Here's a speech I wrote for my local OWS a week or so ago to try my best to explain the current economic crisis in the US. I was wondering if anyone cared to critique it, I realize that I am not the best writer and there may be a typo or grammatical error in there. I tried to keep it as simple to understand for the "everyman" as I could. I trust the opinions of the JREF and would love to hear some criticisms of this piece or arguments against it (especially if I've made any factual or mathematical errors).
I know it's tempting to stop reading after the taxation bit, but please, my main points are nearer the end. I know that using the word theft made a bunch of people just walk away)
Here goes!
Repeat after me: the United States government has no money. The United States government has no money. Everyone knows this now. But not many seem to realize that it never had any.
Whenever the government pays for something, such as the salaries of government employees, politicians, cops, firemen, road crews, contractors, the costs of war, etc, it only has two sources of income to pay for it. The first is borrowing money from other countries at interest through the sale of bonds, and the other is theft.
That's right, stealing.
I know, I know, this is where I lose all of the Stockholm Syndrome taxation survivors, but please hear me out on this point. The dictionary defines stealing as, "to take by force the property of another without permission". This is exactly what the government is doing when it tells you to hand over your money in the form of taxes or they will come after you. Make no mistake, when the government comes to collect, you will either pay or you will get a letter in the mail. Ignore that letter and don't pay the amount they ask for and you will be arrested. If you still don't pay, you will remain in jail for the rest of your life. If you try to defend yourself the same way that you would against a thief coming into your home you will most likely die in a battle with the police.
Government theft comes in two main forms: stealing from people directly through taxation and counterfeiting through printing currency. Counterfeiting steals from anyone that has money through inflation by decreasing the value of their money. If you have $100 with $200 in circulation and the Federal Reserve creates an additional $200, your money is now much less than it once was, and the government has in reality stolen $50 from you (and of course everyone else who has money). This is not semantics, this is mathematics.
Throughout the course of US history, the government has used the money they stole to bribe the public through social programs, subsidies, wars and infrastructure investment. At first, people didn't mind being robbed because they liked what they got back; in essence they were still being stolen from, but the thief gave them back schools, roads, police, environmental protections, etc etc. These socialized industries prevented competition (why build an alternative to a government road system when you are still forced to pay for the one they built?) and gradually the quality of the services provided declined. Inside the government operated schools, children were indoctrinated to believe that stealing from others to help those in need or to help the general collective was morally right. We know that this is bogus for at least two reasons, the first being that stealing and the initiation of force is wrong (we learn this in kindergarten) and empirically because we see that poor people are no better off and are now hated by their fellow man, their every action scrutinized to make sure that they are spending their stolen money in "the right way" (see: drug tests for welfare recipients).
Once we left the gold standard and switched from using an actual commodity based currency to a fiat currency based on nothing, practical fractional reserve banking became a reality. This meant that banks could lend out many times more money then they actually had, backed by the government counterfeiting trillions of dollars to pay for the loans. The best part is that since the government could print endless money, there was no need to raise taxes. The people celebrated as free social programs, subsidization and wars that nobody had to pay for increased in number. Programs like Social Security, which sign future generations up for paying for the current generation's retirement became wildly popular, if only because nobody had to pay for them… at the time.
With an infinite money supply at their fingertips, the government quickly became the biggest employer in the United States. Out of work? The government will pay you. Want to go to college? The government will pay for it. Want to fight a war or two? Create "jobs?" Add it to the government's tab. Military contracts. Police contracts. Free or heavily subsidized healthcare for everyone. Question mark-suited Matthew Lesko on television offering books on how to get free money from the government.
The only problem is, as I mentioned earlier, the government doesn't intrinsically have any money. All they have is the ability to steal or borrow, and with so much counterfeiting going on, the only countries that would buy our bonds want a big return on their investment.
By the mid 2000s, with multiple wars going on and having moved all of our factories overseas, there were simply not enough people making money left to steal from, primarily because it is either illegal for people to work (see: minimum wage) or simply because it is unprofitable to open a business (see: environmental, health and safety regulations), so instead of raising taxes on the people that are making money, which would of course never come close to actually bringing in enough money to keep the machine going, the government ran up huge deficits borrowing money from abroad and doing the usual counterfeiting of trillions of dollars, devaluing our currency through inflation. This was primarily to give the illusion that every service the government provided was free, or at the very least had a very small cost.
