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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @CliffBadger 3h \ parent \ on: If you were an authoritarian leader, what weird things would you do? AskSN
Maybe. I suspect the limits Bitcoin imposes are a lot more radical and not easily resolved with minor changes to budget allocations. It's effectively a regression to pre-WWI spending levels because income and wealth taxes can't replace currency debasement.
I don't think we gain anything from this. We already control all three branches of government, so any temporary boost in public opinion doesn't translate to an increase in political power. All we have is a dead friend. It's a reminder to set up an inheritance plan because this is the risk we take for saying anything out loud even if it's the majority opinion.
But Bitcoin necessarily drives the government into bankruptcy. If they lose the ability to issue currency at zero cost, they can't keep financing all the projects you're asking them to manage.
Only if the buyer agrees to the purchase. Other than that, all his financial planning revolves around BTC, and that's what informs his decision-making about what to buy and when.
All government is bad. When Bitcoin replaces the state then it becomes obvious. All the school textbooks in the year 3,000 agree that the fiat era of state-run public schools was a dark age.
Calling it an investment is a post-hoc rationalization for the state's motivations, which is the control of information and the replacement of the child's parents as their primary authority figure.
It's never free. It costs money to build the school and hire teachers. The question is whether the state should be taking money from some people to provide it free at point-of-use to others. The answer is no. What will happen is the state-funded schools will be trash, wealthier parents will go out of their way to pay for a superior education, the wealth gap will get even worse, socialists will use that to justify greater spending on failing schools, and it'll just be a never-ending cycle of violently chasing richer people's money, until eventually everything is owned by the state, everything is bad, and the only way anyone can afford something nice is by working for the state.
Politics isn't separable from economics. You said property rights need government force for protection, so what does that good government look like?
Where's the hyperbole? Do you think the PRC is "good government"? If I were a citizen, would I be allowed to say the CCP is infested with demons? Because if you don't think such basic self-expression should be permitted then I can't take seriously your claims about how an ideal society should look.
It's the vendor's standard unit of account. Someone else has to agree to sell a certain amount of Bitcoin in order for the transaction to occur.
But other people listing their prices in USD doesn't mean you have to run your calculations in the same terms. You're half the transaction. I can wait until the price of a $50k car comes down to 0.1 BTC before I offer to buy it, regardless of how the vendor chooses to display the price.
The shithole picture is correct. The GDP number comes from having a large population, and if you're a limosine leftist who can afford armed guards then California isn't so bad. The huge taxes don't apply to the film industry and other pet projects. It's the working class that gets driven into poverty to the point where they can't afford to move out. The birth tourism from wealthier immigrants probably helps with the economic stats also, because that means money is still getting spent even though it wasn't earned within the state.
But we don't know if $111k is worth 1 Bitcoin in the future either, so why would you award the "unit of account" prestige to USD? All USD prices are presented digitally and could double in a matter of months when something in the banking system finally snaps. At least if you use BTC as the unit of account, you know that the price changes will generally be in your favor. "Ultimately" the USD is going to zero and we have to use sats as the unit of account because that's what everyone has to adopt.
My friend, if my country adopted your model of good government I'd be dead in a week for thoughtcrime. I'll take my chances with the jungle.
Finally someone's asking the important question.
Public schools are orphans-only now. Everyone else go home.
The great depression would have been a minor market correction if FDR's socialism hadn't turned it into a depression. That "mixed economy" is what caused the West's decline. You're trying to appeal to my antisemitism but it can't work if all your anti-capitalism talking points are sourced from Keynesian Jews.
The US never had an issue with China becoming a rich superpower from voluntary trade. You're projecting imperial ambitions that we never had so that you can blame foreign powers for the failures of internal leadership. You sound like Maduro. China could have become the richest country on earth decades ago but the CCP wanted to set a high score on the "kill as many humans as possible" game first.
And again, the wealth that China is building all gets sucked up and wasted by the CCP, sometimes within the country, but it's still not a voluntary choice on the part of the Chinese. Any individual in China is only as wealthy as the regime allows them to be. True? They have no guns, no Bitcoin, and no speech. Don't act like the CCP is offering some great alternative to Zionism.
There's no mental conversion to dollars necessary. If someone tells me they own half a Bitcoin, I can think, "Wow, that's pretty good. Financially, they're set up for a good life." That is Bitcoin functioning as a unit of account. We don't need to run the conversion to USD. We're probably better off converting the grocery store prices to sats so that we can understand what we're actually giving up, because the ~$111k price of today really doesn't illustrate the value of a whole Bitcoin.