This of course gets us heavily distorted money and prices because essentially the entire world has retreated into a single household where money is managed like a household budget (congrats people who like that wrong metaphor... this stopped clock tells your time)
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If you think prices for medical care in the US ($18k for a Covid test billed to Cigna by UCSF in one tweet that I saw!) are insane, wait till you see how prices for *everything everywhere* end up in that same insane zone.
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This might be the biggest problem with debt. High debt levels distort prices dramatically by collectivizing interests. Money gets spent the way it does within a marriage for instance -- driven more by the pair psychology and co-dependency pattern rather than any sense of value.
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Within a marriage, this is a good thing. Husband might ignore wife's spending to keep the peace. Wife might ignore husband's crazy man cave for the same reason. Parents might give in to kids demands for toys to avoid tantrums and exhaustion rather than to raise kids well.
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But the cost of this is all spending is towards the stability of the collective rather than the ostensible value of things being bought from the outside world. The price of the wife's cosmetics or husband's man cave or the kid's toys is set by the value of "avoid conflict"
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The collective that has bound itself in mutual obligation like a family using debt mechanisms has heavily overindexed internal signals over external signals. The "family" now no longer knows the cost/value of anything against an external reference.
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Or in terms of design of money, the design reflects inner psychological realities of the collective rather than outer material realities of survival and wealth creation.
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Or to put it in terms of a sociological metaphor, the "debt huddle" is so inward focused, it behaves like a locust swarm in the external world, feeding unsustainably on anything it can find.
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And opting out of the monetary system with gold or bitcoin is no use because the real base of value is people, and if the majority of people are in a locust-huddle due to economic-environmental stress, a few choosing not to be locusts can't change anything.
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Replying to @vgr
Have you ever questioned the assumption that the “real base of value” is people?
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I only recently adopted it. Not all people though. Like 5% of them. The rest are free riders mostly.
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