Insider
by
Chris Martenson
Executive Summary
- The boom in fossil energy has allowed us to enjoy a stability that we may not be able to maintain in the future
- As society erodes, power concentrates in those intent on grabbing it
- Nurturing cultural capital is key to maintaining freedom and fairness
- Strategies for reducing your risk to societal breakdown
If you have not yet read Part 1: Rising Police Aggression A Telling Indicator Of Our Societal Decline available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
Now we need to prepare those people who live in borderline uncivilized nations, which include the US, Mexico, much of South America, and a few European nations for what is coming next.
Ask yourself this: If tensions are this bad now, while relatively abundant resources exist, how bad do you think they’ll get during the next economic downturn or financial crisis?
One of the core predicaments is that the future simply cannot be more wonderful than the past in terms of ease of life and living standards. The pie is no longer growing like it used to, and someday it will begin to shrink.
My Monkey Brain
I have a confession to make. I react strongly to injustice. It simply makes my blood boil. Writing this article has been one of my less fun adventures in a while because of all the horrible injustices I had to wade through to assemble it.
For a long time I thought that my angry reaction to injustice had to do with old childhood slights around unequal Christmas gifts or something, but I’ve since learned it’s a more primal reaction than that.
Or perhaps I should say primate reaction.
Watch how Capuchin monkeys react an unfair situation and if you are like me, you’ll…
Preparing for the Coming Breakdown
PREVIEW by Chris MartensonExecutive Summary
- The boom in fossil energy has allowed us to enjoy a stability that we may not be able to maintain in the future
- As society erodes, power concentrates in those intent on grabbing it
- Nurturing cultural capital is key to maintaining freedom and fairness
- Strategies for reducing your risk to societal breakdown
If you have not yet read Part 1: Rising Police Aggression A Telling Indicator Of Our Societal Decline available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
Now we need to prepare those people who live in borderline uncivilized nations, which include the US, Mexico, much of South America, and a few European nations for what is coming next.
Ask yourself this: If tensions are this bad now, while relatively abundant resources exist, how bad do you think they’ll get during the next economic downturn or financial crisis?
One of the core predicaments is that the future simply cannot be more wonderful than the past in terms of ease of life and living standards. The pie is no longer growing like it used to, and someday it will begin to shrink.
My Monkey Brain
I have a confession to make. I react strongly to injustice. It simply makes my blood boil. Writing this article has been one of my less fun adventures in a while because of all the horrible injustices I had to wade through to assemble it.
For a long time I thought that my angry reaction to injustice had to do with old childhood slights around unequal Christmas gifts or something, but I’ve since learned it’s a more primal reaction than that.
Or perhaps I should say primate reaction.
Watch how Capuchin monkeys react an unfair situation and if you are like me, you’ll…
by
Brian Pretti
by
charleshughsmith
Executive Summary
- Money functions as a store of value and a means of exchange, but it's possible to have 2 forms (or more) of money simultaneously serving as each
- Having complementary forms of money can provide more resilience to a monetary system – history has a number of examples of this
- A key success factor of such systems is that the forms of money are NOT issues and controlled by the State
- Which new forms of money will arise when the current State fiat money regimes fail
If you have not yet read Part 1: The Fatal Flaw Of Centrally-Issued Money available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
Separating Money’s Two Functions
Money has two basic functions: it is a store of value (that is, it holds its purchasing power long after you obtain it in trade for goods and services) and it is a means of exchange: there has to be enough in circulation to grease the exchange of goods and services.
Though we are accustomed to one form of money playing both of these roles, there is no reason why each function can’t be served by separate kinds of money—that is, one for exchange and one as a store of value.
This is precisely what we find in the historical record, where bills of exchange, letters of credit (in essence, credit money), paper chits from retailers and other ephemeral means of exchange greased trade while gold and silver or other scarce materials served as stores of value.
As anthropologist David Graeber established in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, money arose not from barter—the usual assumption—but from the rise of credit-based exchange and debt recorded on clay tablets, notched sticks or parchment.
In Graeber’s view, the key feature of money used for exchange is that it always has an end buyer. The intrinsically worthless chit issued by a retailer can serve as money through dozens of transactions because everyone trusts that the issuer—the retailer—will accept the chit as being worth an established amount of goods, i.e. purchasing power.
If Joe’s Market issues a chit that can be traded for a can of beans, you and I can exchange that chit as payment of debt or purchase of some other good or service because we know we can always exchange the chit for a can of beans. The chit serves as money.
When gold and silver were scarce in…
The Future of Money
PREVIEW by charleshughsmithExecutive Summary
- Money functions as a store of value and a means of exchange, but it's possible to have 2 forms (or more) of money simultaneously serving as each
- Having complementary forms of money can provide more resilience to a monetary system – history has a number of examples of this
- A key success factor of such systems is that the forms of money are NOT issues and controlled by the State
- Which new forms of money will arise when the current State fiat money regimes fail
If you have not yet read Part 1: The Fatal Flaw Of Centrally-Issued Money available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
Separating Money’s Two Functions
Money has two basic functions: it is a store of value (that is, it holds its purchasing power long after you obtain it in trade for goods and services) and it is a means of exchange: there has to be enough in circulation to grease the exchange of goods and services.
Though we are accustomed to one form of money playing both of these roles, there is no reason why each function can’t be served by separate kinds of money—that is, one for exchange and one as a store of value.
This is precisely what we find in the historical record, where bills of exchange, letters of credit (in essence, credit money), paper chits from retailers and other ephemeral means of exchange greased trade while gold and silver or other scarce materials served as stores of value.
As anthropologist David Graeber established in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, money arose not from barter—the usual assumption—but from the rise of credit-based exchange and debt recorded on clay tablets, notched sticks or parchment.
In Graeber’s view, the key feature of money used for exchange is that it always has an end buyer. The intrinsically worthless chit issued by a retailer can serve as money through dozens of transactions because everyone trusts that the issuer—the retailer—will accept the chit as being worth an established amount of goods, i.e. purchasing power.
If Joe’s Market issues a chit that can be traded for a can of beans, you and I can exchange that chit as payment of debt or purchase of some other good or service because we know we can always exchange the chit for a can of beans. The chit serves as money.
When gold and silver were scarce in…
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