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> Here in Europe, I have the feeling the vast majority of people consider it unnecessary. The vibe I get is "The system works, so why not let the government handle and control everything.".

> I wouldn't be surprised if that is a golbal phenomena and holds steady throughout time.

Come to the east of EU/Europe and you'll see a completely opposite vibe. No wonder, people in their 40s still remember communism. And the older people sometimes think communism was still better - however bad it was - than whatever we have now.

Which country for example?

I'd suggest watching the 1420 channel, where they interview Russians on the street. Many of the older generation have a nostalgia of life under communism, whereas the younger generation is more skeptical.

Here's one of the interviews:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjI8jwn0Upo

> the younger generation is more skeptical

i.e., the first generations never to experience it, and the least knowledgeable.

Any country that used to be part of the Eastern Bloc or the Soviet Union itself.

I've seen that vibe. In my experience, communism-was-better generally crystalizes out to two things:

* Good old times / not remembering the bad parts.

* Having your path in life mapped out, i.e. not dealing with uncertainty.

>Good old times / not remembering the bad parts.

Probably because the "bad parts" never applied to them since they had the right socio-economic background (connections to the party), and they knew how to game the system so that it worked in their favor (did no actual work but were reaping the rewards).

>Having your path in life mapped out, i.e. not dealing with uncertainty.

Because after the fall of communism a huge portion of the population was financially illiterate since you grew up and were taught that the state will take care of everything, and suddenly you wake up in an economy that's 180 degress different to what you were taught and were used to your whole life, making people completely clueless to the new world of unregulated capitalism and an easy pray to all the scammers and wise-guy opportunists at every step, so inflation, poverty and unemployment was rampant, as well a huge amount of people fell victims to various Ponzi/pyramid/get-rich-quick schemes that were common in the west 100 years earlier but were new here.

In short, the post-fall countries transitioned to Kleptocracies more than anything else. The transition to capitalism was very spotty and state run businesses existed for a long time after the fall (and in many cases many businesses are still state run and have yet to transition).

Out of the 200M+ [1] people in the USSR, what percentage would you say had connections to the party? My impression is that 99% (all but 2M) likely did not.

Hence, the "bad" parts did apply to plenty of people and those are the people we are talking about. My experience is from living half a decade in a post-fall country from 1995 to 2000. The people I talked to that missed communism often now had it bad and were left behind. In essence the average quality of life was worse under the USSR but the extremes in quality of life were less - nobody was fully left behind as they are now. There was a very certain social net that was there. On the flip side, with less extremes, there was very little opportunity for advancement, so you wind up with a relatively homogeneously poor but not impoverished society. Post-fall, poverty rates jumped (from extremely low to very high), the homogeneously poor society was still poor and the safety net was completely removed (without any of the upsides of non-communism yet to be felt; it's a decades long process to change an economy from the USSR system).

> unregulated capitalism

The only unregulated capitalism's out there are black markets. The capitalism of countries in transition post-fall were largely capitalism in name only. Kleptocracy is AFAIK far more accurate of how to describe those transitional governments that still exist today (Belorussia, Russia, Georgia, the central Asian republics are all examples that exist today)

> as well a huge amount of people fell victims to various Ponzi/pyramid/get-rich-quick schemes that were common in the west 100 years earlier but were new here

Is there somewhere I can read more about this? My impression is the governments switched to democracies in name only. Huge portions of government were there to siphon as much as they could for their own personal gain. Want a drivers license? Pay a bribe. Want a building permit? Pay ten bribes? Want to move your grain to a port terminal? Pay a bribe at every city you pass through. (The very latter is a real example, I was very loosely involved with a post-fall USDA project that looked at that problem. Notably identifying, "Hey, here is your problem - the bribes. By the time a farmer has gotten their grain to port they've payed more in bribes than their base cost - this will not work!"

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population_of_former...

Honestly even with capitalism most of this still applies.

Those with the right connections get to basically make money off other people without having to actually do any work.

A huge portion of the population is financially illiterate and easy prey to scammers.

