Rand Paul endorses Mitt Romney, just days after Romney was seen at Bilderberg and just a few months after his father’s advisers claimed he would deliver his backers to Romney in exchange for Rand’s elevation in the Romney campaign.
By Anthony Migchels for Henry Makow and Real Currencies
The backlash among the libertarian community after Rand Paul endorsed Mitt Romney last Friday is intense.
Libertarian leaders all over the place are denouncing him. Adam Kokesh is clearly hurting badly in this video. On Prison Planet, arguably the most influential pro Paul outlet, the headlines are all about Rand Paul’s betrayal. Mike Adams still cannot believe it and wonders if Paul Jr. is getting in to demolish the system from the inside. This YouTube video asks its viewers to vote to show how they feel and 90% dislike the news. Rand Paul’s Facebook page is being inundated with messages of thousands of disgruntled supporters.
It’s so bad one wonders whether the Pauls have miscalculated. And let there be no doubt, they have been calculating. Even to an outsider like myself, who never cared for either Paul, it looks like the most cynical, blatant and utterly ruthless sell out in quite some time.
Consider this.
In March Time Magazine quoted an adviser of Ron Paul saying ‘If you’re talking about putting Rand on the ticket, of course that would be worth delivering our people to Romney’. (go to 3:40 for the quote).
Lew Rockwell is now on record saying the whole Ron Paul campaign was never about winning. I wonder how the millions of his followers think about that. According to Rockwell, it was all about educating people on the wonders of Austrian Economics, not about winning elections. This probably explains why Paul Sr. never ran as an independent, but preferred losing primaries.
After working for years on Paul’s campaign as a republican candidate Rockwell is now saying one shouldn’t vote and shouldn’t be involved in partisan politics. Now, how disingenuous is that?
And of course all this is just days after it transpired that Romney was at Bilderberg, incidentally upping his credentials as a real threat to Obama big time. The same Bilderbergers, that started financing Ron Paul with millions a few months ago.
So what does it all mean?
Well it’s obvious. Ron Paul exists to lead the opposition into a blind alley. He doesn’t run as an independent, which he would, were he for real. To him it’s more important a GOP candidate wins and he’s undoubtedly worried he would split the vote of the right.
Ron Paul exists, according to his buddy Rockwell, to educate the masses, not to change politics. He ‘touched the hearts of billions of people’ with his love of gold and Austrian Economics.
In the typical Hegelian way his ‘antithesis’ of a ‘free currency market’ dominated by gold vs the ‘thesis’ of government/central bank controlled currency will lead to the classic gold standard the Money Power wanted always. The Daily Bell’s Anthony Wile seems to think so, anyway. Romney is not on board yet, but on the right the momentum for a gold standard is clearly gaining traction and the next crisis, expected anytime, will not be let go to waste.
The GOP will be happy. Ron Paul will probably retire now and is out of the way as the minor hassle that he was. Rand Paul has been completely incorporated and is no problem at all to the GOP establishment. He’s got the charisma of a dead fish and the war mongering program of the traitorous sell out that he is and being cut loose from the support of his father’s backing he will whither away quickly as a real force.
Conclusion
I think it’s fair to say everything has gone more or less as expected. The Money Power has co-opted the opposition in its classical fashion. The millions gasping for truthful change are left holding the bag.
After this election a new change agent will be quickly conjured up out of nowhere, perhaps to establish a Hamiltonian banking system, which, to me, seems to be the next frontier for controlled opposition.
What I find interesting is that both Rand Paul and Lew Rockwell look rather depressed in the linked videos. At least we can see that evil is not a pleasant place.
Related:
The Ron Paul Challenge: 10 reasons why the Alternative Media is failing this test
Hate the State, buy Gold and all will be well: an Alternative Media in crisis
Austrian Economics is still ‘Jewish’ Economics
Phoenix Rising, the Return of the Gold Standard
Top Ten Lies and Mistakes of Austrian Economics
Faux Economics
Five more reasons Ron Paul was a phoney all along
It is not enough to say the Money Power controls our money supplies and that it is too powerful to break its chains. The reason interest-free currencies have not been able to compete in the market-place is simply because their design has been insufficient. The challenges, how to overcome small initial network size, difficulty of financing and liquidity have not been adequately addressed. There can be no doubt, however, that they can be.
By Anthony Migchels for Real Currencies
So that’s the question: why don’t we have interest-free currencies? On the Government level the answer is pretty straight forward: the Money Power has bought all the politicians and kills those that break through to the top without complying.
