It's really about having a more nuanced understanding of these systems.
Money is one of the earliest technologies. It is also one of the most successful because of its ability to allocate power and resources in a way that facilitates both cooperation and hierarchy.
But its form is quite dated. It needs to become a high technology. Some of the "socialistic" ideals (such as food and housing security) are nearly undeniable, if you have moved on from Social Darwinism (which many have not unfortunately).
But socialists have traditionally failed to appreciate the great success of money, the necessity of evolution and freedom, and robustness of dynamic networks over centralized systems.
We have technologies that are sophisticated enough that we can have dynamic evolving systems but still have housing security and limit inequality while remaining sustainable. But we aren't going to be able to do that with old-fashioned traditional money or by banning money or some central control system. To accomplish our goals we need to make society into a high-technology by integrating our innovations properly.
"And now here we are in a world of high information technology β and people think itβs smart, nay cutting-edge, to create a sort of virtual currency whose creation requires wasting real resources in a way Adam Smith considered foolish and outmoded in 1776."
Whatever the high-tech economic mechanism will be, bitcoin doesn't seem likely to be it.
Right. I wasn't recommending Bitcoin. I was talking about things more along the lines of Ethereum.
Ethereum is what happens when you keep evolving the idea of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is what happens when you freeze the idea.
But I will say that despite the wastefulness and other flaws of Bitcoin, at least it uses math to verify the ledger, rather than relying on authority and private entities to distribute points without any real verification.
Money is just a points system used to distribute control over resources. The main advantage of cryptocurrency is that it uses math to verify that people are not cheating in their points distribution.
Money is one of the earliest technologies. It is also one of the most successful because of its ability to allocate power and resources in a way that facilitates both cooperation and hierarchy.
But its form is quite dated. It needs to become a high technology. Some of the "socialistic" ideals (such as food and housing security) are nearly undeniable, if you have moved on from Social Darwinism (which many have not unfortunately).
But socialists have traditionally failed to appreciate the great success of money, the necessity of evolution and freedom, and robustness of dynamic networks over centralized systems.
We have technologies that are sophisticated enough that we can have dynamic evolving systems but still have housing security and limit inequality while remaining sustainable. But we aren't going to be able to do that with old-fashioned traditional money or by banning money or some central control system. To accomplish our goals we need to make society into a high-technology by integrating our innovations properly.