It's been a while since I've seen mail on this list so I thought I'd stir up a little
troll thread and see what comes of it.

While popcorn is going round over The Hacking Team being thoroughly pwnd, it seems that
due to being not well liked by his negotiating partners, Yanis Varoufakis is again
unemployed and with an ongoing Bank Holiday which began June 29th, Greece has returned
to it's knees, requesting another loan.

What's interesting is that Yanis seems to have a coherent explanation for what's going
on, and he uses the metaphore of the Minotaur, a beast in Greek Mythology which demanded
and devoured human sacrifices. The Global Minotaur of Yanis's books is the Wall Street
money machine which (it is conjectured) died suddenly in 2008, sending the world economy
tumbling ever since.

The jist of the story seems to be that it is not the fault of the big spenders that we
are in economic crisis but rather of scrimpy conservitive savers. The hard working
undemanding Germans and Chinese of our world would not so much as think to give money
to their impoverished neighbors in Greece, Spain or India because they didn't *earn* it.
Instead they will put that money into safe investments... Investing in AAA rated
Wall Street assets in solid American institutions which are, but for their incredible
capacity to command more and more loans, absolutely bankrupt. While these institutions
pump the borrowed money into government spending, corporate loans and the housing bubble,
Americans dutifully use it to buy the Chinese goods. So all is well as everybody has a job,
food on the table and a place to sleep at night. In good times, the system remains
surprisingly stable, as the good German or Chinese man is no more likely to spend than is
the unemployed American graduate likely to pay off his onerous student loans, but it is
wildly complex and inefficient. Fundimentally such a system doesn't exist to satisfy any
real economic need or even an imagined need for American global domination, it exists
simply to bend the world around the worldview of the Germans, Dutch, Chinese and all of
the other conservative peoples who cannot cope with the thought of giving something away.


So if this theory is to be believed, why don't we establish a trade and currency zone
which levies a progressive income tax and distributes the money to every person in equal
measure?

Finally, if Unconditional Basic Income is actually economically defensible, could it not
be implemented through a cryptocurrency with an identity management extension?


Caleb


--
Satire is the escape hatch from the cycle of sorrow, hatred and violence. #JeSuisCharlie