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May 30, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:53
258 The Subtle Corruption of State Banking
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Good afternoon, everybody.
It's Steph. Hope you're doing well. 30th of May, 2006.
It is 20 minutes past 5, and Christina has a patient at 6, so we have 30 to 34 minutes to get home, because sometimes our patients come a little early.
So I shall be pushing the pedal.
The pedal. There's a manly driver for you.
I'll be pushing the pedal to the metal for the drive home and we'll see if we can't make it home in time.
So I was just working on an article for Lou Rockwell or whoever wants to publish it around the idea that if you want to look at a pacifistic state in the society, just look in the mirror, which is something that I think needs to be said over and over again so that people can understand that we're not talking about some abstract ideal in the future.
That if you want to look at freedom, how it can really work, you just have to look in the mirror.
And it's all part of the philosophy really in general.
Of working from the standpoint of empiricism first, abstracting, and then testing the abstracts with empiricism again.
The standard scientific method.
Now... Today, this afternoon, I didn't have a chance today to look up a couple of the technical terms that I wanted to talk about with logic this afternoon.
So we'll put those aside.
And what I'm going to talk about this afternoon...
Oh, my friends, we are going to venture into dangerous territory.
Not the kind of dangerous territory where I offend you with statements that you might find problematic.
It's even worse than that.
It's going to be statements which I make without having done enough research or having the research at hand.
And so this is going to be one of those things where I'm going a little bit beyond my scholarly limb.
I have done a little bit of research on this, but not as much as I should.
But it's a topic that people have been pestering me about for weeks, actually months.
So I'm going to speak what I know, and it will be hopefully the springboard for you to either send me voluminous amounts of emails saying, my God, I can't believe you got this wrong.
Actually, I'm sure people could believe it by now.
Or as a springboard for you to do your own study on a very interesting, complicated, and challenging subject.
Now, this subject, of course, is our good friend the Federal Reserve, and it is the issue of currency.
Currency is the physics of capitalism.
It is the bedrock, the gravitational well, the law of attraction.
It is the inverse square law.
It is everything that is related to how a market economy, how freedom works.
Currency is the essential.
It is the physics of economics.
Sorry, it's the physical rules of economics.
Economics is the physics of economics.
But let me not tread all of these metaphors to death.
I don't know what's happening with my metaphor brain today.
Perhaps it has simply gone bye-bye.
We'll see. We'll find out tomorrow.
So... The Federal Reserve, of course, was created by an act of Congress in 1913, and it was created after about 1,500 tries at attempting to do this.
I mean, the state control of currency is something that every government wants a state bank, which, of course, is not a state bank at all.
It's like calling the military state Boy Scouts.
A state bank is not a state bank at all.
It is a tool of exploitation and one of the most subtle forms of corruption and destruction that exists in the world.
It is the slow-fuse weapon of mass destruction in the hands of the government, and that's why they want them so much.
You can't have a war without a national bank like a government-controlled bank.
You can't have deficit financing.
You can't have social programs.
You can't have bribery. And basically, national banks exist to siphon The value of money out of the general population and deposit it into the pockets of the well-heeled, the politically connected, and those who wield either social, political, economic, or military power.
The basis of the Fed, of course, is that the Fed has the power to print currency.
That's sort of the basic idea behind the Fed.
The Fed has the power to print currency and also the power to set interest rates.
Now, there's a lot more to it than that, and I'm sorry that I don't have my documentation on hand, but these are sort of the two major powers that you need to understand when it comes to the economy.
And we touched on this briefly a couple of months ago in talking about the Great Depression, but it may be worth revisiting this topic just a little bit so that we understand this unbelievably biblical power that the state possesses in the form of a central bank.
But to look into it a little bit in history, just in the United States, well, banks issued their own currency in the past.
And, I mean, the basic way that it works, of course, is that if you put $1,000 into a bank account, the bank doesn't create a thousand little dollars and put them in a vault for you and then hand them back when you want them.
That's not, of course, what a bank does.
