Why ideological monetary systems reconstruct what they abolish.
Max Constraints · 20 September 2026
Ideological monetary systems — systems designed around what money should be instead of what money does — rebuild the institutions they set out to kill.
This is that argument, in public.
Read it here:
- Impossibility Trilemma. A system that bans endogenous credit cannot keep its ideology, meet real credit demand, and stay stable. Pick two.
- Misdiagnosis Invariant. When it fails, the doctrine blames impurity, not the ban.
- Fragility Gradient. Each “purer” restart is more brittle than the last.
- Recurrence. Credit demand does not go away. The abolished function comes back — informal, then official, then captured.
Cases: War Communism → NEP; gold standard → 1971; Bitcoin maximalism → ETFs, custody, BTC-collateralised fiat credit.
No paywall. No submission. No peer-review theatre.
Fork it, quote it, attack it. Cite the repo URL.
License: CC BY 4.0 — copy and reuse with attribution.