Fiat Money Creates Tryanny – Why?

People have seen r/K since long before the terms were ever coined:

It may seem unusual that an economist would talk about culture…

A number of economists have observed that fiat money is a prerequisite for tyrannical government, and the idea that monetary interventionism paves the way for tyrannical government is very old and goes back to Nicolas Oresme in the fourteenth century…

Mises said that when it comes to limiting government power, it is essential that the government is financially dependent on the citizens…

Mises believed that those who paid the taxes would then need to specifically limit the size of the government budget…

Now, if we abandon a strict connection between what the citizens pay and what government spends, then we find that we move away from rule by the citizens who are being taxed, and toward greater rule by the elites.

The first way this shift can happen is by the government going into debt… it… allows the government to spend more money than would have been possible with taxation alone.

Now of course fiat money allows government to take out loans to an unlimited extent…

Now we come to the many ways through which a fiat money system affects the behavior of ordinary citizens.

…it has long been an idea among government planners and ideologues of all sorts, even before Keynes, that ordinary people should be prevented from “hoarding” money at their homes.

In a free economy with a natural monetary system, there is a strong incentive to save money in the form of cash held under one’s immediate control…

By contrast, when there is constant price inflation, as in a fiat-money system, cash hoarding becomes suicidal. Other financial strategies now become more advisable. It becomes advisable to exchange one’s cash for “financial products,” thus offsetting the loss of purchasing power of money through the return on that financial investment. It also becomes advisable to go into debt and leverage one’s investments…

But in a fiat money system, as price inflation diminishes the value of one’s monetary savings, we are encouraged to adopt a short-term perspective…

It needs to be stressed that this tendency has no natural stopping point.

Technically, under the tenets of r/K, cash hording would be a K-stimuli, fostering a psychology of greatness among the populace by constricting available resources, and rewarding those who plan for the future. Removing the option or dissuading those from pursuing it, is purely an r-stimulus designed to reward the r-psychology.

There it is, all r-selection, as described by those who think it a strange and aberrant state of affairs that need to be avoided. A psychological shift which weakens the desire for freedom, dissipates the drive to protect it, requires ever more protection for every individual due to motivation/drive debility, and generates a short term strategy to consume ever more ephemeral resources that by their very nature are designed to eventually run out. And so long as the free resources last, the shift will continue farther and farther.

Bear in mind, to an r-strategist, these are wise and valid policies. They would describe the entire state of affairs quite differently. To them this is clever policy encouraging a necessary investment of present value into the system by evil “hoarders,” to produce future conditions that will further enhance the good-feels and happiness, and produce further excess investible value that will further enhance the good-feels and happiness, and produce more excess investible value.

Best of all, all the good feels have no end. With this strategy, the happiness and good-feels can last forever.

By contrast, if you allow “hoarding” to be advantageous, the good-feels stop, the happiness ends, and an untenable situation arises, where some will work hard and enjoy undue success and comfort, and others will not, unless they expend undue effort they may not want to expend.

The only thing missing is the sexual aspects, and the rearing/child-concern/child-protection aspects.

The key to r/K is that it takes the observations above, from merely being the observations of several individuals, to a clear biological mechanism that can be understood from cause, to effect, to the reasons behind it, and which is easily understood by all.

It is the final piece that holds the promise of taking these ideas about limited government, stability, and freedom that we all knew were right, and establishing them as the ultimate truth in the minds of all exposed – on the first contact.