Fiat

"And God said," according to the Latin Bible by which Christians interpreted the Jewish sacred tradition, "Fiat lux." That's a lot of languages, a lot of mythology, and a lot of iron age, bronze age, cosmology/theology we pass through before we get to the English interpretation of King James's scholars:

Let there be light.

"Lux" is "light." So what's "fiat"? Make, create, come into existence ... Who knows? Literal translation is very iffy between incompatible world-views: the old gods, the old myths don't translate one-to-one: not to contemporary schooled persons who think that jobs and health care is what society is about. But never mind: I'm not after literal meaning, I don't believe in literal meanings anyway: only metaphorical interpretations, macroinformational re-interpretations: of the kind that got Jesus crucified. And I want to start a new section among my blogs, sort of parallel to my Knatz.com symbols posts, where the concept "fiat" gets extended as well as examined.

Fiat Money

First: the idea of fiat money, a phrase that's been around for a while, has been stated by pk at and around Knatz.com over the past decade. I'll remount that module following this post (or ASAP thereafter), doing so before I rewrite it as well as it needs, just to get the idea on record. Other people's expression of the idea can be sampled in economic literature on-and-off-line. In brief here:Money emerges from a human market place, then specialized organs of the market such as banks invent bank notes to substitute for horses, cowrie shells ... or gold: then government emerges from the welter of the market with its specialized organs (conceive "market" roughly as property, products, vendors, buyers, public, banks) takes over and, "borrowing" substitute "money" from the banks, issues its own money-notes. The governments next step in "borrowing" everything is to subtract the gold from the money: leaving government with all the property, all of the gold, all of the land, all of the resources ... and the public and the banks and the vendors with a lot of paper: fiat money.
The market had "made" money out of human value decisions; the government takes it over, sucking out the value.Here today I wish to make notes for further development extending the metaphor of fiat-this and that to other preposterous contemporary fiats, especially hidden fiats: fiats not examined in the over-developed but school-addled forebrain of over-populated Homo sapiens moronsis.

Fiat Innocence (/ Fiat Guilt)

coming next (this was my original stimulus to come on line and to blog this.)
(In a word, beyond a certain density, society becomes infected by institutions that exempt themselves from the standards they uphold: the government supervises the law suits but you can't sue the government: except by the most unlikely confluence of improbabilities: such as, you need the government's permission to sue the government!
Thus, in all essential things, the government is innocent by fiat.

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I love James' Genesis where God gives his first command in a passive voice. In Latin, "fiat lux" sounds commanding: now there's a general in charge of the troops: a BIG magician. In contrast, "Let there be light": who's doing the letting? Is God the magician? and the cosmos the sorcerer's apprentice?
According to BigBangers, the universe first existed without light. Is that what James' Genesis means? Fourteen billion "years" ago (how can you have a year when there's no solar system?) energy had flashed into existence, matter precipitated out, and now the system was ripe for some energy to manifest as visible light, radiating in all directions from all possible sources and propagating at c. velocity: c, being roughly 186,000 miles per second.

(And it was upon penning that last that I decided I had to add a K. Conundrums section.)