There were further calls for me to remove certain posts, there were others who insisted that the blog's proposal was acceptable to them, however that they would like to see the proposal's considerations for conducting financial business. A new paper to answer a number of their questions is in process and shall appear here when completed.
In the meantime, someone sent me a link to a recent, quite unnecessarily provocative article, Screw Up: 8 Million Americans Are On The List To Be Disappeared and asked me to comment on the suggestions presented by the author, etc. Their remarks will appear in blue.
1) The present welfare system was designed to destroy families and the incentive to work.
No, this statement is unsubstantiated. He'd actually have to prove that these were the intentions behind the legislation. These systems may in fact destroy families and pose a disincentive to work, but we contend that their real purpose always was and is to buy off a social revolution. What was the cause of the social upheavals requiring societal fixes from government? In a word, corporations, all limited liability and all operating under state charters including and especially the banks. We view the welfare system as an inevitable consequence, unless you want to have millions of people take out their genuine ire for having their livelihoods destroyed on those who truly deserve it, the money masters of organized capital who have made factors of commerce and industry into ... games of chance.
I would create a voter ID card. Non-citizens would not be able to get welfare and Food Stamps. This would force millions of illegals to self-deport. I would give them cash grants to leave and never return. The voter ID card would insure that dead people do not vote. They would allow only one vote per person. They would have to be scanned to permit voting. This would stop precinct workers from voting for people who did not show up because they did not like the candidates.
None of this is of any direct concern to this blog. We note however that these sentiments are widespread, especially the desire to see the “illegals” and their families, etc. go back to where they came from. There is also widespread sentiment for reforms that would “roll back the clock” to some previous era where things seemed to work better. We contend that there never was any such era, that to go backwards is simply that, and we aren't interested. Without monetary liberty there isn't any sense in attempting to gain political liberty. Since monetary liberty is not presently well understood or accepted, political tyranny of one form or another is a direct consequence. I'll further note that most of this author's suggestions (and those of the few others who commented on his post) represent yet other “statist” approaches which this blog, without any reservation, rejects. We remind those who think otherwise, that 1) no state solution has ever resulted in anything but tyranny and 2) to expect otherwise is not to understand the nature of states.
2) I would turn the IRS into the Internal Revenue and Benefits Service. I would cancel Food Stamps and a lot of other programs to fund a negative Income Tax.
This was an idea at one time proposed by none other than Alan Greenspan. Why keep the IRS around? It is already among the most universally hated of all government organizations. It is clearly an arm of the Federal Reserve system, not the government. No government should EVER be in the position to tax someone's labour as THAT is a disincentive to work. Perhaps the author believes that the IRS collects tax money to pay directly for government services, when in fact it does not.
Suppose a citizen is making $8.50 an hour and is competing against illegal aliens for work. I would give people who work a subsidy equal to the amount required to raise their wages to $11.00 an hour. The illegals would get nothing and would lose Food Stamps as there would be none. I would also give citizens a child subsidy of $600 a month for the first child and $400 for the second and nothing thereafter. I will be eliminating millions of government jobs to fund this.
Notice that this solution involves state intervention where people haven't got the sense to come up with their own solution. Think any of that will ever work out well? What of the guy hiring the illegal aliens and his plight; that without their labour savings he might not even be profitable? How much of that is really going on out there right now? What's the culprit? 1) government regulation and 2) competition from the state's own creatures, the corporations. Somehow people have simply got to get focused on who their real enemies are in society and STOP SUPPORTING THEM, otherwise stop complaining and enjoy the tinsel framed tyranny while it is tolerable. Enjoy being free range slaves of your government collective. Don't whimper when it all comes down and you haven't anything better than to go crying and begging for the state to do something. It can't and it wont, because none of your concerns matter to them.
3) I favor worldwide Debt Cancellation. This will make returning home attractive.
