Post by oliver on Jul 2, 2018 9:50:03 GMT
I found this interesting article from Al Jazeera about Kurdistan: An Account of Cashless Kurds
The basic gist is that in the absence of official channels, people will find other ways to keep commerce alive and will not be held back by the supposed limited quantity of cash or the absence of a central bank. Such levels of improvisation may be hard to imagine for us living in stable political systems, but it's probably normal for many others in less stable regions.
The article also supports what you say below with regards to Saddam's regime. And I agree with it, too. I'm not sure it's about debt being sustainable as much as about overpaying government cronies. But then again, the two may come down to the same thing in the end, at least if sustainability is measured in terms of real goods and services, aka inflation.
This is how the guy behind your link sees 'fiat money':
Governments can misuse the accounting system, and the way they misuse it is always by incurring more public debt than is sustainable -- any money created is just a by-product of this kind of misuse. It's not an ability to create money that is dangerous, but an ability to incur public debt without there being any creditor who could stop this. Yet this ability must always exist in a modern democratic society, I suppose, and it is the debtors, the public, who should set the limits. By the way, today this is even more true of private debtors. They should themselves say no to incurring more debt. Once all the (potential) creditors say no, the debtor has already incurred way too much debt.