Want to Save the Economy? Burn Your Money! 🔥
Want to Save the Economy? Burn Your Money! 🔥
But seriously… cash is trash
In the long run, destroying money helps the poor more than creating money does.
Very few people understand this.
Let’s run a quick scenario:
Picture yourself speaking to an audience of 1,000 people.
You light $1 million on fire.
The audience gasps.
What a waste of money, people whisper.
That idiot should’ve given the money to the poor, thought everyone, though 99.99999% of humanity has never given a homeless person $1 million, or $100, even once in their entire life.
“Don’t worry,” you tell the audience. “I just made every poor person richer.”
Your audience scratches their heads.
Huh?
Minting and printing money
For the majority of human monetary history — since at least 2700 BC until 1900 AD— money was mostly gold and silver minted into ingots, weights, rigs, and coins.
Since the early 1900s, and especially after 1971 when the US went off the gold standard, money has been created by banks re-lending deposits at interest.
4600 years: Minting.
125 years: Printing.
If you deposit $100 worth of real gold in a bank today, here’s what happens:
The bank gives you a deposit credit (IOU) for $100, which you can spend at the swipe of a card or the beep of a phone.
The bank then re-lends your real $100 to John (plus interest.)
John spends that money at Jane’s bakery, while you spend your $100 at Tony’s mechanic shop. Tony and Jane deposit the money in his and her accounts. The bank gives Tony and Jane deposit credits as well.
The bank then re-lends Tony and Jane’s money to Sam and Jess (plus interest.)
If the bank has done its job really well — meaning they’ve invested heavily in lobby-bribing Congress — they can even lend that money to the government, which is about as risk-free a source of interest as you can imagine.
Banks do this over and over and over again, for infinity.
It’s called the Money Multiplier Effect.
For every “real” dollar in existence, there are more than ten depositor credit dollars.
When people talk about banks “creating money out of thin air,” this is how they actually do it.
It’s the reason JPMorganChase has made $53 billion in net profits in the 12 months.
It’s the reason why the world is $307 trillion in debt.
It’s the reason American taxpayers will pay $1 trillion in interest this year.
It’s the reason why your taxes keep going up, your services keep getting cut, and your public assets keep getting sold off.
And it gets worse!
Bankruptcy
John owes the bank $100… plus interest.
Sam and Jess owe the bank $100 each… plus interest.
Every borrower owes the bank $100 plus interest.
Let’s say ten borrowers each borrowed $100 at 10% interest.
10 borrowers x $100 = $1,000 borrowed.
Each borrower owes $100 + 10% interest = $110.
10 borrowers x $110 = $1,100 owed.
There’s only $1,000 in money out there… but the borrowers collectively owe $1,100.
It’s literally impossible for everyone to pay the bank what they owe.
So here’s what happens in real life:
Everyone competes like dogs, works overtime, and slaves night and day to stay ahead of bankruptcy.
9 “lucky” people pay back the $110 they owe.
The last person, who owes $110 but only has $10, has only two options:
Claim bankruptcy.
Borrow more money at interest.
The modern money-creation system is designed to force people to work and borrow so they can keep working.
And it gets worse!
Inflation
When banks create new money by re-lending deposits, they increase the money supply.
Because there’s so much new money pouring into the economy, prices start to rise.
Money supply inflation creates price inflation.
Now that things cost more money, now even more people need to compete harder and borrow from the banks (at interest) in order to not go bankrupt.
Can we all agree that the modern money-creation system is pure evil?
Inflation is stealing from the poor to give to the rich
The rich love inflation.
Think about it:
They borrow $50 million today — value: $50 million — and pay it back in ten years with $50 million devalued dollars, meaning they’re only paying back less than $40 million in 10-years-old-value. (Read that again until you understand it.)
At the same time, they can invest that $50 million in an asset, like their company’s stock or a beachfront mansion. After ten years of price inflation, those assets are worth $60 million or more.
Meanwhile, inflation is brutal for the assetless poor:
They work hard for ten years to save $50,000 for a down payment on a $250,000 house.
For those ten years, inflation steals purchasing power while increasing the price of the house they want to buy.
After ten years, when they’re ready to buy a house, the price of the house is $400,000, but their savings which were originally worth $50,000 have 40% of the purchasing power.
This isn’t some made-up scenario — this happened to my wife and I, except it was worse.
We saved for 12 years, and in that time, our savings lost half their value and the average house in our hometown went up $650,000.
So let’s say you light $1 million on fire.
You’ve actually just deflated (decreased) the money supply.
Which means you’ve actually eased (deflated) the price of goods.
You could give a million people $1 each… or you could just burn the $1 million… the outcome has the exact same effect on their purchasing power.
In fact, the latter option is actually better because it favors the poor instead of the rich — and that $1 million wouldn’t get deposited into banks which would then create more price inflation by inflating the money supply.
How messed up is that?!
Should we actually all burn our money?
Probably not…
…but democracy absolutely should.
Let’s say America (or Britain, Canada, etc) somehow arrested all their traitorous, corporatist, bankster-backed overlords (politicians) and threw the current evil money-creation system on the scrap heap of history.
America could then create, say, $100 trillion in new money debt-free and interest-free, and simply spend it into the economy by investing it in the creation of new assets — things like affordable homes, high-speed eco-rail, renewable power, etc.
The U.S. could then sell those affordable homes at cost, or make a small profit off rail and power, and then simply destroy that $100 trillion.
+$100 trillion new dollars
+$100 trillion in new assets
-$100 trillion in destroyed dollars
=
+$100 trillion in new US assets… homes for all, affordable green power, rapid transportation, reducing unemployment, skyrocketing growth, easing the climate crisis… with zero money supply inflation or price inflation.
This is how wise nations build great civilizations that endure for millennia.
The sad news?
No more interest for all those poor banksters. :(
Now they’ll have to get a real job and actually create and contribute new, real, useable wealth and value to society.
Heaven forbid!
Explore Jared A. Brock’s books and films:
Redeeming Uncle Tom: a documentary about the real-life slave who inspired the nation-shaking novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Red Light Green Light: a documentary about human trafficking and how to stop it.
Over 18: a documentary about pornography addiction.
A God Named Josh: a myth-busting biography about Jesus’s politics, economics, and philosophy.
The Road to Dawn: A biography about Josiah Henson, the real-life hero who inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
A Year of Living Prayerfully: a comedic 37,000-mile pilgrimage around the world.
If we're up to our eyeballs in debt, if the world is in effect almost bankrupt, how can money still be so powerful and so worthless at the same time?