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781 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 15 Nov 2023 \ parent \ on: _Broken Money_ book club, part 4 bitcoin
Oh man, there is a question I'll post later that you're going salivate over I think. I'll move it up in the queue when I get back to the computer.
That's for sure true, I was just trying to not bleed the argument everywhere.
I don't think you're off target either.
There's all these famous examples of how this worked in the mid to late Roman Republic, where people would get elected to these different administrative positions for a term (I forget the non-Consular titles, and I forget how long the appointment was -- I think 2 years?) and they'd absolutely bleed the provinces dry for as much tax revenue as they could harvest, to unlock the next step in the Roman political cycle. Political office has always been expensive.
Aside from the obvious takeaway, which was the point you made, it's interesting to me that sound money helped curtail this process not at all. Bitcoiners sometimes talk about eras of debasement leading to the fall of the Empire, but that came later, and was (not surprisingly) multi-factorial.
Figuring out the true, non-hopium-derived power of sound money is a topic I think people should care about a lot more than they seem to.
it's interesting to me that sound money helped curtail this process not at all.
I was making a similar point on a recent post. There are lots of perverse incentives in society that are based on a wide variety of institutions. What sound money does is fix a small subset of those.
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