Worldwide default will happen anyway as the present system is doomed. I expect many ex-patriots to return after that, if they can. Anyone who seriously mentions paying back past debts is kidding themselves. We've already explained (and most get it) that the way money is presently generated and issued guarantees that there will never be enough money to pay off all the debts as under the terms of genuine usury, that which is demanded as interest was never created and must be filched from already created money. In fact, and we don't much care what any maritime law has to say about it either, all contracts involving usury are invalid since they are based on this particular fraud.
In the U.S. I would offer adult citizens of sound mind who are not incarcerated $20,000 each in Debt Cancellation. This money could only be used to cancel debts or to be deposited into co-operative trusts for retirement.
NO! This merely supports the same societal cancer and shows the invariable negligible understanding of money, sorry. The author should read this blog thoroughly and then he'd have quite different ideas, more to the effect of finding and creating new jobs and opportunities that make sense long term to communities, states and nations more generally.
The one exception would be for a down payment on a house. Not much where you live. But there are places where that is substantial. The loss of immigrants and the sharp rise in wages will change the demand for housing in your area as well. But it will rebuild other parts of the country. I would pass an urban Homesteading Act to permit qualified applicants to buy boarded up homes for taxes owed.
NO. No old taxes may be repaid. We don't care about whether some city or county got themselves into debt on our behalf or not. These policies were stupid and we shan't give them credibility by allowing them to continue. We believe that when money is created and issued by private individual members of society rather than states, that most local governments will be forced to deal with real people, not their corporate creatures. Then and only then, will public finance ever be restored to a sound basis.
4) I would cancel all federal, state and local debt with all that money I seized from the wealthy elite stashed in offshore bank havens. That would require that we send our troops into the Cayman Islands, Lichtenstein and other such places. The Chinese have $4 trillion stashed in British Commonwealth Caribbean banks. I would use that to fund Debt Cancellation for China. I would also use the money government agencies have stashed in secret funds as described at http://www.CAFR1.com
Now really! Money is either electronic or represented as bills and coins. In either case it matters not how that money changes hands as that it does change hands. The music stops when someone either shouts, “I have no more money to pay you” or “I wont take your money.” If any “public” money reaches this status it is worthless. This by the way quenches the loathsome and stupid idea that money must have any intrinsic value. Anyone who maintains this is apparently unaware of Gresham's Law, which is a real law in that, if one tries breaking it, they face the consequences. If anything calling itself money has any intrinsic value then it is a commodity and cannot be money. And yeah, if you still think so, you're an idiot! An idiot by the way is someone deficient in knowledge, merely ignorant of the facts, not someone intrinsically stupid, so there is always hope for idiots.
[2-8-14: So does that mean that you agree with Mr. Burnanke?
Yes, as a matter of fact, it was one of the rare instances where he dared to tell the honest truth. Precious metals are fundamentally commodities, with definite quantities, operating within distinct markets for their use. Obviously their other uses in trade, etc. preceded their use as money. One of the attributes of money is that it represents a scale of monetary value attributed to each item of money as trade tokens, which is really what they are. A colleague used to call them "tokens of appreciation." Ask yourselves whether those currently making money on money without contributing any value to the system are being appreciated too much.
That's what money is; tokens representing a scale of value, used in trade. Gold and silver as circulating money are rendered obsolete by all modern representations of money largely through Gresham's Law, which basically says that if there are two competing tokens representing the same monetary value, one being in precious metals, the other in some other form, whatever that other form is will trade first and inevitably the gold and silver tokens will cease to circulate; the cheaper the money the more likely it will circulate; the cheapest money circulates more than all other contenders. Obviously within the membership of a VEN, we intend that our money will be the cheapest available.
If tokens of exchange do not circulate, they do not promote trade, they don't even promote local trade, which is more important than anything else.]
