21 Bitcoin Songsheets Fiat Delenda Est – Bitcoin Magazine
This is an opinion editorial by Jimmy Song, a Bitcoin developer, educator and entrepreneur and programmer with over 20 years of experience.
I have been saying this sentence for approx. 2.5 years now and have ended my podcast, newsletters and speeches with this sentence. In this piece I wanted to get to the heart of what this means and why I keep repeating this.
Carthago Delenda Est
The phrase fiat delenda est comes from the expression in Latin, Carthago delenda est, which means that Carthage must be destroyed. The expression can be attributed to Cato the Elder. He would end all his speeches in the Roman Senate with this phrase, no matter what he was talking about. He was like a nagging mother yelling for her teenage son to come down to dinner. And, like the teenage son who let his food go cold, Rome ignored Cato until they suffered losses to the Carthaginians.
Who were the Carthaginians? They were the enemies of Rome. Like the Romans, the Carthaginians were a competing empire along the Mediterranean. As both expanded, they clashed and the two competing empires had some epic battles. Two Carthaginian generals, Hamilcar and his son Hannibal inflicted some serious losses on the Romans,
We actually don’t know much about the Carthaginians because Cato’s words were eventually followed. Rome didn’t just sack Carthage, they completely pulverized the city. They were determined to wipe them out, so the Romans made sure to leave the city in ruins for over a century.
In short, Cato wanted to destroy Carthage because otherwise Rome itself would be destroyed. The victory over the Carthaginians was a major conquest that would lead to the legendary status of the Roman Empire in history that it now holds. The destruction of Carthage was the signature victory that propelled the empire to the heights it eventually achieved.
Fiat
The word fiat in Latin is not an adjective as it is in English. Here is Genesis 1:3 in Latin: “Deus said fiat lux et facta est lux.” Meaning: “And God said let there be light and there was light.” Fiat Lux here means “let there be light.” Fiat is a verb in Latin that means “let it be”. And that’s actually where the term fiat money comes from. It means let there be money. The money requires no work and is decreed into existence, so as a result fiat is an adjective in English meaning “by decree.”
Fiat is the idea that you can create something by telling it to exist and not by doing the work to make it exist. The fiat mentality is the illusion that you can decree something into reality just by saying it.
But as any child can tell you, wishing something into existence doesn’t work. Someone has to do the work to create. I can say let it be beef all day, but that won’t happen unless someone raises a cow, someone butchers the cow, someone cooks the beef and someone delivers the beef.
Who does the work?
In other words, we must ask the question who or what actually fulfills the decree? Who does it like that? Someone or something must invest time and energy in order for the thing to be made. Someone has to do the work. Labor is not voluntarily given in a fiat system, but through tyranny. Coercion and violence is how you get involuntary labor.
Force and violence are not popular and they generally escalate tensions and make it very difficult for a government to stay in power. Tyranny is justifiable resistance and revolution is not far behind. The former Soviet bloc used mandates and decrees to “create” things at gunpoint. They were particularly cruel and authoritarian, all because they had the fiat mentality that they could decree new things into existence. It’s not new, of course. Civilizations as ancient as the Egyptians used force and violence to get things done by decree. It is no wonder that so many rulers thought of themselves as gods. What they decided would happen, but only at the cost of massive human suffering.
In contrast, the modern Western world used a different form of decree through fiat money. Fiat money allows for soft mandates. Fiat money is still decreed to exist, but all other decrees are not forced upon others so much as paid for through money printing. The biggest advantage of fiat money is that it is an indirect system of mandates. By paying people for their labor through inflation, fiat money creates the illusion of market forces. Because there is monetary compensation and monetary incentives, fiat money makes government mandates look like a normal function of the market. But as we all know, inflation is a form of theft and their action is similar to a thief using your wallet to pay you.
Fiat money is a decree limited to the most tradable commodity on the market – money. But because money can be used to buy almost anything, the end result is that the government can force the market to do its bidding. The authorities get what they want and the governed become ignorant slaves. Instead of being forced to do the work, they are tricked into doing the work. The authorities look like a generous employer, but in the background they are stealing from your savings to pay you. Like Tom Sawyer, they have managed to get us to do something through a trick.