What a bank does is...
It says, okay, well, you've given me $1,000, so I'm going to put like $20 or $50 into a draw, and the rest of it I'm going to lend out for interest.
And from that interest, I'm going to pay myself enormous amounts and then charge you a lot of money for getting at your money.
That's sort of the new banking.
But the old banking, of course, you got some level of interest.
So you really weren't depositing your money into the bank.
What you were doing is you were loaning your money to the bank.
There's sort of a very big distinction there.
And we're talking in the 19th century, not after the deposit insurance corporations came into existence, which protected people from bank runs and so on.
We're just talking about the idea of banking.
So in banking, you get a twofold benefit.
One, your money is protected by security guards and vaults and so on.
And the second is that you get some return on your deposit based on the interest that the bank charges to people, which then pays some portion of to you.
And so banking runs on what's sometimes called the 363 rule.
And the 363 rule is pay the money out at 3%.
To the people you've borrowed the money from, you charge 6% to the people that you are lending the money to, and you go and play golf at 3.
That's it when it comes to banking.
So when you give $1,000 to a bank, they lend out $950 at 6%, they pay you 3%, and they keep the rest.
Is it a ripoff? Well, of course not.
Of course not. In a free society, it's a perfectly rational transaction.
The gap is not a free 3% to the bank, and the bank's got to invest in the bank and the security guards, the vaults and all that.
And of course, the bank has to find enough people that are a creditworthy risk that it's willing to lend at 6% to.
Now, a credit-worthy risk is not, if you've ever lent money to your brother-in-law, you'll know that it's not always the easiest thing in the world to find people who are good for the money.
And lending is particularly difficult, of course, because if you are lending at 6% and you have to pay 3% to the depositors or the lenders who gave you the money, then you've got 3% to work with, you're going to spend 2% in overhead, and your profit is about 1% when it comes to lending money.
Now, what that means is that if you have a loan blow up on you, you have to have 101 loans that work out perfectly before you start making any money again.
That's not the easiest batting average to try and achieve.
That's not the easiest thing in the world, and that's why banks make a lot of money when they're good at it.
So finding a hundred people that you can lend money to who are going to pay you back perfectly and without a flaw to make up for the one dead bee who took the money and ran or who went into bankruptcy the day after or the week after or the month after he took out the loan, it's not the easiest thing in the world, which is why credit histories are so important and credit worthiness is something that is a bit of a hoop to jump through because...
It is a 100 to 1 leverage of successful loans to fail loans that banks need to achieve on average when they're not protected by the state and have these savings and loans protections that cause everyone to treat the deposit box as their own personal piggy bank.
But in real banking, it's a tough job.
And that's why they don't extend credit to people who are risky, right?
For that you need loan sharks, venture capitalists, and the mafia.
So, you know, there are other ways that the market fills the void, but banks aren't going to lend to you if you are a risk.
This is why banks, of course, want collateral.
So when I was in business...
And I was a chief technical officer of my own company.
Then when I wanted to borrow from a bank, they were more than happy to lend to me at a fairly high interest as long as I had guarantees, right?
So I said, if my business can't pay back this loan, I will pay back my loan.
And if I can't pay it back, you can take my house and my car.
Or sometimes both.
Then the bank was willing to do it.
And a bank is willing to lend you money to buy a house if you put a good deal of money down.
Because if you can't make your interest payments, they'll just take your house and then they'll sell it and take the money that you put down.
So that's your collateral. So there's lots of ways in which banks protect their interest.
And we want, of course, we want banks to protect...
We want banks to protect their interest because if banks don't protect their interest, then the money that we provide to banks as depositors slash lenders will get a much worse return on investment.
So instead of getting 3% back on our savings, and I know, again, I'm talking about the past, not the 0.001% you get back now.
The state's coming to help. But you will lose that.
And of course, the real risk of it is not that you lose your interest.
The real risk is that you lose your principal.
Because all banks are leveraged.
And leveraged just means that...
We won't get into the technical terms.
