I think the switch over you are really referring to, is the creation of the Federal Reserve, some 60 years before going off the gold standard. Before that, local banks would issue their own currency. A relative once sent me a photocopy of a bank note, with the picture on it of a joint ancestor, as the founder of a bank in Illinois, which apparently went under in the crash of 29.
The issue of the gold standard was whether the money had a solid backing, not whether there was some central authority.
You do need to look a little further back in history, as before the land closures in England, there was common land and everyone took responsibility for it, yet there was also private property. You seem to have difficulty wrapping your mind around the fact they can co-exist. The fact remains that we have to invest for the future in something and just putting it in a bank account and letting the banks worry about it, is how we got here in the first place. How would you suggest we invest for the future? Government bonds? Derivatives? Apple stock? Bitcoin? CLO’s?
Yes, it would be nice if we all had our own business, house, land, etc, and the only public property were the roads, but life is a little more complicated, than our ideals wish for. For one thing, as someone who grew up on a farm, it can only be a joint effort. The work really is hard.
Probably part of the problem in Russia was they were coming out of many centuries of a top down theocratic backed feudal culture, being led by some absolutist intellectuals, who wanted everything at once. Leading to one of history’s true sociopaths being in charge. Not to mention in the middle of two world wars, the first to shed monarchy and the second to deal with all the blowback from the first. They got fucked. Such is life.
Doesn’t mean we can’t learn lessons, but that means being able to sift through quite a lot of evidence and differing points of view. Yes, the world is currently being led by a bunch of superficially intelligent people, with attitudes as to how everyone else should act, but that system is still built on an enormous bubble of debt that is quite quickly coming undone. Somehow we still have to work together, not everyone just burrow down into their separate holes.