You may stop me at this point, and rightfully point out, "But we need the environmental, health and safety regulations! You are a heartless monster!", and that may be true. But when we passed those regulations, the violators just took their factories elsewhere, where the people of the US (probably including yourself) didn't care about the environment, or the health and safety of the workers, and you rewarded them through investments and buying their products, leaving the businesses here that had to pay to conform to the regulations to go out of business. So let's not fool ourselves, the regulations don't stop the problems, they just make us feel like we are doing something noble while we put the child labor, unsafe factories, environmental damage and pennies a day salary out of sight in a foreign country.
Since foreigners own so much of our debt, it was crucial to keep interest rates low. Even one percentage point could mean billions in extra money that we would have to pay back. The banks capitalized on this and borrowed money at little or no interest from the government. Combined with the mortgage money brought in by the housing bubble, the banks and their traders wagered it all in the derivatives and housing markets and lost hundreds of times what they invested. The government covered the losses of the banks through the bailouts, where it injected more stolen and counterfeit money into their balance sheets. This is where the Occupy Wall Street protesters get angry, because in their eyes, it was ok to steal money and to counterfeit as long as the money was going to something "productive". But now that the stolen money is being given directly to banks, that's something to be mad about, and I agree.
This brings us to where we are now. We pay over $500,000,000,000 in interest alone each year on our outstanding debt. We have trillions in counterfeit money and the United States and its major banks hold trillions in worthless assets. Unemployment is rising, and the world is starting to wonder about continuing to prop up the world's most indebted country. This is why a carefully chosen super committee of senators with extralegal powers can't come to a solution, because even ceasing all funding for the departments of Education, Transportation, Homeland Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, etc while ending our wars overseas are just a haircut off the top of what we owe.
People are starting to voice their complaints, now that their bribes are going away. The police have switched from solving expensive crimes like homicide and rape to ticketing, red light cameras, and arresting people for victimless crimes like drug use to save money. Only with a system like ours could a raped woman have to pay for the prosecution, trial and confinement (average 45K/year to jail someone) for her rapist. The cost of living is rising as jobs disappear and inflation continues.
I don't care how many people say they support the troops overseas. Once the military comes home from Iraq and Afghanistan the unemployment will hit double digits, there will be thousands of emotionally scarred and financially broke men and women who missed a decade of career growth. To top it off the military guarantees their health care and housing after they come back. Most states are way in the red as they exceed their budgets. Arizona has been forced to sell its state buildings to pay for the police and other basic government programs. The Federal Reserve has injected trillions of more counterfeit money into the system in the last year to try and spur growth through "quantitative easing", or "inflation" as it is known to economists. This money was mostly was stolen by banks, but even the small part that went to "help create jobs" was by all measures ineffective, especially looking at the long term. Any jobs created where the government pays the salary is unsustainable. Meanwhile the real effect has been the devaluation of the dollar. We are slowly discovering that it is simply not possibly to counterfeit or borrow your way out of debt, it's a contradiction in terms.
I can paraphrase many of my friends as saying, "I wish it could just go back to the way it was." This is naive and basically asking to go back to blissful ignorance at this point. Just look at Greece and Italy. Their economies are either currently collapsing or have collapsed due to the exact same situation that we have here. There is just not enough money in the world to bail out the United States when you see that the FDIC is insuring tens of trillions in fake money and toxic assets. There is no going back. Electing a new president will not solve this problem, which is obvious, just look at the candidates for president now. None of them are even admitting we have a problem. Their idea of cutting the budget or increasing taxes are so ridiculously ineffective that you have to wonder if it is intentional or if they are simply stupid.
What we see today is that bribes were the carrot that the government used to get us to pay our tribute. Now that the carrot is gone all they have is the stick. We've watched police violence increase steadily until now, where police assault on innocent people is reaching a bloody crescendo of violence on the streets of cities and college campuses. Every day there is another video of a police officer kicking a pregnant woman, spraying chemicals into the faces of the elderly, arresting protesters simply for being in a certain place. 6.7 million adult men and women -- about 3.1 percent of the total U.S. adult population -- are incarcerated at a cost of 45K per year to the dwindling number of taxpayers. Our best and brightest, not wanting to see their kids yoked with trillions in debt, are leaving for greener pastures. And the old people still haven't realized that Social Security won't be paying out for them.
