happy cake day!

This would be an interesting change my view.

Do it

Aside from residing the in Corporate Federation, I have no allegiance to it.

Somehow i always come back to reddit in time to wish you a happy cake day. Stay gold my friend

Happy cake day dude!

Think of it as a belief system like the one currency is based on. Does it matter that individual dollar bills have no inherent value? No, because everyone believes in its value.

The same can be said for the "social contract" like the constitution, it doesn't matter what an individual thinks of it, if one agrees or not, if the rest of the population does.

It'll still hold its power as long as people believe in it, if you were to get yourself in violation of the law and proclaim in your defense that the law doesn't apply to you, that's not going to make an ounce of difference because the rest of the population will fundamentally disagree.

Of course you never signed it, neither have I, and maybe it's unfair or unlawful or undesired, but that doesn't change anything in being. What gives the constitution its power is not the signatures on it or the institutionalization of it, but rather the collective faith the population has put in it. I'd argue that it's much more like a social contract than a legal contract, no signature required.

Well put.

I'm always struck by self-proclaimed rationalists who scorn religion and sneer at people's tendency to engage in faith-based beliefs . . . and then turn around and say "Sure, there's no logical basis for money--it's an agreed-upon illusion--like 'social contracts' in government. Nevertheless, I'm still for it."

So their minds can get beyond religion . . . but not money or government.

Unless you can see through all three, you're not truly awake.

All modern atheists have done is swap out one god for another, one religion for another, one faith-based system for another.

• Footnote: In the Middle Ages when, what we think of as 'modern nation-states' didn't exist, the peasants believed in God, but not the State. It would have struck the medieval peasant as barbarism if you would have suggested that the State had rights over your body, or that the government had the authority to mass-murder its own people. Yet in the 20th Century (and now the 21st) you have this slavish cult-like behavior as it pertains to the State.

Well, I drew the comparison with religion but I didn't intend it to be taken literally. Religion is abstract, it's spirituality spun and organized to justify certain things, good and/or bad.

Currency isn't as much faith-based as it is trust-based. It's a social construct dependent on the trust people have of each other and the government that controls the currency. There's nothing spiritual about money, so I don't think it's entirely accurate to say that it's a faith structure as religion is.

I think the two are fundamentally different and I don't see any hypocrisy in being an atheist while at the same time believing in currency. Currency is a sort of unspoken contract between millions of people on individual bases, and while there is a central bank or federal reserve pulling the strings, it's fundamentally still an organic social (human) construct.

Many people may be unaware of the fact that paper bills have little inherent value, and some may know it all too well, but that doesn't change the fact that we can all collectively "pretend" to see it as a form of value. It works because of almost everybody has trust in it, not faith.

Even if I didn't have trust in the system, I still recognize that I can take these paper bills to almost any store and exchange them for something of value.

Religion is also an organic social construct, with puppeteers pulling the strings to their own benefit, and masses of people celebrating the concentration of that power, be it in a pulpit or in a bank account.

Even if I didn't have trust in the system, I still recognize that I can take these paper bills to almost any store and exchange them for something of value.

Tell that to the fine folk living in Venezuela.

Venezuela is a prime example where the population has stopped believing in the system. Because of the large amount of meddling by the central Venezuelan government, currency has lost its value in the eyes of the people.

The government maintains that the exchange rates with foreign currencies and goods (food, consumer goods, oil etc.) is stable and strong, but the black market indicates otherwise.

People in Venezuela are flocking to more stable foreign currencies, most notably the US dollar, because they ceased trusting their own, they no longer agree to the value that the bills of the Venezuelan bolivar hold.

So yes, it's absolutely possible for people to lose trust in their currency. It happened with the German mark, Zimbabwean dollar, Argentine peso, and now the Venezuelan bolivar.

In fact, it happens to a small extent in every currency all the time. This is essentially what exchange rates are. The British pound dropped significantly in value compared with the euro and US dollar recently over economic fears regarding brexit.