Problems with Fiat mentality
The proponents of fiat money at this point might say, well, what’s wrong with this system since people are fine with providing these goods and services and we’re not forcing people into gulags? Although not as severe as a traditional authoritarian regime, there are some serious problems with this fiat mentality.
First, fiat money centralizes power. The theft is very subtle and the result is centralized power with a mild form of authoritarianism. The fiat money controller can make us do whatever we want just by paying us to do it. It is a softer form of slavery than, for example, communism, but it is still slavery. The ability to steal money through inflation allows those in power to control our labor output.
Second, fiat money creates some serious civilization-destroying incentives. Cheating and theft become widespread. I had a friend in high school who was trusted with some computer systems that mistakenly gave him access to the school’s grading system. He discovered this and gave himself good grades. As a teenager, of course, he could not keep this information to himself, and soon his friends offered him money to change their characters. He took their money and changed their grades. Then cute girls would ask him to change his characters and he would do it. Soon the whole school knew, and as you might expect, he was expelled from high school when the news finally reached school authorities.
Fiat money is a lot like that. As long as it lasts, working for fiat money is a cheat code for civilization. You don’t have to provide any value, and few people even know you’re stealing. Unfortunately, the bureaucracy created by fiat money grows like a cancer and destroys civilization.
And that brings us to the final consequence which is the ubiquity of politics. Fiat money makes everything political. To see why, let’s go back to the bureaucracy that continues to grow. Rent-seeking positions are inherently political and everyone wants one. After all, who doesn’t want to do little work and make a lot of money? Never mind that they charge a lot of transactions without providing any value. It is easy to rationalize such choices when money is involved. Rent-seeking is an easier way to make money than offering goods and services to a fickle market.
So how do people post rent seeking positions? Of politics. In politics, the moral high ground is a great way to get what you want. This is especially true in fiat money societies because there is an implicit obligation for those in power to do something about any form of suffering. The assumption ultimately means that everyone is motivated to make themselves a victim of some kind. There is a reason we are inundated with claims of victimhood. That’s because they all want the stolen money!
Lack of respect for truth
What this means is that the truth doesn’t really matter. In politics, it is not the one who gets the money who is the truth teller, but the one who can claim that they are being oppressed. And ultimately this permeates everything as the fiat contagion spreads.
This is in stark contrast to a world based on good money. In a fiat money system we have slavery by tricking people into doing the work. There is considerable rent-seeking which leads to the destruction of productivity. Finally, we get a society and a political environment based on lies. Bitcoin, on the other hand, gives us freedom from government interference, stimulates production and is based on truth. As you might imagine, real production and real construction is aligned with Bitcoin and not fiat money.
That’s why I say fiat delenda est. Fiat must be destroyed because this fiat mentality, this illusion that you can create something from nothing, is destroying civilization. Fiat is an existential threat. We must destroy fiat because otherwise it will destroy us.
How to destroy Fiat
So how do we achieve this? First, we destroy the entitlement mentality. Many people believe that they can decide that others will do something for them whether they realize it or not. For example, making health care a right means that someone is forced to provide that service. All rights are ultimately paid for by someone, and theft and/or violence is what provides it.
Second, we must punish rent-seeking. The best and brightest minds of the last 50 years have gone into rent-seeking businesses such as investment banking. We must make such behavior shameful and offensive. Why is it that someone like Warren Buffet, someone who has just moved money around his whole life, is one of the most respected people in the world? Compare this to 100 years ago where people who created things, like Edison or Tesla, were some of the most respected. Whatever a society reveres, it will get more of. We give deference to the wrong kind of people. Far too many people would rather rent-seek and avoid productive work. We must bring shame to these tax-collecting leeches.
Third, we must make truth great again. Fiat money would not have been possible if truth prevailed. Unfortunately, the lies won and we have all suffered for it ever since. A market economy cannot function on lies. There must be a fundamental respect for the truth for markets to function. We must not be deceived.
The truth is that there is considerable theft in the current system. This is at the root of how the fiat mentality thrives, and the obvious counter is to adopt money that is very difficult to steal. Bitcoin is that money.
Fiat must be destroyed if we are to preserve civilization.
Fiat delenda est.
This is a guest post by Jimmy Song. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
