaders not have been in rebellion to get the land; it had been a way to draw many potential confederate soldiers away from battle; but many of them were inclined to support the "states rights" cause even though they were far too poor to have owned slaves, and many of our rural areas still have this inclination very strongly. They haven't quite internalized the fact that not only is the homestead act over, the possibility of such a thing is over and trying to act in ways that were appropriate in the 1860s through'80s is just not possible in today's society.
In many ways this is regrettable. The homesteads of the future will be on the Moon, on Mars, perhaps on asteroids or O'Neill cylinders, or even on planets around undiscovered stars. It will take a much larger investment--of talent, of training, of treasure--to achieve these, and there won't be many openings for non-wealthy, poorly educated, but determined and hard working farmers. The craving to do whatever you please, even at the risk your own survival, is strong in the human race. But there is no space left for "sovereign citizens" like Doug, and if they shoot at people, they must be dealt with as criminals. I'd like to leave the Dougs and the Cliven Bundy's of the world alone, to find out just exactly how hard it is to live a truly "sovereign" life, but unfortunately they are our neighbors and we need to keep our other neighbors safe.
11 August 2014
Bitcoin and Gold
Many people think that gold is a good currency because it has intrinsic value. This is almost (not quite) complete nonsense. Nothing has intrinsic value, except for goods and services. The value of a thing is what people are willing to buy and sell it for. If it keeps its value, it's because somebody is willing to pay.
Back in pre-history, people traded things with each other. This is sometimes inconvenient--the buyer may not have what the seller wanted, and a third party, who does have what the seller wanted and also wants what the buyer has, might be necessary. Fairly early on, people figured out that instead of a third party, a third item which had a fairly reliable trade value, because almost everybody found it useful, could increase the possibility of negotiating such trades. Items which could easily be adjusted to fit the value needed were more useful--grain, pieces of cloth, etc. Things which are easy to carry around are also better--and of course the more rare the item, the more valuable it is, which makes it easier to carry around. The reason gold rose to the top of this heap is because it's both rare and very difficult to fake: it's heavier than any more common metal (19.32 gm/ml. Lead is 11.34.) and it's soft and doesn't tarnish. That's it. But that's very useful, and before long, nearly every trader or laborer would happily take gold for their goods or services. Somebody, most likely in ancient Lydia (today, part of western Turkey) figured out how to make standardized coins with a press around 700 BC, which is also about the time the Bible was written, and this idea quickly became universal. Coins made of baser metals were less valuable, both because they were more common than gold, and because they were easier to fake. But they were still convenient. Even then, none of these necessarily maintained their value--inflation happened with gold as with any other currency, although what was happening was not understood until the 15th century.
Some people, including Ron Paul and Lyndon LaRouche and a lot of equally confused people, think that there's something special about gold. There is, but it's only that scarcity and difficulty of forging. Anything else that has a limited supply and is difficult to forge works. Fiat currency--printed money--was invented about a thousand years ago in China. This is very convenient--government can print as much as it needs. But it didn't take long for people to figure out how to fake it. And if government printed too much, inflation got out of hand and destabilized the economy. Central banks were created to manipulate the money supply. Today, most of the world money supply is just numbers in account books or their computer equivalent. The central banks of the world manipulate demand for it and thus the amount in circulation by manipulating interest rates.
Bitcoin is no different: it's just a form of currency that's difficult to fake and the supply is constrained by a technological trick, which impedes the printing of it. The appeal for some people is that because government is not involved, government won't be able to manipulate it. This is true, and it's a bad thing. Since, like coins and printed currency, it's very hard to trace, it's been a boon for criminals looking to hide or launder their transactions. And because it's hard to produce much, if demand skyrockets, its price will skyrocket too.
There are very few cases of the Federal Reserve and other central banks doing things to devaluate our money, in fact quite the reverse: in 1979-81 the fed intentionally drove up interest rates and caused substantial unemployment to stop inflation. Had a sizable part of the economy been out of their control through a mechanism like bitcoin, both inflation and unemployment would have been much higher.
There have been cases of government explicitly devaluating money, e.g. the 1967 devaluation of the British Pound, and there have been lots of cases of incompetent, corrupt governments printing lots of money and causing hyperinflation. But as long as the Federal Reserve is relatively immune from political pressure from economic naïfs like Ron and Rand Paul, and professionally staffed, it's unlikely to do that.
Back in pre-history, people traded things with each other. This is sometimes inconvenient--the buyer may not have what the seller wanted, and a third party, who does have what the seller wanted and also wants what the buyer has, might be necessary. Fairly early on, people figured out that instead of a third party, a third item which had a fairly reliable trade value, because almost everybody found it useful, could increase the possibility of negotiating such trades. Items which could easily be adjusted to fit the value needed were more useful--grain, pieces of cloth, etc. Things which are easy to carry around are also better--and of course the more rare the item, the more valuable it is, which makes it easier to carry around. The reason gold rose to the top of this heap is because it's both rare and very difficult to fake: it's heavier than any more common metal (19.32 gm/ml. Lead is 11.34.) and it's soft and doesn't tarnish. That's it. But that's very useful, and before long, nearly every trader or laborer would happily take gold for their goods or services. Somebody, most likely in ancient Lydia (today, part of western Turkey) figured out how to make standardized coins with a press around 700 BC, which is also about the time the Bible was written, and this idea quickly became universal. Coins made of baser metals were less valuable, both because they were more common than gold, and because they were easier to fake. But they were still convenient. Even then, none of these necessarily maintained their value--inflation happened with gold as with any other currency, although what was happening was not understood until the 15th century.
