But it does inspire some counterthoughts and a bigger question. Further comments welcomed.

1. There wasn’t much threat of invasion to the US after 1815, if that. And not again until the 20th century, and that’s generous to what might have been possible for Old World powers. Easy to neglect the army.

2. It’s still only been 243 years. Some of earlier republics lasted longer, albeit none so large or powerful.

3. Britain, though the possible symbolism of monarchy may have played its role, was in practice an oligarchic commercial republic run first by landowners and latterly by merchants for a solid century during its heyday, and treated its soldiers as disposable on a good day. I don’t know if that British experience is a supporting example for the thesis that America has nothing to fear, or a counterexample, or the systems were still not similar enough to compare.

Bigger question- America’s shifting attitudes to its soldiers, to military power in general, to those symbols that might be called “militarism” [I think my place for drawing the line on that word is a bit old fashioned now]- flags, parades, military bands in public, and so on.

I can see that America took an almost British “Tommy left behind” attitude to its soldiers in the pre-1861 era, given the army’s role was actually pretty similar to the British army’s role- long service regulars policing scattered frontiers and occasionally aggressing a far off neighbouring state. And officers mostly living in an insular society of their own, and not all that upwardly mobile. Hmm. Maybe even worse than Britain’s relationship with its army.

But the Civil War, while far from turning the postwar US into anything but a booming commercial republic, seemed to institute both the celebratory cult of the veteran and the cult of a military education, at least for some. I remain mildly fascinated by the prevalence of military prep schools that mostly sprung up in those years, and seemed to thrive more than just lingering until the post-Vietnam era. Some still around of course.

I am aware to a degree that attitudes to both veterans and military trappings had their ebbs and flows even in the century from 1870-1970 or so, but they seemed to live on a higher plateau in that time than before or since.

And the sheer number of those schools still amazes me. The English had cadet forces at a lot of schools, but one doesn’t get the sense that the military ethos played nearly as much of a role.

We’ve done ok since.

This guy needs to read a history book.

I’m open to complete loss of trust in the paper, the pieces for that are all there in society, but if there is any sense the US government is still around in this scenario, I could see lingering assumptions about the paper lasting a while longer. We also have a fair degree of built in social habit regarding the [fake] solidity of physical cash. Even our habitual usage of phrases like “cash in hand”, hard cash, and so on, when compared to credit, for example.

I’m not saying long, or for everyone, just suggesting it isn’t obvious it will die before crypto. Installed base alone might be an advantage.

By 2nd order, yep. Down to metals and barter.

FTR, I appreciated your earlier noting, as so many metal advocates don’t, that even gold and silver money is still much the same as fiat money in the sense of being theoretical value. It’s a more robust and longer rooted theoretical value, but some gold bugs don’t seem to remember.

Apologies; appear to have missed a critical paragraph were you cover much the same thing. Seems my reading mode was off last night.

To be fair, you now have me thinking about varying degrees of apocalypse when it comes to currency viability in the aftermath.

4th Order. “Business as normal”; Fiat currency holds value in aftermath.
3rd Order. Normal fiat currency worthless. Crypto, gold, and barter goods ok.
2nd Order. Crypto-worthless. Gold and silver and barter goods ok.
1st Order. Gold worthless. Food, fuel, drugs and weapons only!
0th Order. No trades possible (no contactable trade partners?)

As a store of value, crypto-currencies are sub-optimal, particularly once the power and other infrastructure goes away. Physical representations of wealth don’t tend to evaporate once the electricity goes off.

Sorry, think you’re wrong here. Yes, fiat currency is a “confidence game” (technically, a co-ordination game). But…you know….so is gold. Gold has very little consumption value. The world produces far more gold than it consumes in a given year. We’re not eating it.

80%+ of the demand for gold is “monetary demand”; gold as a store of value. If gold was only used as an industrial metal and jewellery, prices would be a fraction of current levels. Same for silver and platinum to a lesser extent.

Gold, silver, platinum (the monetary metals) are the ONLY metals (indeed pretty much the ONLY raw materials excepting energy) which have held their values in real terms over decades. Nearly all of their price is due to them being monetary instruments.

The attraction of gold as a monetary instrument is, firstly, that we agree on it as a monetary substitute (the “confidence game”) secondly, that it cannot be debased in infinite quantities by a government, and thirdly that it is relatively easy to handle and move.

Good Cryptocurrencies have all of these properties. There is no reason why, in the long run, they should not capture a share of the market for stores of value not under government control. This may not change the world, but the capitalisation is not to be sneezed at!

Modern fiat currency represents a confidence game, backed by big governments and big banks…”

I’m not sure if you’re talking to me but I never said or implied any of these things was worth anything. I wish I had bought some bitcoin a long time ago it went up fantastically in price. I also wish I had bought some Confederate money and bayonets when I was a kid. Bundles of the currency went for a dollar and the bayonets the same.

“…You start looking for the monkey running the machinery, and he won’t be there, so…”

I know where the monkey is and what he’s doing. Sorta.

Modern fiat currency does work perfectly fine if too much is not printed and it can be converted for goods, services and has the backing of the government to pay taxes and debts. If they print too much then…

https://pavlopoulos.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/207328-100-trillion.jpg

I have about 20 of these. They’ve actually gone up in value.

