Jim Bell fan?


I am not iCEBREAKER, but I do, by 2024. The reasons are many and intertwined, but in short the post-ww2 baby-boomers burn down their assets in decrepitude, creating crashes, and crashes cause CB printing, which create a dilemma: hyperinflation or crushing, strangling central economic control.  Either scenario is bullish, with the latter being the best case for black markets.  2024 is the demographic bottom, but it may take 4-8 years for any real recovery to occur.

Never forget: Only black markets matter.  Because only black markets are free markets, and it is only in free markets that unbiased price discovery can occur, without which malinvestments and inefficiencies of rents and licenses - ranging from the mild but worsening cases in the u.s. and e.u. today,  to the mass-starvation-inducing cases we have seen in China (1950-60s), Russia (1930-40s), Venezuela  (2010s), Zimbabwe (2000s), etc. - cause inequality to balloon, and productivity to crash.

I think it is difficult for modern Yanks and Europeans to comprehend the levels of disruption which they are about to experience.  The educational systems created by Dewey et filia are factories designed to produce good consumers and factory workers, but the underlying economic apparatus, what Marx would have called substructure, just doesn't need people to fill "bullshit jobs" any more.  There is some measure of realism in the Eastern Eurozone, because the Iron Curtain and the Soviet collapse have not entirely faded from memory, yet, from Vienna to Nome we have a population of consumers and tax donkeys which is so soft, so compliant, so dependent of the provision of their masters, that they simply cannot imagine a world in which the warm teat of the corporation/government is taken from them.  

Collapse is a process, not an event.  It began in 1971-75 when the gold standard was replaced by the petrodollar fiat system.  Since 1971 every U.S. generation has experienced an increase in labor burden and a decline in real wealth compensated only by technological hedonic factors and the emergence of the two-income, no parent, household.  Well, there is no more blood to be wrung from that latter stone, and technological progress is (1) obsoleting the worker and (2) still dependent on unsustainable resource equations.

In order for technological advance to drag us out of the hole we are in, we need functioning markets with functioning price discovery, and, in my opinion, a UBI.  To me the former implies hard, non-inflationary money, with privacy and fungibility baked in, while the latter implies an inflationary fiat or a freigeld which floats against the hard money.  I do not believe that a knowledge-based economy can function without both forms of currency, at least not without the adoption of a regime of continuous recurring atrocity (which is the current trend).  The former is required for capital formation, required to build enterprise and conduct research involving capital equipment, while the latter is required to support excess consumers.