We stick with Riegel's observations and to hell with the rest of the economist's world! To us regular academic economists are all fools and liars if not both! You see right away that expecting military FORCE to be used to chase after stolen or otherwise expropriated monetary tokens is a colossal waste of effort not worth the blood of a single human being! As for Walter Burien's site, since it does contain some important information, though not the subject of this blog, we have posted a link to it among our news links.
5) I would issue a non-interest bearing currency like Lincoln’s Greenbacks.
We don't care, we don't want any. We're sick and tired of governments being the biggest spender in the economy, we're sick and tired of nannying by unwanted government “experts” and we have no respect for those who claim to care or know more about how we should live our lives, down to what we can or can't think, than we ourselves. We say to the world that money is the proper concern of every single human being as an extension of their individual private property and has no business being usurped by any state. We are likewise sick and tired of attempts to save any of the existing monetary infrastructure. Sorry, all of it, including maritime law, will simply have to go.
I would end fractional reserve banking.
If there is no alternative, banking will continue to operate the way it has for centuries, as a fraud, simply because people are too timid and dumb to expect anything else. Banks will hence rise, fall and take all the money with them when they depart. We propose the Value Exchange Network (VEN), a private market subject to black market rules, supported by independent Valun Exchanges (IEs). The unit of exchange is the proposed international standard Value Unit (Valun) which will in every case be issued by a human being, not a bank, corporation or a government.
I would only permit the Treasury to create currency. And only our new Central Bank would create checking account money.
Again, we don't want any and we certainly do not need or want a central bank. We don't care what governments must do to raise money for its usually phenomenally wasteful projects. It will be best when no government is ever allowed to borrow money as Jefferson and others suggested.
Prices are a ratio of the Money Supply to the GDP. Increase both at the same rate and you will have stable prices.
NO, you idiot! This never works because it is based on a LIE which you have accepted hook, line and sinker, because you have accepted the “commodity theory of money,” which we wholeheartedly reject. Stable prices are the result of two things only; supply and demand. The fact is that not all money in existence is ever available for any single sale. That is the essential lie. Economists, who make glib statements such as this, want the world to continue to be hoodwinked by believing that some expert knows better what a gallon of milk or a gallon of gas is supposed to cost in any particular locality than someone actually buying a gallon of milk or gas there. What happens when prices go up? People buy less. What happens when prices go down? People tend to buy more. It has nothing to do with the possible quantities of money involved. It has everything to do with how much money the buyer is willing to spend.
You will also be allowed to spend the increase in the Money Supply into circulation. That means you could fund $550 billion in new spending.
I guess he's a Keynesian then. We reject Keynes as we reject Marx or the so called Austrians. We do not want more government spending as THAT is the sole cause of inflation, because the government has nothing to sell back into the economy with which to recapture what it spends. It taxes as much back as it can in the vain attempt to keep inflation in check. I want everyone who reads this to understand that the machine these people envision to replace the old one is by its very nature just as incompatible with freedom as the old one.
6) We have a $4 trillion deficit of infrastructure projects that need to get done to prevent America from becoming a Third World nation. I would give each state their share of $100 billion a year in infrastructure repair but I would include school and hospital construction. This would work out to $2 billion a year for a state with 6 million people. I would match that with $100 billion in federal grants.
Sure, just keep going with the usual, just knock it back a few years and it will all be better. No it wont. We have no idea what the infrastructure should be for our future since we are sitting on many unused ideas that could change things quite dramatically. None of this spending or financing would help anything. Sooner or later, the bill would come through and interest due which must come from uncreated money supply. You're right back where you started. We remember the Depression era song about the guy who built a railroad, made it run on time, etc.
7) The cancellation of state and local debt combined with federal assumption of school, road, sewer, water and hospital construction will make state tax reduction a reality.
This guy really must be a statist as his solution keeps the central government big and oppressive. As said earlier, debt repudiation shall be an inevitable fact, as people will have no money to repay past debts and shall not rest quietly as attempts are made to have their physical assets seized in an attempt to repay them, sorry.
