What is money? (Part I)

Oh yes, we’re tackling the big question today. No more subtly alluding to a certain view of money and economics while assuming you “get it” too. I’m going to break it down to the fundamentals here and do so as painlessly and simply as possible.

If you’re an advocate of “sound money” or “honest money” and you want to understand your own views better or find an easier way to explain them to others, read on! If you have a friend who is new to this kind of economic thinking, this might be a good article to share with them.

Economic thinking isn’t hard. In fact, it’s quite natural and intuitive in a lot of ways. People who make it more complicated than it really is are doing so to keep you from thinking about it and to convince you that you can’t really understand it like they can. Knowledge is power. So the less honest stewards of economic thought have decided to keep that power to themselves by making the knowledge seem unattainable to people without advanced degrees or Nobel Prizes. Don’t be intimidated! Finance and economics are for everyone.

The Federal Reserve and Santa Claus [Spoiler Alert]

Spoiler Alert: If there are any six year olds reading this blog, you can skip today’s post. It’s not written for you. Do the right thing and click the “x” on this tab right now. Santa’s watching.

I believed in Santa Claus a little longer than most children do. For some reason, as long as I couldn’t definitely prove that my parents were the ones leaving presents under the Christmas tree, I wasn’t ready to completely reject the possibility that it really was jolly old Saint Nick riding a sleigh pulled by reindeer and magically shrinking himself small enough to slip under the front door or through the key hole and into my house (we didn’t have a chimney).

And my parents were incredibly sneaky. I never once caught them. But when I finally told my dad I didn’t believe in Santa any more, he said, with a sly grin, “Santa doesn’t deliver presents to kids who don’t believe in him,” and I promptly responded, “I believe! I believe!” The matter was settled. I got some awesome Legos that year.

The Federal Reserve, fiat money, and inflationary stimulus policies are no different than the Santa Claus of our childhoods. The only problem is that so many adults still believe in them.

Scumbag bin Laden

100 Reasons to End the Fed

This is an important resource I've put together to help educate people about the evils of central banking and inflationary monetary policy. Please share this around as much as you can! Here are the first ten reasons to End the Fed:

1. The Federal Reserve System constantly inflates the value of our dollar by printing money out of thin air.

2. Graph: The value of a $1 Federal Reserve Note in 1913 dollars (the year the Fed was created).

3. The Fed even recognizes its inflationary activity. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston says: “When you or I write a check there must be sufficient funds in our account to cover the check, but when the Federal Reserve writes a check there is no bank deposit on which that check is drawn. When the Federal Reserve writes a check, it is creating money.”

4. American economist Irving Fisher said: “Thus, our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which lend, not money, but promises to supply money they do not possess.”

5. If you or I did what the Fed does when it prints money, we would be found guilty of counterfeiting and locked up for a very long time!

6. The reason you or I would be arrested for counterfeiting is it’s theft! Every bill you create in bad faith, which doesn’t actually represent the creation of real goods and services, real value that has improved life by directing resources to their most productive uses, is a lie and an appropriation of value from the rest of the world, which gives the counterfeiter goods and services in exchange for nothing, because he or she did not actually create anything of value in return.

7. This is true of what the Federal Reserve does: “Neither paper currency nor deposits have value as commodities, intrinsically, a ‘dollar’ bill is just a piece of paper. Deposits are merely book entries.” – Modern Money Mechanics Workbook, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, 1975

8. “The Fed creates absolutely nothing. It does not produce a single grain of wheat to feed people, a single drop of oil to power the engines of an industrial economy, nor a single ingot of metal from the ground to build the products and buildings that improve our lives.” -Wesley Messamore

9. This situation, in which you or I would be arrested for doing something the Federal Reserve does every day, is the hallmark of institutionalized theft and a legal system turned on its head. As French economist Frederic Bastiat said in the 19th century: “But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply… See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”

10. The inflation that results from the Federal Reserve’s massive counterfeiting operation steals from hardworking Americans by diminishing the value of the money they earn.

Read the rest here.