Inflationary monetary policy is wealth transfer into the upper class without most people realizing it. Wealth, be it institutions or individuals, will always push for central banking as it entrenches their power.

“Inflationary monetary policy” is wealth transfer to the government (which they're then supposed to spend on common infrastructure, and other collaborative projects that everybody agrees on but nobody wants to shell out for unless everyone else is too). If the government is supporting the upper class and leaving everyone else to rot, no monetary policy will fix the issue.

I think this is supposed to be true, but nowadays when the wealthy mostly hold assets that have real value, like real estate and equities, as opposed to USD in a bank account, I'm not sure how well it works.

That's what tax is for.

Sadly, my internet degree in armchair economics doesn't give me the ability to come up with a functioning tax system (however much I think I can beat the status quo) so I have no further pearls of wisdom.

Is this really the case? Inflation favors debtors over creditors, the upper class tends to be the latter not the former. While it is the case that the value of savings goes down, the lower class are much less likely to save.

Nobody owes more money than the rich. This is true of countries as well.

“Wealth” as most people think of it comes from power over money more than from the absolute value of net worth.

I had a lot of credit card debt in University. I was the richest person my friends knew. That money gave me access to people and opportunities I would not have had otherwise. Today, I owe a million dollars ( mostly mortgage ) but am considered quite well off I think. Don’t get me wrong, I am far from wealthy but I am probably the “richest” person in my family.

In University I used to joke that if you gave $50,000 to a penniless man with nothing, he would have $50,000 ( be doing pretty well ) whereas if you gave it to me I would be broke and it would not change my life at all. Today, I guess it would be several hundred thousand instead but otherwise still totally true.

If your average Latin American country was able to borrow as much per person as the US owes, they could build roads and factories and hospitals and universities and chip foundries and be instantly wealthy. The only problem is who is going to lend it to them?

Wealth is not what we think it is.

I think you're mistaking wealth with purchase of luxury goods. If someone has no money, and borrows to buy a fancy set of clothes they might be perceived as wealthy by onlookers but they still have no money. Worse, even, as the interest on that loan will make them even poorer to the point of having a negative net worth. If you owe more than you own, you are not wealthy as you have negative net worth. Inflation someone in your situation precisely because they aren't actually wealthy: they owe more than they own.

This is exactly my point: someone who borrowed money for, say, university or to buy a house or a car is helped by inflation. By comparison wealthier people who are more likely to have bought those assets outright, are not. And the wealthiest people who are - directly or indirectly - the ones lending out money to other people see their wealth transferred to the first group.

Some debtors and people who own hard assets benefit from inflation.

People with more ephemeral assets and in service business are harmed by inflation. The service sectors in particular are full of low quality, debt-laden companies who can’t withstand interest driven financial stress.

>Nobody owes more money than the rich. This is true of countries as well.

This is completely incorrect. The rich are net lenders. They are also net interest recipients.

The companies they own are also net lenders.

Net lender doesn’t matter if there is no cap on the upside. The person you are replying to has it right.

It's not the case, but people keep wringing their hands about how inflation robs the poor of the ~$500 they have in their savings accounts, while ignoring how much it helps the middle-class mortgage owner who is in fixed-rate debt for a million dollars.

They get away with it because they don't make the distinction between price inflation and asset inflation. The cost of bread doubling is a huge problem for the poor, but means little to everyone else. The cost of assets doubling doesn't matter to the poor, because they have never, and will never save enough money to buy assets. The cost of assets doubling matters greatly against a yuppie who is trying to buy a home. The cost of assets doubling matters greatly in favor of someone who bought a home last week.

Inflation sucks for you if you earn minimum wage, because half the country thinks that raising the minimum wage to keep up with inflation means will bring about the apocalypse. Inflation doesn't matter much to you if you're in a high-demand industry, with wages rising to match it. Inflation sucks for you if you're not working, but doesn't matter to you if you are, and there's a labour shortage, which increases your wage bargaining power.

Let's use an example that might look familiar.

If inflation robs the poor person of the $500 and helps the middle class person with a mortgage.... all other things being equal, we transferred wealth from the poor person to the middle class person. yay, with me so far?

By the same account, if the middle class person is helped a little bit by inflation, (but also has some cash) the rich person who is leveraged many times over into 10 properties, and has most of their wealth in equities (which themselves are leveraged because of corporate debt) is going to be even better off after the increase in money supply.

Their share of the pie grew and the middle class persons maybe grew, but not relative to the rich person. Therefore, that is wealth transfer.

The majority of US equities is held by the upper class and corporate debt dwarfs consumer debt (including mortgages).

But you're missing the bigger picture: the rich who issues mortgages (or more likely, has stake in a real estate company) is having their wealth transferred to the lender. Most wealthy people loan more than they owe. If you owe more than to loan out then by definitely you're not wealthy, your net worth is negative. Similarly, a poor person who owes $20,000 on an auto loan, whose car is now worth $25,000 just saw a significant gain.

Inflation helps people who owe more than they lend out (most poor and middle class people). People who lend out more than they owe, directly or indirectly through stake in companies that do lending, are the ones experiencing less profit because of inflation.

You're right that the banking system is a little more complicated than I made it out to be, but let's ignore that for now. You agree that the majority of the fortune 50 is holds more debt than credit, right?

We don't have to speculate about how much debt rich people have, you can look at what % of equities is owned by the upper class and you can go compare consumer debt to corporate debt.

Now as to the banking system, there's a little bit of a feedback loop here because they're really the ones creating money, so no they're not really a net creditor either. I owe my bank 700k on my house, but that's new money being created in some respects.

> You agree that the majority of the fortune 50 is holds more debt than credit, right?

No. Not at all. Apple, #3 on the list for example, has hundreds of billions its loaning out because it has nothing better to do with its excess cash [1]. Almost every company on that list has positive total equity, some on them on the orders of hundreds of billions of dollars.