I want to eliminate property taxes on owner occupied homes. This will encourage family formation and allow savings for retirement in the form of a place to live.
How nice of you. You sound like a swell politician. Shall we inevitably tar and feather you before sending you on your way?
8) I should emphasize a few points about asset seizures.
Yes, do that, so we can see the scale of the FORCE you would wield as a state official.
Most stocks and bonds are held by brokerages for their clients. If you legalize drugs, you can seize the assets of the drug cartels and what I would call ‘War Criminals’. This money is to be used to fund Debt Cancellation worldwide for those who cooperate with us and also pass monetary and banking reforms.
You're a dreamer of the worst imaginable sort. What gives anything value is the ability to trade it. Stock and bond holders rationally decide to hold as long as these assets seem to be fetching higher prices and unload them when their prices begin to fall. Most amateurs hold longer than they should and usually end up no better off than those who call themselves professionals. You have missed the point of these assets in the first place, which is to create stores of value out of figments of the imagination, especially equities, and to ensure that the factors of production remain in selected hands.
Fractional reserve banking cause Depressions. You will find that many of the ‘War Criminals’ are not Jewish. The aristocracy of Europe and the wealthy of northern Italy are close allies of the Rothschilds. This has to be a worldwide revolution to work. We can offer the Italians, the Greeks, the French and everyone else Debt Cancellation and tax reductions. I would offer to pay the VAT tax which runs at 20 to 21% in Europe for any nation that joins us.
We don't really care about any of this. It is all aimed at keeping something afloat that nature shall deem deserves death and destruction for failing to live by natural laws. A worldwide revolution may be in the offing anyway, we hope that it is peaceful, but it probably wont be because most people are frankly just too stupid and lazy to think for themselves as a matter of social conditioning.
Suppose the non-violent people of England are told that the Americans will pay their VAT and that they should refuse to pay it. That would eliminate a major revenue source. They would have to accept the money we seized from offshore banks. The public would support us. The parliaments would fall and we would get people to back currency and monetary reforms and even support more domestic asset seizures.
We do not want any more domestic asset seizures! If their assets aren't worth what they imagine them to be, then what will their assets be worth in the final outcome of a sale where the owner is willing to part with them as a natural consequence of trade? Who would want them if the monetary system behind them is no more? Would such people expect to be paid in precious metals? They may have a long wait. What if he accepts Valuns instead? He'd have to be a member in good standing of a local IE and if not would not be permitted to operate within a VEN. What then of the value of his assets? How would he afford to keep them up? We'll tell you ahead of time; shares in corporations are a fictional part of a fiction created by the state. Bonds are other people's debt that one pays a discount for, expecting that the debtor will eventually pay off the face value. Are bonds any safer in a monetary system where usury guarantees there will always be a scarcity of money? You tell me.
9) I would give everyone 90 days to register at a bargain price the deed to their home with their county. We would be taking MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration Service) mortgages and turning them into old fashioned deeds. The public will love that. But we will require all deeds to residences and commercial property be examined for true ownership. Anyone who comes forward with a deed held by a corporation registered overseas will have to divulge the true owners. This seizure of real estate assets will rebuild retirement funds.
Nice try, but again we aren't interested. MERS is organized crime and those behind it are criminals. So what? Who is going to ever prosecute them? We advocate an alternative land registry with all properties denominated in Valuns. In order to make this happen, we shall inaugurate a new era of property refinancing that should make the purchase and acquisition of homes, farms and industries much cheaper than is usual. All we care about is paying them off to get the titles. After that, let nature take its course.
10) I would give women who are citizens $10,000 to have a baby provided they are 18 and pass a mental competency test. The present system encourages 14 year-old girls to have babies. We have to stop that cold. That money could help fund home buying. The rebuilding of America would make high paying construction jobs available. That will help build families and give state and local governments increased revenues.
