• BarqsHasBite@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        I can’t believe the Republicans are appeasers. They beat the drum for decades how Democrats couldn’t stand up to tyrants, and now Republicans are literally appeasers. It’s 1984 levels of turnaround.

        • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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          1 year ago

          They don’t believe in anything but power. Internal consistency is not a concern.

          Republicans are an existential threat to the US and we should treat them as such.

          • hemmes@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            It’s not like you’re gonna find them all flying over to Russia together, like during the 4th of July or some crazy shit like that…

        • weedazz@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          They will verbally jerk off Ronald Regan for “outspending the USSR into dust” and then act like Ukraine Aid doesn’t do the exact same thing

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          1 year ago

          It’s a whole party caught between giving head to their long term partner, the Military Industrial Complex, or their new side fuck, Vladimir Putin. Either way, the rest of us are forced to lick up the leftovers.

        • winterayars@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          They always were and always will be appeasers and bootlickers. Democrats are also appeasers who lack conviction and courage, but they’re not (anywhere near as often) bootlickers.

      • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Fun fact for those on the fence about this, the US has monetary sovereignty in a fiat currency, which means that the US government has essentially infinite money.

        Edit: for those that are curious, yes, the game about the federal budget is exactly that. The deficit is essentially tracking the amount of money that the federal government owes to itself. Remember, fiat currency means that the value of money exists because the government says that it holds that specific value. A $2 dollar bill is still worth $2 when purchasing items, but worth several $ more than the printed value.

        Edit 2: I didn’t think it needed to be said, but I’ve been proven wrong. I don’t literally mean infinite money.

        • swab148@startrek.website
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          1 year ago

          I wonder, sometimes, what a society would look like without inflation. Is there an economic system that says “this is the price of bread, from now on” and builds off of that?

          Of course, my only talents are music and memes, so I doubt that I’d specifically benefit from such a system, but maybe humanity as a whole?

          • itsprobablyfine@feddit.uk
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            1 year ago

            One of the reasons some inflation is ‘good’ is that it drives investment. People are discouraged from saving their money since it will slowly devalue. Rather, those with capital are incentived to invest it in other areas of the economy.

            • swab148@startrek.website
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              1 year ago

              That would only happen if deflation was a thing too. In my (highly idealistic) world, money would not change value at all, so growth in a business would be real, not just projected numbers on a chart no one understands. In a fixed-econony, you invest into businesses that actually grow.

              I know this may come off as controversial, but this sort of thinking will be necessary for interstellar trade, if we don’t blow ourselves up first.

              • Whimsical@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Could you elaborate a bit on that? I’m not really sure how a business that “actually grows” would be functional ina fixed economy without becoming confusing graphs or entering some other major problem.

                • swab148@startrek.website
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                  1 year ago

                  Like, the business actually gets bigger: opens more stores, creates new products, offers more services. The regulatory system behind this is starting to sound a bit tankie though, so I’m gonna shelve it for more thought.

              • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Taxes are the current most frequent form of deflation in any country with a sovereign currency. The government spends/prints money in step one, the currency circulates through the economy in step two, and the last step, taxes, is your anti-inflationary device.

            • swab148@startrek.website
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              1 year ago

              But fine, then my bicycle is worth how many breads? If I offer to play my guitar for you, how many breads is that worth? I don’t care what kind of leftist you are, these are the real questions we should be asking in a post-capitalist society.

              • Dave.@aussie.zone
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                1 year ago

                After a while it becomes a pain to lug all that bread around, so what if everyone just agrees to have little bits of paper with “1 bread” written on it in place of actual bread, and we can use that. Someone gives you a bit of bread-paper and later if you need bread, you can just go see them at home, or wherever they keep their bread, and get a loaf or two as agreed.

                But of course people will just write “1 bread” without actually having the bread so it’s better if we have some central authority where people can swap their bread for carefully drawn bits of paper that can be verified as real, and if anyone wants bread they can just go to that authority and swap their paper back for bread.

