I have been reading over my earlier essays, preparing a new collection (One Planet Makeover), and I seem to discover an apparent contradiction. On the one hand, I ridicule the career of the Almighty Dollar, as the American government fearlessly prints up more money by the trillions of dollars, leading to a National Debt somewhere in the neighborhood of $26 trillion dollars, and, in these days of the Pandemic, growing at a rate of multiple trillions per year, while, on the other hand, I seem to be advocating the most extreme version of fiat money ever proposed.
But there is a very big difference in the way I envision Big Money playing out, and the way the Big Banks want it to continue. Under the present system, the Bankers are the final masters of the universe, and all money comes and goes through them. Whenever money is currently “created,” it is a machination of the Banks in which all the money is based on debt, held by the Banks. So, the more money pumped up into the system, the more it is all owed to the Banks, which just get richer and richer as everyone else wallows in poverty and confusion, not really understanding the swindle, a kind of carnival shell game, in which the Banks always win. And, anytime the Banks don’t win, the American government is so paralyzed with fear that they “bail out the banks” to the tune of as many trillion dollars as it takes to keep the monster from devouring them. They are hooked on the swindle, and don’t know how to get the monkeys off their backs. All of this money shared by the Banks and the 1% comes from the debt piled onto the account of a piece of fiction invented for the purpose: The United States of America, whose taxpayers will be the ultimate losers when the Crash comes.
Under my system, however, the banks would have nothing to do with this process at all. The Government Bank would simply create money by fiat unabashedly, and owe nothing to anyone from the process. The money would be simply created to pay for all government projects ~ the planting of trillions of trees, the funding of the Free Farms, paying farmers for the food they grow (which they supply to the free farms as well as distribute through non-profit food stores), funding inner city transit, health care, education, infrastructure, and anything else deemed to be appropriate for the general welfare. All they have to do to keep the game legit is to tax enough of this money back from the wealthy, up to whom most of this money gravitates by a sort of natural law, so that the supply of money in circulation maintains the value of the currency at its targeted value. (The taxed money would be simply annihilated, whence it came.)
I just consider how much better this system would be to deal with the problems of the New World of the Pandemic ~ the government could simply distribute money to replace whatever is lost from the absence of economic activity. As I understand it, the Banks (of course) and the Big Tech firms are raking in money in unprecedented amounts these days, so there will still be plenty of money which could be taxed to balance the books.
What is missing from my vision is the role of private banks at the center of all this money creation, like spiders at the centers of their web. To paraphrase Dylan, “Flies, when you gonna wake up?” Or, “We don’t need no stinking spiders!”
