Learn How To Be A Crook

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"If you are wondering where we have gone wrong as a country, then read this book. Shane Coley does a great job of getting to the very core of the problem. The media and talking heads we hear every day are so fixated on the symptoms that we forget to search for the root cause. This book peels the onion back layer by layer and explains in detail where the problem is. This book is a MUST read for anyone interested in restoring individual liberty in America!" ~ Clay Ortiz

Know Stealing at Amazon.com

Know Stealing

Know Stealing at Amazon.com

Know Stealing is the culmination of 15 years of research and 5 years of writing, learning more, digging deeper, throwing material away and writing again, always searching for the root causes of our problems as a state and nation.

Know Stealing begins:


"A people or nation that does not understand liberty cannot defend it." 


"I work late and rise early thinking about liberty, production and the nature of things. The stakes are high. Your time is valuable. Please permit me to be direct. We have been deceived, and I know how it was done.
The reader with an open mind, who actively questions everything, including the ideas recorded here, will get the most out of Know Stealing. When you reach the last page, it is my hope that you will have demanded, and that I will have delivered, solid arguments capable of standing under scrutiny and pressure."


Following are a few other excerpts from the introduction:


"... My single objective is to share the very best of what I've learned with those who are willing to open their minds and think, in order to understand how to restore and preserve our great nation as a land of liberty and production. I welcome all challenges with regard to these ideas."


"... The material in this book is powerful. It will teach a bold middle school student all that is necessary to debate and defeat a formally educated economist or an experienced politician. Imagine a magnificent skyscraper that is built on a lie. If a person, even a child, can show that the foundation is a lie, then the whole building has to be an illusion. Many things we believe are true are no more than illusions. Children who study the ideas presented in this book will have a better understanding of the world we live in than most successful and formally educated adults."


"... One of my challenges is to explain where we are wrong in our thinking without unnecessarily offending people. At the same time, I would debate any citizen, businessman, pastor, professor, teacher, leader, political activist, elected official or journalist on these ideas at any time, in any place. The bottom line is that our thinking is extremely mixed up and, in many important areas, just flat out wrong. The errors in our thinking and understanding are costing us our liberty, our homes, our jobs, our retirements and our children's future."


"... Liberty and prosperity are always at stake in every nation for every generation. Eventually bad decisions in the past force a generation to come to terms with the truth about what is necessary to sustain a free society. We are one of those generations. In our case, we can no longer naively depend on past production, new land, old-style immigration, industrialization, available cheap energy and paper wealth to maintain our standard of living."

###

Know Stealing will shatter preconceived notions and replace them with clear and precise knowledge which is capable of driving restoration in our American Republic in particular, and modern civilization in general. Clearly the preceding statement is bold, but it will hold up under honest critical review. 


With wisdom, knowledge, understanding, courage and commitment, we can right the ship and restore prosperity in the United States in a matter of months. The same is true in any society that will genuinely defend individual life, liberty and property.


One of the principle goals of the book is to enable more people to Know Stealing, so that we can enforce a policy of No Stealing. Theft that goes undetected will never be stopped.


Know Stealing at Amazon.com

My Testimony - HB3 Constitutional Tender Act

Click here for the video and response from the committee.


Coverdell Legislative Office Building (CLOB)
18 Capitol Square SW Atlanta, GA 30334

Atlanta, GA

Monday, March 7 · 9:00am - 12:00pm

Good morning. My name is Shane Coley.

I have studied history and economics extensively.  I was raised in the cattle business, I can operate or rebuild heavy equipment and I am a professional software architect. I am self-employed. I was recently a candidate for state Senate in the 47th District where I carried my home county.  My positions here today match my positions during the campaign.

The laws of Georgia are created and modified by our state legislature.  The legislature is made up of individuals, like you, who analyze legislation in the context of your personal belief system, which makes your belief system very important to Georgians.

The majority of the banking and finance committee members publicly claim to be Christian. Therefore, I will talk about some of the general constraints or limits of the Christian belief system, and then about secular belief regarding theft or stealing.

In at least nine places the Bible tells us about differing weights and differing measures.  In at least four places the Bible says that differing weights and differing measures are an abomination to God.  A Christian must not ignore this.

Here is an example of differing measure:  Suppose I were in the market buying wheat and I had a basket marked one bushel, but the basket was secretly larger than one bushel.  My oversized basket would enable me to steal part of your wheat. 

