Not enough people realize it, but every time the government prints money, it is stealing from us. It is stealing the purchasing value of the dollars we already have, and this tends to affects the poor the worst.
The government can choose who receives the new money (friends of government and military contractors) and by the time it trickles down to the rest of us, the new money has already lost much of its value. "To steal from the shoemaker the fruit of his labor," noted Herbert Schlossberg in Idols of Destruction, one can take his product or the money he has received for it. Or else one can so tamper with the monetary system that the money will not serve to purchase economic goods equivalent to the product the shoemaker provides. Outright stealing is widely recognized for what it is, but the economic crime that accomplishes the same thing through debasing the money is not. Yet the motive and the effect are the same."
Ron Paul made the same point in his excellent little book The Revolution:
"When the value of Americans' savings is deliberately eroded through inflation, that is a tax, albeit a hidden one. I call it the inflation tax, a tax that is all the more insidious for being so underhanded: most Americans have no idea what causes it or why their standard of living is going down. Meanwhile, government and its favored constituencies receive their ill-gotten loot. The racket is safe as long as no one figures out what is going on.".Even the perverted pedophilia John Maynard Keynes (1883 –1946) agrees with me:
“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, government 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. – 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."
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2 comments:
Robin, the predictions of massive inflation by people like Ron Paul simply haven't come true. I'll outsource this to Paul Krugman, who has shown that the inflationistas have gotten it all wrong.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/speaking-of-people-whose-models-have-failed/
Additionally, self-righteous moralizing about the homosexuality of Keynes has absolutely nothing to do with the validity of his theory, which has performed well explaining the current economic crisis.
Again I'll outsource to Krugman.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/opinion/keynes-was-right.html?_r=1&ref=paulkrugman
“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” - John Maynard Keynes
I suspect your views come from the peculiar religious/political perspective unique to American evangelicalism. And you should know how this very gnostic/puritanical worldview has shaped American politics and economics with its supreme elevation of the individual over the collective. That American Christians could be so enamoured with libertarianism is strange to me. It is, as far as I can tell, uniquely American. And I think this extreme individualism stems from the Puritans.
I just love Tom Wirght's politics. Being conservative theologically does not equal conservative politically or in economics. Consider this quote from Surprised by Hope: "Reading the collected works of F.A. Hayek in a comfortable chair in North America simply doesn't address the moral questions of the twenty-first century."
In a recent interview he says the following: "Well, if wealthy people do make things happen in our world—like creating jobs and having a healthy effect on our society—then that’s a good thing. The trouble is, this idea is classically used as a smoke screen by the rich. There’s this old trickle-down theory of economics. In my country and I see here in the U.S., too, the money certainly isn’t trickling down. It’s going the other way. I think people have fooled themselves that it’s all right for people to become so rich. I think we need to be asking urgent questions about this imbalance."
http://www.readthespirit.com/explore/2011/11/22/interview-nt-tom-wright-simply-jesus-kingdom-bible.html
The collusion with empire that American evangelicals have participated in is a scandal. And much American Christianity is simply wrong. Go Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia and come at them with the hyper-Calvinist nonsense that is taking root in America, with it's political and economic ideology bundled up with it. American Christianity in most of its forms is completely foreign to ancient Christianity expressed in these ancient Christian communities. Go and tell the Ethiopian Christians that they should abolish the central bank, aid agencies etc. You need to step back and take a wider look at the world and realise that the way American Christians think just isn't the way other Christians do. And, I believe, the political and economic position of American evangelicals -whether Reformed or charismatic or whatever, is downright anti-biblical. How anyone could read the gospels and minor prophets, Isaiah 1 etc and make this jive with Ayn Rand and F.A. Hayek indicates to me that thier own self-serving ideology is being read into scripture.
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