We'll just talk about the numbers. So banks are leveraged.
And what that means is that they never have all of your money available to you.
They have to have a pretty strict statistical control.
And they look at the averages and the rate of velocity of money and how much people need it and when.
And they plan to have that much on hand.
When you come in to get your money, so you give $1,000 to the bank, they're not expecting you the next day to come back and take $1,000 out.
It just takes time to set up an account, why would you bother?
And that's pretty important to understand.
So, when it comes to banking, they're going to lend out the majority of your money, which means if they have a whole bunch of bad loans, you're going to get a run on your bank.
Which means that people are going to say, holy crap, this bank has $100 million in deposits, but it only has $10 million of capital left.
And so what's going to happen is people are going to want to get their money out as quickly as possible because the first guys in line get all the money, right?
So if I've got $1,000 in this bank and I'm first in line, I'm going to get my $1,000.
This bank that only has 10% of its deposits left because it blew all its money on wine, women, and song.
Now, the guy behind me is going to get it, and the guy behind him is going to get his money, but at some point, the bank's going to turn out its pockets and say, sorry, but we don't have your deposit anymore.
This, of course, didn't happen very often in a free market situation, but once you got the Federal Reserve and you started to get into the Great Depression, it happened Fairly regularly, of course, which naturally, since government power is causing all these problems, everybody knows what the response is to government power that causes problems.
Yes, all is one.
More government power!
Yes, exactly.
That's exactly what happens. It's not the most subtle response in the world.
Corruption breeds corruption.
Oh, banks are closing because the government has so much power over banking, so obviously we need to nationalize the banks.
So that's the inevitable progress and march of state power to social collapse and final freedom.
So that's sort of a brief overview of the challenges of being in the banking world.
Now, when you start to look at the government...
As someone who is going to borrow money from you, well, it's kind of tricky.
It's a very tricky thing to lend money to the government.
There's lots of reasons why as a bank you're not going to want to lend money to the government.
And the two major reasons, I guess there are three sort of major reasons you don't want to lend money to the government if you're a private bank and they don't have any control over you.
Number one, you're pretty aware that the government doesn't make any money.
The government is a net consumptive entity.
So, given that the government doesn't make any money, the only way that the government is going to be able to pay you back your interest, your principal plus interest, is by raising taxes.
So... The banker is going to be aware that if he lends money to the government, the government is going to have to raise taxes so that it can pay back the principal and interest.
Now, bankers tend to be fairly well-heeled men and women, and of course, when the government raises taxes, it generally does it upon the middle class and the upper class to some degree.
Which is going to put him or her more at risk for tax increases.
So there's a certain amount of hesitation there.
Now you could say, well, we'll find ways around it and we'll get exemptions and this and that.
But it's not really the same.
There's a risk. Like if you've got a million dollars, you can lend it to the government or you can lend it to some private industry with a great track record of paying back its loans.
You're going to charge a premium to the government, basically.
Because you have this risk of tax increases, which doesn't occur if you lend it to your friendly local neighborhood bath manufacturer.
So that's number one.
Number two is the issue of collateral.
So if I want to go to a bank and say, lend me some money, they're going to say, well, you drove up in a shiny new car, I'll lend you money on the condition that if you don't pay me back...
I'm the one who's driving the shiny new car.
Then I have collateral and they're going to be willing to make the loan for me because they're not going to lose money.
I mean, they'll lose a little bit because they have to sell the car, and this takes time, but they've already factored that into the loan price, so they will do that.
Now, the problem with the government is, well, what collateral does the government have?
I mean, it's sort of important to understand that as far as the government goes, ownership doesn't exist.
There's no ownership in the government.
Who owns the schools?
Is it this guy? Is it that guy?
It can't be the piece of paper.
That's the school charter. It's this fictional entity called the government.
Everything is in fact run by people.
I mean, everybody has some dispositional capacity over property.
And so somebody ends up owning it, sort of nominally, but they don't actually own it.
