Or does the $900 they lent create a -$900 for the bank that is cancelled through repayment?

Correct (effectively). Remember how you are “loaning” money to the bank by depositing money in ur bank account? Think about it - if someone loaned you money, and you spent it somewhere, would you have 0 money or would you have negative money (in terms of cash)?

Interestingly, this is why Nordic countries technically have one of the highest wealth inequalities in the world. It’s because they easily get home loans as the government acts as their guarantors. Here’s a vid to explain this.

Holy shit. I get it! That’s a great explanation and I really appreciate your taking the time to type it all out. I’m glad we don’t have Lemmy medallions to award but, if we did, I’d give you one.

Awwww thankssss

I’m a scientist, not an economist

I’m neither lmao. We just had a macroecon credit in my degree program, which is where I learnt about this.

Halp!

Now onto this… You’re kinda right but kinda wrong in that fractional reserve banking “creates money”. Here’s a way to think about putting your money in a bank. By opening a bank account, you are not putting your money in a vault. You are loaning it to the bank. The bank then loans it out to another person, who then “loans” it to another bank. Hence, fractional reserve banking is a natural side effect of this logic. What would happen if we had a 100% fractional reserve? Well, the bank wouldn’t be able to loan your money to anyone then. It would essentially become a vault.

Therefore, fractional reserve banking is necessary to make loaning money possible. Loaning money is necessary for obvious reasons.

Now to the “creating money” part. Sure, at the macro scale, you get a lot of virtual money in the economy. At the micro level though, individual banks aren’t creating money. They still have to get the money that they’ve lent out back. If they fail to do so, they’re going to go bankrupt. Banks would never go bankrupt if they could print money on a micro scale, right?

Okay, so now let’s zoom out back at the macro scale. Now, you can accelerate or decelerate the economy by controlling the ratio of money that is in circulation vs money that is out of circulation. It’s simple- more money in economy = more demand = more profits = more investments in increasing supply to be competitive = more work done. If this demand however drops, profits drop, and increase in supply drops. This is very bad as no work will be done. However, if demand increases too much for essential goods (like food, housing, etc.), it is bad as it can cause problems for people till the supply can catch up. The economy is going too fast in such cases.

Now, you can slow the economy down by many ways- by increasing interest rates, increases the fractional reserve and so on. This way, less people are going to borrow (you just reduced demand by this simple technique). You now reduced demand in your economy and slowed it down. The opposite can be done to speed the economy up.

It’s a little more complicated than that. Without fractional reserve banking, the economy would be more difficult to control. I would recommend a quick macroecon video or something.

I myself took quite a while to really understand why this was legal even during my macroecon credit. It actually makes sense when you think about it.

Upper age restriction

And what happens when medical science increases life expectancy? U would have to amend the constitution to pass this. Think of how nightmarish it is to do this. Now think of amending this AGAIN when life expectancy increases every year.

Does not lie about well known facts from scientist, like Covid-19.

Who decides what “well known facts” are? A particular non-political committee? The supreme court was supposed to be this committee. It clearly became political quickly…

Disclaimer: Fuck Trump.

That being said, convicted “criminals” should still be able to run for any public office in my opinion. A tyrant CAN capture the judiciary and imprison their political opponents. This is in fact what happened in the Indian elections right now. This is in fact what happened in the US elections in the early 1900s, where a socialist candidate ran for President from prison. What was his crime? Striking when the State had deemed it illegal to do so.

Agreed. Although I do not believe this trend will be consistent for the next 4-5 decades. The US will definitely get universal healthcare in at least 2 decades. Making constitutional amendments for such short term issues is short sighted in my opinion.

Covid has had a huge role in skewing this.

How dare the animals engage in such unnatural behavior!!! /s

No. Doing so would be very short sighted, considering that human life expectancy would be seeing a massive bump in the coming decades.

bUt OcToBeR 7th… ThAt ChAnGeD eVeRyThInG!!! /s

Art, animation, etc. See furry art to know more.

Trillium notes!!! It’s a really really beautiful note taking application for linux!

India. Very strict gun laws. This law is enforced in the part of India that I live in. The only gunshots that I’ve heard in my life are from movies and video games. However, I did hold a gun in my hand once hehe. One of my friends’ dads had a gun license for some reason (I think he was a top level policeman or something). It was an unloaded black revolver that he was showing off to us kids lol. I remember being surprised at how much heavier it was than I thought it to be.

HOWEVER, in northern India (especially Uttar Pradesh), illegal guns are a very real thing. The law is very poorly enforced there. So yeah… There’s that.

The communist utopia would be a post scarcity society, where money would be irrelevant at individual level. Hence, “paving the road” wouldn’t be a scarce service. Therefore, noone would oppose it. But let’s assume that some still oppose. In this case, it would just be democracy at work. That’s why the communist utopia is something that we can get extremely close to, instead of actually reaching it.

For instance, “banning murder” is coercive for murderers. Now, they are coerced into not murdering people. This however doesn’t mean that shall be allowed to go on murdering people, right?

When someone who owns the path to your house decides they won’t let you use that path anymore. Or when the guy who owns the water works doesn’t like you and decides that your house won’t get any water any more?

This would be public property. No private ownership.

Or even more simple: what if you and your neighbour have a conflict that escalates further and further? Should you just duel? Or maybe shoot the neighbour in their sleep before they do it with you?

So this is how I understand it. Achieving the communist utopia in its purest form would be impossible. However, the goal should be to go as close to it as possible. In your scenario, your neighbor would just be “nice”, thus stopping any escalation of your conflict. Again, as it’s impossible for this to happen completely, we would still require the presence of SOME coercive entity. However, the scale of this entity would reduce over time, as people would tend to be less asshole-ey over time (consider how wars have reduced over time).

And lastly: To get to this state, you need to coerce the current coercive institutions out of said power. Is that not being coercive yourself?

It is. However, this isn’t necessarily contradictory. Say you have an institution with 121 coercion points. You thus overthrow this institution, thus becoming worth say 70 coercion points. After the overthrowing is complete, you dissolve your own institution that did the coercion on the other coercive institution. Thus, 0 coercion achieved.

Another way to explain this: The Nazis started a war. The goal was to end this war. However, to end this war, the allies entered the war, thus expanding its scale. In the end however, the war ended.

YESSS!!! I HAVE AN ENTIRE MANIFESTO ON DIGITAL DIRECT DEMOCRACY!!! The only part that stumped me was how it could be stateless (I was confusing “state” with “government”).

Yea, cops do tend to be grumpy little assholes. I was talking about the police force from a theoretical standpoint. If someone was breaking into my house, I would need to call for help, right?

Okay now this is the answer that I was looking for! This makes perfect sense! For me, “state” and “government” were synonyms prior to reading your comment. So basically, the communist utpoia is a world devoid of institutionalized coercion.

To answer my question, a space program could definitely work. The only thing is, all scientists would be working voluntarily there. No scientist would become homeless if they decided to stay home for the day.

Well, the communist utopia is stateless, no?

Ok, so then would be correct to say that the communist utopia is a sort of singularity (consider y=1/x, where x=0). It can never be achieved, but the goal should be to get as close to it as possible. We will never achieve total post scarcity. However, we can achieve post scarcity for things like food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education, then probably internet access, smartphones, video games and so on.

We can never eliminate institutions of authority, but we can reduce their presence as much as possible. For example, we can never eliminate the police force, as there still would be some sociopaths who we would need protection from. However, as society would progress, crime would drop such that we would require smaller and smaller police forces.

So in conclusion, am I right in considering the communist utopia as a singularity?