Differing weights and differing measures deceptively cause theft, which is a violation of the Eighth Commandment, "You shall not steal".

Since 1971, the only way to create a new US dollar is to record an entry in a ledger of the Federal Reserve System, or in a ledger of your local bank.  Producers have to work years for new Dollars that the bank creates instantly with the stroke of a key.

When new US dollars are created in this way, there is no new wealth created, but the purchasing power of all previously existing dollars is decreased.  This is an example of using differing measures to steal labor and property from producers.

This is clearly, undeniably, objectively a form of theft. To support fiat or fractional money is to support theft. 

Some claim that our money system makes us wealthy. This is false. Wealth is the result of production.

Many of us notice that People depend on Production. People eat food and use things. Food and things must be produced. Government Produces nothing and wastes much. Since people depend on production and government interferes with production, there is no way that government has any solutions for us. We must remember that every promise made by a government official has to be kept by a producer. There is no other way.

It is impossible to confiscate a loss. Only profits or capital from past production can be confiscated. It is logically impossible for the creation of new US Dollars to make us wealthy. If I had time, I would prove that creating costless money will first make us poorer and eventually crush our free society.

The reality is that the creation of costless money can only lead to the destruction of a free society.

For those who are not constrained by the Christian belief system, if you oppose theft then you must oppose creating new US dollars from nothing.

Please listen carefully to the following quote from an old banker.

“The few who understand the system, will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favors that there will be no opposition from that class. The great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantages will bear its burden without complaint.”

To the Christians and those who oppose stealing: I respectfully ask that you vote for the Constitutional Tender Act as a small step toward eliminating differing weights and differing measures and theft from our monetary system.

And finally, let’s recall a bit of what John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1919: “while [creating costless money] impoverishes many, it actually enriches some” and also “[Inflation] engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

To those members who hold stock in banks or have otherwise profited from the banking business: Since our loss is your gain, I respectfully ask that you recuse yourself from this vote and from the vote on the final bill.

Coinage Act of 1792

The Coinage Act of 1792, passed while George Washington was President, called for the death penalty for anyone who profited by manipulating our coins in any way.

Penalty on debasing the coins.

Section 19.  And be it further enacted, That if any of the gold or silver coins which shall be struck or coined at the said mint shall be debased or made worse as to the proportion of the fine gold or fine silver therein contained, or shall be of less weight or value than the same out to be pursuant to the directions of this act, through the default or with the connivance of any of the officers or persons who shall be employed at the said mint, for the purpose of profit or gain, or otherwise with a fraudulent intent, and if any of the said officers or persons shall embezzle any of the metals which shall at any time be committed to their charge for the purpose of being coined, or any of the coins which shall be struck or coined at the said mint, every such officer or person who shall commit any or either of the said offenses, shall be deemed guilty of felony, and shall suffer death.

Purchasing Power and Productivity

Can you imagine an exchange that does not have productivity mixed in?

I believe that it is impossible to have an exchange without productivity mixed in.

Net productivity may be consumed in the exchange or may be generated, but there is always productivity mixed in with any exchange.

Money is not a necessary ingredient in exchange.

Exchange can occur without money.

I will illustrate these points with a simple example.

Suppose you owned 100 train cars filled with gold. Let’s assume that the cars are secure and that people are willing to accept gold in exchange.

Could you purchase a hamburger with some of your abundant supply of gold?

The answer is a dependent yes. There is a prerequisite of productivity.

Someone must till the ground, plant wheat and make flour. Someone must raise and slaughter a steer to have the meat. Someone must plant a tomato and make ketchup. Someone must collect these and other related ingredients and resources into a single location and prepare the hamburger. And all of this has to happen in an environment that includes the producers being better off to exchange their product rather than keep it.

In addition, your gold would not have been secured, mined, refined, and aggregated unless someone engaged in productive labor.

Additionally, it is possible to exchange the makings of a hamburger for a quantity of fresh chicken eggs, instead of money.

Thus we see that productivity is a required component in exchange while money is optional. This is a critical point.

Think of costless money as a lazy and uninvited slob who barges in to your private dinner and forcibly takes the head seat at the table, demanding your honor and obedience.

Remember, the dinner cannot even occur unless gentle, honest productivity is at the table; perhaps this is productivity generated by the dinner party or perhaps captured by force. But always productivity will be present.

To be clear, money is not required at all. In addition to money not being required, unless it is honest money, money goes even further and steals from your productivity while giving nothing back.

