Conservatives sometimes suspect that monetary reform is just another redistribution scheme?
Not at all. Monetary reform does not redistribute the output of our incentive-driven system. It merely removes the major killer to incentive driven competition -- a monopoly on money itself.
What's the key element of that monopoly? The National Debt. Here's a real news flash -- governments don't have to borrow! Government debt is the secret poison -- the hidden corrosion -- of the incentive-driven system -- the system that must be preserved at all costs if the American experiment in governance by self-determination is to survive to see its tricentennial.
Laissez faire capitalism is the optimal economic system to maximize both innovative productivity and class mobility. If you work hard, you can improve your family’s lot in life – incentives. Where it goes astray is when politicians want to borrow some extra money so they can spend more than the national income. It doesn't matter if you champion gold money, bi-metalism, or greenbacks. It doesn't matter if you end the Fed or fix the Fed. If you allow a National Debt, you've done NOTHING!
Redistribution schemes -- the political "isms" -- don't work -- have never worked. As the great British historian, Nesta Webster wrote:
"...ownership of property ... is not peculiar to the human race. The bird has its nest, the dog has its bone that it will savagely defend... if everything were divided up today all would be unequal again tomorrow. One man would fritter away his share, another would double it by turning it to good account, the practical and energetic would soon be more prosperous than the idler or the wastrel. The parable of the ten talents perfectly illustrates the differing capacity of men to deal with money."
In addition, monetary reform answers Jefferson’s main complaint about the U.S. Constitution:
“I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution…. Taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.”
And speaking of the Constitution, read Article 1 Section 8: "Congress shall have the power to borrow money... [and] regulate the Value thereof...." How can they control the value when they have ceded that control to a private money monopoly -- one over which the have absolutely no control?
In the very next line of Section 8 it even talks about counterfeiting: ""To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States...."
Don't you think that investment banks creating money at ratios of at 53 times more money than they actually have qualifies as counterfeiting under the law? It certainly would if you or I did it!
Removing the government’s ability to borrow is the single most crucial element of monetary reform. In the coming fiscal year, the US government will spend north of $700 billion on interest payments -- mostly to the big money center banks in New York, London, and China. That’s an astounding 10% of ALL WAGES paid to everyone in the United States and a whopping 25% of all disposable spending by all Americans. Yet we argue whether or not to fund NASA to the tune of $14 billion.
So what could we do if we weren’t spending $700 billion every year on interest payments on the National Debt? Well, guess what the total receipts from federal income taxes are? $1,100 billion! In fact, all discretionary spending available to Congress is only $500 billion.
Now that's just the spending by the feds. Then there are the states. Think of the effects of removing all interest payments on bonded indebtedness from all state budgets? It would free up huge amounts of money for use by the general public.
The result: the crushing debt loads that are killing our economy would no longer be payments to the big money center banks, ultimately shouldered by taxpayers. That money would be returned to the public as wealth.
So, monetary reform is not redistribution of wealth, it’s nothing less than the prevention of national theft in the first place.