> We don't have to speculate about how much debt rich people have, you can look at what % of equities is owned by the upper class and you can go compare consumer debt to corporate debt.

I'm really baffled at what you mean by this? Yes, the rich own most equity. But how do you interpret this has having more debt? Equity isn't debt, it's ownership in a company.

> Now as to the banking system, there's a little bit of a feedback loop here because they're really the ones creating money, so no they're not really a net creditor either. I owe my bank 700k on my house, but that's new money being created in some respects.

Sort of? Banks don't get to regulate currency supply, the Fed does. It's true that banks leverage more than they have in their reserve, but that doesn't necessarily increase the money supply.

And my point is if you owe 700k on your house and inflation doubles (all prices go up 2x, but so do all wages) then this is very good for you. You effectively got a house for half the price. If you are a multi-millionaire real estate mogul who's writing mortage loans, then this not good for you. That money invested in the home loan isn't even going to keep up with inflation.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braeburn_Capital

Thanks for the detailed reply, we're really getting into the meat of it here in this debate.

    "has hundreds of billions its loaning out because it has nothing better to do with its excess cash "

That's not really being a creditor if you're investing in something that doesn't cap the upside. Likely apple's fund is investing into companies that will benefit from inflation, and if in my contrived example the money supply doubles their valuation in said company doubles.

It's really fixed rate loans that are 'creditors', not investment firms. Some googling tells me they also have ~230 billion in outstanding debt. So I think it's safe to say in this example they're a net debtor.

     >But how do you interpret this has having more debt?

By proxy through being invested in corporations that themselves take out debt to invest in money making ventures.

     >Sort of? Banks don't get to regulate currency supply, the Fed does.

Banks ARE the Fed! The local federal reserve banks aren't themselves buying assets its nationally chartered banks that are required to be part of the fed that are participating in this dance.

     >If you are a multi-millionaire real estate mogul who's writing mortgage loans, then this not good for you.

Most multi-millionaire real estate moguls who are writing mortgage loans know this, which is why they sell them to the federal government or other government institutions.

> If inflation robs the poor person of the $500 and helps the middle class person with a mortgage.... all other things being equal, we transferred wealth from the poor person to the middle class person. yay, with me so far?

No, I'm not with you, because it's not the poor person who is fronting a million bucks in cash that the middle class person borrows, in order to buy the house.

For the obvious reason that he doesn't have a million dollars to lend out.

FYI, corporate debt is ~60% of household debt in the United States. (~10T vs 15T). Corporate cash balances are ~4T, and household cash balances are ~5T. [1] Net corporate debt is ~6T, and net household debt is ~10T.

You look at these numbers, and you tell me - who benefits more from having debt inflated away?

[1] https://www.valuepenguin.com/banking/average-savings-account...

You need to stop viewing money in amounts and start viewing it as % of total available money in existence.

In our contrived example, now the middle class person owns a bigger slice of the pie after the pie doubled in size due to their leverage.

Your contrived example very conveniently excludes what inflation buys (Infrastructure, public spending)[1], and also who pays for the majority of it (The lender - who happens to be neither of the two people in your example.)

So yes, if we have an incorrect contrived example that doesn't even attempt to serve as a proxy the ground facts, and we ignore half the consequences of it, yes, of course, we can draw whatever conclusion you want.

Still not with you.

[1] Yes, obviously, its possible for a government to spend that money on stupid shit. It's a good incentive to elect ones that spend it on useful things.

     >our contrived example very conveniently excludes what inflation buys

Yes I did this on purpose because you seemed to misunderstand some very basics of economics. That poor folks holding cash has wealth indirectly transferred to debtors who are leveraged into assets is not a controversial economic theory. It's fucking basic math.

So once the contrived example made sense to you your first response is to move the goalpost completely and talk about something unrelated?

We're not talking about the necessities of monetary policy we're talking about the effects, please focus on the relevant parts of a debate instead of jumping around to avoid conceding a (very basic) issue.

As an aside, you picked infrastructure as your main deflection point? Do you have any idea what % of US revenue is spent on infrastructure compared to everything else?

You also seem to misunderstand per capita vs. aggregate. Do you think if poor people have as much money in aggregate as one rich person that means they're rich? In the same way, comparing all outstanding consumer debt (of which the vast majority of mortgages) is not helping your argument, you'll have to show me a breakdown that shows on average a poor person is more often a net debtor.

You also need to distinguish debt into assets vs. depreciating assets. Using leverage on stock is not the same as buying nikes with a high interest credit card.

You're still missing the part where its not poor folks who hold cash. The bottom quartile owns next to zero cash. All that an average person in that position owns is the clothes on their back, their personal effects, and maybe a shitty beater car.

The rest of your argument unravels, because you've based it on this fundamentally flawed assumption.

You seem to be all over the place, I picked $500 cash because YOU used that as an example. Do you remember? Scroll up a bit.

   >The rest of your argument unravels, because you've based it on this fundamentally flawed assumption. 

No, it's not flawed, it's not my argument, it's logic and economic theory that anyone without some weird learning disability can follow.

If there are two groups of people and you give them both newly created money, but one group more money, the group that got less is worse off. Just because number go up doesn't mean they're better off.

All things are not equal. I know someone who was the CEO of a small hospital network.

When he retired, his compensation was greater than the sum of salary for the entire company. The company paid for his Tesla lease, but orderlies making $12/hr had a uniform deposit deducted from their first few checks.

I would need a source to believe this. The hospital would have had to not have any doctors on staff to come close.

That can happen. Doctors are employed by physician practices which work as contractors at the hospital.

Something like 70% of the population has no savings of any kind.

You know that the arguments about poor grandma with $500 life savings are bullshit, because everyone making them would happily let grandma die for a buck.