He sure likes giving money away, doesn't he? If he weren't such a statist he'd see that allowing an economy to work would provide all the incentives required for people to form stable families, etc. All you need do is get out of the way and let nature take its course. Since limited liability corporations that operate by state charters are artificial, as are all their maritime laws, since they run counter to natural law, they deserve to fail and their assets will require selling off. Smaller is better when it comes to any business and redundancy rather than specialization is also a preferred course of action looking forward.
11) I want to make pensions illegal. I want all retirement funds to paid as they accrue into an account in your name at a cooperative trust. This will permanently take away all power from Wall Street and the City of London.
NO. Making pensions illegal is one thing, forcing people to save is another. Both are matters best left up to individual cases, not governments. For the time being, we will use pensions as a measure of the amount of money we would allow each of our A members who have pensions to create. We know that long term, there simply wont be many if any pensions because they will not be necessary in our system as no member will ever have to go completely broke ever. This is our direct answer to state socialism. A Riegel based monetary system ultimately extinguishes poverty and deprives states of the abilities to finance wars. If you really care about ending poverty and war, you should join us.
12) I should mention Hollywood and the media as special targets of asset seizures.
Seems this guy would really like to take things by FORCE from people as a solution. I think you'd best read this blog thoroughly before getting back to me about why anyone even cares about this. The Hollywood system exists because people buy into it. When people no longer buy or prefer something else, Hollywood will change or it will die of natural causes.
13) The US government has many secret patents. They seized Nikola Tesla’s lab experiments and notes (155 boxes) in 1943. The editor at Popular Mechanics told Art Bell more than a decade ago that material created in zero gravity exhibited new properties. Glass formed in zero gravity was stronger than steel.
Our view of patents is that they inhibit creative development and keep competing ideas from the marketplace in support of entrenched monopolies. We anchor our detestation of intellectual property and any and all so called laws applied to them as impositions on private property; if someone buys something they own it and the seller has no more claim upon it. It is strictly speaking unlawful to forbid an owner from doing whatever he likes with his property, including going into competition with an existing producer. That's real progress and creativity. If you don't happen to see it our way, we're sorry, you are most certainly an idiot!
If the secret government does have what I think they have (including free or at least cheap energy) I would issue patents to new corporations. I would issue them credits at zero interest with no payments due until the new American based manufacturing facilities are up and running.
Do you see what I'm seeing? More corporations? More governments? No, we need those patents released and then let venture capital and nature take care of all the rest. If Tesla had anything worth pursuing, we would then find out.
The value of stock shares would not be stolen through IPOs and through management issuing them selves shares. I would distribute shares in these stocks to people who would not retire for 20 years but will need help to fund retirement.
Most people were able to retire comfortably enough before the 20th century, if they could live that long. What then are we to expect the government, any government, your government to somehow guarantee life expectancy? Have we had enough garbage from the existing order already?
Young people would be released from Social Security.
If people were not taxed on their income, there would not need to be any Social Security. As previously indicated, these programs are used to buy off potential problems from running state chartered corporations which unfairly compete and tend toward monopolies.
They would contribute directly into their trust account retirement funds.
These funds would then be invested in what to guarantee a return? Does anyone else see the problem? This proposal is really not a lot different from any Social Security. Nice try, but no cigar.
Tesla energy sources would reduce energy costs making living easier for working families and also creating new industries and opportunities.
That's taking quite a lot for granted and I wouldn't count on it.
I might point out that the US has a plane that can fly 20,000 mph in the atmosphere. That material is able to withstand tremendous friction and is worth a fortune. It will go into the retirement funds. They also have batteries 20 years ahead of what we have. That patent would make electric cars a reality. That patent is also worth something as are all the other inventions they have been secreting away. The secret government created the semi-conductor and gave it away to AT&T. No more.
