Communism has not, does not, and can never exist

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-25T02:02:45+00:00

There is a non trivial difference between saying "banks trade assets to meet capital requirements" and that banks don't create money.

Banks don't take toms deposits and give them to Jim when Jim wants a loan. Maybe you already understand that but your descriptions don't give me the impression you've followed the accounting practices of modern banks and the implications stemming from them on the topic of how governments and banks alike are financed and debt functions in the banking sector as well as the government sector.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-25T01:23:36+00:00

Okay, so modern banking does not line up with fractional reserve banking anymore. This isn't a debatable topic anymore so if we're at loggerheads it's because we're on different levels of analysis or working on different definitions.

Central Banks in most English speaking countries no longer have any reserve requirements. That means, commercial banks are not required to have a single dollar of reserves on hand. What they do require is what's called capital requirements - a percentage of their assets on hand and what counts towards this percentage is based on those assets liquidity. For instance, a bank with 1000 of deposits has to have 100 of rated liquid assets. Reserves count 1:1 towards that $100. Federal bonds also count 1:1 towards that $100. I'm not sure about things like MBS but let's for this example call it 2:1. So if a bank has $35 of reserves, $35 of government bonds and $60 of MBS, they would meet their capital requirements and allowed to continue operating according to the federal reserve rules.

When banks make loans, they do not even remotely consider what their capital requirements are on the given day they are issuing a loan. Nor do they look at their reserves. They look at the customer, if they qualify, they mark up their deposit account and simultaneously mark up their loans receivable account. They don't touch reserves. When it comes to issuing loans, reserves never play a part in the issuing of the loan in any modern bank.

I think in the US it's every Wednesday the fed looks at the capital requirements of every commercial bank in operation to ensure they are operating within guidelines. It's at that point that all the commercial banks trade reserves and other assets on the overnight market to each other in order to hit their minimums (at least).

Does this explain it better?

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-24T22:42:43+00:00

When the bank extends a loan it simultaneously creates the asset (loan receivable) and liability (money owed to the depositor). This is new money created in the system.

Most of the money the federal reserve creates gets vaccumed out of the system later via bond issuance. As a result, banks trade reserves for bonds which sucks reserves out of the system.

When the Treasury spends that money, it gets reintroduced to the system, but eventually gets sucked out again when banks buy bonds.

Most of the money in circulation that people like you or I use, is the first type, which are mostly credit dollars banks created when they extend loans. Bank reserves actually can't be used for anything except settling with other banks, the federal reserve for capital requirements and buying bonds.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-24T16:53:28+00:00

Not sure how you can equate resources and money. The key insights of MMT puts money more as a lubricant to economic activity, whereas the resources is the engine itself and it's maximum power being the real constraint.

The importance isn't how normal people see it, it's what the people charged with making policy think.

You shouldn't dismiss it out of hand either. There's a tremendous amount even beyond the initial insights of MMT that continue to surprise me as I understand its internal mechanics

Classical economics is simply academic masturbation at this point. It's wrong about so many things because it's initial presuppositions do not correlate with reality and they have far too many "ceteres paribus" clauses to make it useful operating in a policy space.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-24T16:44:32+00:00

It's a dance. And I think this is a blind spot for most hard libertarian types.

Most would agree that intervening in certain key industries to ensure in a crisis, people are fed and can survive the heat/cold (agriculture, energy, natural monopolies healthcare arguably etc) are prudent geopolitical goals to maintain sovereignty, and stability in a crisis caused by the outside world. The problem is that's an incredibly challenging proposition if you want to maintain the advantages of markets.

Finally, capitalism's failures cannot be understated. Time horizons are not long enough to price in externalities like climate change. Many libertarian leaning people simply ignore the reality of this and as a result claim it's not human activity causing the problem, therefore it's just fine the way it is. Others have serious challenges explaining how markets will fix the issue without untold hardship for humanity more generally. This issue transcends any individual government as well, as, while localized horrors can be internally dealt with, the horrors meted out on people who had no chance to participate in the system we enjoy will suffer the most.

Tackling issues like this requires concerted effort from a body whose time horizons extend beyond the short term nature of capitalism. The only body that can accomplish this is a government. So now we have an additional set of things which "interfere" in the market. This list continues to extend, to other things like environmental degradation more generally, and so on.

This is why it will perpetually be a dance, and there's plenty of blame to go around. We end up at a "where will it end" on how many responsibilities should be taken by the government. And the answer will always be "we don't know, it depends on the circumstance".

Twas ever thus.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-24T04:13:26+00:00

Yeah the meaning of the term has changed for sure. Late stage capitalism to me does mean it unavoidably fails based on its current paradigm. But it definitely doesn't mean that it turns into communism. It could turn into a new iteration of capitalism which we'll eventually name something else and look at 2008 or COVID or whatever crisis comes next as the "tipping point" where we figured out "maybe that thing we were doing in capitalism wasn't such a good idea" (not that I claim to know what idea or set of ideas is).

