Socialism

[Zlaxer]

If you want an ancient example of a more socialized economy, read up on the Incan empire. No money. Not even large markets, I think. Everything was planned. The government taxed with labor taxes, and then distributed the goods (mostly food and infrastructure) from the labor tax.

Where is the Incan empire today?

[Speaker to Animals]

If you want an ancient example of a more socialized economy, read up on the Incan empire. No money. Not even large markets, I think. Everything was planned. The government taxed with labor taxes, and then distributed the goods (mostly food and infrastructure) from the labor tax.

Where is the Incan empire today?

It's contemporary form is today called Peru. They are doing okay.

[Zlaxer]

If you want an ancient example of a more socialized economy, read up on the Incan empire. No money. Not even large markets, I think. Everything was planned. The government taxed with labor taxes, and then distributed the goods (mostly food and infrastructure) from the labor tax.

Where is the Incan empire today?

It's contemporary form is today called Peru. They are doing okay.

Where is the empire?

My point is....it's not around....somehow, they didn't progress fast enough to ward of the Spanish bastards....perhaps their socialism stifled innovation.

[Martin Hash]

Even Capitalism would have a tough time against Smallpox and firearms.

[Montegriffo]

Whatever comes after Federal Reserve Notes.

Nobody knows what that will be, and neither do I; except I'm pretty sure is will be real and not fiat issued by some gang. This is what concerns me most about crypto, but I don't know shit about the tech, so what good is my take on that?

How is currency based off something "real"? Its always imaginary to one degree or another, no?

Real money comes naturally out of a barter system as some universally valued good that becomes a stand-in for all trades.

In early Appalachia, for instance, they had poor access to a sufficient supply of gold and silver coinage. So the natural economic result was that some other good (in this case whiskey) became the money supply.

Which is a good historical example of how this works, as well as how federal grifters will literally do anything, including fomenting a civil war, in order to make their currency king.

The expression a shot of whisky literally comes from exchanging a bullet for a slug of alcohol.

[Fife]

Exchanging a *cartridge* for a shot of whiskey, not a bullet.

When offering a bullet in trade, the customer would hope to receive as much whiskey as he could carry away and all the gold and silver in the drawer, and not the typical counter-offer of a bullet in return.

[Speaker to Animals]

That counter-offer can be a son-of-a-bitch.

[Fife]

It's not an easy task to name the Worst POTUS Ever; it's a tough competition. FDR is somewhere in the top 3, I'd say. Wilson and Lincoln put up a pretty good fight.

From the estimable James Bovard:

FDR’s Worst Perversion of Freedom: The "Four Freedoms" Speech

Franklin Roosevelt did more than any other modern president to corrupt Americans’ understanding of freedom. Last week was the 75th anniversary of his 1944 speech calling for a second Bill of Rights to guarantee economic freedom to Americans. Nation magazine whooped up the anniversary, proclaiming that Democrats now have a “unique—and likely fleeting—opportunity to deliver where FDR fell short” with vast new government programs.

The 1944 speech, given as the tide in World War Two was finally turning, was a followup of his 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech which exploited Americans’ rising apprehensions to see far more power for the government. Roosevelt promised citizens freedom of speech and freedom of worship and then, as if he was merely enumerating other self-evident rights, declared: “The third [freedom] is freedom from want . . . everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear . . . anywhere in the world.” Proclaiming a goal of freedom from fear meant that government should fill the role in daily life previously filled by God and religion. Politicians are the biggest fearmongers, and “freedom from fear” would justify seizing new power in response to every bogus federal alarm.

. . .

And, while Roosevelt pretended to magnanimously recognize a right to freedom of speech, that did not include freedom to dissent: “A free nation has the right to expect full cooperation from all groups.... The best way of dealing with the few slackers or trouble makers in our midst is, first, to shame them by patriotic example, and, if that fails, to use the sovereignty of government to save government.” Roosevelt sounded like James Madison had simply forgotten the asterisk to the First Amendment about using “the sovereignty of government to save government.” FDR’s “new freedom” would justify suppressing anyone who balked at the political ruling class’s latest goals.

