Thursday, October 11, 2018
Orlov misses one of his best points
Orlov is a prophet, but even a prophet sometimes forgets his own vision. He missed a major point in his latest offering.
Scrip was not exactly currency; it was more like pre-printed and pre-denominated checks. It was issued by city governments or major businesses or the Chamber of Commerce. All local businesses agreed to use it for paying workers and selling stuff. And it worked.
Populists missed the chance to grab onto Scrip and maintain it. They were still trapped in the pluponent idiocy of bimetallism.
Another decentralizer was Mutual Benefit Societies, universally active from 1870 to 1920 and still existing marginally. (See Christian Medishare.) These were nonprofit businesses that handled all insurance services from medical to property to burial, and often specialized in care for the elderly.
Still another was Fordist corporations. When you worked for NCR or Ford or Conoco, you had the same all-around service as an MBS.
Populists did help to create and spread MBS, and Fordism was the last big push of Populism.
Both of these trends were displaced and scattered by the financialist boom of the 20s. When the boom crashed, some Fordism remained but the MBS were gone. The government picked up the elderly side with SS, then the profit-making insurers picked up the medical side after WW2.
= =
Hawala or scrip is the economic implementation of a principle that's painfully familiar and even trivial in other areas.
Decentralizing works ONLY when the modules or units share a common ground.
A trust network (like MBS) holds up ONLY when the units are built with a shared purpose. Ideally each unit should be physically incapable of harming the network.
When you can count on the units to follow the same rule in the same situation, you don't need a heavy controller sending commands to the units, and you don't need a lot of communication between the units.
When the modules have different grounds or different limits or different operating systems, you need a strong central controller, and even then the overall system will be inefficient. Most energy will be chewed up in the contradictory and redundant operations of the bureaucratic control system.
In electronics the common ground is literal, and the modules may also need to agree on limits of output voltage and input impedance, or may need to be sync'd to a common phase. It's easy to design modules that are physically incapable of violating the limits.
In law and morality, the common ground is a shared immersion in the same system of commandments and taboos. Natural Law works best because Natural Law was scientifically settled by 50k years of experimentation. Other systems and charters and constitutions are generally designed to violate Natural Law, so they don't hold up. (Our insane constitution held up for only 16 years, 1787 to 1803.)
The Chaotizers of Deepstate understand this principle better than anyone. After you eliminate the common operating system, the common understanding of reality, the units will DEMAND a strong controller.
With hawala or scrip, the separate bankers share a common PURPOSE of helping the ethnic group or township. A banker isn't quite physically incapable of breaking trust, but he knows that the group or township will physically break his legs if he goes wrong, so he remains trustworthy.
Hawala has both sticks and carrots. The banker earns a small fee on each transaction. The American scrip system didn't last long enough to grow carrots, but a fee structure would undoubtedly evolve given more time and experience.
= = = = = END REPRINT.
Paper checks were the Patient Things that saved us when the banks dissolved. Paper is OUTSIDE THE CONTROL OF NSA. That's exactly why Deepstate hates it and tries to make total control COOOOOOOOOL with the Agents Provocateurs of Bitcoin and MMT.