So if I don't pay back my loan to the bank, the bank takes my car, and they can take my pink slip, and I have ownership of it.
Now they have ownership, they can sell it, and so on.
But if you lend to the government, and the government puts up a bunch of schools as collateral, Well, if the government doesn't pay back the money, you can't go and take the schools because the government, in a sense, doesn't own them.
There's no one individually in the government who can sign over the schools to the bank and then the bank can sell them, you know, or sell the children into nimble, fingered, pickpocketing kinds of slavery to get the money back.
So there's another risk, which is that collateral in the government doesn't really make any sense.
It's not something that you can seize as a bank, and so there's another negative to lending money to the government.
Now, the third issue in lending money to the government is that lending money to the government is like lending money based on the value of a house to someone who's renting that house.
Because the government is a conveyor belt, and we're not talking about the bureaucrats who are in there like moss on a rock, we're talking about the politicians.
So, some politician comes to you at the bank and says, gee, I really want to borrow a million dollars, and I'm not going to sign for it personally.
I'm going to sign for it on behalf of the government.
Well, in two years from now, this guy could get voted out, or he gets moved on to another post, or he shuffles, or he transfers, or he retires, or becomes a consultant.
Who knows? But the issue is that by signing to get something like some fictional entity called the government to pay you back, there's no one individually in that that you can nail, either from a collateral standpoint, as I just mentioned, or from the standpoint of being sure that they're going to be personally liable if they're not going to pay it back.
And you could raise similar arguments to corporations, and we'll talk about that another time.
I'm just sort of talking about the state here in a free market situation, or a largely free market situation.
Of course, not real free market if there's a state, but let's just talk about a much smaller state than we have right now.
So, if you lend money, the government's going to raise taxes.
You can't get your hands on any real legitimate collateral, and the people who are borrowing money from you are gone in a year or two, and they're not personally liable, and so it's sort of like lending money to someone based on a million-dollar house when they're only renting it.
I mean, they could move out any time, and also they're on a lease, and you don't know if they're renewing their lease.
They probably won't. So, lending them half a million dollars based on the million-dollar value of a house that they're only...
Renting, which is analogous to the democratic process, isn't really a valid thing to do from the standpoint of a bank.
So, from that standpoint, there's the sort of third strike against lending to a government.
Then, of course, there's lots of reasons why you wouldn't want to lend to the government over and above that, and moral reasons and other practical considerations, but those are sort of the three biggies.
So, the government faces an enormous problem.
The politicians, they face an enormous problem.
That capital in the free market does not flow towards them, but rather flows away from them.
So, if you're the government, I mean, the government's a tumor.
It constantly wants to grow. And it's not going to grow by simulating the free market, by offering better services that it's going to voluntarily compete with against the free market, because it's not a free market institution.
I mean, the government is a gun, right?
So, it's hard for the mugger to say, well, I'm going to give you a better service than the guy who's not mugging you.
It's not going to work, right?
Not the social entities, not the people who are in the government aren't attracted to that kind of stuff.
So, as a government, you're continually needing to grow, wanting to grow.
You want to wage war. You want to expand programs.
You want to bribe people. You want to get rich.
You didn't get in there for public service, right?
There's no such thing as the public or a service at the point of a gun.
So, that's not your bag, so to speak.
So, what you want to do is continue to expand.
Now, the problem is that the banks don't want to lend to you.
The banks would much rather lend to an enterprising capitalist who's going to deliver to them some good that they want rather than a vicious bunch of thugs who are going to expand taxes and run off with the money and never be held accountable.
So, now that you understand this, government continually wants to grow, but government can't get its hands on capital in a free market situation.
Now, if you get that, you sort of understand the reasons why governments are always so keen to create central banks, right?
And by central banks, all that they're really talking about is statist banks.
All they're really talking about is money laundering activities, money laundering operations.
So, Lincoln tried it, and the Rockefellers tried it, and a whole bunch of people tried it throughout American history, and I'm sorry I don't know the history of it in other countries, but what they don't want is the gold standard, right?