The only reason resource extraction types care about inflation is that most use debt to avoid taxation, and increase interest rates hurt their return on assets. Because the perversion of the US Senate has happened, we care more about corn companies, oil drillers, etc than anyone else.

That's not really correct. What's correct through is that the bottom 80% don't receive enough interest to break even on interest expenses. I.e. they pay more interest than they receive back. This is the primary driver of inequality.

And this is true for everything. For housing, for stocks, for lent out money.

Deflation and inflation are bad because they make people speculate on the currency in either way. Inflation discourages paying off debt. Deflation encourages hoarding. Both of them are harmful because they create a self reinforcing feedback loop.

A negative interest rate forces money to circulate and it encourages you to pay off debts. Thereby it eliminates both inflation and deflation.

I'd imagine that wealthy individuals are highly leveraged. In other words, rather than selling assets to buy things they take loans against those assets to buy things. This (1) prevents ever having to pay tax (2) gives them benefits from inflation and (3) gives them benefits from low interest rates as their assets appreciate faster than their interest rate consumes money

Most sources I read indicate the opposite: poor and middle class people are much less likely to be debtors rather than creditors. They're more likely to have an auto loan rather than own a car outright. Likewise, they're more likely to have a mortgage on their home rather than own it. The wealthy, by comparison, are more likely to invest their money, issuing loans to other people.

Yes, the majority of US equities is held by the upper class and corporate debt dwarfs consumer debt (including mortgages).

> inflationary monetary policy is wealth transfer to the upper class without people realizing it.

Going to need some evidence to back up that statement.

Without centralized banking you essentially have no set policy one way other the other. I can understand why one would take issue with the current governance structure, but I don’t agree that letting money randomly fluctuate with no mechanisms for intervention to be a good thing.

In a nutshell if I have enough assets that generate lets say for example 6% return and can borrow cheaply like at 1% then I can't lose. Money makes money unlike the poor who borrow at 19%. Inflation benefits the wealthy because their assets go up in value and then that "perceived wealth" gives them access to more cheap money as collateral.

The problem is that interest redistributes wealth since it is based on how much you already own.

Even if you were paid 19% interest and the rich not you would not have enough money to break even.

Outsized returns on capital happen with or without an inflationary environment.

The phenomenon you are describing has existed since before central banking was established.

> no set policy one way other the other

Isn't that the idea of liberty though? No central authority deciding what is a "good thing" - just keeping the peace.

The absolute end to that line of reasoning is that there shouldn’t be any state at all.

Why does the state need to “keep the peace”? It does so through a monopoly on force. Why can’t private individuals simply work things out on their own however they see fit?

The idea of liberty, to me, is the idea that citizens have power over collective decision making, ie the rule of law, consent of the governed. I realize I am in the minority in modern day America though.

No, the absolute end is that the state should enforce negative rights, not positive ones. Liberty is the freedom from interference by or obligation to other people.

> Why can’t private individuals simply work things out on their own however they see fit?

They can, so long as they do peacefully. What the state provides is simply due process for the resolution of disputes, and the expectation that this process will be used instead of violence.

> The idea of liberty, to me, is the idea that citizens have power over collective decision making

This is democracy, which is somewhat tangential here. You can have a decidedly un-free democracy or (more hypothetically) a very free dictatorship.

“It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person. True freedom can only be where there is no exploitation and oppression of one person by another; where there is not unemployment, and where a person is not living in fear of losing his job, his home and his bread. Only in such a society personal and any other freedom can exist for real and not on paper.” - Ronald Reagan

> Ronald Reagan

you cheeky monkey

>- Ronald Reagan

For those unaware, the quote is actually from Stalin.

Spoilsport ;-P

I define liberty differently than you do.

I don’t accept the popular, modern definition of negative rights vs positive rights as the bedrock or liberty. It leads to nonsensical conclusions.

There is no such thing under my definition as a “free dictatorship”. A system where rulers aren’t bound by legitimate laws is by definition un-free.

I don’t think my definition is super far off from yours though: liberty as non domination, one isn’t subject to the arbitrary will of another.

A free dictatorship would be one where the dictator's powers are very limited, but he is not democratically elected.

> liberty as non domination, one isn’t subject to the arbitrary will of another.

Yes exactly. I just see things like "interfering in private negotiations/transactions between free, equal people" as fundamentally authoritarian/dominating.

If interference with private transactions is fundamentally authoritarian, I still don’t understand how you see any sort of state as compatible with liberty.

Yes yes, “keeping the peace” but how is such an authority deemed to be legitimate? Who gets to define due process? How are they funded if not by taxation?

At the end of the day I don’t understand how you aren’t just an anarchist.

You just said that interference with private transactions was by definition a violation of liberty, so any outside action of the state would be at best a violation of liberty to secure liberty, somehow. Which, is somewhat nonsensical. There is no well defined liberty math.

> a violation of liberty to secure liberty

You've pretty much got it. These are the only legitimate violations of liberty. Doesn't seem nonsensical to me.

If that is your reasoning then consider barter vs money exchange.

With money one party has to borrow it first and pay interest. With barter nobody is paying interest. The money lender is clearly abusing his "authority" over money by excluding it from the economy. He uses that power to charge interest and thereby render economic activity that can only cover its own costs unprofitable.

Here is an example. I sell you an apple for $1 and you sell me a banana for $1. We are both better off because I like bananas you like apples. However, if I had to borrow the money first from a bank with interest, then the trade would not be profitable. This is the real source of unemployment. Artificial minimum profitability.

Well, none of this has anything to do with liberty until some force is used. What happens if you just fail to pay the money lender? If he can imprison or enslave you then you're absolutely right. If all he can do is spread the word that you're not likely to repay your loans then it's not a matter of liberty.