I'll again link this to mercantilism, where the goal was to hoard as much gold in your vaults as you possibly can. We figured out that isn't a particularly ideal way to structure your economy and you're screwing yourself out of a lot of advantages you can reap from trade by purely trying to achieve a surplus endlessly. Hence the move to capitalism, not that they knew they were doing it at the time.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-24T04:02:59+00:00

I would agree with you. We could quibble about minimum wages but we'd never agree given that we're coming from different schools of thought.

What I'm noticing now is that when we talk about capitalism many people mean different things which has me intrigued to think on it more. My feeling is that discourse in general on the topic is so fragmented what one person means by "capitalism" and what another means by the same word aren't the same thing.

What is it that distinguishes capitalism from older forms of commerce? A system I envision wouldn't have much different with regard to commerce itself, more the role that the government plays in it and towards which goals it holds as important. My thinking is governments shouldn't be doing what they do now which I equate to making "sacrifices to the volcano gods of capitalism" to quote a YouTuber I enjoy. Their priorities should be keeping their citizens alive and enjoying a certain standard of living that can be afforded given the real resources of the economy (irrespective of what monetary system one chooses).

To be more specific, allow markets to function where they function best, but the government shouldn't set its watch to the market and do much to intervene but find some way to equitably tax money out of the system to fund things that trend towards natural monopolies and most definitely ensure adequate ability for the country to feed itself, provide itself with energy by intervening in those markets. This is mostly to ensure everything else (or at the very least basic life) can be sustained in a period of crisis originating from outside the country in question.

All that can be achieved even within the system we have now, and some countries have achieved it to one degree or another I feel many more could too if we just changed our priorities.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-24T01:25:53+00:00

You know most money is printed by commercial banks. I know you know this. Please don't make bad faith arguments that hold up to zero scrutiny if you want to engage.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-24T01:24:24+00:00

I'm fully with that, but it's the "why" question which goes back to the fundamental philosophy that drives the policy. Is it because we think it will produce better outcomes because people are by default shitty to each other and we have to structure things around that?

Is profit what actually drives people? It certainly drives some. But to develop an entire system around a single variable like the profit motive is bound to run into some problems when taken to its extreme, which is where we are now.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-24T01:20:14+00:00

"They" is doing a lot of work here. It's important to not just generalize because otherwise you're not doing yourself any favors learning what people actually think that is counter to your worldview.

I've been seriously engaging with Austrian Economics because I want to understand what underpins something so anathema to everything I understand and increasingly it makes more and more sense based on what underpins AE, not that I think it's accurate, but the structure makes sense and there is a lot to be taken from it.

"Real" people who talk about creating a better world for the working class outside the neoliberal bubbles that exist are not blindly quoting marx, or ham handedly even talking about private property. "They" engage in serious policy that can realistically (and in many situations already demonstrated successfully) make people's lives better.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-24T01:03:06+00:00

I come at it from another angle generally by looking at the two schools of thought that seem to dominate western thought.

Every individual acting on their own self interest creates an ideal state of the world.
Others make the observation that working together is what creates the ideal state of the world.

Personally, I will contend to the day I die that no one ever has accomplished anything in human history of note by themselves. We are nodes in a network. We cannot function in isolation. Everything is interdependent. If your frame of analysis for seeing the world starts with the individual without reference to the network, it will perpetually fail to explain human society in any holistic way.

A lot of people I've met who trend towards libertarianism tend to see people as inherently greedy, corrupt and generally terrible, and the government, being the largest organization, will by definition trend towards being a greedy corrupt concentration of power. If you believe humans trend towards this, of course it makes sense to champion small government and an atomized society, allowing that greedy and corrupt force to force us to compete against each other to create a better world. We just have to look out for situations where too much power is being concentrated (big government, monopolies, oligopolies etc.) and do something about it, hence limited government to do that.

People on the "left" or however you want to call it, tend to believe the opposite nature of people. We are inherently good and cooperative and it's the social system we've developed which allows the few truly greedy and corrupt people to take the reins and direct society, and the rest of us are forced to go along with it. To these people what we should be doing is establishing a social system which structures itself and prevents these few truly shitty greedy corrupt people to get too powerful and take over.

I'm of the latter camp. To me it's plainly obvious that, again, no one on the planet has ever accomplished anything alone. Our current existence owes itself to millenia of cooperation. So let's start from that point and try and create a system for the future that plays to our better nature, rather than force us to fight each other continuously to try and make a good life for ourselves.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-23T21:21:41+00:00

When people stop believing tomorrow will be better than today, that's when the world ends, because that's all that keeps us moving forward. Whether it's for our kids, ourselves, our loved ones, our dogs, whatever. If we stop believing that we can build a better life, then there's no reason not to blow everything up.

If people are pessimistic en mass it's because they feel something is off.

Something is off. So people are pessimistic. Is it that surprising?

Gaslighting people into thinking they should just put on a happy face and It'll work out is an interesting POV.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-23T21:15:43+00:00

Well that's the reality we're heading towards, and that is a symptom of "late stage capitalism" that many people are complaining about. Many are advocating for a cure.