Thanks for listening to me talk. I'd love to hear any constructive feedback, positive or negative. If you don't think that taxation is theft, then what if there were no government bribes? Would it still be OK with you? Because that is the future, taxation without social programs and domestic spending.
I know it's tempting to stop reading after the taxation bit, but please, my main points are nearer the end. I know that using the word theft made a bunch of people just walk away)
Here goes!
Repeat after me: the United States government has no money. The United States government has no money. Everyone knows this now. But not many seem to realize that it never had any.
Whenever the government pays for something, such as the salaries of government employees, politicians, cops, firemen, road crews, contractors, the costs of war, etc, it only has two sources of income to pay for it. The first is borrowing money from other countries at interest through the sale of bonds, and the other is theft.
That's right, stealing.
I know, I know, this is where I lose all of the Stockholm Syndrome taxation survivors, but please hear me out on this point. The dictionary defines stealing as, "to take by force the property of another without permission". This is exactly what the government is doing when it tells you to hand over your money in the form of taxes or they will come after you. Make no mistake, when the government comes to collect, you will either pay or you will get a letter in the mail. Ignore that letter and don't pay the amount they ask for and you will be arrested. If you still don't pay, you will remain in jail for the rest of your life. If you try to defend yourself the same way that you would against a thief coming into your home you will most likely die in a battle with the police.
Government theft comes in two main forms: stealing from people directly through taxation and counterfeiting through printing currency. Counterfeiting steals from anyone that has money through inflation by decreasing the value of their money. If you have $100 with $200 in circulation and the Federal Reserve creates an additional $200, your money is now much less than it once was, and the government has in reality stolen $50 from you (and of course everyone else who has money). This is not semantics, this is mathematics.
Throughout the course of US history, the government has used the money they stole to bribe the public through social programs, subsidies, wars and infrastructure investment. At first, people didn't mind being robbed because they liked what they got back; in essence they were still being stolen from, but the thief gave them back schools, roads, police, environmental protections, etc etc. These socialized industries prevented competition (why build an alternative to a government road system when you are still forced to pay for the one they built?) and gradually the quality of the services provided declined. Inside the government operated schools, children were indoctrinated to believe that stealing from others to help those in need or to help the general collective was morally right. We know that this is bogus for at least two reasons, the first being that stealing and the initiation of force is wrong (we learn this in kindergarten) and empirically because we see that poor people are no better off and are now hated by their fellow man, their every action scrutinized to make sure that they are spending their stolen money in "the right way" (see: drug tests for welfare recipients).
Once we left the gold standard and switched from using an actual commodity based currency to a fiat currency based on nothing, practical fractional reserve banking became a reality. This meant that banks could lend out many times more money then they actually had, backed by the government counterfeiting trillions of dollars to pay for the loans. The best part is that since the government could print endless money, there was no need to raise taxes. The people celebrated as free social programs, subsidization and wars that nobody had to pay for increased in number. Programs like Social Security, which sign future generations up for paying for the current generation's retirement became wildly popular, if only because nobody had to pay for them… at the time.
With an infinite money supply at their fingertips, the government quickly became the biggest employer in the United States. Out of work? The government will pay you. Want to go to college? The government will pay for it. Want to fight a war or two? Create "jobs?" Add it to the government's tab. Military contracts. Police contracts. Free or heavily subsidized healthcare for everyone. Question mark-suited Matthew Lesko on television offering books on how to get free money from the government.
The only problem is, as I mentioned earlier, the government doesn't intrinsically have any money. All they have is the ability to steal or borrow, and with so much counterfeiting going on, the only countries that would buy our bonds want a big return on their investment.
By the mid 2000s, with multiple wars going on and having moved all of our factories overseas, there were simply not enough people making money left to steal from, primarily because it is either illegal for people to work (see: minimum wage) or simply because it is unprofitable to open a business (see: environmental, health and safety regulations), so instead of raising taxes on the people that are making money, which would of course never come close to actually bringing in enough money to keep the machine going, the government ran up huge deficits borrowing money from abroad and doing the usual counterfeiting of trillions of dollars, devaluing our currency through inflation. This was primarily to give the illusion that every service the government provided was free, or at the very least had a very small cost.