Money is just cut paper, a convenient medium of exchange. If you have bad credit, your liberty is not in danger. The only thing in jeopardy is the willingness of others to cooperate/transact with you. Since they don't owe you anything to begin with, the point is moot.

That reductionist approach to liberty is a mirage for teenage boys and hermits. If I can do whatever I want, you can’t.

The United States would have been pushed into a deep depression, but for JP Morgan’s vacation plans being a little different. Early 20th century America was not a radical place, the fact that the Federal Reserve was created underlies how fubar the system was.

> was not a radical place

By what metric? For who? Surely it was good for some and bad for others, much like any other place. How comfortable people are and how happy they are are fundamentally unrelated to how free they are.

> how fubar the system was

All we basically disagree about is how the general welfare clause is to be interpreted. It had a narrow interpretation for most of US history, and then a broad one starting in 1936 with United States v. Butler. The US was clearly a good place to live pre-1936, given that so many people immigrated there. I don't see why a continued narrow interpretation would be catastrophic.

"How comfortable people are and how happy they are are fundamentally unrelated to how free they are."

That would be false.

"The US was clearly a good place to live pre-1936, given that so many people immigrated there."

That would be false, too, unless you were very wealthy. Just because it was better than, say, starving in Ireland does not mean it was "good". Source: My father's father was a sharecropper.

I guess we're just disagreeing about definitions then. What word would you use to describe the freedom I'm referring to?

Absolutely!

I do not know any single word or short phrase that describes "the freedom [you are] referring to", since as far as I can tell, the concept you use is known only among certain libertarians where it is called "freedom". Perhaps it would be "the absence of a hypothetical[0] threat of legally sanctioned violence from 'the government' in response to actions outside of a certain limited range". (Personally, if we're discussing the threat of violence, I am much more concerned by non-legally sanctioned violence from 'the government'[1][2], where by "much more" I mean "not very much at all" since violence and the threat thereof is actually fairly low on the useful methods of coercion scale.

Now, if you are interested, my personal definition of "freedom" is along the lines of (OED, 1978 ed., "Freedom (4)") "the state of being allowed to act without hindrance or restraint" with the additional proviso of something like "...not infringing excessively on the freedom of others..." and made all lovely and transitively closed by the Kantian version of the golden rule.

[0] Before you get all wrapped up around "hypothetical", consider: let's say your state health officials declare a mask mandate and you, like all rational people, do not wish to obey; you go into a convenient Half-Price Books mask-free. Many freedom-loving libertarians seem to believe that the next event would be a member of the 101st Airborne popping out of a convenient closet with an M1A1 Abrams under each arm and reduce you to a fine mist for your temerity. What would much more likely happen would be a store employee or manager asking you to leave. Unfortunately, that presents a problem for our libertarian friend---at that point, you are technically trespassing and even the fiercest libertarian would say the use of force against you is legitimate, no?

[1] What is the dividing line between 'the government' and any other human institution, and why do you regard it as more dangerously coercive than, say, your family?

[2] Y'all do realize Rand Paul doesn't want people who vote Democratic to have their votes counted? The methods for that are technically legal, I suppose, but it's not really very far from "round'em up and shoot'em" (which would be illegal) in the grand spectrum of historical human behavior.

"I'm of the opinion that, like my house, under what conditions I choose to admit people to my business is none of anyone else's concern."

...

"...which injures no one else..."

How does denying someone my cooperation injure them?

You're smart, you'll figure it out if you think about it for a while. Try putting yourself in the position of someone who could be injured.

That's one definition of liberty, but not the only one. I'd propose the alternative: Liberty is the freedom to take actions in society as it exists. Therefore a society that had greater prosperity has greater Liberty.

You sort of admit as much, what is keeping the piece but ultimately deciding which things are good things or not?

Keeping the peace means enforcing nonviolent interaction and providing due process for conflict resolution. Liberty isn't the same thing as prosperity/economic power. They are different words for a reason. You can be very poor and very free, or very comfortably enslaved. Liberty is fundamentally your relationship with those who can use legitimate force against you.

Your definition of liberty here is getting really tangled.

If liberty is “fundamentally your relationship with those who can use legitimate force against you” then how is having a set monetary policy incompatible with liberty as long as it comes from a “legitimate” source of power?

But we all agree that the government is legitimate, and so it's use of force is legitimate. Additionally, if the government forced you to pay it $1000 a year, even if you could deposit that in gold, you would still be forced to pay. The currency seems irrelevant.

It seems like what your saying is you believe taxation is legitimate, but requiring taxes to be pain in USD is illegitimate. Which, like, is just your opinion man (and makes the whole argument circular) I don't see any generic argument that makes taxation compatible with your definition of liberty but taxation in USD incompatible". I don't see really any generic definition of liberty that would distinguish between those two actions.

I'm rate limited, but to your example below of a currency no one could obtain, the government could equivalently apply a greater than 100% wealth tax. Or the government could define all speech as force or any number of other things. A capricious government can do bad things yes, but requiring taxes to be paid in a particular currency doesn't give them any more powerful ways to be capricious.

The currency seems irrelevant, but it's not. Imagine my government in Tyrannia only accepted taxes in a currency which was impossible to obtain except by stealing it (also illegal). The government would then hold every citizen in a catch-22, allowing it to arbitrarily decide whom to imprison for not paying taxes and who to imprison for stealing the currency required to pay them.

It seems like the government issuing their own currency still isn’t really the issue in this thought experiment…

What you’re saying is essentially “imagine a government with the power to create laws that allow arbitrary imprisonment with no recourse, that would be tyrannical”, which, yes, but that only has to do with the currency because that’s what you chose for your example.

Said government could pass a law stating that all citizens must be in two places at once, and achieve the same effect.

