Why Arbitrarily Peg YOUR REGION'S Fiat To Some OTHER REGION'S Fiat?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

While reading a new, MMT Website in Italian, econoMMT , a thought kept occurring - one I've been harping on for years, without grasping why most people don't understand systems. Today, most citizens are strangely mis-directed, and hence unprepared to START with what many would view as the obvious and necessary start to managing group-situational-awareness. The causal mis-direction is highly distributed, across nearly all professions. Only basic systems-training prepares one to scale up systems thinking as system size increases by orders of magnitude. Let's get back to that in a moment.

First, kudos to the founders of the new Italo-MMT site. Maybe we'll soon hear "Marriner Eccles" bandied about in Italian too - as Italians ponder how they swapped fiat lira for pegged euro? Say, that's a good question. Why arbitrarily peg YOUR fiat to some OTHER REGION'S fiat?

To a physiologist, that's about as brain dead as insisting that the foot and hand maintain the same local oxygen tension at all times, for all of the hundreds of different muscles in your body. W.T.F. FOR????

What if you want your foot to simply brace the body, or even dangle idly, while one hand does heroic amounts of work, to the point of hand-muscle exhaustion and extreme oxygen tensions? Independent freedom of action among system components might well save your life, or someone else's. Example? Imagine the power's out, and you're sitting in a chair, pumping a hand ventilator for someone on life support. There are infinite, unpredictable situations that ANY system could find itself in. No problem, right? Just maintain system agility by allowing infinite operational freedom for local components to pursue locally-required tactics while coordinating SYSTEMIC STRATEGY with all other system components. That's what allows an agile system, whether an agile human body of diverse cells/organs/muscles, or an agile large economy made of diverse towns, regions and states. Right?

But NO! In the example above, the person relying on the hand-pumped ventilator must die. Simply because some idiocy says you can't let your hand's oxygen tension exceed quite moderate limits set by ... whom? A systemically brain-dead Brussel's Sprout somewhere, or some collection of Hot Dogs pursuing useless uniformity standards? Again, what on Earth for? Who came up with such an idiotic premise in the first place?

That is NOT the way dynamic systems work. In banking terms, the entire purpose of a fiat currency Central Bank is simply to denominate and track regional expressions of fiat, NOT to suppress regional fiat dynamics!!! Return on systemic coordination works exactly BECAUSE local components in a whole are free to pursue any, wildly different permutation of local responses to local conditions induced as part of system strategy. Such coordination is necessary in order for the the whole to be more than the algebraic sum of it's parts. Duh!

I mean, exactly what part of Duh don't universal conformists understand? Here's a note to humans everywhere: Never let your Luddites try to run a system required to be infinitely flexible, and dynamic.

Aesop (and countless others) wrote about this 2000 years ago (or more)! This is NOT rocket science, folks. It's standard tribal, nomad or small-group operations - not to mention systems math and systems biology. How on Earth did we lose that minimal system-logic during our transition to large groups?

Apparently, largely because we're very seriously mis-training almost all people in most of our overly-isolated professions. That's one inescapable conclusion. How else are you going to simultaneously explain such vast amounts of distributed knowledge AND such shocking systemic ignorance and systemic stupidity? It's as though we doubled the size of the neurons in our own brains, but dissociated them, rather than increasing their coordintion 10fold. In that case, we'd have more cells than ever, but less function, since they'd be a mass of cells each pursuing local logic instead of building the group logic we call a human CNS. Group logic works the same way in a national or continental economic union. Cultural logic is only as adaptive as the level of effort put into coordinating a culture's diverse components, each of which is allowed to express infinite flexibility! It's astounding that we delegate system-policy to idiots who don't KNOW this most fundamental of facts.

The goal of any "system" is systemic-agility, built on systemic-coordination of regional diversity, NOT uniformity. How much more brain-dead simple do we have to make this, before what our grandparents took as given sinks in again?