Natural law is the basis for what we think of as justice, or treating each other fairly. The atrocities of an evil government, like, say North Korea, are considered wicked because we judge them according to a standard of justice. That standard is natural law. It’s common to people, which is also why it’s sometimes called common law or even common sense.
Governments throughout history have tried to change this standard for their own benefits and the result is fiat morality. When justice gets corrupted with fiat morality, there are significant consequences. The ones who suffer are the ones on whom the fiat morality is imposed.
Why Elites Push Fiat Morals
The elites of society want to get away with behavior that would be considered abominable under natural law. Take stealing, for instance. Fiat money lets elites steal from others through inflation. They reframe money printing as “bailouts” or something that prevents the collapse of the entire system.
Giving certain companies and individuals favorable treatment would be considered unjust under natural law. But reframing that to be about the environment and making judgments about which companies are more moral makes picking winners and losers sound reasonable.
Historically, war has been the most common reason for fiat morals. Governments want to justify war, and use fiat morality to gain support for the war. Every war, even in ancient times, needed justification. The invasions of Iraq were framed as moral crusades . The defense of Ukraine and the billions spent per month is being framed in the same way .
Ultimately, fiat morality is about political power. Elites push a morality that will give them more moral authority. The BLM movement, for example, places the people pushing that agenda as moral arbiters. It’s similar with the ESG movement. The elites gain the power to decide what is or isn’t moral through the mechanism of fiat morality. Instead of earning trust from the populace, they can take trust implicitly by declaring themselves the referees.
Fiat Money Leads To Fiat Morality
Fiat morality is like fiat money. It creates unstable situations that erupt violently. Whenever money gets debased, morals also get debased by decree. I wrote about this with respect to no fault divorce and the end of the gold exchange standard . Fiat morality is easier to impose under an easy money standard. If money can be changed, why not moral standards?
Money, like moral standards, exists to make trusted interactions between people easier. A high trust society is a moral one where debts are repaid, contracts are upheld and fraud is punished. The debasement of money makes all such interactions more fraught with danger and less trustworthy. Thus, the debasement of money is also a debasement of trust and ultimately, a debasement of moral standards.
Perhaps debts are repaid with bailout (read: stolen) funds. Or bank deposit contracts are allowed to be broken for the purposes of not letting the economy collapse. And fraud that brings the country to war is allowed under particular circumstances. These all require some justification and this is where fiat morals come in. Justifying new behavior, especially behavior that enriches or empowers the elite, requires some rationale, or new rules. Every fiat moral rule is really a justification of something the elites want to impose on everyone else. They are a necessary, costly part of any political game.
New moral rules not only justify big changes, but also justify the very small. Never underestimate the pettiness of bureaucrats. Thus, we get fiat moral imperatives like recycling, or not littering or social distancing. These are really ways to get us to make the bureaucrats’ jobs easier.
Fiat Morality Is Fiat Slavery
Fiat morals reflect a shift in how the authorities see the people. Under natural law, governance is really about enforcement of already existing moral standards. Under fiat morality, people are seen as resources of the government, to be done with as the elites please. People are manipulated through fiat morals to do the bidding of authorities.
When the authorities treat the populace as their slaves, they mandate petty authoritarian rules like recycling. Controlling the money puts the authorities in a position to mandate morals that favor them. The citizens become their slaves through propaganda.
A good history lesson in this regard is the four pests campaign under Maoist China. The sparrow was made into an enemy by fiat moral decree because it was thought to decrease crop yields. The people became slaves to the system and were tasked with killing sparrows. The campaign was a spectacular failure as it contributed to famine and starvation, but the bigger question is: Why are people being tasked with making a socialist paradise?
Fiat money creates a slave view of the populace through fiat morals. Our central-bank-backed fiat monetary system brings us much closer to socialism than we realize.
Better Money, Better Morals
Bitcoin gives us a stable monetary standard. Instead of a fluctuating and constantly changing money, we get a standardized, unchanging money. Since money is half of every market transaction and a large part of almost every other relationship, making money constant makes transactions, or trade, more trustworthy.
The hope of Bitcoin is that interactions between individuals become better because the central bank is removed from that interaction. There are also no Cantillon effects to win. This means less need for justifications. The lack of rent-seeking means less fiat morals! You don’t need an excuse to steal when you can’t steal.
As a result, the specter of fiat contagion disappears and the need for fiat morals lessens. The associated costs of propaganda and heavy coordination go away and get put into productive use. The elites need less justification for their bad behavior because they can’t benefit from Cantillon effects. Governance becomes about the governed instead of the governors and citizens aren’t seen as slaves to be manipulated. We can go back to using natural law and not get twisted morally.
In short, we can kick out fiat morality to the curb and stop being manipulated by virtue signalers.
Good riddance.
Ten Fiat Moral Rules Soon To Come
Suggesting that inflation is due to anything other than corporate greed is racist
Wearing hairnets is necessary to prevent the spread of lice
Forcibly silencing people who say anything offensive to someone is not only justified, but deserves a reward
Dissemination of anything that makes the authorities look bad is treason
Children belong to the State and parents who want to teach them something the State disapproves of are criminals
Possessing lots of fat on your body is a sign of virtue
It’s not hypocrisy unless the authorities say it is
Beastiality and incest are different forms of love
Injecting Pfizer’s latest product into your body is the socially responsible thing to do
Ethnicity is something you can self-define and must be respected
This is a guest post by Jimmy Song. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.