Friday, November 16, 2012

The Misinformed Want to "Fix" Our Private Savings



I've heard of the blind leading the blind, but backwards? Why?

Spay the Private Currency Saver? ....   Liquidate the liquidity?

How many times, from John Law to Ben Franklin to Abe Lincoln to Marriner Eccles to Beardsley Ruml to Warren Mosler have sane people pointed out that a Fiat Currency Issuer's entirely virtual accounting "deficit" = Currency Users nominal "savings"?

This is NOT a problem of math, accounting or logic. It's purely and simply a problem of competing marketing campaigns. So far, the money-disinformation campaign has won nearly every round, since ~1650.  Luckily, they haven't won EVERY round.  We're still here.

We don't need more information. We need a dead serious campaign design, by professional campaign designers.

This is NOT an issue of Currency Operations. It's an issue of Political Operations and Propaganda Operations. Capiche?

Fixing an Economic Herd? No thanks.

Our dynamic mix of economic steeds is not a herd of mares and stallions to be "fixed." We do not need intellectual geldings in policy offices. All that does is purposely bypass insanely great national and cultural options, solely so that self-styled national handlers lacking situational awareness may more leisurely lead our country inexorably into oblivion. National castration does NOT produce a viable survival path in a Cultural Adaptive Rate race. We need accelerated Cultural Recombination, not sterile obsolescence. National Options are a terrible thing to waste.
That is NOT why past and present citizens founded the USA. There is a better way.

Our deficit is in Situational Awareness, not in fiat. How the heck does one even produce a deficit in fiat? Virtually, by doing less than nothing? Ok, then a virtual deficit in fiat involves letting others do your thinking for you. That's how you submit to being ruled by a herd of intellectual geldings - and their few handlers.


3 comments:

beowulf said...

A better question is why its called debt when you loan money to the govt but its called deposits when you loan money to a bank.

Roger Erickson said...

Glad to see you support that view, Beowulf. Even Mosler/Wray/Mitchell accept the current accounting definition of "debt" as an adequate way to talk to non-accountants. In my experience, it simply doesn't scale.

Given such a lean vocabulary with diverse, context-specific semantics, we really can't easily address multiple audiences in one essay, without precisely defining terms.

That was driven home from day one in development of both the legal and software fields, where all term types and definitions had to be declared in portable header files - or else no amount of prose or coding could be guaranteed as non-nonsense to someone!

Why should micro/macro economics be any different?

This is at least in part a linguistic conundrum. Market "pidgin" languages like English are not designed with universal, multi-context application in mind.

Roger Erickson said...

ps: meant, as a way to talk to non-accountants about the budget of a fiat currency issuer

per Beardsley Ruml, if taxes as revenue are obsolete to a fiat currency issuer ... then so is the general concept of debt

(for the issuer of the new, fiat currency, it's very confusing to talk to currency users using a redundant term that normally means something else to the currency users)