12/28/2013 Portland, Oregon – Pop in your mints…
As 2013 winds down, it must be acknowledged that in the financial and monetary world, the story of the year has been crypto currencies. Our own awareness that Bitcoin may be something more than a passing fad, our monetary epiphany, if you will, came in March of this year, when we were contacted for assistance in forming a business plan for an exchange. The episode, while it has yet to be fully capitalized on, caused us to look deeply into Bitcoin.
What we found was astonishing. You can read the details in our eBook on the subject but the jest is that it is digital gold.
As the crypto currency gained in price and popularity, many have been the detractors who have dismissed it on the grounds that it is “nothing”, or a “Ponzi scheme.”. What such detractors fail to realize is that it is they that do not comprehend the very nature of money.
Money, in any form, is nothing more than a concept. All that Bitcoins do is capture this concept, that we refer to as the monetary premium, in its purest form.
JPMorgan Steps Into the Fray
The latest news on the crypto currency front is that JPMorgan is dusting off a patent it filed in 1999 in what is surely a heavy handed effort to exert its primacy in the crypto currency space. Whether or not they will succeed remains to be seen, but one thing is clear, the digital currency space is divided into those who want to mainstream these currencies and being them under sovereign control, and those who do out.
These types of philosophical divisions are as old as time itself, that of the anarchist and the statist, and the schism will remain, though the thought of anarchists and statist sharing a blockchain is interesting indeed.
Dogecoin
Another development worth following is the rise of the Dogecoin, which is all at once a joke and a serious foray into the crypto currency space. You see Dogecoin is one of many cryptos that we foresaw coming into existence back in April and is further proof that the fiat currencies of the world are wholly inadequate and act as a restraint on human trade rather than a facilitator of it, which is really their only redeeming quality.
It is a beautiful irony that a fellow Portlander had a hand in creating it.
Why Long Term Unemployment Benefits Must be Extended
Those who have suffered through The Mint for any amount of time are likely aware of our Libertarian and Anarchist philosophical sympathies. As such, it may come as a surprise that we believe that most Social Safety nets should be maintained. As such, we think that lawmakers are making a grave error in failing to extend the emergency extensions to the Federal unemployment programs that have recently expired.
It is not that we champion sloth or laziness, as our position may cause some to assume, (though we admit that at times, our own inner-laziness gets the best of us).
Our reasoning behind this position is that poverty, joblessness, the skyrocketing cost of living and the like are largely a result of the current, insane debt based monetary system in which the United States and much of the world have been forced to live for over a century now.
As one looks back on the origins of what has become known as the Social Contract, it must be noted that they occurred in the 1930s after the great depression had ravaged the country. What the politicians realized was that they had a very big problem on their hands, the workforce was severely “dislocated,” to use today’s terminology. What they did not realize that the cause of this was the currency act that had been signed back in 1913, when debt, in the form of Federal Reserve Notes, became money.
The mandate for the American populace to use this system amounted to a cosmic shift in everything the American workforce knew about money and how to make it. The economic rules had been turned on their head, and it would take a very long time for an honest and hard working people to understand that in the new system, the only way to get rich was to severely indebt oneself.
Indeed, today many still do not get it. However, the debt based currency system must keep growing in order for it to remain viable, meaning that contrary to the beliefs of some, the Federal Government will always run a deficit, or at least strive to, and the largest companies will be the ones who are able to indebt themselves faster than their rivals and convince others to do so.
Using debt as currency changed the entire societal paradigm, making Social Safety nets a necessary part of the landscape, not because people were better off or well cared for as a result of them, rather, because the debt based currency system requires every member of society to participate in order for it to perpetuate itself. Even those who are unemployed must be given some currency to circulate so that they stay attached to the game.
Otherwise, if too many of them stayed out of the game for too long, as is the case now with youth in much of Europe and even here in America, they may just realize that there is much work to be done outside of the currency system, and that, in fact, the debt based currency system acts as a giant straight jacket on human potential.
If they dwelt upon the above clever metaphor, as you may find yourself doing now, fellow taxpayer, they might understand that Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and other crypto currencies are the latest attempt by humanity to break out of the straight jacket.
If efforts to hinder them, such as JPMorgan’s patent filing, ultimately fail, as we believe they will (at least in practice), the straight jacket of debt based currency will be off and the systems of the nation state which supported them will become relegated to the second class status they so richly deserve.
The very concept of Unemployment is made necessary by debt based currencies, as such, it is right that they should provide Safety nets to catch those who fall out of the workforce. At this stage, it is inconceivable that the current Congress would cut these benefits, for to do so is to plant but one more nail in the coffin of the current debt based currency system, and to encourage a new and better understanding of money, one that will benefit both humankind and the creation itself.
Stay with us, there is much more to come.
Stay tuned and Trust Jesus.
Stay Fresh!
Email: davidminteconomics@gmail.com
Key Indicators for December 27, 2013
Copper Price per Lb: $3.35
Oil Price per Barrel: $100.32
Corn Price per Bushel: $4.28
10 Yr US Treasury Bond: 3.01%
Mt Gox Bitcoin price in US: $779.89
FED Target Rate: 0.08% ON AUTOPILOT, THE FED IS DEAD!
Gold Price Per Ounce: $1,214
MINT Perceived Target Rate*: 0.25%
Unemployment Rate: 7.0%
Inflation Rate (CPI): 0.0%
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 16,478
M1 Monetary Base: $2,620,500,000,000
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