As mentioned in a previous comment, I'm saying "Imagine a government without broad power over general welfare". This was the US government until 1936 with United States v. Butler. I don't think it would be a catastrophe to reverse this decision again. It seems that in spite of best efforts, the US has failed to preserve the very meaning of liberty, as it was initially envisioned, from total deterioration even in its very definition.

The material distinction when the United States was founded wasn’t whether the state in general had broad power over the general welfare, but whether the federal government would. State government did have such power.

Yep. The bill of rights didn't even broadly apply to the states until the 20th century. Have fun with that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...

Any centralized authority with a monopoly on force is going to have to levy taxes. Otherwise you’d end up with people just refusing to pay because they didn’t get the judgements they desire.

If there is a state _at all_ there is force involved. I don’t really understand what you believe is possible here. What you’re discussing is tantamount to assuming that American traditions of due process just exist in a state of nature when they absolutely do not.

I believe it's possible to have a state whose powers and authority are fundamentally limited. I also believe that was the original intention of US. I agree taxes must be levied. I just disagree it's legitimate to levy them for most of what they are spent on today.

If I ask myself "what should the state be allowed to do?", it's basically answered by "what would I be comfortable holding a gun to someone's head for?". To take a popular example: If it's wrong to hold a gun to a doctor's head in order to force them to treat a patient (which I think it is), and it's wrong to hold a gun to a bystander's head to force them to pay the doctor, then it's wrong to fund healthcare with taxation.

You would hold a gun to someone’s head over petty theft or the violation of a contractual agreement?

> over petty theft

Yes, I'd have no problem shooting a thief, especially in defence of my primary food supply.

> violation of a contractual agreement

I'd have no problem holding a gun to someone's head in order to extract what compensation is due to me under a lawful agreement.

Stealing from your primary food supply isn’t really what I had in mind when I was referring to petty theft. If anything I meant stealing a small amount from a significant excess.

> I'd have no problem holding a gun to someone's head in order to extract what compensation is due to me under a lawful agreement.

So if a doctor enters into a contractual agreement with the state to provide healthcare, then it’s ok?

Contracts should have monetary penalties only - you can't sign yourself into slavery. If the doctor breaches a contract, and the contract has provisions for what he will pay in breach, then he must pay it or have it seized (with force). We've long banned debtors prisons for good reason. There's no holding a gun to anyone's head required unless they try to stop you from seizing property to which you have a lawful claim.

So as long as I write the laws and excite the laws I can do whatever I want. Taxation is lawful because the government duly passes laws asserting such claims. Taxation therefore cannot be theft.

Unless there is some definition of “lawful” that exists outside of writing and enforcing the laws. Which begs the question according to who? In this instance that someone seems to be you.

Taxation isn't theft, it's robbery, since it involves the threat of force. The only remaining question is "What services is it ethical to rob people in order to fund?". My answer is "Not nearly as many as most people today suppose".

This doesn’t square with your definitions of legitimate claims on property.

Taxes are “lawful”, therefore under your framework, they are neither theft nor robbery.

Unless, somehow, lawfulness has nothing to do with laws. In which case what you’re saying is just straight up nonsense.

Anything that we enact into law is "lawful", it's circular reasoning. It doesn't say anything about the ethics of the situation. If 80% of people agree democratically to murder the other 20%, it will be lawful, but does it suddenly become ethical? And if they change the word so that it's "lawful execution" does that make it OK?

In the same vein, I'm using the common definition of "robbery" without any legitimizing window dressing. I'm asking "under what circumstances is it ethical to rob people?" and "under what circumstances is it ethical to enslave them?"

Surely some exist. For instance, being drafted to fight a war and being enslaved are basically equivalent in terms of lived experience. We've decided that yes, in order to defend society against existential threats it's ethical to enslave people. I don't disagree, and would like to point out adherence to the maxim of violating liberty only in direct defense of liberty.

But this does frame the draft to fight WWII and the Vietnam War differently. It's much harder to make the case that North Vietnam was an existential threat to US liberty, so drafting/enslaving people to fight there seems much less ethical.

Following this line of reasoning, the question is "Is it ethical to rob people to pay doctors?". And since lacking a doctor doesn't deprive anyone of liberty, the answer must be "No".

You'll note that all of this can basically be derived from the following (from the Declaration of the Rights of Man)

> 1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights...

> 4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights...

So many words, and yet still no coherent sense of what makes something “lawful” or not.

A couple comments ago you said it would be ok to murder someone for stealing an apple.

Anything written into law is lawful. I'm trying to discern what's ethical to write into law. It would help if you answered the questions I posed.

> enforcing nonviolent interaction

By ultimately using force or the threat thereof to prevent people from using force in disallowed ways, right?

> Liberty isn't the same thing as prosperity/economic power.

I didn't say they were synonyms. I said prosperity was a prerequisite to liberty[1]. A poor person isn't free to inhabit a house, and if they try to do so the state will use force to prevent or remove them.

[1]: actually I said all else equal, more prosperity means more liberty. To use your example (which I don't really buy, a rich slave is sort of not a thing), a "rich" slave is able to purchase better food for themselves than a poor slave whereas a poor slave would need to resort to theft, and risk force as a consequence.

A homeless person can be more free than a person confined in a mansion, can they not?

> By ultimately using force or the threat thereof to prevent people from using force in disallowed ways

Yes, since using force to compel action is basically the definition of slavery and decidedly un-free.

> A homeless person can be more free than a person confined in a mansion, can they not?

Sure. But a rich homeless person is no longer homeless, and a poor person confined in their home is less free than a rich person confined on their home. You haven't addressed my point.

> Yes, since using force to compel action is basically the definition of slavery and decidedly un-free.