Ponzi/pyramid/mlm schemes still pop up to fleece people.

> Probably because the "bad parts" never applied to them since they had the right socio-economic background (connections to the party), and they knew how to game the system so that it worked in their favor (did no actual work but were reaping the rewards).

Without having to "game" the system, one could easily fall for the rose-tinted glass effect. I have seen it a few times in people that have lived through the war (WWII) and would have happily told you how their leader weren't so bad (including the one in bed with or directly associated with Nazism).

This dichotomy was made extremely apparent to me during the pandemic. In the US, not saying all opinions were homogenous but most of my liberal friends supported government actions during the pandemic (e.g. closures originally, then mask mandates, vaccine mandates, etc.) I'm friends with a number of folks from Eastern Europe, a couple of whom spent their early childhood under Ceausescu, and the difference couldn't have been more stark. While these friends generally agree with things like union support, worker protections, environmental action, LGBT rights, etc., their opinions were pretty much lockstep with the US right in terms of the pandemic, and it was clear this was due to ingrained government distrust. The sad thing to me is that while I could clearly understand and wholeheartedly agree with some of their positions, it got to the point where it often veered off into "crazytown" in my opinion ("You're not going to inject Bill Gates' mind control poison, are you?")

> their opinions were pretty much lockstep with the US right in terms of the pandemic, and it was clear this was due to ingrained government distrust

As a person born in communism but too young to remember, now living in USA, my attitude during pandemy was best described as: The mandates are more like guidelines than actual rules.

They were definitely a good thing. We needed people not to congregate en masse in poorly ventilated spaces. But joke’s on you if you think that means I won’t go running without a mask, not like I’m breathing in peoples’ face for extended periods.

What really sucks is that I can't say anybody is wrong for being skeptical of a government, insofar as any large organization with power over individuals is dangerous. But the critical mistake they are making is that this doesn't mean a government action can't be good. Coordinating public health responses is probably one of the most good government actions possible, and it was vilified for political power.

In my mind, it's analogous to a starving rural person saying they should have their hunting rifle melted down (condemning them to likely death) because lots of people have been unjustly murdered by assault rifles. Yes, guns are dangerous - they're powerful, and power is dangerous. So we recognize that there can be abuses of the power of guns (and governments), and we already have guardrails against some of the most egregious abuses - very few people argue citizens should have free access to heavy machine guns and missile launchers. What we argue about is where we should draw the line between usefulness vs risk of abuse of abuse. And in this analogy, there are some people so scared of guns that they're saying we shouldn't even have them available as a simple hunting tool.

Bringing it back to government, people are so traumatized by government abuses, regardless of whether those abuses happened to them or even happened at all, that they're sort of arguing for the melting down of the government even when it is genuinely acting in their best interest. Except it's worse, because the anti-mask movement is not trying to actually abolish government at all, just weaponize their own fear for targeted harm.

The issue is that there's a difference between coordinating and coercing. If you want to have a body that studies the best way to stymie a pandemic and make recommendations, and one of those recommendations is to wear a mask in certain circumstances, that's great. If that body has a reputation for being competent and reasonable then most people will follow their recommendations.

The problem comes when those recommendations become regulations which get enforced without context or nuance, because then people chafe, and it becomes a political issue, and then people resist for the sake of resisting. Which makes everything worse, and that doesn't work.

The thing that works is for people to actually believe in the rules and follow them out of solidarity and self-interest. But then you don't need to point a gun at anybody. And by the time you've sullied your own reputation to the point that you do have to, you've already lost.

> The problem comes when those recommendations become regulations which get enforced without context or nuance, because then people chafe, and it becomes a political issue, and then people resist for the sake of resisting. Which makes everything worse, and that doesn't work.

The core issue was fearmongering and misinformation. We had people on TV, on the internet, reaching a wide audience, just making up lies about the pandemic or "just asking questions" in a way that is identical to making up and spreading lies. They did this for power, for ratings, for fun, whatever. It is also true that the implementation was not great and that Americans have a cultural tendency to petulance when "told" to do something, but I expect most of that could have been worked through if there wasn't such an active opposition.