I’ve traveled around and have lived in a few different places in the US and in Europe, and it’s absolutely shocking how backward and substandard and really run down the US has become, how many things there are really outdated, sometimes in a dangerous way—like the way the bridges and the highways are, and other infrastructure, such as water and sewer mains, the electric grid, the railways, etc. It is also stunning how absolutely ridiculously stupidly everything is organized, from the tax code to the permitting and licensing systems. The banking system in the US is the most retarded banking system I have ever seen. Who has ever heard of paper checks? That’s just not done any more.Paper checks are the PARAGON of old durable mechanisms, ready to serve when modern crap collapses. This is Orlov's main point in his original US/Russia comparison. Russia stuck with old tech like streetcars and vacuum tubes and families and useful work and Natural Law economics. Things that are just not done any more. America surged ahead into "self-driving" cars and cell phones and variable gender and offshoring and Goldman debtism. Old stuff works because it's been tested for a long time. Old stuff remains ready for duty when the new shit updates itself into oblivion. Time for a double reprint, mashing parts of two items together. I've covered scrip many times; these two items were the closest to Orlovian. = = = = = START REPRINT: How do you cure economic abstraction? I was making the point that MMT claims to cure abstraction by even worse abstraction, like curing crack addiction with flakka. Bitcoin is another reverse "cure", pulling economics even farther into the world of pure software. You need to cure abstraction by REDUCING abstraction, but you don't have to go all the way back to gold. You just need to keep the abstraction MINIMAL and LOCAL. America discovered the cure ALL BY ITSELF, without government help, in 1933 when FDR closed the banks. As I've noted before, a system of SCRIP self-organized almost instantly.
Scrip was not exactly currency; it was more like pre-printed and pre-denominated checks. It was issued by city governments or major businesses or the Chamber of Commerce. All local businesses agreed to use it for paying workers and selling stuff. And it worked.
Populists missed the chance to grab onto Scrip and maintain it. They were still trapped in the pluponent idiocy of bimetallism.
Another decentralizer was Mutual Benefit Societies, universally active from 1870 to 1920 and still existing marginally. (See Christian Medishare.) These were nonprofit businesses that handled all insurance services from medical to property to burial, and often specialized in care for the elderly.
Still another was Fordist corporations. When you worked for NCR or Ford or Conoco, you had the same all-around service as an MBS.
Populists did help to create and spread MBS, and Fordism was the last big push of Populism.
Both of these trends were displaced and scattered by the financialist boom of the 20s. When the boom crashed, some Fordism remained but the MBS were gone. The government picked up the elderly side with SS, then the profit-making insurers picked up the medical side after WW2.
= =
Hawala or scrip is the economic implementation of a principle that's painfully familiar and even trivial in other areas.
Decentralizing works ONLY when the modules or units share a common ground.
A trust network (like MBS) holds up ONLY when the units are built with a shared purpose. Ideally each unit should be physically incapable of harming the network.
When you can count on the units to follow the same rule in the same situation, you don't need a heavy controller sending commands to the units, and you don't need a lot of communication between the units.
When the modules have different grounds or different limits or different operating systems, you need a strong central controller, and even then the overall system will be inefficient. Most energy will be chewed up in the contradictory and redundant operations of the bureaucratic control system.
In electronics the common ground is literal, and the modules may also need to agree on limits of output voltage and input impedance, or may need to be sync'd to a common phase. It's easy to design modules that are physically incapable of violating the limits.
In law and morality, the common ground is a shared immersion in the same system of commandments and taboos. Natural Law works best because Natural Law was scientifically settled by 50k years of experimentation. Other systems and charters and constitutions are generally designed to violate Natural Law, so they don't hold up. (Our insane constitution held up for only 16 years, 1787 to 1803.)
The Chaotizers of Deepstate understand this principle better than anyone. After you eliminate the common operating system, the common understanding of reality, the units will DEMAND a strong controller.
With hawala or scrip, the separate bankers share a common PURPOSE of helping the ethnic group or township. A banker isn't quite physically incapable of breaking trust, but he knows that the group or township will physically break his legs if he goes wrong, so he remains trustworthy.
Hawala has both sticks and carrots. The banker earns a small fee on each transaction. The American scrip system didn't last long enough to grow carrots, but a fee structure would undoubtedly evolve given more time and experience.
= = = = = END REPRINT.
Paper checks were the Patient Things that saved us when the banks dissolved. Paper is OUTSIDE THE CONTROL OF NSA. That's exactly why Deepstate hates it and tries to make total control COOOOOOOOOL with the Agents Provocateurs of Bitcoin and MMT.Labels: MMT, Natural law = Soviet law, Patient things, Pluponents
¶ 1:07 AM