Right, so when I said

> You sort of admit as much, what is keeping the piece but ultimately deciding which things are good things or not

I was correct. The government decides which things are good or not (using force in disallowed ways) and prevents those. Generally governments high in libetry also do things like punish fraud, because fraud is bad and misleading people and stealing their money...reduces liberty? Or is fraud prevention unrelated to liberty, and should the government even do it?

> I disagree. The rich person may be more comfortable, but they are no more free. Confinement is confinement.

Is level of confinement the only thing that defines slavery?

Assume the rich person and the poor person want the same thing. The rich person can acquire it. The poor person cannot (or can only do so by risking force in response).

All else equal, the rich person can do strictly more things. How are they equally free? The definition of freedom is usually something along the lines of "the ability to do things". The rich person can do more things, they're freer.

The term for what I'm describing is sometimes "freedom from want" and is a commonly considered to be a freedom/right when discussing freedoms if you look beyond liberalism as it was in 19th century. The idea being that while liberalism does a decent job of ensuring that the government doesn't oppress you, it does nothing to ensure that other people don't oppress you. Granting some standard of living to everyone ensures that you can't be taken advantage of because you have no better option, no one can treat you worse than the living standard the government provides.

Ensuring a minimum standard of living doesn't dictate how people interact peacefully, not does it require oppression, you're attacking a straw man.

> doesn't dictate how people interact peacefully

It very much does if it involves limiting what terms employers and employees can agree to. And it certainly requires oppression if you're going to seize and redistribute wealth to finance the required bureaucracy.

> It very much does if it involves limiting what terms employers and employees can agree to

You don't really need to do this if you provide a strong welfare state. Provide government healthcare and benefits to all citizens equivalent to say $10 an hour, and you don't need to limit how employers and employees interact. They have the freedom to quit.

> And it certainly requires oppression

So we come back to the beginning: all taxation is oppression?

Keep in mind that my scheme actually probably involves less government force than yours. People will be less violent, requiring less respondent force, if given a minimum standard of living. So do you want the government to use more force? Or is "oppression" the issue, I can't keep up.

> You don't really need to do this if you provide a strong welfare state

Why is providing a welfare state a prerequisite here? From where do you derive the need to protect people from the total consequences of their failure or misfortune by forcing the collective to bear the burden?

> all taxation is oppression?

Of course it is - it's robbery. Just like the draft is slavery. The important question is "What circumstances make it ethical to rob/enslave people?". They do exist, but they are quite limited.

> do you want the government to use more force

It's not about degrees of force, it's about what situations force is applied to. The only acceptable application of force (read violation of liberty) is to defend liberty itself from imminent danger. Applying any degree of force to compel cooperation is indistinguishable from that degree of slavery. What's the problem with strictly voluntary, at-will, consensual interaction between people?

> From where do you derive the need to protect people from the total consequences of their failure or misfortune by forcing the collective to bear the burden?

I'll answer this with a question: you said elsewhere that its unethical to compel doctors to treat a patient. Let's assume that's the case. What happens when you are robbed by someone, shot, and your wallet is stolen, you even pass out from the shock and blood loss.

A bystander calls an ambulance. Then what? The ambulance service, the hospital (and the doctor) have no idea if you can pay for their services. Let's assume you can, you have fantastic insurance. What is the right way to resolve this situation? It seems to me your answer is that the hospital should have every right to refuse to serve people without identification (and in fact this is probably in the hospitals best interest, from a pure ROI perspective).

So do we throw our hands in the air and let some people who, by any account, don't deserve to die (they're insured, if their wallet wasn't stolen, there'd be no issue at all!) through no fault of their own, or do we protect people from the total consequence of their misfortune by providing some kind of guardrail?

A more general answer is that people, in aggregate, don't like the instability that comes from a lack of welfare state. If you provide absolutely no welfare state, and I lose my job and can't find a new one, it is very likely that the best thing for me to do is to steal from someone. And people generally speaking dislike that because unlike robbery from the government, which involves paperwork and court rooms, that kind of robbery really actually involves guns. And people seem to find suits and paperwork to be less force than guns.

So you pick your poison: a democratically controlled nonviolent robbery that you can influence and plan for, or a stochastic violent robbery that you can't control at all. Personally, I find paperwork to be less violent than a gun, but you have weird ideas about what constitutes violence, so I'm curious what you'll say.

> What's the problem with strictly voluntary, at-will, consensual interaction between people?

It doesn't exist. Is coercion voluntary? If it's violent to threaten someone's life by holding a gun to their head, why isn't it violent to withholding food they need to live (or the money they need to buy the food they need to live, or the healthcare they need to live, or the money they need for that healthcare)?

> What happens when you are robbed by someone, shot, and your wallet is stolen, you even pass out from the shock and blood loss.

You are at this point reliant on the charity (read: voluntary) of others. Even if you were identified and your insurance accepted, the paramedics or doctors can just refuse to do their jobs, for whatever reason, and face only professional consequences. You are in no way guaranteed to be treated.

Also, the insured could demand coverage for this case from their providers, with liability to their estate if they are not treated. This would force insurers to negotiate with hospitals to treat these patients rather than incur the liability.

> don't deserve to die

What do you mean "don't deserve?". If you're laying shot in the street, then clearly you're going to die soon without lots of outside intervention. This is your lot. Insurance isn't there to provide a guarantee of some outcome, it's there to reimburse as best it can after the fact.

> don't like the instability that comes from a lack of welfare state

Doing what "people like" isn't the same as being ethical.

> the best thing for me to do is to steal from someone

That depends on the risk/reward balance between stealing and figuring out how to be productive. If the punishment for robbery is severe, then chances are you'll figure out how to be useful to someone before resorting to it.

> Is coercion voluntary

Yes? If your grandmother offers you a cup of tea, insists, and will be offended if you don't take it, does that make it involuntary? She's clearly coercing you.

