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Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

jpkoning.blogspot.com

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Re: Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

#71

Post by big-green-man »

It's just a way to bypass the cantillion effect and hoard the benefit of debasement for the lord. That's why he exempted the aristocracy, he had to cut them in to maintain his power.

So, suppose the ruler begins a debasement. You have a lot of coins. You take them into the mint and exchange them for debased coins but more coins than you had minus a cut to the king, go buy some asset that can't be debased like salt, wait and then sell it on the market after price inflation occurs. You benefit from the cantillion effect because you got the fresh minted money before prices rose to compensate.

Now with the extortion scheme, you lose that. The revenue goes straight to the king in the form of the tax, the king might make do with the same revenue as before, thus significantly reducing the inflation that occurs, or maybe raises his revenue to the match the cost to the economy before but now the aristocracy get nothing. To compensate, he had to exempt them or they would overthrow him, and now they get benefit in that regular people get directly fleeced, price deflation occurs but regular people don't gain purchasing power because it was their money taken from them out of circulation, but the rich people don't have that problem so their purchasing power increases.

Re: Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

#72

Post by thaumasiotes »

Beijinger wrote: post #67
thaumasiotes wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the downfall part of that?

If your money becomes worthless?

What does that have to do with downfall? The value of your money is whatever it is, determined by the productivity of your state and the amount of money it recognizes.

Given your username of "Beijinger", you should be familiar with the traditional Chinese currency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_of_cash_coins_(currency...

> the weight of the Chinese money necessary for a journey of over three thousand miles was, as the Russian consul thought, one of the greatest of our almost insurmountable obstacles.

The extreme worthlessness of Chinese currency didn't play into any Chinese downfalls.

(Though it's not obvious to me why Sachtleben wanted to transport currency rather than bullion.)

Re: Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

#73

Post by Beijinger »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #72
Beijinger wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your money becomes worthless?

What does that have to do with downfall? The value of your money is whatever it is, determined by the productivity of your state and the amount of money it recognizes. Given your username of "Beijinger", you should be familiar with the traditional Chinese currency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_of_cash_coins_(currency... > the weight of the Chinese money necessary for a journey of over three thousand miles was…

The Roman Empire could not pay her troops anymore. Neither could they pay the Chinese for their products.

BTW, when China accumulated a majority of the world silver again and did not buy anything from the world, the British said, we have something you need! The reason for the opium wars....

Re: Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

#74

Post by lomase »

imtringued wrote: post #58

Ah yes, taxes on money holding and land, two of the most evil taxes ever invented. The average citizen prefers paying income taxes, payroll tax and sales tax and VAT to the government and paying the land tax aka rent to land holders and the money tax aka interest to money holders to maximize the dead weight loss. Then they complain that the government is bankrupt and is doing inflation. The average citizen is incorri…

You are above all.

Re: Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

#75

Post by adolph »

Qwertious wrote: post #21
adolph wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people decrease spending - why spend $100 on something today, if you can buy it for $85 in a year? Imagine if everything suddenly was infected with the Osborn Effect. Otoh, certain products like TVs do seem to get better and cheaper as time goes on, yet people don’t seem to delay purchases. It’ll be interesting to see if conventional wisdom about deflation holds, should it come to pass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wik…

>Otoh, certain products like TVs do seem to get better and cheaper as time goes on, yet people don’t seem to delay purchases. It’ll be interesting to see if conventional wisdom about deflation holds, should it come to pass. The problem isn't just the osborne effect, it's that deflation rewards a non-productive investment (money hoarding) that crowds out productive investments, which makes the economy less efficient.…

The current "money hoarding" rate is around 5%. For an X of [de|in]flation, what do you think is the function describing the Y of money hoarding?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT

Re: Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

#76

Post by lazide »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #70
lazide wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is spending a ton of money on Mississippi’s rural road network a useful use of the money?

Missippians (#) think so :-) (#) ok, that’s a fairly low value comment that I frankly should have not clicked send on, but I just spent ages getting that one blasted word past my own spell checker, user friendly piece of shit, and realising not for the first time that typing anything on a textbox on a mobile is its own piece of hell. Sysiphus I am with you. And yeah Musisippians is probably the wrong collective noun…

Mississippi has been a reliable Republican voting block since the parties switched platforms in the 60-70’s.

So republicans don’t need to spend money there to get votes.

And even if democrats spent all that money there to ‘buy’ the vote - would it be enough to work, considering the socio-political aspects?

An argument could be made vis-a-vis gdp improvements. But are good roads good enough to drive major GDP improvements in Mississippi, considering other factors? Probably not.

Re: Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

#77

Post by creer »

panarky wrote: post #26
Mistletoe wrote: post #9

Bitcoin fixes this for the first time in human history. I’m excited about a future without monetary debasement. How many wars have been started by the “print more money until it is worthless, oops I have to start a war to fix it” spiral? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement

You should be very excited indeed because the future of your dreams arrived two years ago! Since early 2022, the US central bank has been "unprinting" money. Their balance sheet is shrinking and the money supply is falling. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1rdgN You don't need Bitcoin to save you from the inevitable war that's caused by an inflating money supply and printing money out of thin air bec…

They would still have to go a very very long way to get back to even pre-covid level. In the meantime: propaganda.

Re: Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

#79

Post by Wytwwww »

lazide wrote: post #76
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missippians (#) think so :-) (#) ok, that’s a fairly low value comment that I frankly should have not clicked send on, but I just spent ages getting that one blasted word past my own spell checker, user friendly piece of shit, and realising not for the first time that typing anything on a textbox on a mobile is its own piece of hell. Sysiphus I am with you. And yeah Musisippians is probably the wrong collective noun…

Mississippi has been a reliable Republican voting block since the parties switched platforms in the 60-70’s. So republicans don’t need to spend money there to get votes. And even if democrats spent all that money there to ‘buy’ the vote - would it be enough to work, considering the socio-political aspects? An argument could be made vis-a-vis gdp improvements. But are good roads good enough to drive major GDP improvem…

> Mississippi has been a reliable Republican voting block since the parties switched platforms in the 60-70’s.

In presidential elections? Yes. On the local level the Democrats controlled the Mississippi House of Representatives every single year until 2011 (almost the same for the Senate).

Even federally, the Democrats usually won most of the house seats (occasionally all 5 of them like in 90, 92) until 1998. Last time they won the majority was in 2010.

> So republicans don’t need to spend money there to get votes.

Only over the last ~10 or so years (and the Democrats still have 1 mostly safe seat there).

The party "switch" wasn't really a switch to such a huge extent on the local/state level. The Southern Democrats lost most of their relevance on the national level but locally the it didn't really happen until the generation that held offices in the 60s retired/died out

IMHO even nationally it wasn't even that obvious, the Democrats "abandoned" the South but the Republicans more or less just stuck to the same positions that were mostly mainstream in the party for the last 20-30 years outside of the progressive wing. On the whole even Nixon was relatively progressive and liberal by modern Republican standards (probably much too progressive considering his stances on healthcare reform and the environment).

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