Atta (9): 242: Today's kick-ass question

[mikebailey]

On Thu, 17 May 2007, Monte Davis wrote:
> I'm somewhat sanguine about reductions in "lopsidedness" on
> racial, sexual, and imperial lines -- but on a 50-to-500 year time scale, I
> don't see that nation-states, corporations, religions -- or political
> systems advancing claims akin to those of religions -- are in much danger of
> "being phased out."
>

but there you go: doesn't matter what you _call_ the system,
the important fact is that it functions in a "kinder, gentler" manner
--- still a lot of work remains to be done, that can't be denied

but prior to Proudhon, the only philosophical ideas about a different
way to run things were religious, and religions grew leaders, and leaders
grew close to the temporally powerful and so forth...

somebody like Paul would come along and reaffirm the divine right
of kings and screw everything up, social-change-wise

so that merchants and business owners tended to think about
their role in the business as the king of it, whereas exposure
to non- or anti-authoritarian thought in all but the densest
tends to modify that thinking - "why should I want to be the
big, stinky cheese?"
 which in turn modifies the way things
work, making room for more change...good money driving out bad
in the reverse of Gresham's Law as Shea and Wilson pointed out
(as opposed to Grisham's Law, which involves Tom Cruise and the Caymans)

hey...checked Wikipedia, and not just Shea and Wilson noticed this ---

"In an influential theoretical article, Rolnick and Weber (1986) argued that bad
money would drive good money to a premium rather than driving it out of
circulation. However their research did not take into account the context in
which Gresham made his observation. Rolnick and Weber ignored the influence of
legal tender legislation which requires people to accept both good and bad money
as if they were of equal value. They also focused mainly on the interaction
between different metallic moneys, comparing the relative "goodness" of silver
to that of gold, which is not what Gresham was speaking of.

"The experiences of dollarization in countries with weak economies and
currencies
(for example Israel in the 1980s, Eastern Europe and countries in the period
immediately after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, or South American countries
throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first century) may be seen as
Gresham's Law operating in its reverse form (Guidotti & Rodriguez, 1992), since
in general the dollar has not been legal tender in such situations, and in some
cases its use has been illegal.

"These examples show that in the absence of legal tender laws, Gresham's law
works in reverse. If given the choice of what money to accept, people will
transact with money they believe to be of highest long-term value. However, if
not given the choice, and required to accept all money, good and bad, they will
tend to keep the money of greater perceived value in their possession, and pass
on the bad money to someone else. Said in another way, in the absence of legal
tender laws, the seller will not accept anything but money of real worth (good
money), while the existence of legal tender laws will force the seller to accept
money with no commodity value (bad money). Thus, the buyer will always try to
spend his bad money first, but in the absence of legal tender laws, the seller
will not accept money with no real worth."

-------------------------

which is just a clearer way of saying that compulsion debases life

still, I have to be sort of tripping to skip from peak to peak
and say this is definitely the way things are going
- not a hardship, though; I like to be tripping (not necessarily druggardly)
as much as possible anyway