But how about the market-place? Is it true the Money Power has an unbreakable monopoly? We can immediately establish this is not the case: both in the US and in Europe there are free currencies. LETS, the Berkshares, the Ithaca hours, the Chiemgauer and other regional currencies in Germany, RES in Belgium and of course the WIR in Switzerland.
Nonetheless, except for the WIR none of these currencies managed to pose a credible threat to the Money Power’s de facto monopoly.
Why not?
The fact is: none of the mentioned units is good enough. Worse, they are all rather primitive. Each of them holds one or two keys, but all lack a comprehensive appreciation of the challenge at hand.
And interest-free currencies, starting from scratch, do face a major challenge. The main thing is to create a sufficiently large scale user base. Clearly, a unit used by only a handful of users will not add much value. To have a notable impact, in terms of turnover and percentage of total turnover for participating firms, a sizable numbers of participants is necessary.
For instance, the WIR has about 60,000 firms on board and this results in about 10% extra turnover for participants. This sounds like a big number for only 10% extra, but it must be kept in mind that the WIR circulates throughout Switzerland. On a regional level, a much smaller number of participants would be necessary to provide members with a similar boon.
So to overcome this challenge and to strike a serious blow at the MP’s monopoly, we need truly high powered units and here’s how to go about it.
0. All out focus on liquidity
Liquidity is what the unit will buy. Start up units, with few participants are weak because they have very limited liquidity. This is the basic challenge: how to provide working capital that is sufficiently liquid to have the necessary impact? All the measures below are answers to this basic challenge. The more successful measures to improve liquidity are in place, the more successful the unit will be.
1. Shedding naivety
The interest-free community, particularly in Europe, but certainly also in the US is actually quite naive about the backgrounds of the current order. They tend to think it is all just a wonderful accident. True, its leaders realize there is such a thing as a (central) banking cartel, but they are still handicapped by the ‘conspiracy theorist’ put down. Or they fear the ‘antisemitism’ label. Few of them will accept the depth of the rabbit hole. This is a major problem, because, as Sun Tzu teaches us, for victory to be assured one needs to know both oneself and the opposition.
This is the key reason why we have discussed the nature of the conspiracy at some length on this site. It is not to look for controversy or to defame people or religions, but because it is unsound strategy to go into battle without knowing who you’re up against. The more so if one is facing an enemy as relentless and powerful as the Money Power.
2. Combining interest-free credit (IFC) with convertibility
As discussed previously, the key challenge for the near future is offering units based on IFC, Mutual Credit, that are convertible to other units. At this point there are euro/dollar backed units like the Berkshares or the Chiemgauer that provide convertibility. This is a result of the backing with the national unit: because there is a dollar for every Berkshare, firms can convert them back with the issuing organization. However, because there can never be more Berkshares than dollars in the bank, there can be no credit based money creation as with Mutual Credit. The downside of Mutual Credit is that there is no dollar backing the outstanding money supply, so convertibility in the classical way is impossible.
Thankfully nowadays the way forward is known: the Mutual Credit based units should be traded in an open market-place, in a way similar to Bitcoins. Read all about it here.
3. Offering solutions for both Business to Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B)
This is the classic chicken or egg dilemma that the interest-free community has struggled with forever. Should beginning networks focus on B2C or B2B? However, this is fallacious or/or thinking. The solution is simple: and/and. New units should provide methods of payment for both consumers and businesses. B2C solutions include cash, which is the classical approach, also used by most German regional currencies. But also cards are possible, as used by the Belgian RES network. B2B basically means a telebanking system is necessary. Firms typically deal with businesses further away and often larger transactions are involved where cash becomes cumbersome.
Servicing both B2B and B2C simultaneously massively increases liquidity and paves the way for the next point.
4. Start promoting the payment of salaries early on
This is another breakthrough: usually salary payments in the free currency is thought of only in regard to mature networks. This is a mistake. By offering to pay a small fraction of salaries to employees, liquidity is enhanced drastically early on. It also massively enhances purchasing power and acceptability for the unit. Of course employees should not and cannot be forced to accept the unit, but if it is clear where they can spend the unit and why it is important for their employer that they start paying with it, many of them will comply willingly. Too much is at stake and good communication can make this clear, even just on economic grounds.
The benefits for employers is clear: more liquidity for their Gelre assets. They gain a new outlet for their income in Gelre and of course for their interest-free credit line.
