Quote from: MoonShadow on June 26, 2011, 02:00:28 PM

Of course not. I don't think that you could be convinced of anything. You have a strong belief system, and are unlikely to accept any evidence to the contrary of that belief system. It's like trying to convince a muslim from afganistan that a Catholic is correct. It doesn't really happen. Very few people who grow up surrounded by such a particular belief are going to be able to break free from it,

oh, the irony, since you just accused me of making strong assumptions about my interlocutors (which i indeed wasn't even doing). as i just finished saying in my last message, my beliefs have evolved substantially since i was a teenager. have yours? do you actually read, in the present day, sophisticated positions that disagree sharply with yours and consider their merits? again, i do, and indeed that's roughly my half-time job. are you anti-intellectual enough to think that my intellectual focus on the subject necessarily corrupts my reasoning so that i cannot see the faults of governments and must merely accept them as the 'slave' that libertarians must imagine i am?

you appear to be stuck in tragically simple generalities. there's apparently almost no content to your position, other than an anger at largely unspecified governmental forces. are you a member of the american tea party? it would be consistent with the many guns you've claimed you keep in the event of governmental collapse. the tea party is not known for its intelligence or sensitivity, to put it mildly. almost all smart people who care about political economy (1) consider extreme libertarianism in their youth and then (2) reject it on its merits in favour of something more nuanced. if all nuance is necessarily your enemy, it's hard to take your position seriously.

westkybitcoins: my point, which i've spelled out many times now, is that the legal tender laws aren't as significant as you're making them out to be. they simply don't matter much, because they don't force long-term holding of any currency, and they don't prevent any significant trade. i couldn't care less whether they're repealed, and my prediction is that it would make very little difference empirically if they were. suppose that the laws said that in addition to any other agreed-upon forms of payment, large merchants needed to accept online bill payments in the customer's choice of major currencies to satisfy debts. that is a 'legal-tender' law, and nonetheless it would be a minor procedural rule and wouldn't make much of a difference beyond the payments industry. legal-tender laws are quite similar in scope and effect.

if your concern is human liberty, you're simply picking the wrong regulatory targets to critique. if i wanted to be a demagogue for effect, i could make the same sort of conspiracy-theory-laden points as people commonly do in this forum: wouldn't the 'state' much prefer that you be complacent about the real, more significant threats to your liberty and have you spend all your time focusing on a mostly irrelevant procedural law about how payments have to be made before they're converted voluntarily into other instruments by anyone who cares? surely you want to pick the right thing to criticise; i'm trying to suggest that you be more careful about the ones you choose.

bitcoin0918: i'm not sure what the point of your questions is. i can't read the mind of the central bankers in a foreign country. what relevance would my answers have to the larger analytical points i've made?

note that i've never said that central banks are perfect, that they can't be corrupted, etc. perhaps you assume that that's what i think, because i'm not willing to suggest abolishing them entirely? if so, that would be an incorrect assumption. i'm just trying to explain that a system should be criticised for the problems it has, rather than made-up ones. the critique of a system should go no further than the problems it has; the proper response to an imperfect system isn't always to try to destroy it.