                You don’t have to go and actually get the bread of course. Nearly everyone will take the bread-paper as a replacement for actual bread, because hey, if they really need bread they can go to that central authority and get bread. And it’s good bread, high quality stuff, so everyone trusts them to give them bread if they need it, but how many people really need all that actual bread? It’s much easier to swap bits of bread-paper for that motorcycle, or groceries, or whatever, rather than pass actual bread around the place.

                But then after a while it becomes a real nuisance to hold all that bread somewhere, so how about we just hold a nominal amount of bread, say, enough to cover people who might want to change their bits of paper for bread today, and for the rest of the bread we’re supposed to have we’ll just keep track of who has how many bread-papers in a journal.

                And so on and so forth, until there’s no bread at all and hardly any bread-papers even, and we’re transferring bread-papers electronically using phones and plastic cards with a lot of smarts in them and in the end we’re just mucking around with bread-numbers in a book somewhere.

                • FrostyTheDoo@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Just want to say my initial comment was a bit tongue in cheek but you actually used it to explain the issue really well, so thank you!

          • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, but I love the revolutionary optimism. That has been a question that has been posed in philosophical politics ever since Marx and Engels were alive.

            • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Before even then

              Price controls were something people were trying even as far back as the crisis of the third century when Diocletian set the standard prices for several common items bought by the Roman peasantry like bread.

              Contrasting against the grain dole, which worked better because it was the state stepping in to directly remove a large cost from the lives of eligible households, allowing them to put that money towards improving their fiscal standing. For ancient Romans it was Bread, but for modern Americans a solid equivalent would be medicine or education, shit you could argue that the post war boom was in part because of the govt. doing this partially with housing, subsidizing the costs of WWII vets to build new homes or buy existing ones, of course because America black vets got shafted and redlined but the general idea is still there.

              • swab148@startrek.website
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                1 year ago

                And in a country with practically infinite money, why don’t we ensure housing? We have infinite money, we could house literally everyone, but we don’t. Why not?

                • DickFiasco@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  Infinite money is not the same as infinite resources. We can’t just create houses out of thin air just because we have money. We still need tangible things like lumber and concrete to actually build the house.

                  With that said, we could certainly provide housing for everyone in the U.S. It’s not an issue of resource scarcity.

                  • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
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                    1 year ago

                    Not even housing scarcity, there’s already more available units than there are unhoused people, the problem is property owners who are eating properties up they have no intentions of living in themselves to collect rent on them.

                • anlumo@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  It’s a way to force the masses to be productive for their capitalist overlords. Overt slavery isn’t acceptable any more, but saying “you’re going to live under a bridge unless you comply” still is.

              • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                I’d genuinely love to learn more, do you have any readings for pre-marxist ideas about equality in economics?

                • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  https://youtu.be/hvk_XylEmLo?si=k4sT-b3VnwAdjiTI

                  Not a reading, but it’ll certainly getcha blood boiling!

                  He’s actually a good resource on ancient Roman history generally too, he’s the guy who brought my attention to how successful the grain dole system was and why it was that successful.

                  He also includes social developments like the Aedileship of Agrippa, which was one of the greatest periods of infrastructure development and renewal in Roman history.

            • swab148@startrek.website
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              1 year ago

              Not sarcastic at all, I just wonder about the need for “growth”. I know absolutely nothing about the theory, I just wanna know why it seems to be necessary. Why don’t we fix prices, or at least have them justified regionally, based on the need of the region?

              • Eldritch@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                There is no need for growth. Sustainability used to be a thing. But the wealthy do what the wealthy do with all their leasure. Turning systems inside out and on their head. Gaming it till the growth pushes everyone else out. And it’s not likely to change till capitalists are regulated from existence.

                Currency and markets can exist without capitalism. Sustainably can’t exist with capitalism.