The benefits for the network are incalculable: businesses send their employees to each other. They refinance trade amongst them with interest-free capital, freeing expensive and scarce euro’s for other purposes.
5. No transaction costs!
A common way of generating income in barter systems are transaction costs. This is a grave mistake. Everything should be focused on making transactions as cheap and easy as possible to maximize trade. Transaction costs, even when they are to be paid by the accepting party hinder transactions.
6. Those who pay are more important than those who accept
In the early stages of the Gelre our motto was ‘we accept Gelre’. We had stickers for the participants saying this. All our communications focused on acceptance of the Gelre. But after a year we had a hundred firms accepting the Gelre, but none paying with it.
In hindsight it is easy to see why: to pay is active, to accept is passive. To pay is yang, to accept is yin. Yang precedes Yin. Yang creates Yin. So building the network is about having people pay with Gelre. Businesses seeing their customers wanting to pay with a unit will quickly accept it, if they can plausibly pay (or convert) with them themselves. The unit should be designed with the payer in mind, not those accepting it. Everything should facilitate paying and if a choice has to be made affecting both the payer and the acceptor, the interests of the payers should precede.
7. Professional Management
All successful units have great management. It is THE crucial success factor, even more so than the architecture of the unit. Lack of professional management has relegated LETS to mediocrity and superior management elevated the WIR to the leading free market unit in the world. Even though they have a very similar Mutual Credit based design.
Professional management implies a good business case for the issuing organization, so that sufficient income is generated to pay staff decent wages.
The business case is pretty straight forward: the more firms participate, the more revenues the organization can generate. Firms should pay a fee for participation. This fee should typically pretty low, no more than a few hundred dollars per year. A mature network should see costs for exploitation at a maximum of about 1% of total turnover in the network.
Conclusion
So, what is “high powered working capital”? It’s more than just a cool label. It is a means of exchange that is specifically designed with only one purpose: to serve the community.
Most modern barter units are just cash cows for the issuing organization, just as the banking units themselves are. Or they are pleasant nice, completely innocent little play things designed by well meaning people to prove a point, namely that we can all make money.
High powered working capital aims at competing with banking units in the market-place, in such a way that the people producing the unit can sustain themselves with its proceeds, so that long term viability and stability are assured. It aims at taking away all obstacles for using it. It is provided by, preferably, not for profit organizations, emphasizing the public function that currency really should provide.
It leaves all the added value of production and trade with those producing and trading, taking only what is necessary to maintain the operation. It brings back economic power to those who work and produce, instead of ‘investors’ and ‘capital’. It does not redistribute wealth, as it leaves wealth where it is generated. It relocates the bottleneck in production from capital to labor, as there will always be enough capital, but the labor pool will be limited by nature.
High powered working capital will allow providence to function at its maximum capacity and will bring abundance to the many.
Related:
Mutual Credit, the Astonishingly Simple Truth about Money Creation
Mutual Credit for the 21st century: Convertibility
Regional Currencies in Germany: the Chiemgauer
The Swiss WIR, or: How to Defeat the Money Power
Please support the Gelre!
The Credit Crunch is not some natural phenomenon but an all out assault by the Money Power. What is worse: even without the crunch we are paying trillions per year in interest for absolutely nothing.
The solution is simple: quit their banks.
By Anthony Migchels for Henry Makow and Real Currencies
The Money Power’s goals are obvious. It is not just the massive multi trillion wealth transfer that is under way. It is about bringing the West down a few notches. The US seems strong with a nominal $30.000 per capita GDP, but when the dollar devalues against the Brazilian Real and the Chinese Yuan things will quickly look different. It will also end cheap raw materials.
The reason this crisis exists is because the banks, politicians, the media and economists are colluding in fooling the many into believing we need banks for our money supply. Most of them probably even believe this is true themselves.
They say we need the banks, because otherwise the real economy would have no money to trade with.
All this is complete and utter rubbish, of course. If banks can create credit, then anybody can. That’s just common sense.
Just imagine: we are led to believe that we need to cough up trillions just to have a means of exchange. One that is completely paper/computer based. I.e., almost free of cost.
Banking is part of the Babylon Mystery and bankers believe we are still enthralled with their ‘fractional reserve banking’ sleight of hand. And they are right. Although people are waking up, they still don’t get it.
A good example of this is the ‘take your money out of Bank of America’ of last October. Bank of America decides to rake in an extra 60 dollars per year with a silly fee. This upsets people.
While they are paying $300k interest over 30 years on their $200k mortgage. Which the bank created the moment they borrowed it.