Fact is, statistically speaking throughout history, distrusting government mandates is almost always a safe bet.

Of course, it's not true 100% of the time, but even if it's only 70% (and I'm pretty sure it's higher than that) it's a good default personal policy.

In Poland cashless payments thrive, more than in Germany.

From childhood to adolescence I used to go on calls with my dad to fix air conditioners with my dad and we met a Polish couple. By this time I was 14 and communist, having read the motorcycle diaries. Anyway, I asked them about their experience growing up in communist Poland.

The wife was absolutely disgusted towards communism. Mind you, this couple lived in a pretty luxurious two story house. She associated communism with lack. The husband on the other hand, well, he wasn't communist, but he told me about how you didn't feel precarious, so to speak. How you knew you'd be able to go to college if you studied hard, how you'd get to go to summer camp, how you'd get an apartment when you got a job, and so on. Like you could kind of feel economically secure about your future in a way that you couldn't in capitalism.

I found this really interesting. Perhaps this is gendered because the husband (who worked) is more stressed out by economic precarity than the wife (who didn't), or who knows.

Anyway, I think Poland is a bad example here - I think they are not as nostalgic towards communism generally as, say, Russians are. Moldovans seem to even go beyond nostalgia, holding communism to just be a time when life was much better.

I don't have opinions on this, just my experiences based on a handful of conversations. In other words, less than anecdotal.

> How you knew you'd be able to go to college if you studied hard, how you'd get to go to summer camp, how you'd get an apartment when you got a job, and so on. Like you could kind of feel economically secure about your future in a way that you couldn't in capitalism.

It's sort of like, communism is for conformists. If your goal in life is to be a mid-level bureaucrat who never speaks out of turn then your rent gets paid.

But it's exactly that security that makes it fall apart. There is no penalty for mediocrity so it proliferates.

> How you knew you'd be able to go to college if you studied hard, how you'd get to go to summer camp, how you'd get an apartment when you got a job, and so on.

Except if you pissed off the communist party, then none of that for you and your children.

No way around the state-given requirements - want to work with computers and don't have a diploma for that? Well that's not possible - here's your shovel and get digging already, the state needs you! Want to move to another city and change careers? Well you're going to need good friends at important positions, and gift them dearly (and not just once to get what you want - you needed to build the relationship for a long time before that).

My grandfather was beating his children (my father and uncle) because if a child did or said the wrong thing at the wrong time, it was over for the whole family, and he felt like that's the only way to get the children to truly understand it. And even in 2013 - 25 years after the revolution - he was still afraid of the communist secret police.

My father was hit by a car when he was 12 and had a very seriously broken leg. My grandfather was taking care of him by himself, because the state's idea of taking care was locking him in a dark room with bars on the windows and using a medieval-like machine to stretch the leg, without any painkillers.

My grandfather took him to Yugoslavia to swim in the sea and that actually helped and saved his leg. However since it took months, the communist party decided to label him a parasite - punishable by prison. The local communist party cell voted about it and it didn't go through by one vote... that my grandfather got thanks to a bribe.

It was "good" for the people who fell in line - as in, they didn't have any special circumstances. Anything out of the ordinary and your life was way worse.

> The wife was absolutely disgusted towards communism. Mind you, this couple lived in a pretty luxurious two story house. She associated communism with lack.

Women had to use newspaper instead of menstrual pads. There was only very few styles of clothing/shoes available for women, while men had much more choice. Women didn't get the opportunities to be educated and work like men did, because it was expected they will stay at home and take care of children. It was a system made by men, for men. It's not surprising that a woman hated it.

German have always been more reliant on cash than their European counterpart. The 500 Euro bill was allegedly created on the request of Germany.

There is a general phenomenon that countries who pioneer a concept or technology and start to deploy an earlier iteration at great scale seem to stick with the older version while younger countries "skip" ahead. Good example might be the magnet stripe card payments or check books common in the US but almost never used in Western Europe anymore.

I suspect Poland's precarious positions in the 19th century might have affected its development of central banking and currency in such a way as to make society less "stuck in its ways".

