Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Money as Logos for Communicating Social Debt Forward

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Before people can feel safe to gather in communities, they need means to dignify personal space and property, and they need logos to signify mutual honesty, good will, reason for trust, and inter personal contracts. Thereafter, people in any given community compete and cooperate to set up claims among themselves to allow them to live together — socially and decently. They often monetize inter personal claims and exchanges, so that each person is availed means and logos for assessing his relative standing. Relative claims to monetized wealth avail people with quick means for communicating social priorities and for communicating who has earned legitimate standing to set such priorities. Thus, it is important that money be kept a secure form for storing authority to bid and place values within any given marketplace of fluxing production and changing fads and interests. The legitimacy of this gets complicated when oligarchies accumulate position and means for manipulating entire markets and relative values of currencies (which, at bottom, are nothing more than significations of agreed extensions of relative trust, credit, and authority for directing and demanding production). At bottom, the legitimacy of trust and money depends on respect for traditions. Without respect for marketplace traditions for determining values, there is no basis for representing values in money. Once collectivizers take over setting the value of currencies by fiat, they are soon tempted to set the value of all social relations by fiat. Soon, they are tempted to replace the authority of the family with the authority of those who control the collective. Thus, the setting of values by a marketplace of exchanges of goods and ideas among individually dignified buyers and sellers is replaced by a cohort of crony controllers of the collective. This cohort takes over the setting of values for currencies, goods, fads, and even fundamental mores — all to the purpose of consolidating cynical crony control, to the godless annihilation of the freedom and dignity of each individual and family. God is replaced by “utopia” (and you had best like it, if you know what’s good for you/sarc). Since a crony cohort cannot possibly make the myriad of decisions that are involved in exchanges of goods and ideas in any complex community, it soon abandons the attempt and turns instead to manipulating ways to preserve its power and position, such as by inducing public obeisance with hired thugs (get on your marching shoes and revenge the vote!), thereby inducing feelings of fear and hopelessness. Thus are God and human dignity sold out to secular material wants and faux utopia. Get your freak on.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Isn't there some kind of law of diminishing returns on being a bully? After awhile, doesn't the value of seeking to avoid the bully marginalize the value of tolerating the bully? When other places have lower rates, won't businesses just vote with their feet? Actually, that does appear to be part of the Agenda: spread economic activity away from the U.S. and towards the third world. Even though much of Third World is primed by history to dimmi-diminish humanity into serfdom. What you want less of, you tax. If you want less production in free countries, you increase their tax rates.

Shouldn't the goal of a tax for a rational and free society be to increase revenue without disincenting production and industry? Some say the middle class has too much consumption and not enough savings. Well then, why not do away with taxes on production (income taxes and domestic corporation taxes) and instead tax domestic consumption, progressively? (Capture taxes on export-transfers of dollars from the U.S. by taxing such exprts as if they constituted a form of consumption.) Wouldn't a progressive tax on consumption be as simple to implement, calculate, and collect as to require that all retail purchases be made by each person from his assigned retail account?