Meanwhile, 45% of our disposable income is lost to cost for capital included in the prices we pay for our daily needs.
In other words: Penny wise, pound foolish.
People still don’t understand how badly they are being raped. They still don’t understand how they are fleeced through interest on fictional debt.
Coming to terms
Of course, it was a great step and absolutely fantastic to see people finally showing a little teeth. But it shows how hesitantly people are coming to grips with the reality of banking.
Boycotting the banks is the blindingly obvious approach. If somebody is enslaving you with interest and fractional reserve banking while destroying the economy by not lending why would you patronize his business?
To say this is irresponsible as it will worsen the crunch is ridiculous: propping up a system that only exists to enslave us is irresponsible, not disconnecting from it.
But only few even within the Free Media are willing to accept this simple conclusion.
The fact of the matter is: many are still enthralled with the ‘magnificent edifice of international finance’, as Rothschild mouthpiece the Economist once called it.
It is unfortunate that there is still widespread misunderstanding about both money and our real problem with it.
People do not yet understand how pervasive the enslavement through interest really is.
That’s why they fall for the notion that Gold will solve our problems. But what does it matter whether we pay all this interest for Gold or for paper based credit? The Money Power owns both and all the interest will end up in the same place.
The mind control of the rich, the social conditioning to accept the current order and its despicable ‘morality’, to defend it at the cost of oneself and one’s loved ones is very profound and pervasive in our beliefs. They are not easily uprooted, not even by the ‘Internet Reformation’.
In the mean time we are ignoring the real solution: interest free money. Either debt free, in the form of Social Credit, which would work out like a ‘Citizens Dividend‘.
Or interest free credit, through Mutual Credit.
These solutions are real and we can implement them today.
We would no longer pay interest on a mortgage, which would also mean much lower rent.
While paying 45% less for what we need, because there would be no longer any cost for capital included in prices. World Government would be dead and Big Business would face the competition of well funded small business.
The reason we are not doing this is not only because Washington and Brussels are owned by the Money Power in the City of London.
The main reason is we don’t see the problem and therefore we miss out on the solution.
Fight Back!
We don’t need to wait for reform on a national level. We can create our own currencies. High powered currencies, not just the simple barter units that are now starting to float everywhere in the world. We can create extremely effective, interest free credit based units, convertible to dollar or euro. In effect providing us with a printing press with which we can back the world interest free.
But these will take time to build up. Meanwhile, isn’t it the obvious thing to pull our money out of the banks?
How is it possible that this is being resisted by many well meaning people in the Alternative Media? Is there really anybody out there who still believes the banks will mend their ways? That they somehow will stop being the psychopathic enslavers that they are?
We should not have one dime in that system. Every dollar we put in the banking system gives them a dollar income per year. Remember that. The system, through fractional reserve banking, multiplies your dollar by ten and takes interest over each of them. Real interest (including credit cards) are probably close to 10% and that means they make a dollar per year over every dollar you have in your account.
Remember that 40 years ago nobody had a bank account. Before then there were no computers and the banks couldn’t have handled the administration.
You don’t need a bank to keep your money. The whole idea is insane! Nowhere is your money more prone to abuse and risk than in a bank.
And you can maintain an account for monthly payments, just keep its balance at almost zero. Pay your bills and take out the rest.
Force the FED and ECB to print ever more for bailouts.
Pay cash only. Don’t support their cashless society. Liquidate all your paper assets, both to blow up the system and to minimize your own exposure to the implosion. Let them squirm and lie ever more transparently with every new bailout that they need to force upon us. Let them show their hand. We’re not going to ‘repay’ odious debt.
We’re not afraid. We don’t need them.
Let them eat cake.
Related:
The Swiss WIR, or: How to Defeat the Money Pow
Mutual Credit, the Astonishingly Simple Truth about Money Creation
Understand that the Banking System is One
On Interest
Budget of an Interest Slave
This is an abridged version of Financial Warfare 2012: Boycott All Banks
A major and very important development: a fierce discussion between Tarpley and Jones, i.e. between Libertarianism/Austrianism and the ‘Greenback’: interest free Government money.
Tarpley destroys Jones, of course. Austrianism is deflationary, only worsening our problems. Ron Paul wants to take out another trillion from the budget, destroying the economy overnight.
One problem: it would be even better to provide the people with the purchasing power, instead of the state. Libertarians have a good case for opposing reinforcing the State, as the US Fed Govt is quite a scourge indeed.
