The Political Thread

[Tiplodocus]

...switching to a vegan diet would help with this problem.

To a sauropod every problem looks like a hard-to-reach leaf.

[Jim_Campbell]

I'm probably being incredibly thick here, Richmond, but isn't the "I promise to pay...." just a throwback to the old days when we dealt in gold coins?  If my £10 note's not real money, I've been seriously deluded for the last 56 years!  Ah! well, time for the nursing home!!

Try rolling up to the Bank of England with a tenner and asking for your gold. You won't get it. That tenner is literally not worth the paper it's printed on because someone's defaced it with all that ink.

The point is that when you present it at the bar, the barman, as proxy for the landlord, the brewery and the Treasury, agrees that your piece of paper is worth £10 and, crucially, you agree that your pint is worth £3.50. It's a complete fiction: we imagine that there is gold somewhere to back up that note, but there really isn't, not in any tangible, accessible sense. The system works because it's a consensual fiction between both parties.

Stripped back to its most basic, all human effort is expended to create food and shelter for yourself and your family unit. Once upon a time, we expended that effort directly on these things: you grew, raised or caught what you ate and you constructed and maintained your own shelter.

As humans developed communities, simple common sense dictates that instead of growing your own wheat, milling it and baking bread, you get one guy to grow all the wheat and another to mill it and bake the bread. No one wants the farmer to starve, so he gets bread back in return for his efforts. The problem with barter is that quickly breaks down. If you're the chicken-raising guy in the community and the roof blows off your hovel, you want the roof-fixing guy to put it back on ASAP. Problem is, you gave the pig-guy some chickens in exchange for a a side of ham last week and his roof blew off a couple of days ago and he used those chickens to pay roof-guy, meaning that roof-guy doesn't need any chickens.

So... you could run around town, trying to find someone who has something roof-guy does want and who is willing to trade it for chickens. Or you could agree with roof guy that the work is worth six chickens and write him an IOU that he can bring back the next time he does need chickens. Before roof-guy needs chickens, however, his horse needs shoeing, and the blacksmith's roof is fine, so roof-guy offers the blacksmith the chicken IOU and you've invented money.

The problem with this is that it relies on trust. The moment the blacksmith says "I don't trust chicken-guy — he gave me an IOU last year and he still owes me" the IOU is worthless. What government money does is formalise that arrangement, enabling us to exchange labour or goods with whomever we please in return for tokens that we can trade in for food and shelter. Or an XBox.

However, you may have spotted the wrinkle in this example. If the blacksmith accepts the IOU, and passes it on to the baker in return for bread, who in turn gives it to the dairy-guy for cheese... for as long as it's changing hands, you never have to stump up the actual chickens. Let's say it gets handed to the cow-guy in the next village. You could die and as long as he didn't know you were dead, and the guy accepting the IOU didn't know you were dead, the effective value of that piece of paper is undiminished, but its actual value is zero.

Which is why I find money an amazing thing: its exchange is an act of faith that condenses into physical things.

Cheers

Jim

[The Legendary Shark]

Prof Bear - it's easy. All you do is what they do; send them a letter outlining your charges (no need to nasty about it, just basic and clear) and mentioning that they are non-negotiable.

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They may ignore your letter - which is good as this constitutes tacit agreement on their part.

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They may write to you in order to refuse your charges but you just politely but firmly repeat that if they want you to continue as their customer then your charges stand. Post your reply off to them with a bill - and if they continue writing to you to dispute your charges, just keep on sending polite replies with bills attached.

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Just to be clear, you will probably never be paid for these bills but, the next time they send you a bill you can just knock what they're asking for off whatever they owe you and also charge them for your time in dealing with their administrative paperwork.

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The third thing they might do is write to you thanking you for your complaint and informing you that it's going through their internal or independent complaints procedure. You must stamp on this IMMEDIATELY by writing to them saying that you do not have a complaint and that your Fee Notice was just that - a notice and not a complaint.

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If the credit card is a personal, not business, one then I'd be tempted to just refuse to pay the erroneous debt and get another credit card with somebody else. Eventually your original card company will sell the 'debt' to a debt collector - at which point you're in the clear so long as you keep your nerve.

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See, as soon as you sell a debt (even to a debt collector) then that debt is lawfully and legally discharged. Also, you don't have a contract with the debt collector, unless you're foolish enough to sign something they ask you to sign. Debt collectors rely on the fact that most people don't know this little snippet of law and simply collapse and pay up when threatened.

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I personally have seen off 3 different debt collection agencies using this knowledge.

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Also spend some time looking through www.getoutofdebtfree.org which is full of completely lawful ways of eliminating artificial debt.

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It's great fun!

[The Legendary Shark]

Great post, Jim!

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Of course, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with a fiat money system (look at the Bank of North Dakota, the Brixton Pound and BitCoin as examples). It's how the currency is issued that's important: if it's created out of nothing and lent at interest into society it's incredibly toxic but if it's created out of nothing and spent interest-free into society then everything works like a well-oiled machine and there's enough for everyone.

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As long as we insist on using this primitive thing called money we might as well use proper public money rather than privately issued credit-based money.

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[Eric Plumrose]

On Venus, the atmosphere is thick with sulphuric acid clouds and CO2 - so thick that traps a lot more heat than the Earth's atmosphere, giving it a virtually constant temperature on both lit and unlit parts of the planet.

