Keith Evans
Aug 24, 2017 · 3 min read

It is time for the world, including you as an influential journalist, to take some economics lessons. What absolutely won’t work in the future is the present methodology of our apples to oranges management of leading economies. If the plutocrats decide to retain the power that generalized and weaponized ignorance has given them in economics there will be widespread shifting of economic/political power and that inevitably leads to wars, both small and large.

Most western economic powers effectively left the gold standard in the years following WWII when its feudalistic purposes no longer served in a world brought forever into interdependence. America finalized this in ’71 as it moved to a sovereign fiat currency, but its only authorized issuer of currency, its Congress, didn’t get the memo and continues to govern according to old gold standard economics that always had the priority of defending the gold reserve against inflation of the currency.

The schizophrenic message sent by a governing body that tells its constituents that they must “sacrifice” to maintain the largest and wealthiest economy in the world while also throwing vast amounts of the economic productivity achieved at the very top 1% of the food chain and the MIC shouldn’t garner the support that it does. However, the voting populace of America is unique in its unsophistication and anti-government sentiment, making any “tough” sounding rhetoric quite effective in gaining broad support for issues against its own best interest.

The fact that the message appears compatible with everything people learned about responsible fiscal management of their personal finances makes austerity a much easier sell than it should be. Just include the buzz word “debt” when communicating with the people whenever they appear to want nice things like other countries have and you can sell them on cutting just about anything, even if causes widespread misery and even death. However bad it gets one can always project warning of much worse consequences should they abandon assumed reason and good judgement as they have been conditioned to accept since childhood.

Should the population of America ever discover the truth that their federal government, as the monopoly issuer of the currency that can never run out of it or fail to pay any obligation denominated in it regardless of revenue, is the only source of currency the private sector has that doesn’t leverage its own debt the shelf life of the current politicians will be cut short. A sovereign fiat currency is just as unlimited to its issuing government as the “claps” are to Medium, or “points” are to sports stadiums. The government neither has any currency to start with, nor does it need to tax or borrow currency to spend. Taxes don’t fund any of the spending of government at the federal level, as the currency must be “spent” into existence before it can be collected as taxation. Tax revenue is an oxymoron because taxes are “canceled” currency, not a funding source for spending.

No matter how complex the process is made to sustain a slight of hand shell game to harvest the wealth of the rubes, this means that the “debt” politicians use to beat us over the head and shoulders is nothing more than an accounting of currency remaining in the private sector that hasn’t yet been removed by taxation. We don’t “owe” all those trillions of dollars. We “OWN” them, and our grandchildren will inherit them, not have to pay them back. When the economy was properly managed in America post WWII we saw a half century of unprecedented prosperity because the government spent “irresponsibly”, according to current political rhetoric, on jobs and infrastructure that we are benefiting from yet today. In the years since RayGun convinced us to be “responsible” and accept the deity of the private sector and the evil of “big gubmint” America’s prosperity and infrastructure have eroded dangerously.

The implications of this should be self evident to anyone who is seriously contemplating a future without traditional private sector jobs to sustain a consumer based economy. While I favor a guaranteed job program over UBI, the fact is that our primary “job” in such an economy will be “consumption”, not production. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be important jobs that need to be done, only that work for someone’s profit and income must be disconnected. We will still need public service workers and the production of “social capital” can finally be monetized, requiring thinking mostly opposed to that currently dominating economics. The arts and social infrastructure of health and education will enjoy a resurgence befitting a modern affluent society if we simply have the foresight to elect honest and capable leadership and put feudalistic economics behind us.

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    Keith Evans

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    Meandering to a different drummer.