Check out the Faux Economics page to find out all about the nonsense of Austrianism.
Real Currencies on YouTube!
It’s still very primitive, but it’s a start!
In the future, I’ll be working a lot with YouTube.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGEKLCdRZXs]
(left, Umberto Eco, post modernist, atheist, expert in semi-idiotics (cabalistic wordgames.) In his bestselling 2010 novel The Prague Cemetery, he absolves Masonic Jews of any connection to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.)
Umberto Eco did nothing to discredit the Protocols. Rather he discredited himself.
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion have taken the Blogosphere by storm over the last ten years. More and more independent minded bloggers quote them routinely and extensively. Whether they are for real remains hotly contested, but at the end of the day it is their undeniable incisiveness that grants them their timelessness.
By Anthony Migchels for Henry Makow and Real Currencies
Recently Umberto Eco published ‘the Prague Cemetery’, an obvious attempt at discrediting the quickly growing awareness of the Protocols as a blue print for domination. But although Eco is in good form, with good historical and gastronomical detail, he’s left looking silly.
The book centers around Simone Simonini, an Italian antisemitic conspirator. He is commissioned by a number of conspiring groups to write the Protocols to defame the Jews. This is the classical explanation for the Protocols, of course.
In an afterthought of the book, Eco ‘debunks’ the idea that the Protocols are for real with the usual worn out narrative of ‘plagiarism’ of Maurice Joly’s ‘Dialogue from Hell’. But as Henry Makow has shown, Joly plagiarized the Protocols, not the other way around.
The reason Eco is left looking silly is this: in the book literally everybody is scheming and conspiring for all sorts of causes. The French Secret Service, the Russians, Freemasons, the famous Mazzini (to whom Pike addressed a famous letter) is mentioned several times, the Vatican and the Jesuits. Even Weishaupt’s Illuminati are featured. They are all vying for political power and all of them are trying to blame the Jews.
The only group that is not involved in these schemes are the Jews themselves, except for a few self hating Jews that are trying to implicate their brethren. I’m not kidding, nor am I overstating the case. This is what Eco is doing in this obvious and dimwitted attempt to do away with the Protocols.
Of course, had Eco described the Jews as conspiring like all the others, he would have made a much stronger case. Everybody is doing it, so why pick on the Jews, the innocent reader would have thought. But going about it the way he does makes the good professor look rather inadequate.
But are the Protocols for real?
Henry Makow in particular has made a very strong case that they are. But it is probably impossible to prove either case, for or against, conclusively. The Protocols are to the adversary what Scripture is to the One. Only savoring the veracity of its content leads to understanding of its source.
And the Protocols are very powerful indeed. Just like the Holy Books they remain fresh with every new read, proving a great mind produced them.
Much has already been said about them, but a little scope remains concerning the financial program. As an author focusing on the monetary aspects of the New World Order, I remain absolutely perplexed by the profundity of Protocol 20, regarding their ‘Financial program’. Every advanced student of money should have a closer look at them.
Considering the absolutely shallow appreciation of monetary matters in the public mind, as witnessed by both Mainstream Economics and Austrian Economics, it is quite clear that a real insider must have written this text. It discusses all the main issues with money with great authority and knowledge. A detailed analysis of this Protocol can be found here.
It explains how destructive interest is, both in terms of cost to the borrower and because it hinders circulation of money, which is very important and little understood.
It mentions Gold as being ‘the ruin of the Goyim States’. It explains how the scarcity of Gold hinders full economic activity, while adding ‘they’ have taken as much Gold out of circulation as possible. Thereby openly admitting both their domination of Gold and the specie’s inadequacy as a means of exchange. And thus validating our extensive criticism of Austrian Economics.
It also cogently discusses the issue of the volume of money and how it should be managed. It provides a powerful appreciation of how things should be, including an interest free money supply and a workable unit of account. They suggest a working man’s hourly wage, which, incidentally is the unit of account that LETS circles use all over the world.
In short: Protocol 20 offers a unique insight into all the essentials of monetary theory and practice. It does so in just a few pages, proving great mastery of the issues.
To my mind it is absolutely impossible that some outsider could have written this. I know of nobody that could have created such a text. There is nobody in the Alternative Media, let alone in normal academic circles that could have come up with this. The fact that this was written more than a hundred years ago makes it even more incredible, although it must be said that political and economic awareness was probably higher back then than it is today.