Again with that! The Flamebelt, yes, but not the entire planet. That's just part of the reptilian conspiracy (which Mikey is in cahoots with, natch) and its attempts to prevent us from exploiting the natural resources Venus has to offer.

[The Legendary Shark]

I don't understand what you're getting at, Eric...

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www.universetoday.com/14146/atmosphere-of-venus/

[Theblazeuk]

So the answer to your question is that my views on MMCC and the Carbon Tax are only superficially linked. My questioning of MMCC and my opposition to Carbon Taxes (under the current system) are separate arguments in their own right.

Yes! If you could only stop switching between them when trying to talk about MMCC 

[The Legendary Shark]

I shall endeavour to be clearer in the future.

[Recrewt]

Right!  I'm still getting my head 'round this, and you know what, I don't give a toss, if it's real money or not, they still put the jumper in a bag and gave it to me.  And, as long as I can go into a pub and hand over some of this "not real money" and get served with a pint of Guinness I really couldn't care less.  In fact, I wouldn't mind a few sackfuls of this "not real money", I'll find a use for it somehow!!

That was pretty much my thought process on it too...

Jim's post has already explained this very well but just to add my ten cents (see what I did there  ).

That £10 note that you have is real money Tankie.  But money itself is just an agreed token in payment for goods and/or services.  For most of us this money is earned through work - you do your 38 hours a week and get so much money in return which in this case, you used some of to pay for the jumper.

The thing to consider is value.  The £10 note really is just a piece of paper so lets say we end up in some post-nuclear wasteland - what use would that £10 note then be?  The funny thing is people often compare money to gold, but let's be honest - the value of gold has been imposed by us anyway.  I mean, what is it?  A pretty stone that has been dug up from the ground.  In that post-nuclear wasteland that gold would be pretty useless also.  The only things of real value to us are food, water and shelter - anything else is really a nice to have.

But ultimately, like you say - it doesn't matter.  We live in a society that has an accepted and recognised monetary system that allows easy trade.  Bitcoin is no better or worse than pounds, dollars or euros.  They are all just different tokens that are used for the same purpose. 

[TordelBack]

The funny thing is people often compare money to gold, but let's be honest - the value of gold has been imposed by us anyway.  I mean, what is it?  A pretty stone that has been dug up from the ground.  In that post-nuclear wasteland that gold would be pretty useless also.

Not much use in efficiently extracting nutritious goo from your neighbours' femurs certainly, but very handy if your mutated descendants ever wanted to manufacture any sort of electronics.

[The Legendary Shark]

No, it's not real money. It's fiat money, the *promise* of money,

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'Real' money is made from something with intrinsic worth and scarcity. Gold, silver, copper, even tin and iron are considered 'real' because these metals are useful for other things besides money.

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Most people think that money is backed by a country's gold and silver reserves but this has not been the case for a long time now. World Wars I and II, for example, would not have been possible had the world been using gold and silver as currency as there wasn't enough of these metals in the world to pay for them at the time - such widespread carnage, destruction and rebuilding was only made possible through the use of fiat or unreal money.

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You think we'd have invaded Afghanistan and Iraq if we'd had to pay for it in gold? Luckily, though, those nice bankers will create as much fiat money as we need to continue ripping people to bloody chunks. Hooray for bankers!

[Recrewt]

The funny thing is people often compare money to gold, but let's be honest - the value of gold has been imposed by us anyway.  I mean, what is it?  A pretty stone that has been dug up from the ground.  In that post-nuclear wasteland that gold would be pretty useless also.

Not much use in efficiently extracting nutritious goo from your neighbours' femurs certainly, but very handy if your mutated descendants ever wanted to manufacture any sort of electronics.

Mmmmmm, bone goo - tasty! 

No, it's not real money. It's fiat money, the *promise* of money,

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'Real' money is made from something with intrinsic worth and scarcity. Gold, silver, copper, even tin and iron are considered 'real' because these metals are useful for other things besides money.

Nope, money is definitely the token itself Sharky.  Have a look in the dictionary at the definition of money.

[The Legendary Shark]

But the currency we use is NOT money - it's the promise of that token you mentioned. It's the equivalent of a photograph of real money, which itself is the equivalent of a photograph of some gold.

[Dandontdare]

Wish I'd bought some bitcoins as when they first came out though:  http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/29/bitcoin-forgotten-currency-norway-oslo-home

...but it's not always good news with Bitcoins: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site

[Recrewt]

But the currency we use is NOT money - it's the promise of that token you mentioned. It's the equivalent of a photograph of real money, which itself is the equivalent of a photograph of some gold.

Right, I think I see what you mean. 

OK, a UK £10 is real money.  It's a recognised and accepted token to pay for goods and services.  The 'promise to pay the bearer' refers to the old days where people originally deposited gold in banks and were given bank notes in return.  Also, people used to be able to go to their bank and turn their bank notes into gold.  That is no longer the case, as you said before, so if you were to go to the bank today and demand £10 for your banknote - guess what you would get back?  Another £10 note. 

Gold can be a bit more tricky to explain, not least because there have been gold coins used in the past, which were also money.  You could argue that gold itself is money however it is not really used as such nowadays.  I mean, what would happen if you tried to pay for your McDonalds Happy Meal with a gold nugget?

Gold is an asset which has a generally agreed value that is easily traded - in that respect it is a lot like money however in the UK the real money is pound sterling.