Money gets up from the table, well fed by your labor, with your silverware in his pocket and various other articles openly picked up on the way out the door, all to be delivered back to his masters; masters who control his very existence by the stroke of a pen.

What does this mean?

If productivity is involved in every exchange and money is never necessary in any exchange then we can draw a few simple conclusions.

1. Apart from Productivity, costless money will never feed even one person one meal.
2. Productivity alone, without money, is capable of providing food, shelter and wealth.
3. If a person were hungry or cold and had the choice of solving their problem by choosing one and only one of these two elements, then choosing a quantity of money without productivity would leave them in a worse condition, while choosing from a pool of productivity would enable them to be warm and well fed.
   
4. In the case of a gift, the same holds true. If we give costless money apart from productivity, the recipient has nothing. If we give productivity apart from costless money, the recipient has a gift with usefulness and value.

Costless Paper Money

We see that gold apart from other productivity cannot provide anyone with a meal.

What about costless money?

Suppose in our nation there are 1,000,000 acres of farm land and 10,000 factories which produce our food and the products we value in exchange.

Now imagine that we print one trillion dollars.

Do we now suddenly have more acres of farm land? Do we now suddenly have more factories?

Someone may say, no, but with this new money, now we can build more factories!

Why can we? Will you build the factory with paper? Will you plant paper seeds in a paper field? No…? Then what do you mean?

I can only purchase more if I produce more things for which people are willing to exchange their own production. As we produce more and more efficiently, there will be a need for more acres and factories to engage in production. Increasing production requires real resources; bricks and steel, acres and seed - not paper.

All that costless money does is grant the first users of the New Money the fraudulent ability to lay claim to your productivity and property which they have not worked to acquire.

I could print money today and immediately acquire your entire year of production from your factory or farm, without doing anything productive myself. I would simply take your labor and property with the stroke of a pen.

The Keynesian monetary system we labor under does this every single day.

Government Stimulus

Since only productivity applied together with real resources can feed a person or increase one’s wealth, the only thing anyone can ever give in exchange for any other thing is productivity.

When the government issues new costless money into the system and the banking sector multiplies it yet again, the costless money only has value to the extent that productivity is absorbed into the costless money.

If we had trillions and trillions of dollars, but no one planted crops or made things, we would be a poor nation. Consider Zimbabwe. A few decades ago 1 Zim Dollar would buy as much as 1.47 US Dollars. Today it takes 37,456,777 Zim Dollars to equal 1 US Dollar.

Do big numbers on slips of paper make a nation wealthy? No. Impossible.

Therefore when the government prints costless money, your property and productivity are necessarily used to impute value to the new dollars, but someone else gets these "valuable" new tokens. They are worthless on their own account, apart from your labor.

Conclusion

The clear and logical economic arguments against the current stimulus and our monetary system in general are somewhat involved and will not be covered in this article. However, the point that we want to convey is this:

The only thing government can give away is productivity and since government produces nothing, they can only give away your hard earned and valuable productivity. Costless money is nothing except a tool to steal what belongs to you.

Furthermore, if we produce nothing then there is nothing to take and nothing to give away, regardless of how many money tokens are created. Again, observe Zimbabwe for an example.

The more we produce, the more the government has access to, which will be used to do the things government does best; destroy liberty and enslave people.

What else have we lost?

Today is Thanksgiving Day and I have the great privilege and pleasure of being in South Georgia with family. I am thankful for many things that are easy to be thankful for. I try to be thankful in all things, in accordance with the teaching of my Christian faith.

During the critical coffee cup selection process this morning I found a cup decorated with a Norman Rockwell image. The scene is of a father and son with fishing gear standing in front of the door to a business. Dad is hanging a sign that says "GONE on BUSINESS"; and one can cipher "will return tomorrow". Dad is happy to hang the sign and go, while the son peeks around a corner in delight as they "sneak off" to fish.

Andy Griffeth comes to mind. And then I remember talk of the days when neighbors would regularly, commonly, often visit on Sunday or raise a barn together. People had time for other things in life than work and a "schedule".

But today, one of my dearest young friends, barely in her twenties, tells me she would be lost without her Blackberry calendar.

What changed?

As I recall from memory, in 1910 about 70% of all business expansion was self-funded. In those days the monetary system allowed a business to save for its own expansion.