> why isn't it violent to withholding food they need to live

Everyone needs inputs to live, and everyone is born without the means to provide them for themselves. Therefore everyone must, at some point, enter into a negotiation with those who possess what they need. Absent any law and order, these negotiations often turn violent. All we've any right to do is make some rules around the negotiations, not prescribe universal cooperation.

> This would force insurers to negotiate with hospitals to treat these patients rather than incur the liability.

The ROI here functionally never makes sense for the insurer to do this, unless clients are paying enough to offset the cost of paying all unidentified people.

> You are in no way guaranteed to be treated.

Are you saying that this is the case today, or that this is how it would be. Because I agree with you. Despite laws that require doctors to treat you that exist today (to prevent this exact scenario), no one ever holds a gun to anyone's head. There's no need for violence. Professional (and in general civil) consequences are enough to enforce this.

> She's clearly coercing you.

Coercion requires force or threat. From me shooting you is the same as the harm from me starving you, so the threat is the same. A grandmother being upset isn't a threat, and certainly not the same level of threat, not is it force. So perhaps let's ask a different question: is choice freely given when your life is threatened?

> Doing what "people like" isn't the same as being ethical.

Utilitarians would disagree with you.

The root problem with how you approach the world is that you see any government force as worse than all force by everyone else. Like given how your approach contacts, if I coerced you to sign yourself into slavery, that's acceptable, since it meets your definition of "strictly voluntary, at-will, consensual".

If you believe government is the worse bad and nothing else can be as bad, sure that's a viewpoint. But it fails when you have other powerful organizations that hold the same power over an individual as a government does.

Imagine for a moment another extreme example where the government has a total use of force monopoly, and I have a monopoly on the water supply. You say that is unethical for the government to act against me, and also unethical for individuals to act against me, no matter what. This is true even if I use that Monopoly to enslave people or commit genocide, because I'm doing it without violence, only coercion. If that's your ethics, something's broken.

And pragmatically it's also stupid: people will lose faith in a government that fails to protect them. So a government that fails to protect its citizenship effectively will quickly cease to exist (the people with guns will desert to protect their families and tada: a new government). So once you accept that democracy is ethically good (and really even if you don't), the ethics are irrelevant. Governments must keep people happy or they will quickly cease to exist. And I subscribe to the idea that the purpose of a system is what it does. Governments try to make their citizens happy. If they don't, they'll be replaced by one which does, because that's what the people want. Your job is then to convince me, and everyone else's that sacrificing my safety is worth a government that is in your view more ethical.

That depends heavily on the rollover period of said debt, along with other factors with how the debt is structured (eg variable interest rates).

Broad swaths of the middle class commonly fit within this framework as well, they leverage debt to buy houses.

The poor tend not to have mounds of cash sitting around, so the effects of inflation are only negative if there are not concurrent wage increases.

Pre central banking and stable (low) inflationary regimes, wealth has always been heavily concentrated in the upper class in the western world. The only real exception was the post war booms, which was during a time of heavy global monetary regulation.

Inflation is super complicated because it depends on what types of assets are held by whom and how susceptible those assets are to inflation. For example, high rates of inflation during/after WWII were a large contributing factor in a net reduction in wealth inequality, because much of the wealthy was heavily invested in fixed-return war bonds. Much of the rentier economy of the 19th century elite depended on predictably low (almost nonexistant) inflation in order to sustain their fortunes. Theoretically, the financial assets of today's wealthy should be somewhat less vulnerable to inflation (real returns over the last ~80 years seem to be lower during periods of high inflation but it's also sometimes hard to untangle inflation from the overall state of the economy). Ultimately, inflation is a pretty crude instrument in terms of who it affects; I think it's hard to make sweeping statements about who it's "good" for that hold up well over time.

That’s why the regulatory environment of the 20th century is important… Monetary policy that includes full employment provides benefits to the broader population.

“Hard money”, gold, Bitcoin, land, etc focused policy only benefits the return on assets for the people with those assets.

What we have now is the worst of both worlds.

You mean interest is a wealth transfer into the upper class. The more you have, the more you get. Inflation increases interest rates which makes it even worse because it not only attacks incomes but also existing savings.

> Inflationary monetary policy is wealth transfer into the upper class

No, it is a means of wealth transfer to the government without raising taxes. Where does the trillions in deficit spending come from? Inflation!

The politicians, of course, know this. But they keep up the misdirection by blaming it on greedy capitalists and/or unions.

The notion that it is for monetary stability is also propaganda. Milton Friedman in "Monetary History" showed that instability increased after the creation of the Fed.

>No, it is a means of wealth transfer to the government without raising taxes. Where does the trillions in deficit spending come from? Inflation!

Saving creates a hole in the economy, the trillions of deficit spending are a very stupid way of filling that hole. It works better than doing nothing which is why we do it.

>The notion that it is for monetary stability is also propaganda. Milton Friedman in "Monetary History" showed that instability increased after the creation of the Fed.

Uh, that is a property of capitalism. It's great at first when debts are low then it gets worse and worse.

Central banks and their role in tyranny is hardly “vague”.

They can siphon off the wealth of an entire nation by printing money. It’s an irresistible temptation that I don’t trust any man to resist long term. That kind of power shouldn’t be in the hands of any one person or organization.

>They can siphon off the wealth of an entire nation by printing money.

There are a countless other ways a country can do this and most of those are more targeted. The tax code is the most obvious example. Inflation is a flat tax of a few percentage points. If the goal is to wield power, it is much more important to control the tax code and move the income tax from 0% (generally true before the 16th Amendment in 1913) to 91% (1954-1963) or from 91% back down to 37% (the current rate). Blaming central banking as the primary cause for these issues just doesn't make sense to me.

> Inflation is a flat tax of a few percentage points

Flat tax on cash holdings, which poor people don't have.

It's a negative tax on debt, which poor people tend to hold. It doesn't apply to assets.