Conclusion
Umberto Eco did nothing to dispel the Protocols as a very important text. Worse, he damaged his reputation in the way he went at them: showing that literally everybody is busy trying to take over the world with conspiracies….except the Jews.
Meanwhile, the Protocols just sit there as a timeless witness of the truth: there are a few men out there who know. And who use their knowledge to rule over us all.
Related:
Boyle: IRELAND: Does ‘Protocol 20’ sound familiar?
Makow: Protocols of Zion – Damage Control
Migchels: The Protocols on Money
Bitcoin has already shocked both the establishment and the blogosphere.
A privately controlled currency, completely independent from Government backing.
Bitcoin leads the way in many respects, but is ultimately flawed: it was built on false premises and does not address the key issue, interest.
By Anthony Migchels
This article was updated for Henry Makow and originally posted at Activist Post.
Bitcoin was developed by Satoshi Nakamoto and launched in January 2009. There are currently more than 8 million Bitcoins in circulation and after predictable major price swings after its launch, they have traded at a fairly stable rate of about 5 dollar for more than six months now.
Bitcoin basically is a debt free unit: it comes into circulation through ‘mining’: the solving of complex algorithms by clients yields new Bitcoins. However, no more than 21 million can be mined so there will never be more than that in circulation.
Bitcoin is important and actually nothing short of revolutionary. It is the first notable independent internet currency.
Why it matters…
Its key strength is its peer to peer design. The issuing organization’s sole function is to provide the client software and on-line market place, where Bitcoins can be traded for other currencies. It plays no role in the creation of the money supply.
In this respect it is a real assault on the Money Power’s strangle hold on our money supplies.
It allows businesses and consumers to diversify their methods of payment, making them a little less dependent on the Government/Banking monopoly.
It also shows that a free market for currencies already exists. Yes, of course regulators are inimical to them, but current legislation does allow for all sorts of units. In fact, there is very little to stop free market currencies, provided those looking for opportunities are dedicated enough.
Furthermore, Bitcoin is the first free market unit in the world that creates convertibility to other units through a currency exchange. This is an innovation that is underrated by most commentators.
Mutual Credit based barters can use Bitcoin technology to create convertibility without dollar/euro backing.
Unsurprisingly, legislators bribed by banks have already voiced ‘concern’ about Bitcoin’s independence. Apparently some naughty drugdealers are using Bitcoin to finance their operation. Its peer to peer character makes it suitable for this kind of transaction. Just like cash. And cash too, as we know, is under attack from Big Brother who would like to know everything we buy and sell. Not to mention that he would like to make us completely dependent on his monopoly infrastructure for buying and selling.
So Bitcoin’s existence is very useful for all monetary reformers as it will allow us to gather information about the strategies that the adversary will use to disable it.
….and why it doesn’t
Notwithstanding these revolutionary breakthroughs, Bitcoin does suffer from a basic flaw. It’s designed to behave like Gold. Nakamoto clearly believes Austrian Economics to the last word, including the idea that hyperinflation is the main threat to the system.
As a result Bitcoin suffers from the same problems as Gold: it is deflationary and expensive. There is never enough of it. True, Bitcoins can be divided in ever smaller denominations, so ‘physically’ there will never be a shortage, but it means Bitcoin is designed to appreciate for ever and this is the definition of deflation.
Worse still, Bitcoin does not address the interest issue. There is no possibility for cheap credit and if the unit matures, a banking system will be necessary to provide credit based on deposits.
Not only will this exacerbate the scarcity of money, it will also lead to very high cost for capital.
Yet another problem is that with a full reserve banking system as required by bitcoin (and Gold too, by the way) would allow the Money Power to mop up the money supply through compound interest within one or two decades, as you can find out here..
The basic conceptual flaw is, that Austrian Economics believes a currency should be a good store of value first and foremost. This is the fatal mistake: money is a means of exchange, and it is the agreement to use it as such that gives it value, not the other way around. This is even true of Gold today: the reason Gold is now expensive, is because many investors are speculating it will be currency again.
Because of this design flaw, Bitcoin is being hoarded by its users. They prefer to have it sit in their ‘account’, instead of spending it, hoping it will appreciate. As a result turnover is lower than it could be. The unit is already an object of speculation, hindering its primary function: to finance normal trade.
Concluding
Bitcoin is a revolution and a badly needed bit of fresh air. Peer to peer and independent of banks and Government it is an example for all of us. Yes, we should press for reform at the Government level, but no, we should not await it. There is a free market for currencies and it is ours for the taking.