              • Dark_Blade@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                If we fixed prices for one thing, we’d have to do it for everything. In a world where resources aren’t exactly infinite, that creates a huge problem; especially when you have to pay people who’re producing this fixed-value commodity (because you need people for that) and you have to increase their wages to buy stuff that isn’t fixed-value, like housing (since land is a limited, though abundant, resource).

          • anlumo@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            On many items produced in the USSR, the price was molded into the form itself, since it was fixed and wasn’t going to change.

          • Wanderer@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            That’s how you end up with either huge government spending to keep the prices of something fixed either by subsidies or by buying surpluses.

            Or you end up with shortages and a black market.

            • swab148@startrek.website
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              1 year ago

              Again, infinite money. Surplus could be exported to countries who don’t have infinite money.

              Also, yarr

        • Wanderer@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Holy Zimbabwe Batman!

          For those that are curious this is not even remotely close to how the economy words. The us government absolutely does not have unlimited real money, sure they can print money and it will become worthless. But that’s not the same.

            • Wanderer@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              I got a degree in economics. I’m not going to watch up trash on YouTube. If you can’t condense it and make a point it is obviously meaningless.

              The government buys things with US dollars, if it uses huge huge amounts of US dollars to buy things you get inflation. It’s a basic premise…

              Just look at Germany pre ww2 or look at Zimbabwe after it stopped being Rhodesia.

              • Stoneykins [any]@mander.xyz
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                1 year ago

                As someone who is not informed on this and just is going by what is written in this thread, the videos seemed high quality and informative, and you saying “I got a degree” and refusing to engage because you don’t like YouTube is absolutely unhelpful and uninformative.

                It seems like @rockSlayer@lemmy.world is right, based on the information available right here. If you really disagree and would like like to show otherwise, please do engage and provide more information, I find this interesting.

              • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                neither of those governments had monetary sovereignty. Zimbabwe was also an exceedingly rare case of hyperinflation within a country using fiat currency.

                Edit: please, engage with the source material. What about monetary sovereignty is incorrect?

                • Wanderer@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  YouTube isnt a source.

                  If what you are claiming is true that the government has unlimited real money this means three things. 1 any government could make as much real money as they like and massively improve the livelihoods of all citizens but choose not to. There is a guaranteed Nobel prize in economics and probably physics. Someone somewhere is hiding a huge conspiracy for whatever reason.

                  That at a minimum requires a paper on the topic. A YouTube video isn’t up to that standard.

                  The claim you are making is extraordinary. I’m not going to watch 1.5 hour worth of YouTube to prove you wrong just as I wouldn’t for a flat earther.

                  It really is up to you to explain this world changing information succinctly and coherently. To at least raise the topic. What you are saying is all the governments and universities are wrong here is a a load of YouTube videos. Not worth my time sorry.

                  • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    Fine, let me grab you some of the sources used in one of these highly researched videos.

                    Books:

                    • the deficit myth - Stephanie Kelson
                    • Debt: the First 5000 years - David Graeber
                    • Soft Currency Economics II - L Randall Wray
                    • Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems - L Randall Wray
                    • The 7 Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy - Warren Mosler

                    Articles:

                    Looks like you have a lot of reading to do. If only there were an easily digestible way to consume all of this information in a way that only had the relevant parts for our discussion.

              • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Just look at Germany pre ww2

                The German government in the early '20s engineered their hyperinflation as part of an attempt to demonstrate an inability to pay the ruinous war reparations demanded by the Versailles Treaty. It’s really not a good example of “natural” inflation.

              • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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                1 year ago

                If you can’t condense it and make a point it is obviously meaningless.

                That’s literally what he did in the first comment you replied to.

                He posted the sources to back up his point because you were disputing it, and then you said “you don’t have a point!” Ridiculous.

                • Wanderer@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  He talked about fiat money being unlimited but it isn’t unlimited.

                  Fiat money is a type of currency that is not backed by a commodity, such as gold or silver. It is typically designated by the issuing government to be legal tender.

                  In no way did he explain why fiat money is unlimited money. That’s the bit that needs explaining.

