Aasof’s Reflections

The following is a brief extract from ‘Big Brother Loves You!’ by Detlev Schlichter in which he rails against fiat money and the creation of debt something that I touched on in A Universal Debt. Commenting on the trend towards interventionist policies and assertive state action, The Economist and the Financial Times talk of the trend towards ‘repression’ and ‘national capitalism’ in crisis management. The public believe that greedy bankers and ‘unfettered capitalism’ brought about this crisis. Yet cheap credit through state fiat money and the systematic subsidisation of the housing market, are not features of the free market but of politics.

Politicians, bureaucrats and many of their claqueurs in the media have drawn conclusions that are conveniently in their own interests: to them the crisis is evidence that things cannot be left to the markets, to consumers, to greedy bankers, and the spontaneous interaction of the public. If the state does not regulate and control everything, chaos ensues. We need more government. More control. More regulation. More oversight.  Politicians and bureaucrats need more power.

It would seem that the problem is not with the policy establishment but with the masses who need to be controlled better.  Consumers and savers, cannot be trusted with their own money and authorities want to monitor and record their transactions. They don’t want the use of cash. “Cash has been a problem for a long time” the UK’s top taxman, Dave Hartnett, told The Daily Telegraph. Hartnett wants the citizenry to stop giving cash to their cleaners, gardeners, and to small tradesmen and other potential tax cheats and economic criminals so that they can no longer avoid paying taxes. “Households have a duty to ensure that other people do not evade paying their share of tax. The people who are worried about it should use our whistle-blowing line to tell us. We are getting better and better at finding people who receive cash.”  The beauty of a big state is apparent to Mr. Hartnett: “Tax provides the funding to run the country.”

Decent citizens don’t use cash. Cash is used by tax-cheats, terrorists, drug-dealers and child pornographers. Once this is established it will be a short step to severely restricting or even banning the withdrawal of cash from bank accounts. As all banks will soon anyway be mere branches of the ever-expanding central bank, which prints the money to keep the nominally private banks alive, all transactions will then be just electronic bookkeeping adjustments at the state central bank. All financial transactions will then be entirely transparent to the authorities. “Irrational” behaviour can be identified early and – eliminated.

It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude. (Aldous Huxley – Berkeley 1962)