Whitetablet: Eco?no,mix

3. The Economy of Today’s Reality

3.1 The Banking System

3.1.1 Inflation

People are regularly confused by complex terminology and formulas. Economic specialists, who understand such technical details, often try to convince others that the formulas for calculating economic indicators are inevitably flawed and that one must delve into statistics to properly grasp how everything works. Those well-versed in these terms and formulas, in turn, cannot understand why this absurdity persists. No one claims someone is deliberately obscuring or complicating matters; rather, the system itself was built as a labyrinth, one in which the pathways constantly shift and everyone must play by the same market rules. In this maze, cryptocurrency acts like a cheat code, allowing people to secure better positions in this financial system without resorting to crime or probability theory. In essence, it helps people reclaim a portion of their funds that the authorities had seized and then tried to hide or transfer through “Bitcoin” to finance someone or something.
To comprehend this complex structure, we do not need a deep dive into economic theory; let’s translate everything into the realm of everyday processes we know well. Imagine you and your family as a small state living on a plot of land with a garden, clean water, and livestock. When you shrink these large structures into something small and then analyze them, you can understand almost everything that exists in our modern world. Let’s continue. You exchange goods with other families, harvest crops, and carry out home repairs. Nature provides you with income; you set some aside, sell some, buy what you need from others, and repair or build new spaces. Now think: where does inflation come into this picture? A poor harvest or pest infestation might count as inflation. The prolonged absence of household goods from families living far away—because their means of transport broke down and had to be repaired, driving up the price of their goods (some of which might have spoiled)—forces them to raise prices in order to maintain the level of income needed to continue living and running their business.
Now imagine that people have gained experience, discussed issues, and found solutions to all these problems—so that all risks have been reduced to zero. Crops are grown in greenhouses, pests are exterminated before they cause any real damage, transport has become more reliable, roads are improved. In that scenario, inflation is essentially the cost of risk, yielding valuable experience and followed by outlays for improvements. Everything becomes more expensive, but now you can always get what you need without delays, and have peace of mind about your harvest. Another question arises, though: if everyone raises their prices equally, they might not need to raise them at all. If they all raise prices by the same amount, they’ll spend more but also earn more. Now it gets interesting: if there is nobody who ends up paying more but receiving the same (or even less) than before, then devaluation would not exist in the first place. Inflation could be viewed as something close to “deferred innovation.” For example, everyone accounts for risk in their pricing, paying for their own losses, and later might decide to build robots to harvest crops—suppose that fails, so people must accept some losses. But reality differs substantially: someone raises prices, while someone else is forced to accept fewer goods for the same amount of money as before, despite putting in the same level of effort at their job or in their work. What does that imply? Under other circumstances, inflation can have different implications, yet in our current system, inflation is a constant devaluation of money. If money is energy, and energy is expended in the course of labor, then effectively this is a process that devalues labor and the energy you invest while working.

3.1.2 Forex

Forex is a currency market where banks and governments trade their own national currencies for those of other countries. The more “valuable” energy is exchanged for energy deemed “less valuable.” You might notice that the USD and the EUR stay very close to one another, with an almost 1:1 exchange rate. It is important to note that energy has its own quality; it all depends on people’s experience, capabilities, and organizational skills. Yet in its potential, energy does not differ—experience grows, capabilities increase, and organizational structures get better over time. Indeed, in this era of perpetual sanctions, we see that when new restrictions are introduced, substitutes are produced without issue, often matching or slightly lower in quality than the original, but costing less. This shows that, if need be, any goods can be replaced, and it matters little whether they were made by a highly experienced 20-year veteran or a 3-year novice. A novice’s limited experience can be offset by their energy and motivation, and so forth. Energy will always find an outlet.
Since every citizen of a country is, from birth, essentially a permanent investor in that country’s currency—not just an investor, but someone who keeps on acquiring it regardless of price, exchanging their energy and time for that currency every time they receive wages or profit—one may wonder: how is privileged energy acquired from everyone else, and what does it mean? Also, what role does Forex play? Forex facilitates exchanges between countries through currency exchange rates, enabling you to buy goods from another country where energy is devalued. You’ve likely noticed (or experienced) that on your daily wage, you might manage to live for a week or a month in a different country, or when you visit a place and try its goods, you might say, “Wow, it’s so cheap here, that’s great!” Is there a difference between the effort put in by factory workers in the U.S. and in Vietnam? Why is an American or European’s labor valued so much higher than that of someone from Asia? Is an American truly more capable than a Chinese national? Every country has different people with different levels of motivation and ability, yet it’s presumed that the labor of one group is inherently more valuable than another. What do we call the domination of citizens of certain countries over others? I think the answer is clear.

3.1.3 Export and Shortage

Cuban locals can hardly get rum; in Russia, building a house from natural wood is a very expensive undertaking, while many Chinese in rural areas cannot afford tea and so must settle for boiled water. One country supplies natural resources to another that uses them to build weapons, only to aim these weapons back at the original supplier... In Australia, bees and honey are burned; Ukraine constantly exports agricultural goods; and in the U.S., weapons are targeted at cows...
In every situation, goods are exported. Yet why is it that local residents often can’t use the resources of their own country for their own needs or to make a profit? Why do we see shortages of products based on dubious “studies”?
Export is a mechanism to redistribute wealth from countries where energy is devalued, while shortages create artificial needs and drive up prices.

3.1.4 Currency

This financial system is built on manipulation and the domination of some people over others. Its “beneficiaries” are not the true “investors” but rather intermediaries. Imagine you want to be a shareholder of a company whose shares collapse each year—yet those shares belong not to you but to intermediaries, like your brokers. Now replace those shares with your country’s currency: the logic remains unchanged.
Moreover, currency issuance is unlimited, meaning an infinite amount can be printed. We’ve already mentioned that the system relies on “living on credit”—on someone’s sacrifice. Central banks print more money and borrow it from themselves. Think of it as if you stumble upon a bag of freshly printed money and then decide to exchange it for something. Ultimately, the person whose goods you’re buying invests their energy, while you do not, having simply found that bag of money. Effectively, you steal someone else’s energy. Of course, that person can take the money and buy something else, since the currency is backed by hundreds of millions of people. However, imagine a scenario in which there are only two of you. You both agree to use this currency for transactions, which will be printed solely when necessary to facilitate an exchange. Suddenly, you realize that the person to whom you gave the “found” money can’t buy anything from you because you have nothing to sell—you never started producing anything. On a national scale, it’s similar: the effects become widespread and are labeled as “inflation.”
Currency functions like a country’s stock, enabling it to operate, and the working population are its faithful investors—“diamond hands.” The issuance of these “stocks” is unlimited, but it is not the working population—the true shareholders—who make corporate decisions; rather, those decisions are made by intermediaries.