And we talked about the gold standard before, but just in case you're dippy-dapping around the podcasts, the gold standard is simply to say that...
That paper currency is called fiat currency, right?
It's just made up, right? But gold is something that has to be mined and manufactured and taken out of the earth and smelted and all that kind of stuff.
So if you have a currency based on gold, then people can't just sort of snap their fingers and manufacture twice the gold, and so there's some restriction on the dilution of the value of your money.
So, if you have an economy which has $100 million worth of goods, and it has $100 million worth of currency, everything's great, right?
Let's just say there's 100 million goods, each one costs a buck, and there's $100 million worth of currency, then each, you know, roughly, I mean, this is really, really a reduction to absurdity of the state, the idea, but...
Let's just say it's $100 million worth of goods.
There's $100 million, so each good is going to cost $1, $100 million goods.
Then if you suddenly double the currency in circulation to $200 million, then more money is representing the same amount of goods, which means that each good is going to cost more money, right?
So you have $100 million worth of goods, $100 million goods.
You go from $100 million to $200 million.
All it means is that now each good costs $2, right?
It's the same number of goods, so that's all that really happens in terms of inflation.
And of course, it It really messes up the entrepreneurs and the business people and the capitalists all get messed up because they don't plan for this sort of stuff.
Now, the person who gets to print the money without competition is the person who makes out like an absolute fiendish, evil, satanic, total, corrupt, mafioso, can only dream of this kind of power, a bandit.
This is the most fundamental power in an economy.
It's not the power of force, but the power of currency.
Because the power of force comes with some risk.
You've got coups. You have to pay people.
It's expensive. You've got to maintain jail.
So the power of currency is like that dim little whir of the printing press is all you need to make a fortune and to destroy the economy slowly and imperceptibly for other people over time.
So... The government desperately wants to gain control of the money supply so that it can lend to itself And so it can print money.
I mean, those are the two basics that it's very interested in doing.
Now, if the government puts out a bank, then it's sort of like the government putting out a car, if there's a market for cars.
If the government creates a bank and creates a currency, then it's going to go the way of the Lincoln dollars, which were used to fund the Civil War, War of Northern Aggression, whatever you want to call it.
That inflated itself into atoms and turned itself into a fiscal gas and disappeared, sort of like the Deutsche Mark in the 1920s when you take this wheelbarrow of money to go buy a loaf of bread and so on.
Well, when the government puts out a currency, no one wants to have anything to do with it.
So if the government produces the, I don't know, the Lada or whatever, the crap cars that the communist governments produce, then in a free market situation, nobody wants the Lada.
They want the Saturn or the Volvo or whatever.
So... The problem is that the government, in order to create a currency, it can't have a system of competition in place.
So let's just say that in a system of free market banking and currency, the government produces it, starts printing its own money and tries to hand it out to suppliers, right?
Because it's got to buy stuff from the free market, right?
I mean, the government doesn't really have much use for its own internal pseudo-economy.
It's got to go out to the free market. So the government prints up, I don't know, Steff dollars or something, and prints a million of them, and then goes and tries to spend them out there in the marketplace.
Well, there are all these other currencies.
Each bank maybe has its own currency, or they consolidate it, or everyone runs it through electronic cash, or Visa, or whatever.
But... Everyone has this stable currency that they've used for a long time that's backed up by independent surveys, and the DROs have the dispute resolution organizations, the private mediating agencies have validated them, and they've been stable for years, and they're fantastic, they're all backed by gold.
I don't know, the CEO of the bank's kidneys or children or something.
And so you've got all these stable currencies out there, and then the government prints up these Steff dollars and tries to buy stuff with them.
Well, people are going to say, you know, I really don't think that's going to be worth a whole lot to me, so I'm sorry, we don't accept Steff dollars here.
What we do take is DRO dollars or whatever it is that's going to be.
Silver coins, gold coins, it's by metallic currency.
So... The government can never compete with anything, which is why the government always strains for a monopoly.
