patrick.net

Misc says

You forgot the wonderful example of Venezuela. Largest oil deposits in the world, all their reserves in gold.

Yeah, they were stupid. Wasn't a very large portion of their gold at the Bank of England which they can't get back because Juan Guaido is "really" their president?

Misc says

AND no toilet paper, or pretty much anything people needed.

I don't know anything about their internal economy, and I know I cannot trust US news reports about that nation since they were made "an enemy".

Nope, they pulled their gold from the US Fed and we let them do it even though we knew they were gonna default on their bonds.

Misc says

Nope, they pulled their gold from the US Fed and we let them do it even though we knew they were gonna default on their bonds.

Mmm, I don't remember honestly, and I'm not going to look it up.

Don't know enough about the situation in Venezuela, I have a tendency to find out what is going on when my nation is fucking with it, and the fuckery hasn't reached that level. If they do a coup or a war, I'll have to do due diligence then.

The fundamental problem with government central planning is what Ludwig von Mises called the Socialist Calculation Problem. That's what imperial governments usually have. Both Russians and Chinese have long histories of imperial governments and central-planning. They need external trade to mollify the Calculation Problem and Corruption. Usually through using external price signals so their economies can know what to produce (and use what input factors). When asked how would his socialist paradise set prices on everything, Trotsky infamously said they would just copy down all the prices the night before socialist revolution. Of course that wouldn't work in the long run: technologies and available input factors change.

Historically, a sea-borne civilization had better price discovery process as various islands and ports could communicate with each other via open sea lanes whenever an existing port pseudo-monoply intermediary charges too much . . . whereas land-based trade routes tend to collapse into wars due to those trade routes are serial so the owner of one fortress along the only path has an incentive to raise taxes at the expense of the transit points both before and after his own thereby giving rise to land-based empires monopolizing a land trade route, leading to bureaucratic inefficiency, civil strife and collapse.

Ironically, the US has been witnessing the same Calculation Problem this century thanks to fiat money central banking progressing to its late stages . . . just look at the widespread "unicorn" frauds in the tech sector and the bubbles and busts (all essentially ponzi scams) in the financial sector.

I have a hard time believing Chinese can do any government-sponsored technology programs like cutting edge chip development any better than Theranos was (i.e. fraud). Whatever outfit doing it not going bankrupt would only suck even more blood from the economy upon which the sponsoring government is feeding off. After seeing how easily the American Empire was prone to be captured by Communists/Fascists in recent years (visibly in the streets of 2020-2021), the world's elite investors might be thinking of transitioning to a "multi-polar" world with physical border separations to prevent systematic capture, similar to the Biblical story about God breaking up the tower building crowd into numerous countries speaking different languages. That's why they have paid agents deliberately waging losing wars in Europe, as a way of breaking up the American Empire while harvesting the bank accounts of European vassal states' citizens.