However, it is not credit based and it does not allow for interest free credit. It’s deflationary by nature, which is very problematic.
Its decentralized peer to peer nature and its convertibility mechanism are its main strengths. If these can be harnessed in interest free credit based units, the Money Power would be really hard pressed.
Bitcoin is a shot heard far and wide, but it is only the proverbial first shot across the bow.
Related:
Why Gold is so strongly deflationary
Mutual Credit, the Astonishingly Simple Truth about Money Creation
Mutual Credit for the 21st century: Convertibility
The Swiss WIR, or: How to Defeat the Money Power
Regional Currencies in Germany: the Chiemgauer
The Problem with Gold
(left: the Gelre Logo. It says: paying with the Gelre, Regional, Interest-Free and Sustainable)
Free market currencies directly competing with the Banks are the way forward. That is the basic premise of Real Currencies as we have put forward. But we don’t stop there: the Gelre offers a revolution in interest free currency and we need your help in building it.
The Gelre is the first Regional Currency (RC)in the Netherlands. But it is so much more than that: it is the first interest free, free market currency in the world that provides both convertibility to Euro and interest free credit.
The point is this: there are basically two classic models for free market currencies:
The first method is Mutual Credit. Barters around the world operate in this way. The famous Swiss WIR is Mutual Credit based.
The main limitation of this model is that there is no convertibility to other units. This means that participants are forced to limit their acceptance of the unit, to avoid being saddled with units they cannot spend plausibly. This is very damaging for the liquidity (what the currency will buy) of the unit.
A Euro or Dollar backed unit solves the problem of convertibility. Every unit in circulation is backed by a Euro or Dollar. Businesses saddled with more of the RC than they can usefully spend can convert them back to the national currency.
However, no interest free credit is possible: for every unit in circulation, there must be a Euro or a Dollar available.
This is the model of for instance the Chiemgauer, or the Berkshares.
The Gelre combines the best of both worlds!
It provides interest free credit on a Mutual Credit basis. And it is convertible. How it’s done can be read here.
We are very close to completing the necessary programming for the Gelre. But we need help. Two kinds of help:
– Money. We are cash strapped. We need every cent we can get to basically just survive until we can get the program on line and hook up the first few hundred businesses. After that it will be self-supporting through a small fee that businesses will pay.
– Programming help. We are looking for a great PHP programmer who will help us out with this. It needn’t be for free, but we would need a little entrepreneurship. A skilled programmer should require no more than net 40 hours of programming for the task at hand. Please contact me at info (at) gelre.org if you feel you can be of help.
The Gelre lays the groundwork for a revolution. Everywhere in the world barters are initiated to help alleviate the problems caused by the credit crunch. History shows these units will help, but they will not end the need for national currencies. They are simply too limited.
The Gelre has been built on the answers to the question: How can we build a unit so powerful it can do away with the Banks?
I am absolutely, utterly convinced that the Gelre and the concepts it entails are that answer. It is now all about implementation.
The Gelre technology will be made available for everybody. The goal is to build high powered currencies capable of competing directly with Euro and Dollar in the marketplace.
Everything you have been reading about on Real Currencies is integrated in the Gelre. They tell the same story in different ways. The Gelre is by far the most important of the two as it goes beyond words and will speak a powerful language of its own.
Think of it in this way: we are building a printing press that will provide interest free credit that will buy Euro or Dollar and thus everything else. It will be made available to initiatives worldwide at (close to) zero cost and these regional (but also international Internet based) currencies will allow the people to buy back the world interest free.
People ask me where to put their money when they take it out of the bank. Put some in the Gelre!
I truly believe it is fair to say one would be hard pressed to find a more suitable cause to support in the face of the challenges of our time.
Please spread far and wide.
Thank you very much for reading Real Currencies and supporting the Gelre.
Anthony Migchels
PS 1: A PayPal donate button is available on the right.
Thanks again for donating. Your help is very much appreciated.
PS 2: soon, presumably next week, http://realcurrencies.wordpress.com will move to https://www.realcurrencies.org
Related:
The Goal of Monetary Reform
Mutual Credit, the Astonishingly Simple Truth about Money Creation
Mutual Credit for the 21st century: Convertibility
The Swiss WIR, or: How to Defeat the Money Power
Regional Currencies in Germany: the Chiemgauer
Financial Warfare 2012: Boycott All Banks
A recent study shows most employees of major Dutch banks would not promote the products of their organizations to their own family members. So why do they sell them to us?