Some people, including Ron Paul and Lyndon LaRouche and a lot of equally confused people, think that there's something special about gold. There is, but it's only that scarcity and difficulty of forging. Anything else that has a limited supply and is difficult to forge works. Fiat currency--printed money--was invented about a thousand years ago in China. This is very convenient--government can print as much as it needs. But it didn't take long for people to figure out how to fake it. And if government printed too much, inflation got out of hand and destabilized the economy. Central banks were created to manipulate the money supply. Today, most of the world money supply is just numbers in account books or their computer equivalent. The central banks of the world manipulate demand for it and thus the amount in circulation by manipulating interest rates.
Bitcoin is no different: it's just a form of currency that's difficult to fake and the supply is constrained by a technological trick, which impedes the printing of it. The appeal for some people is that because government is not involved, government won't be able to manipulate it. This is true, and it's a bad thing. Since, like coins and printed currency, it's very hard to trace, it's been a boon for criminals looking to hide or launder their transactions. And because it's hard to produce much, if demand skyrockets, its price will skyrocket too.
There are very few cases of the Federal Reserve and other central banks doing things to devaluate our money, in fact quite the reverse: in 1979-81 the fed intentionally drove up interest rates and caused substantial unemployment to stop inflation. Had a sizable part of the economy been out of their control through a mechanism like bitcoin, both inflation and unemployment would have been much higher.
There have been cases of government explicitly devaluating money, e.g. the 1967 devaluation of the British Pound, and there have been lots of cases of incompetent, corrupt governments printing lots of money and causing hyperinflation. But as long as the Federal Reserve is relatively immune from political pressure from economic naïfs like Ron and Rand Paul, and professionally staffed, it's unlikely to do that.
10 August 2014
A Few Things I'd Rather Not See
Facebook:
The message "viewing top stories. Back to Top Stories". I have never once wanted "Top Stories", although I occasionally look at it to see what it was suggesting. I always went right back in about 5 seconds.
Trending posts.
Suggested posts
Other people's achievements in on-line games.
Amazon and other ecommerce sites offering to post about my purchases.
I would like the ability to sort by user: a few folks are extremely noisy and they swamp more interesting posts. Perhaps a view that limits any one poster to three a day.
I'd also like a way of categorizing posts: it's very rare that I want to see pictures of people's meals, games, or cats, but occasionally people who post a lot of these have something worthwhile to say. FB is disturbingly good figuring out the general topic of a message....let me explicitly say up or down to the category.
IPhone:
The store popping up when I least expected it. I occasionally buy things, but I always chose the store rather than fumbling into it, with no clear way to get back, when the UI doesn't provide an obvious way to do what I'm looking for. This is especially common in the ipod mode.
I have never once hidden traffic on purpose in the new (since v7) map. yet about every fifth time I use the app I find traffic turned off. it's potentially useful to do if it's obscuring road names or something. (I would like a quick way to get roadnames to become big enough I can see them without my reading glasses)
there are many, many apps that have a very important button which is too close to other buttons to touch without a stylus. Fitbit's iPhone "dashboard" puts "go to the next day", which is about 40% of my use of the app, between "edit", which I have never used, and "device status", which I use about 1% of the time.
Windows8
The stupid windows button everywhere, where I constantly hit it when I was aiming for ctrl, or gripping my mouse or something. there are 4 of them in my current view. one would be ample.
please please please, give me back the XP interface and all that came with it, such as the ability to kill off apps when I'm done with them.
I've been using Win8 for several months now, and I've found exactly two improvements: better control of the start menu cache: it's called "Metro", and touch support works. regressions in amazingly many other areas.
petty but important: the new "xbox" card games are basically unplayable with a mouse, they are a pain to get to, and they frequently ask me if I'd like to send them money for stupid crap I don't want. I'll have to try the xp versions.
The message "viewing top stories. Back to Top Stories". I have never once wanted "Top Stories", although I occasionally look at it to see what it was suggesting. I always went right back in about 5 seconds.
Trending posts.
Suggested posts
Other people's achievements in on-line games.
Amazon and other ecommerce sites offering to post about my purchases.
I would like the ability to sort by user: a few folks are extremely noisy and they swamp more interesting posts. Perhaps a view that limits any one poster to three a day.
I'd also like a way of categorizing posts: it's very rare that I want to see pictures of people's meals, games, or cats, but occasionally people who post a lot of these have something worthwhile to say. FB is disturbingly good figuring out the general topic of a message....let me explicitly say up or down to the category.
IPhone:
The store popping up when I least expected it. I occasionally buy things, but I always chose the store rather than fumbling into it, with no clear way to get back, when the UI doesn't provide an obvious way to do what I'm looking for. This is especially common in the ipod mode.
I have never once hidden traffic on purpose in the new (since v7) map. yet about every fifth time I use the app I find traffic turned off. it's potentially useful to do if it's obscuring road names or something. (I would like a quick way to get roadnames to become big enough I can see them without my reading glasses)
there are many, many apps that have a very important button which is too close to other buttons to touch without a stylus. Fitbit's iPhone "dashboard" puts "go to the next day", which is about 40% of my use of the app, between "edit", which I have never used, and "device status", which I use about 1% of the time.
Windows8
The stupid windows button everywhere, where I constantly hit it when I was aiming for ctrl, or gripping my mouse or something. there are 4 of them in my current view. one would be ample.
please please please, give me back the XP interface and all that came with it, such as the ability to kill off apps when I'm done with them.
I've been using Win8 for several months now, and I've found exactly two improvements: better control of the start menu cache: it's called "Metro", and touch support works. regressions in amazingly many other areas.
petty but important: the new "xbox" card games are basically unplayable with a mouse, they are a pain to get to, and they frequently ask me if I'd like to send them money for stupid crap I don't want. I'll have to try the xp versions.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)