I think a decent proper currency would be Kilowatt-hours. Always more being made and usually directly related to growth so it would track growth reasonably well. So at 10 cents a Kilowatt-hour you’d get a dollar but it would be called, of course, a 10KW-hr bill.

Think about it. Instead of money changing or digging shiny metals out of the ground to get more money you’d have to do something useful like make electricity. Could be a serious revolution with super growth as growth tracks energy usage generally.

Modern fiat currency represents a confidence game, backed by big governments and big banks. There’s no specie in a vault somewhere to back it up, but there is the confidence of the public using them to back it all up. No confidence, no value–Which is why the Fed will never, ever get audited. You start looking for the monkey running the machinery, and he won’t be there, so… The whole game comes crashing down. And, in the final analysis, that’s all it is–A game we play with ourselves. Even gold isn’t worth squat, because, aside from a few industrial and decorative uses, what the hell is it good for? It’s only worth what someone accepts it as being worth, and if there was as much bloody gold in our planet’s mantle as there is silica or iron, we’d pretty much be using like we do lead. Local rarity does not make it inherently valuable. It’s a bloody symbol, and that’s precisely it. I agree that a Krugerrand is worth something; so do you–So we can trade it to represent actual goods and labor. Without that agreement on the point of its value, it’s literally worthless.

Bitcoin and the crypto-currencies don’t even have that going for it–It’s all imaginary money like imaginary numbers are, intellectual conjectures. In the end, they’re only worth what someone says they are, and whatever store of value is in them is there only because there’s an agreement between parties that it exists. No agreement, no value.

Crypto-currencies are to real money what symbols on paper are to actual sounds and sights–They’re not even the flash to the bang, they’re mere conjectured hypotheticals.

Of course, you get right down to it, that’s what most money is, anyway.

“…manage without a portable store of value, physical or not or both?…”

“…run even a pre-industrial economy without credit and debt?…”

I don’t think anyone is saying we don’t need a currency. Certainly not me. The real issue is “who has the authority to issue” currency. That’s the rub.

Here’s the way the US currency works on the macro scale. The Treasury says it needs currency. The FED says ok give me a bond. The currency you need plus some interest over time. The Treasury does so and gets the money from the FED. THE FED GIVES US NOTHING in return. Nothing. We owe the FED the principle plus interest for them giving us nothing. Here’s where it gets tricky. Over time the principle must be paid back plus interest. Where does the Treasury get the money to pay the interest? They MUST get it from the FED…again…plus more interest. Now a little math will tell you that over time the interest will pile up because you literally can not get any money unless you do so with DEBT. All US money is based on debt. Every bit of it. Over time the FED will, through compounding interest, own every single thing in the country.

Now I know you will call me a fool and declare that this can’t be so but…it is. Look it up.

Even worse if all the debts were paid off in the US we would have NO MONEY. That’s right. None.

This is why the Jews own everything. They own most of the FED. They give preferential loans to Jews compared to Whites or anyone else.

A practical example of this is all the takeovers in the 1980′s and since. They get a mass of capital at low interest rates from the FED, (to be sure this may be done in a circuitous manner through various banks but the principal is the same). They use this debt to buy a company. Corporate debt is not taxed so they quit paying taxes and then they crush the employees to come up with the payments for the debt. They also charge large FEES for their advice. Romney did this. He took over a paper company with no debt and then charged them $50 million a year fro “consulting”. A lot of these companies went bankrupt. Look up Carl Icahn he did a lot of these. They not only destroyed the companies they stole the pension funds of the employees. A lot of these are responsible for the moving of manufacturing offshore. I see this as a grave security threat to the US.

Here’s the most important part and it will give you great insight into the wars going on. If a country decides to get rid of their Central bank, controlled by the Jews, they are immediately attacked and the country is ruined. Guess some countries that got rid of their central banks. Germany, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela.

The profits to the insiders are so great they can not afford to lose their central bank status. After all they can print money for nothing.

There are various plans for reform but the basic idea is that we issue our own money. If we did so and tied all loans and government spending to some sort of growth index the money supply could be stable. We’re sort of doing this right now. The FED is giving the federal government loans but instead of selling the bonds from the Treasury they just put them in their pocket. It’s over a trillion a year. It cost them nothing as they don’t give us anything anyways. But we still owe them, on paper, the principal and interest. It’s a massive rip off and it’s how the Jews run the world, along with murder, blackmail and child rape.

I’m quite open to the idea that a system that amounts to enormously sophisticated barter can work give the technology for adequate recording and speed. I’m even open to the idea that for all it’s relative sophistication, our current system might be considered only a few steps above carrying around stamped metal pre-coin tokens.

What I don’t understand is this set of questions-

How do we manage a vast array of commercial and personal transactions of dizzying complexity without something like a currency, physical or not?

How do we manage without a portable store of value, physical or not or both?

Do those have to be the same unit? Does that unit have to have universal fixed value or can it be tradeable in and of itself, and therefore have fluid price?

How would it be possible to run even a pre-industrial economy without credit and debt? How could anything more modern be run on the basis of [even the digital equivalent of] cash in hand?