After 1913 this steadily became impossible. A business could not compete without debt funded expansion. Cheap credit made debt cheaper than savings for expansion. In fact, if one saved, inflation would destroy one's wealth faster than any interest that was earned and your competitor would use debt to encroach on your market share while you saved...

Someone will say; "so invest in the stock market for better returns..."

But the stock market is a scam, unless one takes the view that having "wealth on paper" is the same as having real property. As we have seen clearly (once again) in the past few weeks, "wealth on paper" can disappear in a flash.

Even if the economy were healthy, what would happen if everyone decided to "cash out" on the same day? The whole system would collapse and most people would get pennies on their dollar (which is only worth about two pennies to begin with) if they were lucky.

Meaning in this context

Because business and individuals have been put in a position in which spending is believed to be cheaper than saving, and because saving provides negligible returns, we have become a debtor society. Remember Bernanke stated plainly that a determined government could, in effect, force people to spend rather than save by forcing higher inflation through government deficit spending:

We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation.

Ben Bernanke, “Deflation: Making Sure ‘It’ Doesn’t Happen Here” Remarks before the National Economists Club, Washington, D.C., 21 November 2002

To the point

Not only does our monetary system cause a literal and actual wealth transfer through the process of inflation, it also reconfigures the use and application of factors of production. In other words, what is "valuable" in a system which relies on ever increasing levels of debt, is different than what is "valuable" in a sound money system.

We will leave illustrating the cause and effect for another day and go straight to the claim.

In our false prosperity economy there is no time for the typical US citizen to slow down and enjoy friends, family and fishing.

Someone may think of golf or video games or our entertainment flooded society. Perhaps even leisure time and vacations.

However, the picture is not complete unless we think about how burned out we feel when we vacate. Who is paying for the leisure and the entertainment? What is not paid for in its place? What about the tenuous (at best) condition of our "savings" and "investments" and "retirement"?

As a nation, is our leisure usually cash or credit?

In other words what is the real cost of the "leisure" we consume?

How leisurely is what we do for entertainment? Is our entertainment typically edifying or destructive? Do kids go and consume entertainment when they would be better off and more healthy to have productive chores to do? Or to spend time with friends and a fishing pole?

We have lost our quality time. We have lost simple things, simple times, time for family, fishing, and growing old within a community. We have lost the opportunity to really enjoy each other and the world around us. We have lost relationships and friendships.

As a nation, we have debt instead of savings. Our "retirement" and "wealth" are at the mercy of a system that will fail.

We have little real wealth. What we seem to own requires our continuing participation in the system or we lose "our" property; for example, we must pay property taxes or the government will confiscate our property. Based on law and regulation, the government is the senior controlling partner in anything we own.

If we rest, we lose.

What else have we lost?

The Federal Reserve System and our complicit government has stolen our property and has stolen our quality time with family and friends.

So talk about the other kind of money…

Let's start this way. Which nations have Sound Money?

The short answer is none. To my knowledge there are no nations on the planet which use Sound Money today.

If no one uses Sound Money, what sort of money is in use?

There are 4 basic types of money.

• Commodity (or natural) money
• Gold, Silver, Butter [This is Good!]
• Receipt money
• Receipt for Gold, Silver, Butter [This is Good!]
• Fractional money
• “Checkbook” money. A Bank with $100 in Assets can loan $1000 in “checkbook” money. [This is Bad!!]
• Fiat money
• Value is enforced through legal tender laws. No backing. If you need more, just run the printing press. [This is Bad!!]

In simple terms, most nations use FRACTIONAL money in an upside down pyramid on top of FIAT money. This means that FIAT money is considered an “ASSET” in the reserves of a bank.

A bank is required through regulation to hold “ASSET” reserves of 10% (or sometimes less). Therefore if a bank has one million dollars in “RESERVES” the bank can loan to its customers ten million dollars in “FRACTIONAL” money, also called CHECKBOOK money.

Most people are unaware of this fraudulent scheme. At this point one may ask: “So why should I care?”

The short answer is because you are being literally robbed of your property through this system.

(There is one other possibility; the net effect at the end of a period of time is that you are either robbing others or you are being robbed. It makes no difference how much integrity you have or don’t have. We will explain this in another post.)

Supply and Demand

Most of us have heard of the law of supply and demand. Generally we understand this law to explain that as supply increases, price decreases. There are also other attributes to this supply and demand relationship. For example, there are distinctions between charting supply and demand curves, as compared to individual behavior in the market, given variations between supply, demand and price. For our purpose we will stick to a simple definition; i.e. as supply increases, price decreases.