. . .

Three years later, in his 1944 State of the Union address , Roosevelt revealed that the original Bill of Rights had “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” Roosevelt called for a “Second Bill of Rights,” and asserted that: “True individual freedom can’t exist without economic security.” And security, according to FDR, included “the right to a useful and remunerative job,” “decent home,” “good health,” and “good education.” Thus, if a government school failed to teach all fifth graders to read, the nonreaders would be considered oppressed (lawsuits over public school failures in Michigan and elsewhere against local and state governments have relied on similar claptrap). Similarly, if someone was in bad health, then that person would be considered as having been deprived of his freedom, and somehow it would be the government’s fault. Freedom thus required boundless control over health care.

Roosevelt also declared that liberty requires “the right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.” In other words, government should inflate food prices high enough to keep the nation’s least efficient farmer behind his mule and plow. But FDR-style freedom also required unlimited federal control over every farmer. At that point, USDA was dictating to every wheat farmer exactly how many acres of the grain they could grow. An Indiana farmer exceeded his quota to grow wheat to feed to his hogs. The Roosevelt administration hounded him all the way to the Supreme Court, claiming it needed a free hand to "suppress ... a public evil." And what was the "public evil"? Wheat surpluses and uppity farmers who failed to kowtow to every USDA bureaucrat.

FDR also proclaimed “the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition.” Here was another new freedom that could be secured only by giving bureaucrats unlimited control of the private sector. Two years earlier, Congress enacted the Emergency Price Control Act, which created an Office of Price Administration with sweeping power to set or strike down prices in practically any industry. The act contained no substantive guidelines for the administrator’s decisions but merely required prices that “in his judgment will be generally fair and equitable.” When the Supreme Court upheld the law in 1944, Justice Owen Roberts bitterly dissented that “it is plain that this Act creates personal government by a petty tyrant instead of government by law.” Roberts scoffed at the court’s rubber-stamping of the law as a “solemn farce” because the law was written so that “the courts are unable to say that the Administrator has exceeded the discretion vested in him.”

Pundits and progressives who are whooping up Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights almost always ignore perhaps the biggest surprise in that speech. While Roosevelt spoke gaudily of new rights, he scooped George Orwell’s 1984 by revealing that slavery was freedom - or at least “close enough for government work.” FDR urged Congress to enact a “national service law— which for the duration of the war . . . will make available for war production or for any other essential services every able-bodied adult in this Nation.” FDR invoked the “eternally just principle of ‘fair for one, fair for all’” to justify destroying the freedom of every worker in the nation. He promised that this proposal, described in his official papers as a Universal Conscription Act, would be a “unifying moral force” and “a means by which every man and woman can find that inner satisfaction which comes from making the fullest possible contribution to victory.” Presumably, the less freedom people had, the more satisfied they’d become. And anyone who did not feel liberated by federal commands was a bastard who deserved all the misery officialdom heaped upon them.

H.L. Mencken wisely observed, “One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.” Americans are still suffering because Franklin Roosevelt’s freedom bunkum was not immediately laughed off the national stage. Any politician who seeks more power today to bestow more freedom in the distant future deserves all the ridicule Americans can heave his way.

[brewster]

Proclaiming a goal of freedom from fear meant that government should fill the role in daily life previously filled by God and religion.

While most of the article is simply a manifesto of a conservative vision of small government with no safety nets at all, the above is simply nonsense. The fear FDR meant is fear of violence, both foreign and domestic.

[Zlaxer]

Proclaiming a goal of freedom from fear meant that government should fill the role in daily life previously filled by God and religion.

While most of the article is simply a manifesto of a conservative vision of small government with no safety nets at all, the above is simply nonsense. The fear FDR meant is fear of violence, both foreign and domestic.

No - he meant fear in a very general term...as in, the government should take care of you like a fucking child.