Every ideological movement has its share of crazies. You find them in droves in the comments section of free blog sites. (They are rare on subscription sites' forums. Fees screen them out.)
My series on the Bitcoins mania has served like bird dogs in quail season. It has flushed them out. I hardly know where to begin shooting.
This one is the craziest so far. It was sent by a man I have never heard of.
He began with the nuttiest libertarian statement I have ever seen. In 50 years, nothing matches this.
Gary, by Austrian theory, money is whatever the market may freely choose it to be.Currently, the market is prevented from making that free choice. Therefore, currently no money exists.
Think this through. There is no money. Therefore, there is no social market order. There is no division of labor. And why not? Because Mr. Crazy Pants has defined them away.
Let's take it a step further.
By Austrian theory, money is whatever the market may freely choose it to be.Currently, the market is prevented from making free choices. Therefore, no market exists.
This really is the logic of his position.
We have seen his premises. Now let us see his conclusions.
Therefore,• your recent assertion that "dollars are money" is false
• your assertion that "Bitcoin is not money" is a truism.
This follows from his premises, no question about it. If his premises are correct, I operate in a logical no-man's-land, alternating between falsehoods and truisms.
If his premises are correct. . . .
Two interesting questions arise:• how can the market become free to choose its form of money?
• when it has become free so to so, what form of money will it probably choose?
These are excellent questions. I wish I knew the answers. I wish that anyone who has written a book on monetary theory and a second book on monetary history could answer this.
Mr. Crazy Pants has never written a book.
He directed me to an article on an anonymous blog, where he says he has answered these two questions. I went to this blog. He devoted two brief paragraphs to this. Here is my summary. (I will not quote him verbatim, because you could then use Google to identify him. I am not interested in getting involved with a tar baby.)
First, eliminate all civil government.Second, see what the market chooses.
But how can we do this? Simple.
Convince all employees of the state -- every state -- to quit their jobs. This is now happening.
This man uses deductive logic. He uses imagination. He uses them strangely.
I checked to see where the site he posts on is ranked on the Top Libertarian site. Out of the 120 sites listed, it is in the low end of the top 80%. My Tea Party Economist is #11. GaryNorth.com is strangely absent, but it should probably be #7, dropping Tea Party Economist to #12.
He ended his letter with this: Stay cool.
I shall endeavor to stay cool. From now on, whenever people hear the words "Gary North," they will think "cool."
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