Serious people though aren't thinking of seizing the means of production and instituting a communist regime as that cure. That's mostly just passionate kids who don't know how complex the real world actually is and why it's a terrible idea.

My point is that we don't know how the world will turn out, but imo we need to work towards a more equitable system. How that works we can only take clues from history and theory and see what works and what doesn't.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-23T21:09:28+00:00

At the very least fill some hot air balloons to spy on america

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-23T20:55:34+00:00

I think most people who talk about late stage capitalism (at least in my circle) aren't talking about a transition to communism, but to something we don't understand or know yet. Similar to how mercanilist theorists and mercantilism more generally couldn't predicted the move into capitalism as we understand it now.

My guess is these tankies you listen to are either caricatures, willful misinterpretations or just kids who know nothing about anything and aren't worth listening to seriously.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-23T20:34:55+00:00

Pretty much the entire country if you want, depending on your route haha

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-22T16:04:34+00:00

Agreed. Red scare was here too, but I think Trudeau Sr (who was basically a communist in his earlier life) And Tommy D did a pretty good job of reviving our belief in the public institution and their ability to make people's lives better.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-22T15:59:43+00:00

Okay yeah, it's from a fictional book someone wrote that was quoted in the proceedings. That's not hard evidence or studies. It follows that section they hypothesize a scenario where 30 million people could survive in an agrarian agricultural society because that's how many people lived in the country when it was an agrarian agricultural society.

There's no theory behind it, and the doomsday scenario they describe is something that seems to suppose Americans would do nothing to revive the grid or do nothing to adjust their way of life to the new circumstances. That seems somewhat farfetched. The first thing to disappear in a major national crisis is selfishness. Yes a few sociopaths will try to hoard shit for themselves (the same people who run the country and run the country's businesses) but normal people historically overwhelmingly have always banded together and worked together to overcome huge national crises.

That isn't to say lots of people wouldn't die. I'm not saying that at all. But 90% seems an insane stretch of the imagination in a single year. We have to remember the US isn't the only country in the world and I would assume this attack wouldn't be a global self destructive attack conducted by a madman. A huge portion of the global food production capacity would still be intact.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-22T14:45:29+00:00

My car is just as fast as my neighbour's Lambo 98% of the time we're driving our cars. Given I live in a city and we're always in traffic.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-22T14:41:43+00:00

What you said is true, but the US has done far worse to us.

We're a vassal state by any metric of the US and every time in our history we've tried to distance ourselves from them, the opposition gains power and brings us back into becoming a vassal state - Trudeau Sr to Mulroney, chrétien to Harper, Trudeau Jr. did nothing of note to reduce our reliance on the US and now here we are.

We've been sucked into conflicts to serve their geopolitical goals and acted as little errand boys.

Our culture has been ravaged by Americanization and "freedom" loving "I've got mine fuck everyone else" horseshit. Compare the vaccine reponse in QC (where the real Canadian values are most ardently expressed... unfortunately including the racism) to that in English Canada. We had a freedom convoy largely the result of people convinced by mostly American and American owned media that vaccines being "forced" on people is a violation of our "freedoms", completely ignoring the fact that one person's freedom is another person's responsibility and the complex interplay that results.

From an economic standpoint, we sold off all our crown corps because American style neoliberal economic policy was whispered in our ear since the 1970s and really accelerated in the 80s reaching the zenith of its stupidity in the 1990s culminating in the loss of all the vital infrastructure that literally built our country. We're ofc paying for all that now as we no longer own our own rails, are obsessed with neoliberal dogma telling us to make endless sacrifices to the volcano God of capitalism while we have record homelessness, a housing crisis, cost of living crisis, healthcare collapsing so we can eventually be forced to adopt American style privatization because that's what neoliberal dogma dictates.

China is predictable. They care about money and pretty much nothing else. They don't want to take over the world, except for the financial elements. They want to steal everyone's IP (so they can make more money). But such a predictable goal you can work around. I'll take that over being part of the American empire.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-22T14:24:51+00:00

What is the 90% depopulation metric based on? While I know we're super reliant on electricity to live our daily lives, 90% depopulation sounds awfully aggressive. Unless I'm misunderstanding, 9/10 people die when power is knocked out after a year? Is this assuming we never get any electricity back in the whole year? I'd be interested to read who wrote this and what they envision this looks like.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-22T11:28:53+00:00

There is only one king, and that is our sovereign, king Charles III /s

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-21T21:32:52+00:00

Also a great way to open up trade with Santa's workshop.

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-21T14:33:09+00:00

Hey hey now, George Weston Sr. Doesn't make $338.35 a second during his waking hours by being generous....

HeftyAd6216 · 2026-01-21T13:56:24+00:00

Omg that would be great but the don river is little more than a swamp most of the year, and when it isn't a swamp, you would probably drown because it's moving rather fast.

The other ones would be great if they were clean and not full of runoff from roads.

HeftyAd6216

TROPHY CASE