Cash is subversive
Posted by on February 1, 2012
Commenting on the trend towards interventionist policies and assertive state action Detlev Schlichter said that this is now so obvious that The Economist and the Financial Times talk of the trend towards ‘repression’ and ‘national capitalism’ in crisis management.
Politicians, bureaucrats and 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.
He states that the public believe that greedy bankers and ‘unfettered capitalism’ brought about this crisis. Yet cheap credit through state fiat money and the systematic subsidization of the housing market, are not features of the free market but of politics.
The present mess is the result of decades of institutionalized monetary debasement and the accumulation of public debt. These policies have left us with bankrupt welfare states and overstretched banks, yet none of this has diminished the enthusiasm of politicians and bureaucrats to give us more of their medicine.
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 last week. 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.
The above 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. Let me repeat “I am not a conspiracy theorist” but: electorates in all Western democracies are becoming increasingly disenchanted with their political masters and I do think that fiat money is a means of political control. I am not convinced that ‘in the West’, we are ever going to see a return to a gold standard, although the purchases of gold being made by China has some thinking that China is contemplated a move to a gold standard. Now that would be interesting!
“Life is like Stepping onto a boat which is about to sail out to sea and sink”
— Suzuki Roshi, Zen master