And so when you had other currencies out there, the government couldn't grow.
It couldn't grow in the way that it wants to grow, right?
I mean, these people are greedy for destruction and corruption in the way that the mafia people are, and so they want to grow and they want to, you know, destroy and break people's spirits and souls, and this is what people in the government, politicians in particular, want to do.
So what are you going to do?
Well, the first thing you've got to do is you've got to get currencies off the gold standard.
And the reason you have to do that is that your fundamental competition is gold.
Your fundamental competition is not fiat money, but gold.
So you've got to get off the gold standard and then you've got to start with a central bank.
Now, you can do it the other way around.
You can do a central bank first and then eliminate all forms of currency and then over the long run eliminate the gold standard currencies.
But the first thing you've got to do is to eliminate competing currencies.
And usually that's gold, but it can happen that you just eliminate other competing currencies.
So you have to establish a national currency controlled by the government, and you have to, as the government, control the ability to print that money.
And you also, of course, have to have the right for that bank, the sort of state bank, the socialized bank, to lend the money to the government.
Now, that's sort of the two major things that you need to do.
Monopoly of currency and the ability to lend to yourself.
Now, the third thing that you need to do is gain control over interest rates.
And for the simple reason that as soon as people realize that you've got your hand in the till and you can print money to yourself, then they're going to figure out very quickly that you're just going to print all this money and consume it yourself.
And so what's going to happen is you're going to get runaway inflation.
Now, it took a little while for people to figure this out, but it happened relatively quickly, that people went, oh, okay, well, the charter of the Federal Reserve, which of course is no more federal than Federal Express, The Charter says, oh, currency stability and all these good things and so on, and that's great.
But what is actually happening is the government's just lending to itself, magically transferring money, printing money like crazy, so it can go out and spend, right?
Because the first person to spend the newly printed money is the one who makes out like a bandit, because the inflation doesn't hit till later until the economy has fully absorbed all of this additional currency.
So if the $100 million turns into $200 million, the first person to spend it is still getting a buck for a buck, but as it begins to flow outward, you end up with situations where people are no longer getting a buck for a buck, but a buck ten, buck twenty, and so the people at the end really get it in the shorts.
But the government, which has the ability to print the money up front, is the one that is able to get the real benefit, because they just have, basically, they're stealing stuff for free.
You print the currency and start to spend it.
Of course, this is what the government does.
It just clicks a couple of computer buttons and ends up with the magic set of numbers in some account somewhere, which it then just starts to spend.
I mean, wouldn't that be a great power to have?
How wonderful could that be?
It's like being able to go in and edit your account balance and just type in whatever you want.
I mean, isn't that a fantasy of infinite wealth?
And so the problem is, of course, the government is going to start printing money, the government is going to inflate the currency, which is going to cause inflation to rise.
When inflation rises, of course, the interest rates have to rise.
Because if I lend money to you at 6%, but then inflation jumps to 16%, I'm actually losing 10%.
So I have to raise the interest rates now to like 25% to cover off inflation plus the money that I sort of nominally need, the real rate of return, as it's called, which is the interest rate plus inflation.
Sorry, the real money which is inflated.
You have to take away the factor of inflation to figure out your real rate of return.
So, if the rate of inflation goes high, then interest rates have to go very high as well.
Now, once interest rates go very high, lots of economic activity slows down and stops.
There's a lot of uncertainty, and people just sort of look at that and say, wow, 20% interest on a car loan, maybe I'll just make the old clunker last for another year or two, which is bad because then economic activity slows down, which means that there's fewer taxes and so on.
So... Those sort of three powers are essential.
And the power to lend to yourself, the power to print money, and the power to control interest rates, which is required as a result of all of that.
That sort of stuff is pretty essential.
And governments desperately want to get a hold of this kind of power because it frees them from all rational restraint.
It frees them from all competition.
Now you have this social agency with a monopoly on weapons of mass destruction, which of course were just a whole bunch of rifles back in the last century.
They have a monopoly on weapons of mass destruction, and now they also have a monopoly on currency.
