“The Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee… said the outperformance of haven currencies and those from emerging nations has aided in the debasement of the dollar’s reserve status, according to comments included in discussion charts presented ahead of the quarterly refunding. The Treasury published the documents today. “The idea of a reserve currency is that it is built on strength, not typically that it is ‘best among poor choices’,” page 35 of the presentation made by one committee member said. “The fact that there are not currently viable alternatives to the U.S. dollar is a hollow victory and perhaps portends a deteriorating fate.””

Again -> hey-hey, no worries. Just rack up that credit card a little more, maybe print some crisp new bills and, you know, just keep on keeping on…

You may also find this of interest -> honestly, something everyone should understand is $, you aren’t likely to see a time when you won’t be dealing with it…, and for anyone else who wishes to talk about GDP and growth, keep in mind this is what I think of “GDP”: http://irishliberty.wordpress.com/2008/11/09/gdp-a-meaningless-statistic/, so we already have an issue…

You might want to read this: http://mises.org/daily/5213/What-Is-Money

Money is actually not what you think, and no, it isn’t taught in school actually. It is, however, very much worth one’s learning…

I think we think about things in terms of survival. “Money” is only part of it because it’s what’s needed (and has been ever sense we started living in comunities and began trading with each other) -> it’s a simplified form of exchange.

And I wasn’t calling *you* a liberal, just many, many visitors of the blog, or for that matter Chris himself could perhaps work through all that and make it “logical”, who claim they are and attack anyone who isn’t (I’m actually a fierce independent, I hate both parties equally…), as I would really like one of them to explain how those two conflicting desires work together in their logic.

Again, you want to talk about theory, all fine and dandy in a classroom. I spent over a decade doing such, in both Philosophy and Poly Sci in fact, so I have no issue with such at all. However, I’m talking about the real lived world, a much different beast entirely…

2. What you fail to understand is that the fact that we think about things in terms of money and not in terms of physics is a big part of the problem. Money is something completely meaningless and artificial, what matters is energy (or rather negentropy). The problem of the United States is it has grown far beyond what the negentropy flows it can harvest domestically can support and needs to shrink accordingly or it will fall apart, as it is doing right now. But that’s a very different thing from cutting spending; simply cutting spending, especially if it does not involve the military budget is not going to do anything to address the underlying cause of all the problems. So it happens that no system involving GDP growth or even jobs can survive if the underlying issues are to be addressed in a rational way, and it can not survive anyway if they are but then the collapse will be much more painful and destructive. So focusing on GDP and jobs now is a huge mistake. GDP growth is impossible and people do not need jobs. People need to be fed, clothed and housed. You don’t need GDP growth and you don’t need jobs to do that.

How do these two conflicting desires (sustainablity and uncountroled consumption) manage to work together in one’s thinking?

If you really want to get a grip on resource usage it might help if we close the credit card down and actually only use what we can afford to pay for NOW, rather than use it all up and worry about paying for it after it’s all gone…

That’s the part of this whole debate in here I find most fascinating…