The repeal the 19th meme is funny but now I'm not sure that is as much of a problem.
The property requirement meant that only those with skin in the game were the ones who got to decide who governed. Without it we have paupers and indolents with the power to spend money that they did not earn or pay.
That inevitably leads to the death spiral from the famous quote:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
Obviously no political movement can form based on this principle since our current "conservatives" are too spineless to even fight for voter ID requirements. But at least it is within the overton window allowing for public discussion.
Let me be clearer about this. They can be. They just normally aren't. The reason for this is the same reason a cable TV provider grants you access to 4 of the 6 channels you want along with 200 others you don't. Bundling is the objective to prevent low demand from effecting a business. In politics, the same protectionism applies. You'd have to have a government willing to actually run a program that would respond to voter demand through funding.
And yes, the huge benefit to this is that the voter also becomes a literal investor in his own community and state. The state is required to benefit him in the long run, and fulfilling those benefits makes a high-trust society between the state and the people.
Financially, it shouldn't ever be done. For my purposes, I'm only using it to counter the argument against profitability.
However, for a financial justification, negative yield bonds are still purchased to counter inflation, while assuming that the state will still repay them.
For example, Let's say that back in 2015, you went out and bought a $100, 5 year, US bond that gives you 5% annual interest. When you sell back the bond today, you will get back $128.34. That's nice. It's a profit of $28.34... But inflation is a thing in most countries. The US has around 3% annual inflation. $100 in 2015 is worth the same purchasing power as $109.32 today.
All the numbers went up, but think about this for a second. Inflation causes prices to go up, which means your purchasing power goes down. If you had simply had a $100 bill in your pocket for 5 years, you would have effectively lost $9.32 in purchasing power. Check the graphs on the right hand side of the page. That $100 bill would have bought you significantly fewer snickerdoodles in 2020 than it did in 2015. But because you had a bond, you got $28.34 back... That offsets the $9.32 you lost in purchasing power.
So because of the bond, you gained $19.02 in purchasing power. (28.34-9.32)
What throws people off is the lack of a time reference. I'd argue this done maliciously, so let me be more specific.
In 2020, because of that bond, you are able to buy 19.02 2015-USD more snickerdoodles than you could in 2015... but the cash register will have read 28.34 2020-USD.
The purpose of money is to preserve purchasing power through time. Because of intentional inflation, your currency is actually losing purchasing power all day long.
Bonds and saving's accounts are meant to counter the very problem that government and the banks intentionally created for you. "I'm stealing your money. Quick! Give it to me now and I promise to steal less of it over time!"
Okay, so let's say you don't live in the US. Let's say you live in Venezuela.
Same example. If you had had 100 2015-Bolivars in your pocket it would be worth... um... 5e-9... which is actually worth less than the paper it's printed on. When your currency is worth less than itself, that's a sign of inflation. Remember that the next time John Green rants about pennies.
But let's say you were a mad man and trusted the Venezuelan government to pay back your bonds, and because you were a party loyalist, they did!
But let's say that the bond's interest rate is -5% every year. You're left with 77.84 Bolivars. Now, as bad as that is, it's better than the literally worthless paper in your pocket. Just make sure they don't pay you back the Bolivar in cash (which is what most governments try to do).
That should tell you what investors are thinking when they are buying German government bonds at negative interest rates, they expect inflation to be so bad, that taking a guaranteed loss is better than them keeping currency in their pockets.
Well, yeah.
Alright, I think I understand the negative yield thing. It's..a horrible setup to have expected inflation be so high.
I'm curious if you were wanting another motivation to be at play here? As much as I'd personally like it if people were motivated purely by wanting to further their communities and the usefulness of currently inescapable governing bodies, I don't actually expect others to be so motivated.
It's a bit of a blackpill topic, so I don't speak of it much, but what do you consider to be the primary motivators behind this planned inflation thing that seemingly every nation must suffer? I just shorthand the blame to central banking sometimes, but I know I'm missing some data.
