Could you look a Ridge Runner in the eye?

He must have had a minimum bid or his land has some significant liability. Land that Indians claim is theirs by treaty or toxic cleanup.

Here is a link to some questions I had on property money that @jabowery provided additional information.

Property money discussion

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Consider the word “money” in the following definition of “in escrow”:

The “escrow agency” has actual money in its possession. Think of it as a “reserve bank” where all of these “bids in escrow” are actual money in its possession.

The owner of the property is in a position to liquidate at any moment because money is liquid.

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Yeah the Property Money essay is the intermediate link between my 1992 essay on using the risk adjusted net present value calculation as the basis for a political economy, and militia money.

I published it January 21, 2020 in response to seeing the first signs of the COVID19 pandemic.

My late colleague Randal J. Burns had suggested, at least a year in advance, that a deep state response to potential violence by MAGA supporters could be to release a pandemic.

Indeed, I purchased a whole bunch of N95 masks spring 2019 in part because that was what turned out to be valuable during the prior swine flu pandemic scare. I also tried to get my local Eagles “Eyrie” to deploy a thrown together prototype of militia money involving smart phones, passive rfid cards and cyclos (open source local money system) initialized from the county assessors database. Eagles have a lot of veterans and first responders compared to other fraternal organizations. I even tried to get the Page County Iowa emergency preparedness plan for pandemics to the Shenandoah Eyrie but there was no such plan.

Part of the reason I resorted to the blunt instrument of prompting language models is that I can’t get anyone to engage me outside of the rare individuals like those at Scanalyst.

Even so, as we can see above, to truly explore the nuances* of this proposal requires a lot more than even John’s brain trust can afford to muster given the exigencies of the world we inhabit. This is far from the fault of John’s brain trust. I’m grateful for any feedback I can get given the stone cold silence that typically greets my radical proposals going back to the 1992 essay. Indeed, one modification I made to the original “Valoric Fire” wording happened only after years of pulling teeth in another forum to get critical feedback and for that I consider my years of effort there worthwhile:

This interval may be shorted by the challenged issuing a formal public declaration of its termination. The challenged may not shield others from the end of combat through the end of this interval.

Yes, those 196 characters were worth years of effort to get ANY critical feedback.

* Aside from the analogy to Fannie Mae and the Federal Reserve as government sponsored corporations, there are the microsocial nuances involving things like simple one-on-one bullying that people sometimes conflate with Section 6 out of a failure to consider implications as illustrated by The Tale of Lin Tse, which gives advantage even to young woman who might be better attuned to the natural environment than a bully.

The real nuance involving bullies is that there is no inherent prohibition against a bully beating someone up short of Section 1:

  1. Except in self defense or enforcement of this Law, no one may willfully kill, disable, or permanently disfigure another. No one may secretly restrain another. No one who has reached the age capable of procreation may physically force upon another any offensive, sexually-oriented act; nor engage in any offensive, sexually-oriented act with any person who has not reached the age capable of procreation even when no force is involved. An open (not secret) majority vote of all sovereigns assembled as set forth In §3 below shall be the effective determination as to whether the alleged act took place and whether the act was offensive and was sexually-oriented. Any degree of participation in group force that results in violation of this point of Law regarding offensive, sexually-oriented acts makes every participant fully guilty of the result, along with the person actually performing the act.

For example, what if a bully walks up to you and punches you or wrestles you into immobility but otherwise doesn’t violate Section 1??

Section 5 describes the process of community judgement and the limits thereon. Such a community forum is quite likely to be enough to quell such bullies on nothing more than a reputational basis, but in no event can that communal “judgement” override the appeal of last resort:

If you’re both Sovereigns, you may, as did Lin Tse, challenge him to a mutual hunt in nature. If neither of you are Sovereign, your respective Sovereigns may end up in a mutual hunt in nature. If you are Sovereign but the bully is Shielded by a Sovereign, you may challenge the bully’s Sovereign to a mutual hunt in nature.

