@KevinCarson1 @C4SS oooff at the Epstein thing.

It's one of those things that sort of intuitively makes "sense". You and I , after all, save money to afford stuff. Stands to reason that Pete The Peasant saved his money until he was able to purchase, like, half of Essex, right?

Which...fine?...I guess...until you know how it actually works.

If you still keep up the pretence of people squirreling away gold under the mattress after knowing how it works, then...hey, I've a bridge to sell you, I suppose.

@KevinCarson1 @neonsnake @C4SS

I just had a sudden memory of sitting in high school economics class thinking, "this...this just seems like a big scam..."

Took years to unlearn thinking I wasn't smart enough to understand economics.

@CorvidCrone @KevinCarson1 @neonsnake @C4SS

Not just a scam. Death cult.

@violetmadder @CorvidCrone @KevinCarson1 @C4SS

I have vague memories of being a teen and my Dad* "explaining" to me that banks lend to their customers from the savings of other customers, and also invest savings into other companies.

I'll be totally honest, I still think I'm not smart enough to understand "that" side of economics. Like, everytime I feel I've got a handle on MMT, I read something that makes me completely doubt my understanding of it. I have an acquaintance who is *very* high up in one of the banks in the UK who has told me that no, banks don't create money out of nothing, and that everything has to balance every single day at 4.15pm.

I "believe" him, but I couldn't follow his arguments at all, and there's a chance that in fact they do create money out of nothing, but his way of thinking (liabilities vs assets or something) was at odds with my own - very limited - understanding.

I further believe that this is, in part, deliberate. I've got a vague thought that the whole thing is confusing to us mere lay-people, to keep us from just...going off and ignoring it altogether and doing our own thing.

(In a very, very, very small way, I'm involved with some LETs in my local area - which is literally just a spreadsheet we use to keep track of who owes who what lol)

*My Dad was a Certified Accountant; eventually at CFO level, which might make it even worse 😬

@neonsnake @violetmadder @CorvidCrone @KevinCarson1 @C4SS

I feel like it's important to mention that without guns, currencies are worthless and so is property.

@johnzajac @violetmadder @CorvidCrone @KevinCarson1 @C4SS

I've just had a kneejerk "hard disagree" reaction to this.

On reflection, I suspect it's because we might be approaching both currencies and property in different manners.

I believe that currency - the very strict sense of something that all relevant parties agree to - can be a useful tool for tracking obligations. I have no ties to *government-issued* currencies, however. Just a unit of measure, I don't massively care what it is, and I absolutely do not believe that it needs to be valuable "in and of itself"

Likewise with "property" - property has a lot of different definitions, but in the sense that my house and land is my own, and that it's of a "reasonable" enough size (ie. not stupidly large to the point that I'm excluding others from reasonable use), then the concept has value.

Is your view on both different to mine?

(I live in a country where "guns" are not a thing in the same sense as the US, so allow that as well, my conception might be a little different. Memory serves, you're US-based?)

@neonsnake @johnzajac @violetmadder @CorvidCrone @KevinCarson1 @C4SS tracking obligations is how societies get into trouble. No matter what systems for tracking obligations you adopt someone will successfully game it — to the point that, as we see now, the least deserving walk away with most of the wealth.

You can have property or you can have a good society. You can't have both.

@simon_brooke @neonsnake @johnzajac @CorvidCrone @KevinCarson1 @C4SS

Obligations/debt gets us into the old custom of jubilee, and Jesus flipping tables, and the usurer having no heart and such.

Basically comes down to hoarding.

Cultures tend towards being more egalitarian in areas where food is pretty reliably available year round, vs more hierarchical in places where it has to be stored during long periods of scarcity, or places that have big defendable concentrations of wealth such as a location with a big salmon run.

Things get dangerous where there are points of leverage for bullies to exploit.

Which could be handled if everybody else recognized bullies for what they are, instead of thinking 'oh hey this guy has all this stuff because they're cool and smart and better than me' and serving them.

And the minute one poor person agrees to turn around and hit another poor person so the rich guy gives them a treat, it's all downhill from there. We should smack the rich guy instead for making such a rude suggestion.

@violetmadder @simon_brooke @johnzajac @CorvidCrone @KevinCarson1 @C4SS

Sure, but we all have obligations, whether explicit or implicit.

We all do stuff - hopefully - for other people, and we track it, in many different forms - sometimes very explicit, and sometimes we just think "you know what, Steve is taking the utter piss"

It's not about hoarding, it's about division of labour and keeping a rough or rougher idea of who owes who what.