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.
Apart from Productivity, costless money will never feed even one person one meal.
Productivity alone, without money, is capable of providing food, shelter and wealth.
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.
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.
There was a time not so long ago when I would read a verse that talks about money and quite easily correlate that term with the cash in my pocket or the balance in my accounts. After all, that is what we have been taught for a few hundred years.
But what if the word translated money in Scripture were actually something else?
Would this be important for us to understand?
What if our definition and understanding of money is completely different from the actual and intended meaning in Scripture? If there is a difference in meaning, should this difference be clarified?
We all know words take on new and different meaning over time and across cultural and generational boundaries...
Let's look at two passages of Scripture, one in the Old Testament and one in the New Testament:
Regarding Genesis 43:21 I want to illustrate three points.
1) Between the two translations noted below you will notice that one renders the term money and the other the term silver. This helps to illustrate that it is no great leap to challenge the proper English rendering of this underlying Hebrew word.
2) The underlying word is KSP or KeSeP, which is the word for silver. (not money)
3) This verse also has the added feature of specifically referring to the weight of the money, which is actually the weight of the silver. It is the actual quantity of a commodity that is being referenced and traded.
Genesis 43:21 and it came about when we came to the lodging place, that we opened our sacks, and behold, each man’s money was in the mouth of his sack, our money in full. So we have brought it back in our hand. NASB95
Genesis 43:21 But at the place where we stopped for the night we opened our sacks and each of us found his silver—the exact weight—in the mouth of his sack. So we have brought it back with us. NIV
Next let's look at a New Testament example.
1 Timothy 6:10 For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. NASB95
We see here that the underlying Greek word is rendered love of silver.
What if English translations of Scripture used the word silver every place that the original languages used a word for silver? You know what I mean... Precise and accurate translation from the original language into equivalent terms currently in use today.
If one read silver instead of money each time the original text said silver, one would have cause to wonder about the difference between silver and the stuff we call money today.
The money spoken of and used in the Bible was honest money that, for its part, preserved everyone's property rights. Our money today quite literally causes fraud and theft every single day.
Even if we forget that Scripture says silver, not money, should we really be using the same term for both for honest money from Scripture and the destructive, dishonest, costless money in use today?
A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government. - George Washington
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty. - Thomas Jefferson
Are you ready for a New Constitution? Well its coming, if not now then soon, unless citizens of the several states find a way to stop it.
This Phyllis Schlafly article should be widely read. There are people and organizations who maintain and pursue a goal to overturn the USA as a free and sovereign nation. Considering where we stand today as a nation, a constitutional convention would provide the perfect working platform to swiftly destroy our current form of government.
By the way, "USA" refers to the United STATES of America, not a single central government with the label "USA". The reference is to a group of sovereign states who agreed to maintain a central, federal government which was to be subservient to the states and the people. We lost that long ago.
The primary tool used to destroy us, which we stupidly handed over, was our productivity, transferred through the process of inflation. Our labor has funded our enemies; the enemies of freedom; the enemies of the United States.
In his wise book "Capitalism, Democracy & Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery," John Mueller, an Ohio State political scientist, notes that John Maynard Keynes's central theme, according to his biographer Robert Skidelsky, was that "the state is wise and the market is stupid." Mueller continues: "Working from that sort of perspective, India's top economists for a generation supported policies of regulation and central control that failed abysmally -- leading one of them to lament recently, 'India's misfortune was to have brilliant economists.' " Many of them were educated in Britain, by Keynes's followers. In America today, everyone agrees that the president-elect's economic team is composed of brilliant economists.
I don't know anything about John Mueller, but he is correct in noting John Maynard Keynes' central theme: the state is wise and the market is stupid.
In other words, Keynes operated as though government, politicians, bureaucrats, laws, regulations, favored elites etc. are wise.
And likewise, Keynes believed the market (if you are a producer, that means you) is stupid.
Maybe Keynes was right. Clearly the free market is more productive, efficient, just and stable than any economic order government will ever be associated with engineering and thereby perverting and destroying.
However, someone, working on behalf of "government", has made choices which enable an elite few to pillage the producers. Maybe Keynes was part wrong; "the government" is certainly not wise. Interventionist government is sly, coercive, deceptive and destructive. But Keynes may have been right that the market (that's us) is stupid.
Even if you are one of those persons who know how the game is played, meaning you know how to operate so that you are pillaging your neighbors rather than being pillaged, your knowledge is useless unless you keep playing the game. When you stop pillaging, you are pillaged. Even as you go about your business of accumulating wealth, you participate in a system that can only move closer to destruction. Anyone who knows the truth and remains silent is helping to produce for their children and fellow citizens a legacy of doom and destruction.
I am an ardent supporter of capitalism and wealth. I strongly oppose theft through currency debasement, otherwise known as inflation. I strongly oppose forced income redistribution.
Benchmarking by the ravages of inflation and burgeoning government, we are productive, efficient and stupid.
Not to speak poorly of mules, but we seem to just bear up silently under the load like an old mule.
What happened to men and women of honor?
Where are our leaders?
Why have the citizens of this nation (and many other nations) been silent for nearly one hundred years while our homes, businesses, property and heritage are pillaged and destroyed through the process of inflation?