Yes, no more of the same. You allow big government, big corporations, big everything to fail and then see where nature takes you. You start out with a new money that is based simply, everywhere and always, on an initial dated transaction and allow people to use it and develop what they will by their own efforts for everything they create will actually be theirs not someone else's. That's the only way forward. From another source, some more proposals:
14) No one belongs in “Public Service” over 10 Years. A Cop, a Teacher, A fireman, a dog catcher, a street sweeper, any Government job, except military, and especially not a Politician. This eliminates 3 problems automatically the Pension problem, the Union problem, and the worst problem the Absolute Power problem.
Fine, but none of this is of immediate concern to us except for allowing public employees of various kinds to join our IEs and participate in the VEN. Each IE WILL discriminate concerning which particular people in “public service” will be allowed to participate based on whether the other members regard the public employee's job as an essential service. Right now, all water, sewer and related work scores higher than almost anything else.
15) The 8th amendment needs to be tweaked a bit to also say Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted nor “Cruel and Unusual ” punishment Shall be back to the people.
We have actually never liked the words “cruel and unusual punishment” as being far too vague and open to abuse. Instead we support a change to “the punishment shall fit the crime.” We note that it was usual to expect that thieves would pay back double of what they had stolen ... or work it off. This gives one some idea of what sums might be awarded the state through correct prosecution of organized criminals. However we doubt seriously whether anything like this will ever actually happen.
The Citizens are NOT responsible for other people who have children and cannot afford them as one example. The government Cannot be in any charity giving of the People’s money ever again.
It wasn't the people's money to begin with. Please get that through your exceedingly thick heads out there! Even if you allowed Lincoln greenbacks to return, you'd still be making the government the biggest buyer in the economy with nothing to sell back into it, therefore setting up perpetual taxation or runaway inflation. Our solution is far better.
IF one could arrange for the level of security that the French king used when he passed out the warrants for the arrest of the Templars leaders, possibly a civil war could be averted.
Imagine, they assume that a civil war is coming or even necessary. You out there who smell injustice certainly want justice, but what if you can't ever get it? What if your anger is misplaced or rather misdirected? If you set out to try and do your own thing, perhaps someone will then move against you and stop you. Then you are in roughly the same position as the man who is struck once upon the cheek and then turns the other cheek to be slapped. If slapped again, his next recourse is combat because his natural rights (not given him by any government anywhere on earth) have been violated by a tyrant and or his company of usurpers. All tyrants deserve the same end. But shall we endure a governance that becomes that tyrannical? When is the last straw of tyranny reached? Look around the world at this very moment and you'll have some idea of the situation.
In THIS age that level of secrecy is almost impossible. Hundreds of law enforcement officers all over Europe were informed by letter at the same time, moving on the wealthy and powerful Templars in syncronicity. BTW, those Templars who escaped with ALL the Templars treasure are most likely HSBC today, pursuing the same trade that made them wealthy in the fist place, banking between Asia and the west.
And so, in what did all these reprisals result? Yeah, for the common man (or woman), nothing! For the king and pope who arrested and imprisoned Templar leader Jacques de Mollay both died soon after and what of the Templars' fabulous wealth? It did no one any good. In fact to the contrary, de Mollay was esteemed by the common people as a great benefactor who gave vast sums away to the poor. That can't be said of either the king or the pope. So what good is going after other men's ill gotten gains?
I've noticed that as people have gotten more and more angry over the course of current events, yet they are so apparently blind when it comes to post-judicial solutions. Most are statists without the slightest thought that their idealized regime would be just as tyrannical as the one it replaced. It is time to stop all the nonsense about ever effecting change through a state. It is time to take an honest view of one's own talents and skills and then with the aid of a Valun measurement, to determine what those talents and skills might bring to the marketplace, not the world marketplace, oh no, your local marketplace. If you can't find a buyer there, you either move or do something else. That's the way of natural orders and no state has any right to alter it, without doing serious damage ultimately to itself.
David Burton
dpbmss@mail.com
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