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Yes, that is what I understood by “escrow”. However, don’t duck the question – What if the last time the property went through escrow was two generations ago? How to address the value of properties which have not been sold in decades, during which time developments have happened around it?

And “money”? Who defines what is acceptable as a medium of exchange? Look at the medieval world – Europe used gold, China used silver … different worlds, both using what they claimed was money.

The general idea of Militia Money seems to be something that might work in a world full of reasonable people who are all conforming to societal norms. But lots of things would work in that kind of world.

Previously I asked you to:

Why do you see this as an inadequate quasi-realtime liquidation price discovery mechanism, even if the property has not changed hands ever since title was first issued perhaps hundreds of years ago?

To illustrate an extreme case:

Shays gets Regulator title to his homestead back in 1787 and a Mr. Seixas, coastal merchant, who sold war vertans’ wives plowshares, seed, food, etc. on credit during the Revolutionary War, demands payment in Regulator Dollars (R$) from veterans. Seixas must pay his creditors in gold during the early recovery from war. The US has not (yet) developed industries required to completely resupply Seixas in exchange for R$ – although agrarian products like seed and food are quickly coming in from local suppliers now that the veteran Sovereigns are back home. Seixas is stuck between a rock and a hard place because his foreign creditors demand gold which he doesn’t have. So Seixas looks at the gold/R$ exchange rate sets the demand for debt service by veterans accordingly. The Sovereigns, since they have been issued R$ sufficient to cover the Domesayesque initialization of R$ as property bids-in-escrow, are in possession of an enormous reserve of liquidity which they can withdraw to service their debts.

But they don’t absolutely have to in order keep their family from dying of exposure or starvation because they have homesteads that provide the essentials of life even if at poverty levels of subsistence. They would, however, certainly want to maintain good relations with Seixas – they just wouldn’t need to do so.

Seixas, on the other hand, doesn’t have a homestead – he only has a business and one that doesn’t produce its own goods! What is he going to do now that Washington can’t, via Hamilton, be bought off to attack the veterans and take their homesteads for auction by holders of gold to pay Seixas?

Seixas will certainly be, at the very least, in a position to buy agrarian goods and services – which can be a substitute for not possessing his own homestead and thereby keep his family from dying of exposure and starvation. So he accepts some R$ – not to fully retire those debts but to service him as creditor – presumably at a high rate of interest to protect against risk of inflation as defined in terms of the cost of homesteading (thereby protecting his family from dying). However since the exchange rate with gold is going to demand a lot of R$, Seixas will be in possession of financial capital.

Seixas will, as a consequence be parking excess R$ into high bids in escrow (say to purchase Shays’s homestead) to avoid having to pay demurrage fees on holding R$.

But here’s where it gets really interesting:

Seixas knows the the producers of his goods and services he normally must pay gold for. Not all of them are going to be foreign producers…

So now everyone, merchants and veterans, are sharing the burden of building national self sufficiency in the post-war era.

But what about that high bid in escrow that Seixas placed on Shays’s homestead back in 1787?

It’s now 2025!

Well, we’re going to presume that Shays’s great great great… grandson is still living the Yeoman farmer lifestyle with whatever secondary accouterments might go along with 2025. But bottom line, it is still a homestead and is therefore in one of two conditions:

  1. There has been no development that has driven up demand for it so Seixas’s great great great… grandson has inherited the escrowed money (which hasn’t increased or diminished in those centuries and is still high bid). In this case intergenerational value has been sustained.
    or
  2. There has been development and the value of the Shays’s legacy has grown beyond the price of a homestead which means that someone, not necessarily Seixas’s… grandson, has placed a higher bid in escrow for property title. In this case, Shays’s … grandson must pay more in R$ than did Shays, so he may need to “get a job” working remote or find some more productive use for the homestead or liquidate at the higher R$ and purchase an Alaskan homestead, or become a merchant in combiantion with Seixas’s… grandson, or…
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The only guaranteed use for R$ would be payment of demurrage.

