This reads a lot like the founding of the Federal Reserve:
> [The Federal Reserve] had several key components, including a central bank with a Washington-based headquarters and fifteen branches located throughout the U.S. in geographically strategic locations, and a uniform elastic currency based on gold and commercial paper.
1. Geographically dispersed
2. Value elastic but secured by assets
3. Controlled by a small group of people
4. Goal of stable long term prices
Key differences between this and the US federal reserve seem to be:
1. Libra involves no state actors
2. Libra is pay-to-play (vs representative democracy for directors of the US Fed)
3. Libra has no employment objective
4. Libra has no interest objective (outside of maintaining investment in its reserve assets)
5. Libra is "fully backed by real assets"
While personal socio-political beliefs make #1 a huge concern for me, and #2 has been widely critiqued already, #3 - the US Fed's employment objective - is an interesting difference to me.
I have not read all of the Libra material yet, but so far this belief is the only reference I've found to Libra's relationship to work:
> We believe that people have an inherent right to control the fruit of their legal labor.
Seems simple enough on the face of it. An extremist could perhaps liken it to "taxes are theft," but I don't see evidence of that in one vague sentence.
I think instead this outlines a key philosophical difference between the US Fed and the Facebook Fed:
The US Fed has an objective of (indirectly through labor) distributing capital.
The Facebook Fed has an objective of easing the flow of capital.
The Facebook Fed therefore is neutral, amoral, technocratic in its approach: make what you have easier to use.
Whereas the US fed (and I suspect other federal reserves) have a non-fiscal social component builtin: increase capital distribution through availability of labor.
I prefer the Facebook Reserve as it reflects its largely private corporate roots.
Update: Considering Zuckerberg holds a majority of the voting shares in Facebook, I don't think calling it The Zuckerberg Reserve and Zuckbucks is at all unfair.
> [The Federal Reserve] had several key components, including a central bank with a Washington-based headquarters and fifteen branches located throughout the U.S. in geographically strategic locations, and a uniform elastic currency based on gold and commercial paper.
1. Geographically dispersed
2. Value elastic but secured by assets
3. Controlled by a small group of people
4. Goal of stable long term prices
Key differences between this and the US federal reserve seem to be:
1. Libra involves no state actors
2. Libra is pay-to-play (vs representative democracy for directors of the US Fed)
3. Libra has no employment objective
4. Libra has no interest objective (outside of maintaining investment in its reserve assets)
5. Libra is "fully backed by real assets"
While personal socio-political beliefs make #1 a huge concern for me, and #2 has been widely critiqued already, #3 - the US Fed's employment objective - is an interesting difference to me.
I have not read all of the Libra material yet, but so far this belief is the only reference I've found to Libra's relationship to work:
> We believe that people have an inherent right to control the fruit of their legal labor.
Seems simple enough on the face of it. An extremist could perhaps liken it to "taxes are theft," but I don't see evidence of that in one vague sentence.
I think instead this outlines a key philosophical difference between the US Fed and the Facebook Fed:
The US Fed has an objective of (indirectly through labor) distributing capital.
The Facebook Fed has an objective of easing the flow of capital.
The Facebook Fed therefore is neutral, amoral, technocratic in its approach: make what you have easier to use.
Whereas the US fed (and I suspect other federal reserves) have a non-fiscal social component builtin: increase capital distribution through availability of labor.