A very rough list of the political / economic questions on my mind at the moment

[chess]

I realise that most of the following is pretty far up the idealism curve / probably not actually relevant because nobody who matters is going to ask my opinion on it, but these are the things churning around in my head that I'm trying to research / figure out at the moment.

These are mostly notes to myself, but I would appreciate input on any of them too (especially if it is in the form of 'you should read X' rather than 'that is completely stupid why are you even thinking about it?').

Most important as it's actually a clear and present demand of many people:

* 'Ban Lobbying' potentially impacts a lot of 'good' charities / think-tanks / individuals who are dedicated to a cause. How do we distinguish between 'constituent who has a legitimate interest in an issue', 'genuine advice from experts' and 'paid-for lobbying'?

Things I want to prove / disprove in general, and ideally write a clear and simple explanation of, because I keep getting into arguments over them and am ill-informed:

* Returning to a gold standard / gold or some other solid actually useful commodity as a store of value - what terrible things does that do to the world economy?
* Debt-backed money - is it actually untenable or can appropriate regulations to avoid obfuscation of debt values save it? (If so, what are these?)
* Alternative bases for money - what are the characteristics of the 'forex standard'? what about People-Backed Money (somewhat similar to the Equal Money guys' idea, but with actual exchange rather than a system where prices can't be market-set because you don't actually receive anything - so why ask for money at all when you could earn more social capital by gifting it?) what money-sink tricks can you use to get around the 'inflation is bad, it steals my savings' bleating while still maintaining an incentive to keep the economy running rather than letting money stagnate?
* Why social capital / 'whuffie' only schemes are a Bad Plan (or are they?)
* What are the downsides of 'socialise basic needs, capitalism for luxuries'? How does that work in practice? What are the awkward edge effects which need to be controlled for? How do you do it without authoritarian measures / what level of authoritarian measures are acceptable?
* Is it possible to have a government without going down the icky routes of 'monopoly on force' or 'serious brainwashing program'?
* 'banking', up to and including credit default swaps and CDOs, is an inevitable evolution of the desire to trade - discuss
* What kind of things constitute 'artificial scarcity', and how can we remove these barriers to progress in the easiest fashion - or are they in fact doing a good thing even though they have undesirable side effects? (Related: how do we manage the transition between 'full employment everyone needs to do as much work as they can to produce mostly physical stuff' and 'technological unemployment, most people are out-competed by machines and need to find something else to do', especially the tricky middle stages where we still need some compulsory work?)
* Is it possible to have a government without going down the icky routes of 'monopoly on force' or 'serious brainwashing program'?
* What are the alternative modern government forms to 'representative democracy', how would you implement them and what are their pros and cons?

Comments

[passage.livejournal.com]

I think the gold standard problem is much more fundamental than this - a gold standard prevents trade. It's rather like Greece in the Euro at the moment, their currency can't move to reflect the fact that their economy is broken, so it can't price exports effectively to bring their economy back again.

The gold standard gives your currency all the inflexibility of being chained to Germany without any of the "being able to nick all Germany's money" benefits.

Chess, what is it you found appealing about the gold standard?

[chess]

I don't find anything appealing about the gold standard, but I get into endless arguments with Americans who think it is the solution, and I need to work out how to refute their arguments.

The problem seems to be that 'debt-backed money' (which is what we have now - some set of organisations are empowered to create debt-money pairs to control the money supply) is very obviously 'money from nothing' - unbacked, non-store-of-value money - when you look at it closely, and also people are blaming it for the current crash (which may or may not be fair - it seems that obfuscation of debt values is more to do with it than spending Money From Nothing - but certainly 'creating dollars and using them to ignore our trade deficit' is much easier with debt-backed money than gold-backed money).

So people reject debt-backed money and then look around for something else - but all they can find is gold-backed money, or some other resource-backed money, because that's the previous system and nobody has suitibly articulated a new one yet.

[gwyntar.livejournal.com]

I think you are confusing the basis of the currency with fractional reserve banking. Modern currency is not "debt backed" - it's not backed by anything other than the belief people will accept it, and will continue to do so. It's called "fiat currency". Although there has been some money printing going on (quantitative easing) it's very hard to make a case that that has actually done any harm. (It's interesting that the ECB is much less willing to do this due to the Weimar hyperinflation).

"Debt backed money" sounds like a confused term for fractional reserve banking, which has been around for a very long time. It's a wonderful thing because it allows people to invest money they don't have a use for at a reasonale rate of return in comparative safety. These assets, multiplied by a factor of several times, are then made available to people who want capital for use in estblishing/growing productive enterprises.

The arguments against a gold standard are very simple:

1) Currencies cannot (easily) change in value against each other. This means in a global trade system if some countries enjoy productivity rises other countries wages and prices will have to adjust. Since wages are really really bad at adjusting for this kind of thing you instead get unemployment and unsustainable external debt.

Note that with _floating_ currencies if there are two countries A and B, and productivity improves in country A, country B _benefits_.

2) New major gold deposit found? INFLATION! Major gold mine flooded? DEFLATION!

It's plausible to claim that a lot of the current problems are down to China and (to a lesser extent) Germany preventing their currencies from strengthening and then lending money at overly generous interest rates so that consumer nations are able to continue buying their exports. This lead fairly directly to debt bubbles, especially in the US and southern europe.

Note you cannot "create dollars and use them to ignore your trade deficit", unless your trade party is willing to accept dollars. What's actually been going on is that the surplus countries have been more than willing to make loans to the deficit countries (China's insatiable appetite for U.S. gov. debt, German/French banks collection of highly questionable Southern European paper).