Bitcoin is not rightwing

A well-known experiment, often cited in behavioral studies, involves two capuchin monkeys in adjacent cages trained to perform a simple task, such as handing a researcher a rock. Upon completion, the researcher rewards one monkey with a cucumber slice, while the other receives a grape – a treat capuchins prefer significantly more than cucumbers.

Initially, the monkey given the cucumber accepts it, though perhaps with mild hesitation. But when the experiment is repeated and the same unequal rewards are distributed once again, the cucumber-receiving monkey typically protests – often throwing the cucumber out of their cage (or even back at the researcher) in frustration. Notably, both monkeys are content when they both each receive cucumbers, and they’ll even perform the task without any reward for a time. However, when one is favored in clear sight of the other, the less-rewarded monkey’s resentment is unmistakable.

This behavior reveals a striking insight: a sense of justice is hardwired into us, predating human society and evident even in our primate relatives. On a fundamental, intrinsic, instinctive level, we are reflexively disgusted when we're the recipient of a comparative injustice.

Here's where fiat comes in. Suppose your employer asked you to perform the same job as last year, with equal effort, but offered you a lower salary this time. Your immediate reaction would likely be one of instinctive, reflexive disgust.

But what if your pay could be reduced covertly, without triggering this instinctive response? How might that be achieved?

In a fiat system, your employer can 'raise' your salary annually while still effectively paying you less. This is achieved by increasing your pay below the rate needed to match the true decline in your purchasing power. Official inflation figures, like the Consumer Price Index (CPI), underrepresent the rising costs of assets such as housing, stocks, land and business premises, all of which far outpace mass-produced goods in the long run. Your modest salary bump might leave you and your colleagues feeling underwhelmed, but it doesn’t provoke the same raw anger as an outright pay cut.

Many assume salaries are determined solely by market forces – supply and demand determining a 'fair' price for your labor. But this is only partially true. You, along with all workers globally, play an active role in valuing your labor. Without some mechanism to disguise your pay cut, you wouldn’t willingly work for less this year than last – your innate sense of fairness would rebel.

Fiat currency provides the shrowd to mask the injustice. The muted frustration of a 'pay rise' that doesn’t quite keep up with your ability to afford scarce assets – like a home – differs powerfully from the visceral disgust of seeing your paycheck shrink outright. These inadequate 'pay rises' have been occurring globally for over 50 years now. That sense you have that everything is broken is precisely this.

And in a economic system underpinned by a hard-capped currency like BTC, this deception would be impossible. To reduce your pay, employers would have to lower the nominal amount on your payslip, and everyone else's. The resulting outrage would be swift and collective. Workers would resist en masse.

Fiat currency concentrates wealth among those who already own substantial assets, whilst those with few or no assets struggle to keep up. It does so by cutting everyone's pay globally, every year. Housing and land and the S&P 500 and rare art and fine wine and the Mona Lisa are not rising in price. Your pay simply keeps falling. This trend will persist unless workers demand compensation in a currency immune to such deception.

Bitcoin is not rightwing. Those who think it is have not understood it yet.

Fix the money, fix the world.