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Azelma has often said that he firmly believes in the need to get off fiat money and return to the gold standard. I typically reply that although the current fiat money supply is unsustainable and funds a dramatic stratification of wealth to those connected to the money supply, returning to the gold standard would pose a host of economic, international, criminal and logistical problems at least as bad as those the reversion would be intended to fix.
The other day, I was hanging out at the Country Buffet feedlot. $10 for all you can eat, and they have a surprising diversity of vegetarian food. More importantly, it's quite a walk to get there, and I can sit at a table and read and play GameBoy and do paperwork while drinking bottomless diet soda. No one cares about this apparent violation of proper dining etiquette. The clientele is surprisingly diverse and includes not only the lowlifes you'd expect but a lot of senior citizens and lower- and middle-class families. So, I get left alone, and I don't find them too unpleasant or intrusive. I am hoping eventually I can catch a black or asian chick there.
This older white couple were ahead of me on line and kept making rude glances. When the husband passed by me while we were getting food, he made a point of coughing, just to be dismissive. Characteristically, I decided to troll him.
"You have a coughing problem?"
He wasn't expecting confrontation and reacted with cowardly nervousness. "Uh, yeah, uh, it's my medication!"
"It could be tuberculosis. You should get that checked out."
I knew that he was intelligent enough to grasp the social implications of having TB. His surprise at being confronted was compounded by my unusually clever response and careful aim. If I had simply tried physical intimidation, even if I were overly capable of such a thing it would have been less unsettling. People don't like to be beaten on their own turf or deal with foes that force them to think.
So I sat, ate, read, played my game. I bore easily and by turns worked on some app forms and wrote an erotic story. The elderly couple had a loud conversation with their friends several tables away in the large, mostly empty feedlot, about the fall of the Roman Empire. I decided to beat the shit out of them.
They proceeded on the premise that the empire fell in a single event; I imposed myself and lectured them about why that wasn't true, making reference to facts and information. They were taken completely by surprise, they assumed I was stupid because I am young, and an interesting dialogue ensued. Apparently, he was a retired music history professor from Harvard forced out by the political changes in the administration. The conversation turned to the role of currency in the decline of American power and he voiced his opinion that we should revert to the gold standard.
"Do you know why Byzantine power endured so long?" he asked rhetorically.
"Because they had extremely advanced technology and stable institutions," I replied.
"No, it was their currency. They had a stable, specie-based currency."
"Everyone used specie back then. And to keep head above water, they exploited their own people, which ensured their continued downward spiral. Do you know what the chrysargyron was?"
"Uh, no. But do you realize that the dollar today is worth only 1% of what it was in 1900?"
"We've also seen unprecedented economic growth during that time that would not have been possible without fluid currency."
This went back and forth. Eventually everyone walked away reasonably secure.
Re-reading that history book the other day, though, it made another interesting claim - that the decline of the Roman Empire was driven in large part by exhausting natural resources and environmental changes.
Some might think that this is a purely political claim by liberal environmentalists who write textbooks, but it's actually not. The most highly informed authors, people who were there and or who examined the issues in depth long before environmentalism became a popular concern - Tacitus, who lived during the 2nd century AD and predicted Rome's fall, and Gibbons, who lived during the 18th century AD and literally wrote the book on the fall of Rome - both agreed that environmental damage played a major role in the fall of the Empire, as the climate warmed, fresh water supplies waned, farms became less productive, building materials became more scarce, and all this drove a cycle of war, greed and further exploitation (which is actually the true context of that that "deserts and peace" misquote).
A while back, I'd read proposals to back the currency with carbon credits. I saw this as a problem as it could create a perverse incentive to cause further ecological damage by manipulating atmosphere composition by no less destructive means, and it would not solve the fundamental problem of fiat currency which is reliance on printing money because someone says so.
So an idea struck me.
Why not just make money grow on trees?
Trees and gold share common strengths as a currency:
-difficult to produce
-intrinsic value
-look pretty
Simple principle. Capitalization would be a fixed amount, and the value of an acre of forested land would scale against the total capitalization. The fewer trees there are, the more each would be worth. As more trees would be planted, bringing down the value of each, pouring more fiat money into the economy would incentivize more reforestation efforts.
Regional authorities would use satellites and computers to establish an estimate of their total forestation value from individual trees and small clusters in urban areas, creating an incentive to put trees everywhere they could be fit - between buildings, along roads, on top of roofs. This would not only be good for the environment but create major economic benefits, amongst them:
-freshwater retention and thus more, cleaner and cheaper fresh water
-heat absorption, resulting in lower energy costs
-potential full employment in tree-related industries
-abundance of raw materials for industrial use
-environmental stability prevents the economic costs of extreme weather such as floods, tornados, landslides, hurricanes and drought
-higher crop yields due to improved weather conditions
-abundant supply of cheap food and energy, and thus a more business-friendly economy
To ensure maximum economic exploitation of forests while also ensuring proper ecological balance, economic produce from forests would be low-tax. Regional governments would have an incentive to encourage economic activity by matching funds from the federal government for all tax revenue from forests (meaning that the states and counties charge only, say, a quarter the tax of other land uses, but they get back 125% the nominal tax revenue from the Feds). This would drive a proliferation of highly lucrative industries such as lumber, venison, salmon and boar, crocodile and raccoon skins, biomass, fruit, berry, and honey farming, treehousing, tourism and truffling.
Federal regulation would ensure the use of proper species (ideally oak, redwood and cedar, which reach harvest quickly but peak very slowly) and mandate well-balanced ecosystems for forests to qualify.
A "tree" would be defined not as, literally, a single tree, but a certain density of wooded vegetation - so many trees per acre. Thus an individual tree might be defined as only a fraction of a "tree", while a large tree might count as many hundreds. A "tree" or forested area would have to be a certain age (eight years or so) to count. The equation would award exponentially scaling value to older forests, ensuring long-term, open-ended planning.
It is worth nothing that old growth wood is one of the most dramatically appreciating commodities as forests worldwide are cut down and old growth is simply no longer available almost anywhere. Old growth wood takes hundreds of years to grow, but it also can be used to make tables stronger than steel (as our friend Mr. Hitler will gladly attest) and musical instruments of amazing quality. Creating an economic incentive to lay down old growth by pinning it to the currency, and thus wealth in the here and now, will ensure that our descendents will get filthy rich.
And, of course, if this all goes awry, we can always cut the forests down later, turning them directly into cash.
That is what we did during the 19th century (and the Romans during the 2nd century BC). As opposed to a pure fiat money or gold-based system where we would be left with nothing but a lot of worthless paper. The great strength of greenback currency is win or lose, it produces something of tangible value that can be used later. This policy would build capital.
Mass employment in forestry would stabilize society and provide an economic base for renewing our technical industry. In the very long term (as in about 100-250 years), investment in old-growth wood, coupled with investment in space industry, would drive fantastic national wealth. Pulling down high-energy industrial goods from space factories, combined with cheap food, water, energy and building materials from industrial forests, capitalizing on two shields and one loaf per square plus flat orbital factory bonuses for each American city- 23rd-century Americans could be many times wealthier than any society in the history of the world.
So, Azelma?
Aestu of Bleeding Hollow... Nihilism is a copout.
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