Let's put it this way... who knows whether Bitcoin will amount to much at all. But the horrors of inflation are just as serious as the horrors of tyrannical governments and slavery. Inflation causes capital miss-allocations in the hundreds of billions of dollars, possibly even trillions. Eventually you have to put a price on this and say that millions of man years worth of effort are either out right wasted or lost in opportunity cost.
This is hard to grasp, because it's the productive output you don't get and will never see that's at stake. What are you missing out on? Things real people want: better healthcare, cheaper/healthier food, more time away from work with their families. What did you get instead? Multiple housing booms, useless dot com companies, acres of useless tulips fields. I am not saying the latter have no value, but rather that they are pursued because of inaccurate market signals and come at the cost of non-investment in more valuable, life saving and life improving pursuits.
Inflation is just as deadly serious as mass graves, because at massive scale that's what it quietly causes.
I was born in 1969. The US went off the gold standard when I was about two years old. I remember news reports of the rate of inflation going above 15%. I remember the economy being one of the reasons Carter lost the Presidency. I remember the rate being brought down, not by going back on the gold standard, but by the Federal Reserve following the standard Keynesian prescription, i.e., cranking up interest rates and causing a recession that brought unemployment up to about 10%.
I think I was more politically aware than the average ten-year-old, but somehow I missed anything comparable to mass graves.
Longterm economic servitude under the rule of banking-government complex has a small chance to be broken with this tool. Recall that the shortsighted among us also were fussing and fuming when email went from being in the domain of academic geeks to the unwashed masses.
Some people just dislike change for the better, I guess.
> But the horrors of inflation are just as serious as [...] slavery.
Do tell me how. That is a hilarious assertion. I really hope you're kidding.
Somehow, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer doesn't quite have the same ring to it of publicly lynching people because their skin is a different color. Problems with a market aren't even on the same level as buying and selling humans because they are a minority.
I'm not a member of a race that generally suffered from forced slavery, and even I am offended that you would draw the parallel.
This is hard to grasp, because it's the productive output you don't get and will never see that's at stake. What are you missing out on? Things real people want: better healthcare, cheaper/healthier food, more time away from work with their families. What did you get instead? Multiple housing booms, useless dot com companies, acres of useless tulips fields. I am not saying the latter have no value, but rather that they are pursued because of inaccurate market signals and come at the cost of non-investment in more valuable, life saving and life improving pursuits.
Inflation is just as deadly serious as mass graves, because at massive scale that's what it quietly causes.