You may stop me at this point, and rightfully point out, "But we need the environmental, health and safety regulations! You are a heartless monster!", and that may be true. But when we passed those regulations, the violators just took their factories elsewhere, where the people of the US (probably including yourself) didn't care about the environment, or the health and safety of the workers, and you rewarded them through investments and buying their products, leaving the businesses here that had to pay to conform to the regulations to go out of business. So let's not fool ourselves, the regulations don't stop the problems, they just make us feel like we are doing something noble while we put the child labor, unsafe factories, environmental damage and pennies a day salary out of sight in a foreign country.
Since foreigners own so much of our debt, it was crucial to keep interest rates low. Even one percentage point could mean billions in extra money that we would have to pay back. The banks capitalized on this and borrowed money at little or no interest from the government. Combined with the mortgage money brought in by the housing bubble, the banks and their traders wagered it all in the derivatives and housing markets and lost hundreds of times what they invested. The government covered the losses of the banks through the bailouts, where it injected more stolen and counterfeit money into their balance sheets. This is where the Occupy Wall Street protesters get angry, because in their eyes, it was ok to steal money and to counterfeit as long as the money was going to something "productive". But now that the stolen money is being given directly to banks, that's something to be mad about, and I agree.
This brings us to where we are now. We pay over $500,000,000,000 in interest alone each year on our outstanding debt. We have trillions in counterfeit money and the United States and its major banks hold trillions in worthless assets. Unemployment is rising, and the world is starting to wonder about continuing to prop up the world's most indebted country. This is why a carefully chosen super committee of senators with extralegal powers can't come to a solution, because even ceasing all funding for the departments of Education, Transportation, Homeland Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, etc while ending our wars overseas are just a haircut off the top of what we owe.
People are starting to voice their complaints, now that their bribes are going away. The police have switched from solving expensive crimes like homicide and rape to ticketing, red light cameras, and arresting people for victimless crimes like drug use to save money. Only with a system like ours could a raped woman have to pay for the prosecution, trial and confinement (average 45K/year to jail someone) for her rapist. The cost of living is rising as jobs disappear and inflation continues.
I don't care how many people say they support the troops overseas. Once the military comes home from Iraq and Afghanistan the unemployment will hit double digits, there will be thousands of emotionally scarred and financially broke men and women who missed a decade of career growth. To top it off the military guarantees their health care and housing after they come back. Most states are way in the red as they exceed their budgets. Arizona has been forced to sell its state buildings to pay for the police and other basic government programs. The Federal Reserve has injected trillions of more counterfeit money into the system in the last year to try and spur growth through "quantitative easing", or "inflation" as it is known to economists. This money was mostly was stolen by banks, but even the small part that went to "help create jobs" was by all measures ineffective, especially looking at the long term. Any jobs created where the government pays the salary is unsustainable. Meanwhile the real effect has been the devaluation of the dollar. We are slowly discovering that it is simply not possibly to counterfeit or borrow your way out of debt, it's a contradiction in terms.
I can paraphrase many of my friends as saying, "I wish it could just go back to the way it was." This is naive and basically asking to go back to blissful ignorance at this point. Just look at Greece and Italy. Their economies are either currently collapsing or have collapsed due to the exact same situation that we have here. There is just not enough money in the world to bail out the United States when you see that the FDIC is insuring tens of trillions in fake money and toxic assets. There is no going back. Electing a new president will not solve this problem, which is obvious, just look at the candidates for president now. None of them are even admitting we have a problem. Their idea of cutting the budget or increasing taxes are so ridiculously ineffective that you have to wonder if it is intentional or if they are simply stupid.
What we see today is that bribes were the carrot that the government used to get us to pay our tribute. Now that the carrot is gone all they have is the stick. We've watched police violence increase steadily until now, where police assault on innocent people is reaching a bloody crescendo of violence on the streets of cities and college campuses. Every day there is another video of a police officer kicking a pregnant woman, spraying chemicals into the faces of the elderly, arresting protesters simply for being in a certain place. 6.7 million adult men and women -- about 3.1 percent of the total U.S. adult population -- are incarcerated at a cost of 45K per year to the dwindling number of taxpayers. Our best and brightest, not wanting to see their kids yoked with trillions in debt, are leaving for greener pastures. And the old people still haven't realized that Social Security won't be paying out for them.
Thanks for listening to me talk. I'd love to hear any constructive feedback, positive or negative. If you don't think that taxation is theft, then what if there were no government bribes? Would it still be OK with you? Because that is the future, taxation without social programs and domestic spending.