Now if wages don't keep track with inflation, that's not a tax, it's an employer reducing wages.

I'm not sure the distinction you are making here. A flat tax is called that because it is flat in percentage not in nominal value. Yes, debtors will benefit more than creditors, but that doesn't mean it isn't a flat tax. Also it doesn't just impact cash which should be obvious from the last sentence. If inflation decreases the real amount owed by debtors, it also decreases the real amount that is owed to creditors, and therefore decreases the value of their investments.

> If inflation decreases the real amount owed by debtors, it also decreases the real amount that is owed to creditors, and therefore decreases the value of their investments.

I'm sure that's upsetting for wealthy people with investments

For the mom working 3 jobs at Macdonalds, as long as Macdonalds continues to pay an inflation linked salary, her debts being whittled away, that's great news.

Now if Macdonalds can cut salaries relative to inflation, that's a whole other problem.

> For the mom working 3 jobs at Macdonalds, as long as Macdonalds continues to pay an inflation linked salary

Huge assumption. Wages have not kept up with inflation since the 1970’s. Know what has? Asset prices. Guess who owns stocks/gold/real estate?

I think you are projecting a moral or political argument into my comments. That wasn't my intention. My point is that there are more powerful levers in the government than the inflation rate.

Sure, having your debt reduced by 6% or whatever is good, but the government could also easily forgive all federally owned college debt and 100% reduction is certainly better than 6%. Increasing the minimum wage is another example. That would more directly benefit that mom with 3 jobs more than inflation.

Whatever your political goals are, there is likely a much more powerful tool to accomplish them than nudging the inflation rate up or down a few percentage points.

>It's a negative tax on debt, which poor people tend to hold. It doesn't apply to assets.

Thank you!! This is the first time I've heard someone acknowledge this since the "inflation crisis" started. Inflation is good for student debt holders.

Could be, but it makes a lot of assumptions and is loose with terminology. Monetary inflation does not equal price or wage inflation necessarily. We are definitely seeing price inflation which no longer seems to be transitory. There does seem to be wage inflation, but that is not guaranteed. So while if wage inflation keeps up for those holding debt, then yes. I wonder though if those in the position of student debt have the least leverage to take advantage of the wage inflation.

The other thing is that costs go up. The impact of this is much greater if you are poor which could also affect your ability to actually pay the loans. One has to eat after all.

So imho, it's a lot more complicated for an individual. Sure for a corporation that borrows tens of millions for a new capital expenditure it makes debt cheaper. But that may or may not translate to someone that is poor and paying off debt.

Their student debt might go down but so does their chance of ever owning a home.

They hoodwinked an entire generation of children into going six-figures in debt, made the high school diploma worthless etc.

Before: -HS degree -no debt -immediately start a factory job that makes enough for an average home, 2 cars, and a spouse that doesn’t work

Now: -4 year degree, delaying income in prime years -graduate with a small house-worth of debt, with no house -your new job’s earnings in real terms is barely enough to rent -your spouse has to work too -have to make one car work

The American people have been robbed of their prosperity and sold a bucket of lies.

"The Federal Reserve is private" is a meme at this point that is largely divorced from our usual meaning of public/private. Calling the Federal Reserve Board "private citizens" is like calling the Supreme Court Justices "private citizens". They are both officials appointed by the president, who must be confirmed by the Senate, and who collect a public salary. Any profits from the Federal Reserve go right back into the US Treasury. What more do we need to consider this part of the government?

While all supreme court justices are appointed, from my understanding only the chairman is appointed correct? Everyone that works for the fed is not necessarily appointed?

Maybe we say it is private but the government serves as the board :)

Seeing the tension over the years the Chairman, the President, and Congress implies to me that the government does not have absolute authority over the Fed.

All the board members are appointed. From their website:[1]

>The Board of Governors--located in Washington, D.C.--is the governing body of the Federal Reserve System. It is run by seven members, or "governors," who are nominated by the President of the United States and confirmed in their positions by the U.S. Senate.

Not everyone who works for the Fed is appointed, but that is also true of the Supreme Court, Congress, the FBI, or any other part of the government. The leaders are political appointees and they oversee a bureaucratic system that includes many workers who are ostensibly apolitical.

>Seeing the tension over the years the Chairman, the President, and Congress implies to me that the government does not have absolute authority over the Fed.

Once again, just like the Supreme court. Both of these entities are designed to be more independent of the day-to-day political squabbles of the president and Congress.

[1] - https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/structure-federal...

>Financial elite finances all candidates, some of them win

Your entire point rests on this premise and once we accept this premise we acknowledge the entire government is already compromised. Once that happens why does the central bank matter when everything that follows could be accomplished some other way through that already compromised government? That is my fundamental point. It isn't that the central banks don't have power. It is that a central bank's power pails in comparison to the overall government. Therefore conspiracies theories about taking over the government to gain control of the central bank don't make much sense.

>I guess it matters because public awareness is necessary for us not to allow history to repeat itself.

But it is a symptom rather than a cause of the corruption. The energy spent on raising public awareness about this would likely be better served drawing attention to what we both seem to think is the underlying problem, the outsized influence that the wealthy have on the government.

Fair enough.

Your username is incorrect.

No.

It’s more akin to a public authority.

>They can siphon off the wealth of an entire nation by printing money. It’s an irresistible temptation

A) Which makes it basically another form of tax.

B) The raising of which always driven the wealthy into fits of rage no matter how necessary or beneficial.

Have you met the non asset owning poor? They have debt. LOTS of debt.

The interest rates are high enough and the debt terms are short enough that they get screwed hard by relative buying power loss long before any of that matters.

Having your car loan evaporate over three years doesn't mean crap if you can't afford to make the payment after one.

Unfortunately some of early American politicians had some cranky ideas about central banks - which caused some economic depressions.