Yarvin is blogging tonight, so we are co-blogging. His article is titled A New Sovereign Accounting.
Yarvin wants to maintain the American Empire in Washington, and I want to eliminate it. We have several obstacles to doing so. The nature of the currency and the nature of the military are the most prominent ones.
His sovereign accounting starts with three rules:
- The government owns the country. This is an unusual type of view of government, but it's not an unknown view. - The individuals in the state are mainly part of the collective of the state. If they oppose the state to a large degree, they should be liquidated, either killed or relieved of their assets and power.
- Fiat currency is government equity. This is a new rule that seems to be Yarvin's own: fiat currency is a proxy for specie currency, such as gold and silver. We are almost out of living memory for gold and silver being currency. But in the absence of government, people look to the laws of nature and of art. And of natural scarcity to create value.
- Securities are formal. He seems to misunderstand what a security is here. He defines a contract guaranteed by law to be a type of security. 💡 I would define a security as a financial instrument structured in a regular way, publicly registered, and based in the interest in some real property. ⚔️ this definition is intended to exclude derivatives; they are not securities
Yarvin thus introduces two contradictions and errors. Dollars are not a share of the U.S. government, or at least they should not be. The current policy of 2% per year inflation cannot go on forever.
Yarvin does not yet discuss the stocks and flows problem. That is, does a wealthy individual need to spend money to gain disproportionate influence, or does simply having the money bestow such influence? If you imagine dollars as "shares", it would be the latter.
🔥 If you imagine dollars as "shares" in the US government, it will be owned by China soon.
The differences between money(1) and money(2) is that one of them is virtual. If you have a million dollars from the government, that may or may not be worth anything on the ground. However, the money used in the transaction where you work 15 minutes, you are paid $7; you spend the $7 on a burrito. cannot be mangled by the government.
Monetary inflation is when that relation is abused by the government. ⚙️ this is opposed to scarcity-based inflation. If there is a famine, your money will buy less food, regardless of what the government does.