                  If you flood the economy with money that money becomes less valuable (inflation) and therefore you need more money to buy things. At no point does that mean you can buy unlimited goods, it just means you can print worthless paper.

                  So yea I need to know what evidence I’m disputing to dispute something. It’s not up to me to disprove an argument that hasn’t even been explained.

                  • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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                    1 year ago

                    He didn’t say that it wouldn’t affect inflation. He didn’t say it’s value doesn’t go down by printing more. He simply said it’s possible to print an unlimited amount (I assume barring a shortage of paper or ink or labor), and that remains true.

                    On the other hand, he’s now apparently changed his mind. It would seem he did indeed mean to imply more than just his words.

                  • Stoneykins [any]@mander.xyz
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                    1 year ago

                    “infinite” is hyperbole. In this context, it means “more than enough”.

                    It should be obvious, “infinite” can never apply to real world situations like this.

                  • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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                    1 year ago

                    Yep. “I know better, so just shut up!”

                    He’ll make a typical politician one day.

              • Dark_Blade@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                People just don’t seem to understand the supply-and-demand aspect of inflation, which is what causes these braindead takes; nor do these YouTube videos bother explaining it.

                • Wanderer@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  It’s madness.

                  They get a viewpoint and then just agree with everything that everyone remotely says close to it without judging it.

                  Then to win an argument you spam a huge amount of information that doesn’t prove the point in question but all does need to be disproved or they are magically right.

                  I just hope some people reading comments and not replying at least gain some knowledge of the system they are using.

                  • Dark_Blade@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    I mean, when your worldview is challenged then you only have two options:

                    a) Concede, learn, move on

                    b) Stand your ground, no matter what

                    The former is hard, so people pick the latter. It’s that simple.

                    Also, there’s a form of comfort to be found in burying your head in the sand and pretending that simple solutions exist to complex problems. It requires less critical thinking and gives you hope that someday, somebody will say they’ve ‘had enough’ and solve problems like world hunger or poverty in one fell swoop. It’s a lot more difficult to admit that, in reality, money is inherently worthless and the labor and resources that give it value are usually finite quantities.

                    Well, that or they just think economic problems are super easy to fix because their only source is a poorly-sourced YouTube video.

            • Kellamity@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              Can we please not have YouTube videos be sources

              At best, they’re a tertiary source consistimg of a bunch of condensed summaries of other sources

              More often they’re cherrypicked by content creators to build a narrative for entertainment

              And like, in this context (Lemmy comment debate) you’re asking people to watch a bunch of videos with ads and debunk the points inside. Maybe thats not too much to ask in other contexts, but you must know nobody arguing with you here is going to spend their time doing that

              I could link to a bunch of flat earth videos as sources, and although they would be easily debunked, nobody here is gonna sit through them and follow up the specific claims they make

              • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                The Second Thought video is indeed a tertiary source, but the 1Dime videos has all sources in the comments. I understand that people don’t “like” it as a source, but that doesn’t invalidate them either. They are essentially longer form content explaining what I said in greater detail. If someone came in and said inflation was due to the flat earth, then we can dismiss those claims. Any “sources” would not be backed by economic or scientific theory. This doesn’t change based on the format of the source.

              • Stoneykins [any]@mander.xyz
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                1 year ago

                This is an internet comment section. You need to chill about youtube videos as sources. It almost comes off as snobbish. No one here is under any obligation to do anything for each other. If you wanna ignore a long video someone posted because you don’t want to sit through it, fine. You are allowed to do that.

                The existence of flat earth videos doesn’t invalidate the entire concept of information in videos.

                Get an ad blocker or use piped or something.

        • HububBub@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Absolutely correct. And for more detail on how non-fiat economies work and why the deficit is essentially a fiction to keep bond markets functioning, I recommend reading “The Deficit Myth” by Stephanie Kelton. This also explains why the EU will never rival the US (TLDR: EU member states are not able to control their individual monetary policies).