Sailboat Diaries

Here’s how they did it: they bought enough Congressional votes to pass a bill (not that hard to do). The bill granted their organization the exclusive right to print money in the United States. So they could have printed and spent as much money as they wanted, for free. They manipulated the strings of the US government until it gave them a money tree.

But that wasn’t the trick. The trick was- instead of just printing dollars, they printed notes of debt that were redeemable for dollars. You see, a dollar bill is not a dollar. It’s a bill for a dollar, a representation of a debt owed to the bill holder. It’s an IOU for a dollar. So now, the money they issue as legal tender, enforced by the US government, was an instrument of debt. They manipulated the entire world into thinking an IOU was the same as the underlying asset it was redeemable for! But that’s not the whole trick.

So instead of spending money into the economy, they loaned it into the economy. All money is loaned into existence; they lease us the money supply. We have to pay this organization just to use money, and the government enforces their monopoly with force. But a loan always has two components- principal, and interest. So in order to use money, we (the collective we of the economy) have to pay back the money we use, plus interest. But wait, if all money is loaned into existence, how can you ever pay it back, plus interest? If all money is debt, owed back plus something extra, where can the extra come from? If a loan is principal plus interest (p+i), and the money supply is made up completely of the principal (p), where can the interest (i) come from? And that’s the trick- that’s how they turned us into slaves.

We can never, ever pay off our debts. The very structure of the system prevents us (again, the collective us) from ever achieving financial freedom. This organization enslaved us through our money, using the handy tool of government to enforce their monopoly. In order for everyone to pay back their debts, more debt must be taken on. The only way to pay back the principal plus interest is to take out a loan for more principal. And then to pay back the interest on that loan, more debt must be taken on. In order for everyone to pay back their debts, the system must keep growing. If everyone tried to pay back their debts at the same time, we would run out of money before we ran out of debt. Infinite growth is a fundamental assumption of the monetary system we live in.

Hopefully you can see this isn’t a new trick. It’s a Ponzi scheme, plain and simple. And like all Ponzi schemes, it will fail when it can no longer grow. Look around and you can see it unraveling. When you build a system with the fundamental, structural assumption of infinite growth, it collapses when it stops growing. The system just can’t work unless it keeps growing, and if it can’t work, it won’t work.

This is the paradigm change we are experiencing. The era of cheap energy is over, and the economy can no longer sustain growth. The monetary system will collapse. This isn’t just a possibility, it is a mathematical certainty. The only variable is timing, and it looks like it will be sooner rather than later. This isn’t the kind of thing you want to play chicken with; a year early is better than a day late. Prepare accordingly.

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become “profiteers,”, who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

-John Maynard Keynes (ie Keynesian economics, the standard model of every politician and banker) in The Economic Consequences of the Peace

 

I found this highly relevant video just a few days later: