What Is Fiat Money?
January 28, 2016
BERT PERRY writes in response to this entry on our monetary system and usury:
It strikes me that if we want to fight the current banking system and reduce usury, we really need to little more than look in the mirror. As the eminent economist Walter Williams has noted, two minimum wage incomes get a family of four out of poverty, so if a person is employable and gets married before having children, he’s not going to be poor in our country.
What’s going on here is not the Dickensian exploitation of workers, company stores, and the like, but rather people who are old enough to contract marriage, have children, get jobs, and the like, are led astray by covetousness. They want the more prestigious school, the nicer car, the bigger house, the bigger wardrobe, etc..
You want to put the kibosh on our financial system? There is an easy way to do it in our fractional reserve banking system; pay off your debts. Taking a dollar out of savings to pay off debt eliminates ten to twenty dollars in the money supply due to fractional reserve requirements. And to pay off your debts, you’ve got to confront your tendency to covet things, as Dave Ramsey would point out.
So your key issue here is not Deuteronomy 23:30, but rather Exodus 20:17.
Laura writes:
You seem to have the impression that I am simply talking about personal indebtedness. Soaring rates of personal indebtedness are caused by our monetary system, but leaving that aside, every single person is paying for the accumulated interest built into our debt-based system. Almost all money in the system is created as debt. Don’t believe me? Then will you believe the Bank of England, a central bank similar to the Federal Reserve? More than 90 percent of the money in the system is created as debt. The banks create the principle. They do not create the interest, which means that over time there must be climbing rates of indebtedness as that shortage of money works through the system. (That video is British, but the situation is the same wherever there are central banks in charge.) Again, most of our money is created as debt. From the previous link:
So when lots of people try to pay down their debts at the same time, money disappears from the economy. As a result of there being less money and less new lending spending slows down. When this happens, it’s like draining the oil from the engine of a car: pretty soon, everything stops working.
This means that it’s almost impossible to reduce our debts without causing a recession. And you personally can only pay off your debts using money that was created when someone else went into debt. This creates a debt trap, where over time the level of personal debt in the economy has to keep growing.
Everyone pays heavily for our privatized credit system through inflation and taxation.
The value of the U.S. dollar has decreased by more than 90 percent since the Federal Reserve was created. Inflation is a tax. Inflation is caused by increases in the supply of money. In 1940, you could buy a nice house for $10,000. Now you’re lucky if you can get one for 20 fold that amount.
This extreme instability in the value of money is not due to fluctuations in supply and demand of products, but to deliberately engineered changes in the supply of money. Here is an explanation by Ron Paul of how inflation works.
Who benefits from inflation? Only those who are at the top of the pyramid and receive all that new money directly from the source. As you might have guessed by now, the source is the Federal Reserve, and its recipients include the government which “borrows” a lot of new money each year, without any intention of ever paying it back. Another beneficiary these days are failed banks that are being “bailed out” for the good of the “economy”, or defense contractors that receive money to build up our military so we can have a constant presence all over the world and fight never-ending and unnecessary wars. There was even a huge number of small-time beneficiaries who received consumer loans and sub-prime mortgages they would never be able to pay back.
What, then, is fiat money? It’s exactly what we just talked about: money that can be inflated or increased at the push of a button at the say-so of a powerful person or organization. Nowadays most dollars are just blips on a computer screen and it’s extremely easy for the Federal Reserve to create money out of thin air whenever they want to.
Here’s a documentary on how the Fed creates booms and busts. The Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression, as Ben Bernanke openly stated. (He says it won’t happen again. Given the remarkable power of the Fed, and its closed-door proceedings, it seems that we should not take the chance.)
I am not going to waste time on Walter Williams’ claim that a family can live a middle class life with two minimum wage incomes. It’s really preposterous, unless that family is going to live in a run-down, dangerous ghetto and work at the McDonald’s down the street (but they likely won’t be able to get jobs there) and leave their children home alone.
Even if it were easy for the middle class to make ends meet and the reason why so many families have little savings even with two middle class incomes was just that they are buying too many things, theft is still theft. And our monetary systems amounts to the theft of the nation’s monetary resources, as Major Clifford Hugh Douglas wrote back in 1936.
Imagine if a family had saved $200,000 and one day they woke up to find that amount had been reduced by $100,000 arbitrarily by the bank. Your comment is similar to someone saying to this family, “Well, you know you can still survive on $100,000! Don’t be greedy.”