Hacker News Reader

Comment by _gx90 | Hacker News Reader

One day people are going to look back to today and wonder why we have essentially given a license to print money to a privileged group of people with close to nil accountability. First to central bankers, and now to private bankers (which collect a profit from literally creating money out of thin air and lending it out). Our entire fiat monetary system really is incredibly bizarre and borderline fraudulent when you think about it in close enough detail, and yet it is still seemingly immune from mainstream criticism.

End central banking and you've single-handedly fixed systemic wealth inequality in the United States.

View on HN

>Our entire fiat monetary system really is incredibly bizarre and borderline fraudulent when you think about it in close enough detail

I mean, almost every social construct is bizarre and borderline fraudulent when you get into it in granular detail. Why does someone paid by taxes working in a government created 200+ years ago get involved in my choice on who I marry or live with? Why does an arbitrary marker on a map indicating someone 'owns' a piece of the earth mean I can't walk across the actual physical ground?

They're social constructs. They're not natural. They're supposed to be bizarre. That's the point.

> End central banking and you've single-handedly fixed systemic wealth inequality in the United States.

End central banking and San Francisco will still be full of homeless people and rich people

I doubt that the VC boom would have ever reached the heights it has without easy money policies and quantitative easing from global central banks. You would likely still have homeless people, but you would certainly have far less rich people.

Sure, we would certainly have less wealth in the absence of easy money. But we had paupers, merchants and nobility for several millennia's worth of limited quantities of precious metals being the only money, so it stretches credulity to pretend that hard money has any kind of egalitarian upside other than levelling down.

> with close to nil accountability

Bank regulation is open to be criticized. But it's far from "nil".

> First to central bankers, and now to private bankers

Money was originally printed by private parties, then by banks, and most-recently by central banks.

>Bank regulation is open to be criticized. But it's far from "nil".

Bank regulation is political and is regularly criticised, I'll give you that. However, the Federal Reserve and central banking is borderline immune to any form of criticism from the electorate partly due to a lack of understanding but also due to the widespread perception that central banking is somehow a necessity in a well-functioning economy and that its operation and development should remain firmly in the domain of "experts" like economists and others. I blame out-of-control scientism in economics for this one.

>Money was originally printed by private parties, then by banks, and most-recently by central banks.

Apologies, I phrased my sentence badly. It was more of a figure of speech rather than a historical account.

How will someone start or grow a business or buy a house, without banks?

Is it your claim that the past 200 years of economic develop were stunted by the banking system?

Without fiat money, you have to disable value-generating productive resources as placeholders.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com