Bitcoin is Venice

Joel Kotkin introduces his pithy tract, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, anticipating this re-emergence:

“Of course it will look different this time around: we won’t see knights in shining armor, or vassals doing homage to their lords, or a powerful Catholic Church enforcing the reigning orthodoxy. What we are seeing is a new form of aristocracy developing in the United States and beyond, as wealth in our postindustrial economy tends to be ever more concentrated in fewer hands. Societies are becoming more stratified, with decreasing chances of upward mobility for most of the population. A class of thought leaders and opinion makers, which I call the “clerisy,” provide intellectual support for the emerging hierarchy. As avenues for upward mobility are diminishing, the model of liberal capitalism is losing appeal around the globe, and new doctrines are arising in its place, including ones that lend support to a kind of neo-feudalism.”

Not all, but certainly some, of these afflictions can readily be attributed to the normalized strip mining of capital in the pursuit of ever more leveraged “growth” I outlined in Part Two of this series, The Capital Strip Mine. Those who do not own hard assets are increasingly tending to drown in debt from which they will realistically never escape, unable to save except by speculation, and unable to afford the inflation in the essential costs of living that does not officially exist. What amounts to an “official” message is the likes of Christine Lagarde (then president of the IMF and now of the ECB) musing that, “we should be happier to have a job than to have our savings protected,” and the World Economic Forum projecting that, by 2030, “you will own nothing, but you will be happy.” You will use things that somebody owns, mind you. But that somebody will not be you.

If we were to believe that these people actually mean what they say, and that the strip mining of capital is not going to stop — indeed, that it cannot stop — we might be as similarly inclined as Otto of Freising to look for any sprouts of civilization that manage to advance beyond our rebooted feudalism. There may end up being a variety of reasons that different groups avoid this state. I think that, for some, the reason will be Bitcoin…

MOAR:

https://allenfarrington.medium.com/bitcoin-is-venice-8414dda42070