A national currency can in some ways be seen as an indication of the state of a country as a whole, when people lose a small amount of trust in a country, its institutions and anything that produces value or has the potential to produce value, the currency becomes less valuable compared to other currencies. When this happens big time, in a country like Venezuela, people start to lose trust on a massive scale and hyperinflation occurs.

Like it or not, but US citizens have, broadly speaking, a large amount of trust in their country. Understand though that this is not merely a country's political leadership, but rather the sum of all the wealth producing activities in the country (from the largest corporations to the self-employed), as it is them that makes the world go round.

Fiat currency is "a faith-based system". It's not based on any real value (as sound money is).

We live in a system now where we don't actually use money. We use currency. The two are not the same.

One of the five characteristics of Money is that it's a store of value.

Fiat currency, by contrast, is not a store of value. The government can print it up at will, so things like the US dollar have lost 98% of their value since the Federal Reserve took over in 1913.

(People are always shocked to learn that, pre-Federal Reserve, America had almost no inflation from 1790 to 1913, when the Fed was established. You can Google up charts showing this. Why did we have such price stability on consumer goods? They were priced in actual money, not in fiat currency. So a loaf of bread to George Washington in 1790 cost exactly as much for Woodrow Wilson in 1912. That blows people's minds when they find that out. They've been taught that inflation is some unavoidable force of nature. It just naturally happens like gravity or magnetism, lol. No, it happens because corrupt men hijack the financial system.)

In a legitimate free market system, you can only have as much money as you have economic productivity. (Money, after all, is just a measure of productivity.)

So the more productivity you have, the more dollars you can print up.

In a fiat system, you can print up dollars IRRESPECTIVE of productivity increases. The money ceases to be tied to productivity.

It's like having a tape-measure where the inches and feet don't stay the same . . . where they change day by day . . . and are different sizes all over the length of the tape-measure. And they can be changed upon the whims of men with political ulterior motives at any day, at any time.

No contractor or engineer would buy a tape-measure like that. So it will be abandoned.

As all fiat currencies eventually are.

Voltaire said, "Fiat currency always goes back to its intrinsic value--zero."

You can read interviews with Federal Reserve chairmen who admit this. But they'll add, "As long as we have the faith of the people, we can continue on with the system".

This is when the economic system becomes religion. It's faith-based.

I'm reading the autobiography of 20th Century billionaire Bernard Baruch, and he says, "You must understand. The markets don't change because of a natural disaster affecting supply chains and raw material access, per se. They don't change because of a drought in Asia affecting the wheat harvest or a volcano in Hawaii affecting bananas. The markets change based on PEOPLE'S REACTIONS to these events. It's all psychological."

There's a term in finance: The markets are cycle-logical.

They're driven more by speculation and panics than by actual market changes.

If you want to read a book that will shatter your faith in the "pseudo-science" of economics read 1926's "Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt," by Frederick Soddy. He was a literal scientist, who won a Nobel prize for discovering isotopes in the early 20th Century. After that, he turned his scientific mind toward economics and called it a "pseudo-science". It's flim-flammery trying to dress itself up in the vestments of science, when in fact it's 90% charlatanism.

At any rate, check out that book if you want to see an effective rebuttal of the claim that we're not in a faith-based system.

Well put.

Statism - the most dangerous faith.

Read my other follow up replies, it's not statism.

Literally a political system in which the state has substantial centralized control over social and economic affairs because of people's faith in it.

This is a powerful message that most of humanity should understand, just in general, I can't even, if I wasn't so broke, this comment would be gilded, it deserves it 100%.

Thank you, I appreciate it.

Yup

You post a crazy amount of threads

Without the context sited in the Declaration of Independence there may be a point here, but there's not a Constitution sans the context of the Declaration of Independence, so no point was made.

Nope

Change MY View that you're right...