This is one of the mistakes that Rhode Island made in requiring a butcher to accept RI script rather than merely requiring the butcher to pay taxes in RI script.

If I understand this – Sally is sitting in the home she inherited from her great-grandfather. Then there is a knock at the door – Shylock has just laid down the cash for a bid in escrow for her home. Sally protests that the property she inherited is hers, and is not for sale. It does not matter. Some else has put cash into escrow, and she now has 24 hours to come up with (some form of) cash to enter a higher bid, or she will be tossed out her home.

If that is what this all means, I don’t think it is going to work.

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No. That’s not remotely the way property demurrage works.

She merely must come up with a cash flow that pays demurrage equal to what Shylock would have to pay on that money were it not a high bid in escrow.

Moreover, in the Regulator US, she would likely either be associated with, or would be an individual Sovereign and would therefore be associated with an incoming demurrage stream.

Recall the privatized delivery of social goods that is now In Our Hands.

PS: I will admit that “women” as many call themselves nowadays, would fight tooth and nail against Militia.Money – but what is tooth and nail compared to a 10 inch blade and 50ft of strong cordage in a wilderness area? Or are you talking about that abstract unit of force called “the vote” which may in the not too distant future become obviously the joke that it already has long been?

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The more I learn about your militia.money, the more I think “phooey on that”. Too high an IQ bar to ever actually work.

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It definitely takes a reporientation of thinking but then getting into the frame of mind of the founders also requires such.

I have thought that it may be necessary to produce a role-playing video game so the people can get a visceral sense of the way it connects with our nature. Elon Musk is claiming that grok 4 is good at prototyping games so maybe I’ll try that.

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It looks like you have thought so long & hard about this that there are aspects which seem as clear as day to you – but don’t seem that clear to the general public.

This may be complicated by the use of words to mean something other than their normal use. To most of us, “escrow” means a third party which facilitates a transaction by holding funds for a short period of time. In your version, it seems that the “escrow” holds funds for an indefinitely long period of time, and somehow pays out a stream of income to the person who deposited the funds. If that is my misunderstanding, then it makes the point that the scheme is not clear to the general public.

Back to Sally – who suddenly finds out that, thanks to Shylock’s unsolicited bid, she now has to pay what is effectively a tax if she wants to continue to live in the property she inherited from her grandfather. Some time thereafter, she breaks up with her boyfriend and decides she will take Shylock’s money, give up the property, and leave the area.

At the same time, Shylock has just decided that he has a better use for his money than having it locked up in escrow for Sally’s property. He decides to withdraw his bid and take back his money.

Does what happen next depend on who gets to the escrow office first?

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Thanks for the feedback Gavin I will take it to heart.

This is the kind of thing I’m desperate for and I really appreciate you guys putting up with me.

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I finished “Fears of a Setting Sun”. Amazon apparently won’t let me review it so here’s my review:

Once I read the epilogue it all fell into place for me.

Published in the aftermath of the 2020 so called election and the mutual accusations of insurrection this book is something of a comfort to those who can’t handle reality.

The message is simple:

The founders were imperfect, they distrusted each other, they had grave fears about the ability of a Constitution to hold the nation together. But in the end it all turned out more or less okay didn’t it?

I was rather hoping that the founders would have bothered to mention something about the importance of territorial integrity of religious beliefs because of the profound impact the Gutenberg press had in sparking the Thirty Years War that killed much of Europe.

But, no, they were as ignorant of history as everyone seems to be today.

At least they had the excuse there wasn’t a demographic collapse going on.

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These guys are building a business that at first glance seems like it is a win for “global citizens” with assets to protect in jurisdictions that have gone haywire due to the maltreatment of young men.

But when they say, under “Capacity building”:

Empowering partners with the tools, training, and systems for long-term resilience.

I have to wonder just what they think makes property rights fragile in the first place.

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