Seems like he posted a lame joke. The appropriate response would be for other users to downvote him. I've seen his other comments and he'll regularly be downvoted, but I think you're overreacting a bit. Perhaps you should stick to making sure HN runs, and aside from that mind your own business?
Sadly, it's my business to deal with flamewars, personal attacks, trolling, and other abuses of HN. If flames are allowed to burn this place to a crisp, HN won't be HN anymore. And eventually there wouldn't be anything worth running or anyone to run it for.
As an outsider reading this thread I couldn't help but laugh at this.
Galanwe said phry was "very malicious", which is actually and not just tenuously a personal attack. Do you plan to delete their comment as well? Interesting standards on HN.
Please don't interpret as "standards" what is typically a simple case of us seeing one comment and not the other. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. If you run across something that didn't get moderated when it should have, the likeliest explanation is that we just didn't see it.
Edit: I've tracked down the comment you're referring to and indeed, no moderator saw it. I've replied to it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20964408. In the future, if there's a comment you're concerned about, you should either flag it or email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
If you haven't checked specifically with us about a post, please don't draw conclusions about HN moderation—those are almost always non sequiturs. People usually jump to the idea that we secretly support the one side (where they didn't see us moderate) over the other side (where they did). That is reading patterns into randomness.
Edit: Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
"It lets everyone know it's safe to ignore you" is a personal attack. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd really appreciate it.
Ok, I believe you that that was your intent. But "you" is a personal pronoun. If you use that pronoun and sling pejoratives, people are naturally going to interpret it as a personal attack, as I did. If you don't want to be read that way, the burden is on you to disambiguate that.
> Ad hominem (Latin for "to the person"),[1] short for argumentum ad hominem, typically refers to a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.
You failed at the "genuine discussion" part by citing pop econ horseshit.
OK: there are two fundamental problems that have to be solved in any monetary system: how to keep the records, and how to control the money supply. With regards to the latter, there are only two options:
1. Let the money supply be controlled by the laws of physics, e.g. use a scarce material as money.
2. Let the money supply be controlled by some policy.
The second option subdivides into two further sub-options:
2a. Let the free market produce money competitively like any other product.
2b. Let the government (or a private entity acting on behalf of the government) do it as an artificial monopoly.
That last option is a central bank.
Those are all the possibilities. All of them have been tried at one time or another in human history. Flawed as it may be, the one that has produced objectively the best results in terms of economic stability and prosperity has been 2b. And there isn't really much more that can be said about it.
Oh, almost forgot:
> > Arglebargle?
> Because I know what that word means.
Arglebargle is the name of an obscure author who wrote on all manner of topics, but whose work has been largely forgotten.
> Flawed as it may be, the one that has produced objectively the best results in terms of economic stability and prosperity has been 2b.
I'm certainly no expert, but I've read a bit into 2a (so called "free banking" eras) and they seemed overwhelmingly quite stable. On what do you base an objective dismissal of that approach?
Mainly my knowledge of the history of the financial system in the U.S. which was characterized by regular panics, crises, and bank runs before the Federal Reserve was founded. (Of course, the Fed bungled it badly in the Great Depression, but has done a pretty reasonable job since then.) Looking now at the history of free banking in other parts of the world it looks like it is not invariably catastrophic. Maybe it's a cultural thing. I suspect that free banking works better in a world where everyone knows everyone else, and the banker's customers know where the banker lives so if he screws things up too badly there's a real risk that people will literally show up on his doorstep with pitchforks.
The system in the US before the creation of the Fed wasn't free banking; after the civil war, the National Banking Acts of 1863-64 created a network of chartered national banks with a single currency backed by the US Treasury. Then in 1879, the US went back to the gold standard, so you're on (1), not (2a).
On that view there has never been a 2a system. No one would honor a private bank note that was not backed by some asset or government fiat. Such a note would, quite literally, be worth no more than the paper it was printed on.
There's a difference between people freely choosing what assets are acceptable to back a given currency and having many currencies floating in value against each other, or the government deciding what each currency can be backed against and at what value (the National Banks had to accept each other's currency at par value).
Yes, of course. But if you have currencies backed by too many different kinds of assets those currencies aren't money any more, they are tokens in a barter economy.
It seems like OP just thinks Jefferson has written some "extremely valid criticism" of central banking, from before the US had the system. Who knows? I think central banking is probably fine and cryptocurrencies are stupid and I don't see where the appeal to authority is.
Your thoughts are clear and interesting. It appears we've always had a ratio of 1, 2a and 2b with some collapses or perhaps even more illusive is the [slow] migration. Like paper gold, man-made diamonds or the private entity stops acting on behalf of the government and ends up owning it.
