Hey @davidpakman if you talk to Pavlina again it would be great to hear her thoughts on fractional reserve banking. I'm assuming that fits into the government creates money not barter because the fractional reserve banking system is something that the government created and legitimizes. And to a certain extent taxes are just another kind of debt. The governmen gives itself power to levy taxes and that creates and enduring debt obligation from every citizen which it can raise money on by selling more debt (bonds). If the US government had no power to levy taxes would anyone ever want to buy our bonds?
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great idea!
I notice you didn't talk about cryptocurrencies with her - I was guessing you'd get into that later. Tying cryptocurrencies and my comment about fractional reserve banking together - I've so far seen no cryptocurrency that supports the notion of FRB - you can't just magic coins out of thin air based on how many are in your wallet. To me that's one huge difference between cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies (and sorry, I'm probably totally messing up use of the words "currency" and "money" here, I'm no expert for sure!
When everyone is saying Bitcoin or whatever is a Ponzi scheme I never hear anyone mention that. It's not just the government that print money, banks make it out of thing air at a 10:1 ratio of "real money" to their debt derived money. IMO that makes Bitcoin etc. far superior. You don't have 10x the real money leveraged off future payments of debt at an interest rate. As I said, I'm not expert but the way I read it, if we all stopped paying our debts - mortgages, student loans, credit cards etc, then 9/10 of all money would just be worthless and our economy would collapse over night. Doesn't this explain why Republicans are always passing laws to eliminate use of bankruptcy for us "little people"? They want to make sure we never consider stopping paying our debt and delcaring bankruptcy as a solution to our financial problems!