A little less about that dullest of things

Dear Ludo,

After that long interruption, I had thought of returning to the earlier theme, but I find that Stilwell has been writing more articulately than I could a decent approximation to an Economics of Charity; I hesitate at some of his bolder sloganisms --- I hesitate at most slogans, for I am a timid creature by temperament. Particularly, it seems wrong to say that a true fiat issue is “not backed” and even by nature “unbackable”: rather, the backing of a true issue is its tradability, or under another aspect, the actual wealth of its market, or again, the productivity and honesty of its citizens.

Modulo such concerns, which are either natural or naturally bunk (I am not qualified to guess), I think I can recommend a cautious reading of his notes.

That is all.

from the armchair

With all due deference

Dear Prof. Zmirak,

I have not a whole lot to say, against Austrian Economics generally, or Roepke's writings specifically, or any of that; but I will raise my concern now about the well-foundedness of the "price system", what I'd prefer to call the Monetary Standard: as with all things democratic, it's only as smart as the average vote, and people both rich and poor can be terribly stupid. Not only is "the last whiskey you're willing to pay for" often much too late to stop buying whiskey. Furthermore, as with all things democratic, nobody really knows enough to make infomed judgments about what the next or last whiskey or mobile phone service plan or college application or mortgage really costs him, before he's had it and waked up again the next morning, or until all the peripheral missed opportunities and consequences have echoed around him again. So how can he tell if 5€ really is not too much?

As examples of things which would cost far too much even if you were paid to take them with you, which yet seem to move lots of money around, here is a very short list:

recreational opiates

pornography

idle speech

Anyways, there we are. As Churchill said of democracy, it might well be the worst system imaginable, except for all the rest.

A Subsidiarist

Where does money come from?

Dear Prof. Smith,

The most honest answer is, of course, that we made it up. In other words, it is a creature --- a creature of Man. As such, it certainly has no life: breath, nor sight, nor hearing --- though we may give it mouth and eyes and ears in the form of Her Majesty's likeness. And of course, we don't even pretend anymore that any money has intrinsic value. So, alright, there is paper backed by metal-stock, there are title deeds for plots of land, and so forth. But the primary business of "business" in the British Imperial Diaspora is usually conducted, measured, and reported, (for taxation purposes) in units of some local currency.

Last time I wrote, I alluded to professional and trade unions, strike and other pressure tactics, which have as final cause that "whoever has accepted responsibility for paying them [agree] to pay them more. Whatever that means." The charitable view of strike/work pressure is that for whatever reason, the workers of some trade or profession generally aren't able to live in "becoming dignity according to their state in life", and a re-negotiation of working/contracting terms is wanted so as to correct that. The charitable view of employers' not paying more than they do for needed labour would be that they honestly don't have the extra money to spend. But it's worth-while asking what does it mean to pay people more?

The Root of all Evil

Dear Prof. Smith,

There's a facebook status meme going around, asking people to set this slogan as their status for the day

No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick.

It also asks for "politicians to get this right".

The gap between getting it right and the current state of affairs differs, of course, from place to place and across demographics. Nonetheless, whatever partial solutions are implemented in Italy or the Phillipines or the United States of America, there are common and basic problems that the perfectly-sensible appeal to justice above highlights.