Water

If a man sitting beside a wilderness river in the year 1800 attempted to sell water to travelers, he would be wasting his time. However, if the same man had water that was his private property and his storefront was in the middle of a parched desert, he would have a good prospect of selling water to these same people.

Notice that supply and demand are determined not simply based on “world supply”, but based on available supply, at a specific time and in a specific place, under specific conditions. Water cannot be sold at all by the river. Water can be sold for a potentially unlimited price to a thirsty man in a desert.

Purchasing Power / Supply and Demand

At this point let us note that money is also affected by the law of supply and demand. This is true and can be expressed in different ways. A common way of describing the value of money is PURCHASING POWER. For our example, suppose we know that a car in 1965 cost about $3,000 and today costs about $30,000.

In 1965 $3,000 had enough purchasing power to be exchanged for a new car. In 2008 $3,000 has enough purchasing power to exchange for one tenth of a new car. (Price change is not the whole story of what we have lost, but it will do for our purpose here.)

If the money supply had been stable since 1965 (1965 is an arbitrary date) we would be able to purchase a new car for less than $3,000. There are two basic reasons: 1. The overall increase in products and services would cause prices to go down. 2. The increase in productivity would cause prices to go down.

In other words, in a Sound Money system, if you saved $3,000 from 1965 until 2008 you could purchase a new car and have money left over.

Back to Supply and Demand and Money

What can we conclude from the above comments… based on our simple observations?

We said, in simple terms, that “as supply increases, price decreases.” Then we saw that water can be exchanged for either nothing or perhaps a man’s entire fortune, depending on supply and demand at a particular place and time.

We also saw that our money has lost purchasing power over the years because the money supply has increased.

(Note: This increase in the money supply is called inflation. Our dollar today is worth between two and four pennies compared to a 1933 dollar. Inflation of the money supply is the reason that the Continental notes issued by the Continental Congress became worthless. They flowed in the streets like water in a river and became useless as a store of value for use in exchange.)

So if the supply of money increases (i.e. someone inflates the money supply) then the value of all other money already in existence decreases. This is a simple case of supply and demand.

Increasing the money supply

Therefore, in a fiat system, if someone adds one thousand dollars of money to the money supply, then the rest of the money, held by all the people, will be decreased in value by one thousand dollars.

In a fiat system, if someone instantly doubles the money supply without cost, then the value of all money in existence loses half its value.

But is there a difference between paper and gold; between Mr. FIAT and Mr. COMMODITY? Is there a difference between a Fractional or Fiat money system and a Sound Money system?

If either one of two our men double the money supply in one day, then your old money loses value. He may have just transferred half of your purchasing power into his possession. The only question is whether he worked for the new money.

If this is Mr. FIAT, his money comes into existence because he ran a printer and printed hundred dollar bills for two pennies each; he has stolen half the value from holders of old money. He has contributed essentially nothing in exchange for real assets.

However, if Mr. COMMODITY operates a mine and repairs equipment and pays labor and secures and transports gold, then he has incurred costs while adding the new money to the market. Mr. COMMODITY is then a producer and not a thief. Much more can be said about the relationships between his mining operation and the economy as a whole, but the important point is that he has to produce in order to increase his holdings in money or other property.

Printing houses

Think about it this way: Suppose you were a builder. What if you had to compete with another builder who could simply and literally run a printer to instantly produce exactly the same house that, for you, required time, labor, capital and risk to produce? That is a good picture of our monetary system. Printing equity. Printing assets. Printing labor. Printing houses. The paper money is just a step in the middle.

Theft through costless money

Following are two of my preferred explanations of how we are pillaged:

Creating costless money is robbery because, in the first use after creation, the new money implies an exchange of value, when in fact the exchange would be impossible if not for the law of supply and demand, which guarantees that the value of all the money previously in existence is decreased in an amount equal to the face value of the new money, thereby fraudulently transferring value created by actual productivity into the hands of those who use the new money first. In addition, all early users of the new money enjoy a value advantage during the lag between creation of the new money and upward adjustment of prices in the marketplace.

The purpose of inflation is to use NEW MONEY to purchase REAL ASSETS at OLD PRICES, thereby causing a wealth transfer from the people who get the new money last toward the people who get the new money first.