Comment on Drop your unpopular opinions here because c/unpopularopinions is filled with popular opinions

• arotrios@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  everyone has to agree on the worth of the dollar

  This is the heart of the shared delusion - that everyone agrees on the worth of a dollar, when in fact, it’s worth is can only be defined personally. And to be more precise, I’d correct your comment to “everyone has to agree on the Fed’s definition of the worth of a dollar”.

  If you make $30/hr, a dollar is worth 2 minutes of your time. If you lose your job and get another making $10/hr, that same dollar is now worth 6 minutes of your time, simply because one boss decided you’re worth less than another boss did. This is where the real distortion comes into play - in the perceived value of money versus labor.

  Of course, most folks don’t accept a downgrade in value, so instead, they simply make your earned money worth less over time via intentional inflation. The net effect is the erosion of labor’s earned capital and the increase in the value of assets.

  An all of this is because we accept their definition of how valuable a dollar is, because we believe we have no other way to earn wealth from our labor, save through money.

  Which isn’t true, and hasn’t been true for most of human history. Humans generate wealth by either tending to or exploiting the natural environment. Now, that natural environment is fenced in by property rights, which are governed by the exchange of… you guessed it…

  Money.

  See, we think that money is wealth. It’s not. Money is a communication of value. And all elements of human communication are imaginary symbols we’ve instilled with arbitrary meaning to build a map of reality.

  The map is not the territory. The symbols are not the reality, and they are easily manipulated. Money is one of our oldest and deepest symbols, but we survived before it ruled our minds. If you detach the concepts of wealth, fortune, and happiness from money, you’ll find that your value is far greater than your bank account would suggest.

  But to go back to your comment, if you’ve ever done currency trading, you’ll see the two markets are pretty similar and subject to the same levels of manipulation (on a governmental scale in many cases, lookin’ at you China). The game is effectively the same, and it’s still pretty much refereed by the Federal Reserve, as the dollar current is the default currency for most of the world. And the Fed never gets rid of inflation, because without the constant degradation of labor capital, the asset owning class would lose its position of social superiority.

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  • Dingo_Kidneys@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    You’re conflating a lot of things as being the same thing and it’s important to draw the lines between them because conflation causes confusion that can and will cause harm if acted on.

    Yes, a currency’s relationship with labor fluctuates due to how a market prices labor, but this isnt the fault of currency. It’s a fault with labor markets. In a labor market buyers almost always have an advantage over sellers and as such can devalue labor seemingly at will. This does not in turn change the value of the currency though.

    You’re also right to say the Fed has a responsibility to secure market stability and that right now stability is measured in the independant wealth of businesses. However, the Fed is not private, it’s a public structure. It’s been captured by private interests because Americans largely dont understand/care about economic infrastructure. At any point the Fed could raise interest rates to a degree that almost entirely stops borrowing and that would curb inflation the other way. The downside to this is that it would make borrowing impossible for both small and large businesses. The Fed has a very large lever and no discretion. I dont think I need to say that small businesses dying is also not very good for the labor class.

    As for your argument on money and self-worth. I largely just chalk this up to being a propaganda campaign to get laborers more interested in currency accumulation over community building. That isnt something that changes with fiscal policy though. That’s a culture issue. I’ve yet to convince anyone though that the two are separate, much less that their culture ought to be changed. The cold reality is that many Americans prefer it this way. They’d rather be a space in a system where they could see themselves as kings over a system without kings but higher standards of living.

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    • arotrios@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Yes, a currency’s relationship with labor fluctuates due to how a market prices labor, but this isnt the fault of currency. It’s a fault with labor markets. In a labor market buyers almost always have an advantage over sellers and as such can devalue labor seemingly at will. This does not in turn change the value of the currency though.

      It absolutely changes the value of the currency to the laborer. Labor "buyers’ have an advantage over laborers only because their assets are valued higher than the labor needed to produce them. This valuation is unbalanced and inaccurate, and the inaccuracy is enabled by the concept of currency and exploited by the asset holders. A laborer produces far more value than a landlord, but the system is designed to keep them from accumulating enough assets to ever be a landlord.