They can print their own money, they can lend to themselves, they can do whatever they want.
And there's nobody who can control them at all because this power is reserved only for politicians, only for bureaucrats, only for those in the military.
Nobody else has the power to print their own currency, to just type into their own bank account whatever they feel like spending.
And so, naturally, there is an enormous amount of corruption and brutality.
And what happens, of course, is that the economic landscape becomes very uncertain.
So this is when you hear, like, the Fed has raised the basis point, you know, a quarter points or whatever.
What they're talking about is that the Federal Reserve is controlling the amount of interest that banks can lend at.
And it's doing that because of various nefarious machinations that are going on in the background of the state system.
Which are causing economic instability.
So the government makes a mess and then tries to cover it up by controlling interest rates.
And all that does is send completely wrong, bad, mixed signals to the marketplace so that there's an enormous amount of economically inefficient allocation of resources and so on.
Now, this is all bad enough, right?
But I mean, the real ugly evil of the situation is that by having a central bank, the government is no longer reliant upon the goodwill of the citizens...
To wage war. This is sort of a very, very, very essential thing.
You could not have had the Second World Wars without government-run banks.
Absolutely no possibility whatsoever.
And if you sort of look at the existing situation in Iraq, where families owe, I don't know, $10,000, $20,000, it's some lunatic amount of money that is owed by the families in America based on the war in Iraq.
Well, if you actually sent a bill, if you didn't have a central bank, a government-run bank that was willing to lend to the government, if you actually sent a bill for $20,000 to a family saying, oh, by the way, so far this is what you owe for the war in Iraq, Well, I've got to tell you, I think that those supporter troops ribbons would vanish pretty damn quick.
And people would be out marching in the streets because a lot of families, this would cause them to lose their house, to lose their car, to lose their savings.
Because this is just a bill for the first couple of years, right?
If it's going to be another...
I don't know, eight to ten years in Iraq, and people say, okay, well, every four years you're going to get a bill for $15,000 or $20,000, so it's about $5,000 or $7,000 a year after taxes, you've got to pay for this war.
Well, the war would last about eight minutes, right?
I mean, the war would be over because the government would actually have to go to the people to get funding for the wars and all the social programs and so on that it wanted.
And so the government would be unable to do that because that's actually closer to what people mean when they say democracy, which is people actually having some control over what the government does.
That's what people mean by democracy.
So, of course, that can't be allowed to happen.
I mean, that's unthinkable. I mean, you can't even conceive of that if you're in the government.
It's like, what? We want social programs, and we want a war, and we want a war on drugs, and we want to increase teacher salaries, and we actually have to go to the people and ask them for money like beggars?
Oh, unthinkable!
Can't be imagined!
Oh, what we want to do is be able to type into our own bank accounts, do whatever the hell we want, and screw the people any which way we can.
I mean, it's not the screwing the people is the primary objective.
It's just a natural byproduct of this kind of stuff.
So, that's what the government wants to do.
That's what the government's all about.
And so control of the currency, and we're just touching on like 1% of everything that you can do if you control the currency.
But it's really hard to understand the corruption and brutality of the state and what makes things like war possible, what makes the war on drugs, what makes police states possible, what makes the Patriot Act possible.
All of this is made possible by the fact that the government gets to print its own money, and the government controls interest rates, and the government can lend to itself.
Without currency control, all of this is impossible.
I mean, the fundamental thing is state education, right?
Controlling the minds of the young.
But the second thing in terms of state power is the control over the currency.
So I hope this isn't been too rambling a discourse.
I'm sorry that I didn't have any stats and figures in front of me, but they're readily available if you want to go and look them up.
So I hope this makes sense.
I look forward to your feedback.
Those who are more experienced in the Fed, please let me know how I can further improve this analysis.
And thank you so much for listening. And speaking of me being able to print my own currency...
Feel free to drop by freedomainradio.com and throw me a couple of state dollars.
I hate the concept, but I'm willing to use them.
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