Is fiat currency not another case of "the worst solution except for all the other ones we've tried?"

Gold-backed reserve notes and even coins made of the metal(s) can still be debased (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_currency#Debasement).

And as noted, transacting in ingots of the precious metals isn't practical. Also heavy and hard to securely store and transport.

Trying to transact in and hold a commodity is also problematic because these metals have other uses. What if you hold a bunch of gold and then we find a better non-tarnishing conductor and switch to it, and the price plummets? What if you lent platinum to a friend and suddenly we find a room-temperature superconductor that needs platinum, and the value of that platinum is now 10x'd? Or you lent platinum to a friend and before they could spend it, its value plummets for industry reasons and now they can't even do the thing that was presumably going to allow them to eventually repay you?

"Our fiat currency is valuable because, and exclusively because, our government pays its debts, has excellent regulation and enforcement, a well-understood legal system, 99% of the world's aircraft carriers, and a large stockpile of nuclear weapons" seems like a pretty decent option compared to all the others? And the Fed doing monetary policy things isn't exclusively negative. They seem to have kept us from going into a recession or having runaway inflation just this year and the three years prior. So that could've been a lot worse, I think.

> What if you hold a bunch of gold and then we find a better non-tarnishing conductor and switch to it, and the price plummets?

With metals you can only question "What if?", with fiat currency the only question is "When?", because all fiat currencies in history have collapsed and become worthless.

> all fiat currencies in history have collapsed and become worthless.

No, they haven't.

Name one fiat currency that over a period of 100 years has not lost 99% of its value (or around that percentage)

First, I don't accept “99% decline over 100 years” as collapse of a currency.

Second, even if I did, the US Dollar retains 5.6× the value this standard would set. (Of course, it wasn’t purely a fiat currency over that whole time period, but then, setting a standard for collapse/no-collapse time window longer than pure fiat currencies have been a norm and then demanding counterexamples that have existed and not collapsed in that time is kind of sketchy, independently of whether you have a sane definition of collapse.)

>Gold-backed reserve notes and even coins made of the metal(s) can still be debased

Well, yes, but it's harder to play games with, which makes it more stable. It's similar to making the argument that while Windows is less secure than Linux, Linux also has security issues, so we should just have everybody use Windows.

We have ample evidence that the caretakers of our money supply are, shall we say, less than diligent.

No currency system is going to be perfect. You have to balance a lot of things, and every single one is subject to corruption and other sorts of chicanery. There is always a "what-if" scenario.

> Well, yes, but it's harder to play games with, which makes it more stable.

Gold might be better at average value performance over time than fiat currencies which are actively managed for stability and a bias toward slight value decline, but its very definitely not more stable than major fiat currencies.

Over enough time it is more stable than all fiat currencies. But most people don't care to consider that time scale.

If you mean “the wide range in which the extremely unstable value of gold varies doesn't move very much over time, so that the value it had a 300 years ago today is likely to be repeated sometime within a 100 year window centered on today, whereas fiat currencies have a more consistent downward value trend”, that’s true, but its not value stability, or a good thing in a currency.

Its not a particularly great thing in an investment asset either.

That's an odd assertion to make, considering the current condition of fiat currencies.

Gold is more or less untethered to anything right now, other than what people think it's worth as a hedge. There is an intrinsic value in industrial applications, but that's an edge case. So you are basically valuing gold based on what you can get for it in fiat currencies, which is like using a yardstick to measure itself.

Inflation after closing the gold window in the 70s has been staggering. If you have to cough up something--gold, silver, goats, something--for your currency, you can't play the sorts of games we do now with dollars.

> That's an odd assertion to make, considering the current condition of fiat currencies.

Its not, if you look at the actual inflation-adjusted price of gold over time.

The claim that the exchange value of gold for other goods and services should be more stable than the exchange rate of fiat currencies for goods and services simply is inconsistent with the facts.

> If you have to cough up something--gold, silver, goats, something--for your currency, you can't play the sorts of games we do now with dollars.

