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The amount of $100 bills in circulation is surging. And it's leaving some economists scratching their heads.
The number of outstanding U.S. $100 bills has doubled since the financial crisis, with more than 12 billion of them across the world, according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve. C-notes have passed $1 bills in circulation, Deutsche Bank chief international economist Torsten Slok said in a note to clients this week.
[...] "By eliminating high denomination, high value notes we would make life harder for those pursuing tax evasion, financial crime, terrorist finance and corruption," [former Standard Chartered bank chief executive Peter] Sands wrote.
The global illicit money flows were "staggering" and fuel crimes from drug trafficking and human smuggling to theft and fraud, Sands said. He estimated that depending on the country, tax evasion robs the public sector of anywhere between 6 percent and 70 percent of what authorities estimate they should be collecting. And despite "huge investments in transaction surveillance systems, and intelligence, less than 1 percent of illicit financial flows are seized.
[...] "The Federal Reserve and Treasury make 99 dollars for every $100 dollar bill they print and sell offshore," Colas said. "There's a natural desire to keep printing these things — the U.S. government makes a lot of money selling them."
Superbills?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @09:11PM (1 child)
Your best bet for convincing me of the legitimacy of governing the unconsenting it to convince me of utilitarianism.
Your best bet for convincing me of utilitarianism is to argue that morality isn't intrinsic to reality, it's just the set of behavioral restrictions we're personally ok with forcing on nonconsenting people with violence. I am, for example, happy to use violence against a nonconsenting person to force them to not steal from me, and so I consider that moral. Push on this a little and one ends up concluding that "X is immoral." just means "I'm willing to use violence against nonconsenting people to stop them doing X.".
Morality then is merely a partial description of one's utility function/decision theory, specifically the set of actions they license which involve doing violence to nonconsenting parties to prevent or force an action from them. As such any morality which calls an act we ourselves would perform evil is simply mistaken, and incorrectly describes those actions we are willing to perform, because morality is descriptive not prescriptive.
Therefore the fact I am willing to shoot the plane down demonstrates that I consider it moral, and I am simply using the words morality/moral/immoral/etc incorrectly in my post.
This doesn't answer the question of what one's morality ought be though, and just kicks the can down the road to what one's utility function/decision theory ought be. Strong arguments can be made for what one's decision theory ought be, leaving only one's utility function undetermined.
While this argument doesn't answer the question of what ought be moral, it does at least argue that everyone already is a utilitarian and just use deontological heuristics.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @09:58PM
What our utility function is isn't directly chosen by us, though it can be influenced by our choices. Rational agents will never ascribe positive expected utility to changing their utility function at the time they are considering doing so*. Therefore our utility functions will, to the extent we are rational, only drift neutrally and so we don't need to care about altering them. Therefore our morality is out of our hands to the extent we act rationally, and what appear to be people altering their morality are actually just people deciding that a given strategy leads to greater expected utility (e.g. because they feel good for having done so/because they avoid feeling bad/because it's just habit they got into due to a process with positive expected utility (e.g. obeying parents on moral matters and not bothering to reconsider)/because they avoid prison/et c.).
Therefore I, and all others, already do seek maximum utility without regard for morality, because it can't influence our behavior but is rather a description of it. Choosing to be honorable so that others will be is just a decision theory problem, not anything deeper. My prior sacrifices of utility in the name of morality were just the products of a heuristic for maximizing utility, and still good decisions because they caused others to trust me, which is more beneficial than the utility I would have obtained even if never betrayed.
I believe that maximum utility will be obtained from pseudo-rights, where they're respected up to a point and then are ignored, as almost all people currently support but mistakenly call rights.
Guess I'm a statist now. Didn't expect that. This has been coming for a while, but I didn't expect such a sharp 180 into egoism.
Please point out any mistakes, I'm tired and know fuck all about this topic. I'll think all this through properly over the coming days/weeks. I don't expect my actual behavior will change in the slightest because of this, being trustworthy is far too valuable to give up for the utterly minor gains I could have by violating other's rights.
*newcomblike problems aside, accounting for them isn't needed to communicate my point.