Going off of gut instinct, I want to blame the stock market because I get warning signs over that easy-money, no-value, gambling-for-adults racket. I've even managed to get a few friends to agree with me on stocks being untrustworthy or "wrong", but ultimately, they feel they have no choice but to invest because of inflation/devaluation/random economics jargon. I hate that - people feeling forced into a specific action because of pressure from all angles. That's part of why I immediately jumped to financial reasoning for bonds.
I'm not gonna bother asking "How do we delete inflation?", it's enough to just understand why it's being forced everywhere all the time. I imagine the federal reserve and our debt-based currency is part of America's problem here, but I don't think that explains things in other nations. Money stuff and globalized systems tend to make me angry, and so I kind of shut them out of my mind, leaving me lacking on a lot of data.
Well, no. I say that it shouldn't ever be done because it's literally a bad deal. You're guaranteeing to lose money on an investment, but you're doing it anyway because what the government is doing is worse than just you losing a portion of your money.
I don't consider the functions of reality to be 'black pill'. The fact that you understand something means you can figure out how to get around it.
I will give you the direct answer first, and then provide you with 2 videos that elaborate the two parts.
The reason perpetual inflation is done is because inflation is not done universally all at once. Inflation is done in piecemeal segments over time. The first people to get the inflated (printed) currency benefit immediately. For them, it really is free money. The last people to get it, actually lose purchasing power. Inflating currency has to be done with the support of the world's largest investment banks. Which means, they get the money first. All of us get the money last, and our purchasing power goes to the banks due to inflation.
Here's a video from Academic Agent covering how Inflation works, and why Time Preference determines who benefits.
Here's a video from Michael Maloney, explaining how the banks, the treasury, and the government create currency, and how the stockholders of the Federal Reserve, as well as the largest banks, benefit.
Just as a note on Mike's video, Bonds don't have to be involved in creating currency. It's just that our government chooses to do this as part of our monetary system.
It's not that the stock market is the problem. It's that the stock market's behavior is the result of the problem. Basically, the stock market has to filled to the brim with other people's money because it's trying to pay off all those long term mortgages, retirement plans, and pension funds that are supposed to make people money at the end of their lives. But the system can't actually manage this forever. It simply must fail.
That's literally what the system is designed to do. It's why your parents, teachers, and friends understand that keeping currency under their mattress is bad, and it's why they need a savings account to counter inflation.
But the inflation was never an accident. It's on purpose. The largest banks on Earth set up a system where not only do they benefit from making your currency worthless, but you have to give them your currency in order for it to have any value in the future at all.
Actually you asked a really good question. It's called "deflation". Prices collapse to correct for the money supply. As with the The Great Recession, the stabalizing effort by the banks is to move their debts into failing corporate & legal entities and close them out. Effectively erasing billions of dollars from the currency & debt supply.
What happened recently is that they couldn't do that from the spread of COVID. Everybody started calling all their debts to be paid, and there wasn't ever going to be enough money to pay anything off. You notice that the price of oil fucking collapsed? That's deflation. The bank's survival was dependent upon currency injections from the fed, but somebody had to pay...
... so they chose to let the Lockdowns last months and put 50 million Americans out of work. There are serious food crises all around the world. They faced the choice of going out of business and destroying millions of lives, so they decided to wipe out the poor.
They dodged a deflationary bullet, and it very nearly cost them their power. They're not going to be willing to take that risk again. ... Though, I don't think it will matter.
Actually it does. Our Keynesian Monetary system is replicated by damn near the entire planet, and all international funding packages go through the International Monetary Fund which is also Keynesian.
Everyone's committing fraud
Thanks, it can be hard to find decent talk about economic stuff that doesn't make my skin crawl. It's over my level, so I have to stop here and digest. I saw you mention Austrian Economics in another post, so I assume that's the key. Whatever other version is being taught in american schools has a load of junk.
They teach Keynesianism.
Let me know if you have more questions.