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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

The government will literally arrest people who try to avoid using a fiat currency. I mean, you have to admit "this is in your own best interest" is a suspicious argument when it involves printing stacks of cash, giving it to big business/asset owners and prosecuting anyone who seriously tries to use a consistent stick to measure wealth. It looks like a bunch of people believe it isn't in their interest and need to be bought into line by force.

I don't mind if you want a steering wheel, but given that we seem to be driving something of a money printing train I'm not sure what you expect the wheel to do. They're following an exponential curve of money creation. The only surprise is that they keep pretending that at some point they will be able to stop printing.

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Source of this ever happening?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_dollar_(private_curr...

Thanks for sharing a source

Well, gold was banned in US not that long ago ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Reserve_Act ). Naturally, we could argue whether gold is a currency and whatnot, but for the sake of the argument, I will state that there is absolutely nothing government will not attempt to legislate.

Hell, they can legislate that 2 + 2 = 5. It won't make it accurate, right or even make sense, but they can.

It is fundamental to the tax code. Say someone gets paid some amount of gold, holds on to it for 10 years then tries to barter it for something.

They'll get charged with tax fraud on the theory that their lump of rock is worth more now than it was when they bought it so they should be paying some amount in capital gains tax.

Now I'll accept an argument that we should have some sort of transaction tax, fair enough if you want to believe that.

But the theory that the gold is becoming worth more over time in real terms is blatantly silly. It doesn't change, the supply of gold is increasing faster than population and the arguments that its value is changing are frankly a bit forced. It isn't increasing in real value at a rapid rate like the official numbers suggest it is.

And the US dollar is, by policy, losing value - so the same basic argument will hold for any asset even ignoring the fact that the inflation numbers are wilfully ignoring asset price inflation.

I appreciate how thoughtful this comment is.

Question, in the gold scenario is your issue with the idea of capital gains, or an issue with how it's accounted (given that you think the gold *hasn't* appreciated)?

Yeah the gold accounting bit just slipped in through force of habit. Sorry about that, too much time arguing badly on HN.

The key point there is the implementation of capital gains tax. It isn't so much that I have issues with CGT. CGT is ok, if we're going to tax things we may as well tax Capital Gains. But, if someone tries to avoid fiat, they're going to be imprisoned because they can't comply with the IRS when they come to collect the fake capital gains caused by inflation. Ditto income tax now that I think about it.

The point here is that the "[you don't understand] history, economic cycles, inflation-deflation and the role of monetary policy" counter is patronising and pretty obviously wrong. It isn't for our own good, it is because they want to put more of the burden for keeping the country running on savers. That isn't good for savers. And they're doing it that way because if they implemented an equivalent but obvious policy people would point out "hang on, taxing disproportionately from savers seems like it might be a bad idea" and probably carry the debate.

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