      Secondly, you’re incorrect regarding the Federal Reserve - it’s a hybrid public/private system:

      The Federal Reserve System is composed of several layers. It is governed by the presidentially appointed board of governors or Federal Reserve Board (FRB). Twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, located in cities throughout the nation, regulate and oversee privately owned commercial banks. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) sets monetary policy by adjusting the target for the federal funds rate, which generally influences market interest rates and, in turn, the American economy via the monetary transmission mechanism.

      The Federal Reserve has been criticized for its approach to managing inflation, perceived lack of transparency, and its role in economic downturns. The shift from the gold standard to fiat currency has led to long-term inflation and financial instability, with some calling for the Fed’s abolition or greater accountability through audits

      The Fed has been captured by private interests since its inception. They gained legitimacy for the dollar by attaching it to real wealth (gold), and then once they had everyone believing in the strength of the dollar, they rug pulled the wealth that was supporting it. This allowed the asset owning class now to essentially pay their laborers with paper instead of gold. And they can make all the paper they want.

      This has worked for about as long as people had faith in America, because the dollar was still considered an “investment in America” and because America had a really good PR team. But once the dollar lost its connection to real wealth, it became a tool of disenfranchisement.

      Oh, and ever wonder how the Federal Reserve got started? Spoiler alert, it wasn’t in a congressional committee:

      In 1910, Aldrich and executives representing the banks of J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, and Kuhn, Loeb & Co., secluded themselves for ten days at Jekyll Island, Georgia.[9] The executives included Frank A. Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of New York, associated with the Rockefellers; Henry Davison, senior partner of J.P. Morgan Company; Charles D. Norton, president of the First National Bank of New York; and Col. Edward M. House, who would later become President Woodrow Wilson’s closest adviser and founder of the Council on Foreign Relations.[10] There, Paul Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb, & Co. directed the proceedings and wrote the primary features of what would be called the Aldrich Plan. Warburg would later write that “The matter of a uniform discount rate (interest rate) was discussed and settled at Jekyll Island.” Vanderlip wrote in his 1935 autobiography From Farmboy to Financier:[11]

      Despite my views about the value to society of greater publicity for the affairs of corporations, there was an occasion, near the close of 1910, when I was as secretive, indeed, as furtive as any conspirator. None of us who participated felt that we were conspirators; on the contrary we felt we were engaged in a patriotic work. We were trying to plan a mechanism that would correct the weaknesses of our banking system as revealed under the strains and pressures of the panic of 1907. I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyl Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System. … Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would be wasted. If it were to be exposed publicly that our particular group had gotten together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress. Yet, who was there in Congress who might have drafted a sound piece of legislation dealing with the purely banking problem with which we were concerned?

      Despite meeting in secret, from both the public and the government, the importance of the Jekyll Island meeting was revealed three years after the Federal Reserve Act was passed, when journalist Bertie Charles Forbes in 1916 wrote an article about the “hunting trip”

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      • Dingo_Kidneys@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        You’re doing a lot of conflating again, so let me pull things apart. First, labor excess value being extracted is again not a function of currency. It’s a function of capitalism. In a capitalist system, capital owners are permitted the ability to extract excess from laborers so that they can invest that excess into new ventures. It has nothing to do with value perception. What does have to do with labor perception is how much wealth laborers allow to be extracted from them, which is the whole reason bargaining power is so important in a capitalist system for the labor class.

        On fiat currency, in principle it isn’t a terrible idea. What makes the dollar volatile though is that it is a fiat controlled by a single state. The gold standard worked better for the dollar because the value of the dollar would always be in effect controlled by gold supply, but this is something that can be worked out without gold as to avoid gold hoarding. We have modern solutions like crypto that could create an artificial line for the dollar to ride on, but that brings us back to it being easier to just have the dollar represent the buying power of the american market. If you keep that a function of public fiscal policy, it isn’t all that dangerous.

        On the Fed, the planning and writing of the bill that established the Fed being a behind closed door meet with the hyper wealthy does not make the Fed a private enterprise. It makes it a public enterprise that was constructed by private interest. Welcome to the home of the free, much of our infrastructure was built by wealthy business owners lobbying congress. That doesnt mean that the Fed can’t be reshaped by the American people, it can, but the American public seems to not like taking the effort it takes to consider a bill that would reshape the Fed. Private interest groups do it instead because there is no competition.

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