Yes, its much harder to actively manage a commodity currency for price stability, which is the main “game” played with fiat currencies.

> the exchange rate of fiat currencies for goods and services simply is inconsistent with the facts.

Those who did well in the birthing geo lottery of North America have a different experience than most others. Even European nations in past 25 years cancelled their currencies.

EU countries who switched to the Euro did not cancel their currency. It automatically converted and you had years to convert physical currency at the bank.

If you find a 25 year old buried bucket of Portuguese Escudo, US dollar, and gold, which still spends? Which was cancelled or went to zero? Europe has frequently cancelled their currencies over past 25 and 100 years.

Those who were born into US dollar over past 25 or 100 years may believe fiat currency stays around, but that is a US-centric view.

Maybe Austrians have a valid historical concern about cash.

> What if you hold a bunch of gold and then we find a better non-tarnishing conductor and switch to it, and the price plummets?

Or, for an example that actually happened with gold and silver, we find a previously unknown (to the society using it as currency) plentiful and cheap supply of the same metal?

There are some fairly obvious solutions to this. For example, suppose you had bearer securities representing shares in an investment portfolio. It wouldn't have wild price changes any more than the underlying security, which could be a highly diversified index fund or a real estate trust or whatever you like.

The bearer token has a secret in it, which you can change over the internet if you have the existing one, so if the token changes hands you can swap the secret out and be assured the previous owner hasn't kept a copy of it. Which would also allow you to transfer them over the internet.

That would make for great "cash" but not if trading in them requires you to be a securities broker or file a tax form each and every time you want to buy a pack of gum.

> The vibe I get is "The system works, so why not let the government handle and control everything.".

It works probably better than in many other places, but which European country is that?

Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Denmark are the countries with the most faithful government worshippers. It's simply a religion in those countries at this point.

You'd expect Switzerland to be on that list, but in my experience the Swiss are nothing like that.

So a who's who of the top ten democracy index countries. Not really surprising considering that.

I don't want to seem dismissive but the Netherlands + Sweden + Finland + Denmark <= 40 M people, so less than 10% of the EU and they do change governments leaning alternatively to the right or to the left like any other country.

Seen from outside, Switzerland has a lot of checks on government with referenda for everything, important or trivial matters.

> Governments on the other hand understand very well that money is a sham. Thats why they hold hundreds of billions of dollars in gold: > https://www.madisontrust.com/information-center/which-world-...

Wow, that was really interesting. I wonder why some supposed richer countries are quite low on that list. E.g. Sweden way down at 30

Possibly because as a total amount of gold by itself is a poor indicator of anything. As a fraction of GDP and/or per-capita might yield some numbers that at least made the amount relatable to something that countries commonly differ in in important ways.

There was plenty of resistance including cases that went to the Supreme Court. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Clause_Cases

However most people didn't have the approximately 20 ounces of gold that was the cutoff, or didn't have it in the bank to begin with.

As a Frenchmen, I think we can't say we are against government oversight. But I don't think I would agree that:

> people consider it unnecessary

In fact, I've discussed a cashless society with friends, and the majority is against, precisely because of this.

Now it may be my bubble, and not apply to the average French citizen.

> Frenchmen ... the majority is against

When did it become so hard to pay for fuel with cash in your territories?

The matter is creeping in...

"What makes cash special is that compared to other assets, it puts a bit more power into the hands of the individual and a bit less power in the hands of the government."

s/bit/lot/g

They can take the value out of it much more easily than printing more. They just need to instruct the central bank to not redeem a deposit for the note. If for some reason a commercial bank continued to accept central bank issued notes, the government can simply require the banks to stop accepting them as a requirement for their banking license.

> As it combines the durability of gold with the usability of money.

But these two things are mutually exclusive. If it's durable, you don't want to use it, because it might be worth more in the future.

What a solution for consumerism. Imagine we only bought what we need. I’m being half tongue and cheek

Gold is a sham, too. Its economic value in terms of useful uses is waaay below the market rate. The only reason people hoard gold is because everyone historically believes it to be valuable...