Of double standards and Judicial murder of those who are different ..
There are two questions which should be asked of any newspaper or politician who has criticised the National Trust's William Bankes exhibition at Kingston Lacy.
1) What do you think about
* DA'ESH (the so-called "Islamic State" caliphate) throwing people off five-storey buildings for being gay in the fortunately rapidly diminishing area it controls,
* Other countries like Iran which still apply the death penalty for homosexuality, (there are about ten of them) and
* Islamist groups like the Taleban who urge that gays should be hanged from the nearest lamp-post?
2) If, like the vast majority of people, you think this is a revolting policy amounting to judicial murder when it is applied advocated elsewhere (especially by people you disapprove of) then
* should we not remember that this country also once had that policy and celebrate the fact that Britain has moved on from it?
During the 16th century I understand that the death penalty for homosexuality was passed into law, repealed and then reinstated several times before finally being on the statue book from 1563 to 1861.
According to the National Trust's historians, during the lifetime of William Bankes who owned Kingston Lacy but was forced to flee into exile for being gay, some fifty-one men were hanged in Britain under that statute during his lifetime.
I believe that people are entitled to privacy around their private lives and that what freely consenting adults do in their own bedrooms is nobody else's business and certainly not that of the state. I think most people in Britain today would agree with this, but it is important to remember that freedom from interference in people's private lives, like most other freedoms worth having, did not always exist and had to be fought for.
I do not wish to defend every aspect of the way the National Trust seems to have handled their actions to mark the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act - for example, under precisely the right to privacy which I referred to above, people should not have to answer questions about their sexual orientation if they find these intrusive or insensitive and the NT appears to have upset some of their own volunteers by not getting this right.
But where the history of a building or artistic collection which the NT is preserving for the nation is very much affected by Britain's past discriminatory laws - which is very much the case at Kingston Lacy - that history should be recorded whether the discrimination was on the grounds of race, religion, or sexuality. It is by remembering the errors of the past that we can best ensure we do not repeat them.
1) What do you think about
* DA'ESH (the so-called "Islamic State" caliphate) throwing people off five-storey buildings for being gay in the fortunately rapidly diminishing area it controls,
* Other countries like Iran which still apply the death penalty for homosexuality, (there are about ten of them) and
* Islamist groups like the Taleban who urge that gays should be hanged from the nearest lamp-post?
2) If, like the vast majority of people, you think this is a revolting policy amounting to judicial murder when it is applied advocated elsewhere (especially by people you disapprove of) then
* should we not remember that this country also once had that policy and celebrate the fact that Britain has moved on from it?
During the 16th century I understand that the death penalty for homosexuality was passed into law, repealed and then reinstated several times before finally being on the statue book from 1563 to 1861.
According to the National Trust's historians, during the lifetime of William Bankes who owned Kingston Lacy but was forced to flee into exile for being gay, some fifty-one men were hanged in Britain under that statute during his lifetime.
I believe that people are entitled to privacy around their private lives and that what freely consenting adults do in their own bedrooms is nobody else's business and certainly not that of the state. I think most people in Britain today would agree with this, but it is important to remember that freedom from interference in people's private lives, like most other freedoms worth having, did not always exist and had to be fought for.
I do not wish to defend every aspect of the way the National Trust seems to have handled their actions to mark the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act - for example, under precisely the right to privacy which I referred to above, people should not have to answer questions about their sexual orientation if they find these intrusive or insensitive and the NT appears to have upset some of their own volunteers by not getting this right.
But where the history of a building or artistic collection which the NT is preserving for the nation is very much affected by Britain's past discriminatory laws - which is very much the case at Kingston Lacy - that history should be recorded whether the discrimination was on the grounds of race, religion, or sexuality. It is by remembering the errors of the past that we can best ensure we do not repeat them.
Comments
This time syndrome always sinks in, always does.
This time we are masters of the economy, This time its different, This time we have the greatest minds on it, This time we know what we are doing, this time fiat currency will work.
eh, yeah, good luck with that.
Actually we do sometimes learn from history.
Unfortunately sometimes we think that because we have learned how to solve the problem which was confronting us in the last crisis, and then we walk right into a different problem, which is why generals and politicians are so often accused of re-fighting the previous war.
And yes, there are some instances - the claim to have abolished boom and bust springs to mind - when people claim to have learned from history at the very moment they are repeating the mistakes of a previous generation.
Having a modern banking and credit system is not one of those mistakes. It was allowing a modern banking and credit system to operate here and in much of the rest of the OECD with inadequate regulatory system which was the mistake.
so which part of :
"every single fiat currency in the history of mankind, every one of them has crashed to nothing, without exception"
do you find so hard to understand, and I shall endeavour to explain, or if i don't know will promise to find out for you
There is no such thing as a perfect economic system, which is why "this time we have abolished boom and bust" would have fitted perfectly into your original comment.
It is certainly true that countries with a fiat currency system which have allowed the money supply to increase by massively more than the productive capacity of the economy have invariably experienced high inflation.
So have countries with a specie-backed currency when the supply of gold and silver increases by massively more than the productive capacity of the economy, or when they debased the coinage.
It is far from obvious that the record of fiat currencies over the past millennium taken as a whole is worse than that of specie-backed or other commodity-backed currencies.
Since the early 1970's virtually the entire world has had fiat currencies. During those 45 years most of those currencies have not "crashed to nothing."
Gold has had value since, well since all ways really, but certainly since the time of the ancient Egyptians. Gold has never dropped to zero value, never.
Every fiat currency has. now sure gold can become debased over time (usually done historically using copper, in order to fund social programs, massive social building projects, and wars) but that is a debased currency, and debasement is the cause of the collapse.
Fiats always go to zero (well ok the value of the coin or peice of paper) but they always do.
so to the question "has a fiat currency ever lasted thoughout all of history?"
Short answer :- No
Long answer :- Nope
as we speak Venezuela has 700% inflation, but i will tell you something for nothing, 1g of gold there still has the same purchasing power it had yesterday, and the day before, and 5 years ago.
The pound has effectively been a fiat currency since Britain was forced off the gold standard in the 1930's. As you rightly say, the entire world is effectively using fiat currencies and has been doing so since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970's.
In the context of the social, political, economic and technological upheavals of that period of nearly 50 years the fact that most of those fiat currencies have survived without collapsing to zero suggests that you cannot say that history proves they must.
In fact the collapsing currencies have been the exception rather than the rule. That is not to say it has never happened or that there is nothing we can learn from the occasions when it has.
There certainly have been some cases, invariably due to grossly incompetent management or deliberate sabotage, where fiat currencies have experienced hyperinflation.
Just as you say that when a specie-backed currency suffers inflation due after debasing the coinage, "the debasement is the cause of the collapse" and you would nearly always be right.
The one exception which I know of when inflation in a specie-backed currency was not caused by debasement of the coinage was the inflation problem in 16th and 17th century Europe. This was caused by the enormous increase in actual gold and silver in circulation because of the huge amounts of those metals which the Spanish looted from the Americas and brought over the Atlantic in their regular treasure fleets.
In the same way, every time a fiat currency which has suffered hyperinflation the cause has been that the people running it allowed a huge increase in the money supply which was disproportionate to the activity in the economy.
The problem was that mismanagement, not the principle of a non-commodity backed currency.
In all three cases it was the huge increase in the money supply, generally exacerbated by gross incompetence from the monetary authorities, rather than the currency itself, which was the problem.