Left: Bert Hellinger
By Anthony Migchels for Real Currencies
It transpires that no less than 67% of employees of ING Bank, Holland’s biggest, would not advise their family members to purchase its financial products. ABN AMRO fared only slightly better: 56% of employees did not trust their bank’s products enough to suggest them to their families. Only RABO Bank saw most of their staff answering they had sufficient faith in their bank’s products. But there also 20% of staff declined the opportunity to sell these products to their loved ones.
These results remind us of the 75% of doctors who claim they would not undergo chemotherapy would they be diagnosed with cancer.
These numbers raise serious questions. In the conspiracy community it is common to suggest normal people are mind controlled into submission: ‘forgive them, for they do not know what they do’.
But apparently they do. It makes one wonder how many journalists know they are lying to their readers? How many politicians realize they are betraying the people who voted for them? How many police officers know they are protecting the criminals, instead of locking them up?
A friend of mine is particularly upset with chemtrailing. Every day he checks the air to see how bad they are today and he often tries to alert people. Some time back he got into a discussion with some cops and he pointed up in the air: ‘and what do you think these are?’ he asked them. ‘Chemtrails!’ was the astonishing answer he received. ‘So what are you doing walking the streets looking for ‘criminals’ then?’ he asked in amazement. But the cop just shrugged his shoulders and was on his way.
Of course, such a thing as chemtrailing is not easily stopped by one man in uniform. It is understandable such a man would feel it was way over his head. On the other hand: what’s the use pretending you are fighting crime, when your bosses are spraying you and your family with an unknown set of toxins?
How many people are willingly wasting their time and actually propping up a system they know is a fraud and a danger to themselves and the people they love? Let alone the rest of humanity?
It’s not just about personal survival, the idea we need these jobs to survive.
Bert Hellinger, a German counsellor, discovered what he calls the group consciousness. According to Hellinger conscience is not a sense for good and evil, but a sense for the right to belong in a relationship. We have a conscience for every relationship we cultivate, both with people and groups of people. Conscience measures the score of giving and taking. When we take in a relationship, we feel guilt, signifying a diminishing ‘right to belong’, when we give, we experience innocense, a growing ‘right to belong’.
The more important the relationship is, the stronger the conscience is. It is for this reason that we’d rather betray a stranger than our parents.
Membership of a group comes along with the need to submit to the group’s morals. If we don’t and act in ways that are unacceptable to the group’s standards, we experience guilt. If we insist, the group will reject us.
However, we will experience innocence, even if we are involved in clearly criminal behavior, when the group’s rules allow our conduct.
A clear example of this is war between nations and the innocence that men can experience while slaughtering each other.
Another example is bank employees willingly and consciously raping the public, with ‘services’ they would not dare offer their own blood.
Hellinger’s observations are very important. They show us that to grow, we need to be able to endure guilt. Because clearly we cannot afford ourselves to succumb to the pressures of group conscience when it suggests criminal behavior, damaging other people.
It shows experiencing innocence is not the same thing as having clean hands. It explains the bizarre behavior of people working for criminal states and corporations. It explains how people can commit horrible crimes while being surprised after the fact
It also confirms the importance of cultivating our awareness of the fact that we are One. If we first and foremost experience membership of the human race, and rate other groupmemberships as secondary, our conscience will not wreak so much havoc on our moral compass.
Better still is to accept God’s call on Abraham to sacrifice his first born son. Because elevating our relationship with our Maker to become our main priority in life will provide our conscience with a correct hierarchy of relationships. We will experience guilt when sinning against our Father and innocence when doing the right thing, even when it is abhorrant to the mainstream.
Lest we forget: the Evil One rules in the World and we cannot allow ourselves to be corrupted by joining groups aiming at supporting his agenda.
Afterthought: I’d be most interested to hear from people who have first hand experience with operatives of the system knowing what they are doing, also if they were part of it themselves.
The Austrian ‘Free Market for Currencies’ Hoax
Many people have been seduced by the Austrian Economics notion of a ‘free market for currencies’. But ‘free markets’ exist only for one second. Then they are taken.
By Anthony Migchels for Real Currencies
In the old days of Austrian Economics things were simple: one just derided fiat currency. It is unfair to be raped by interest for paper money created out of nothing, even the Austrians will admit. So, they claim, stop fiat money and replace the paper with Gold. We’ll all feel a lot better when we can slave away for our usurious tributes to the Money Masters if we can pay in Gold coins.
Gary North built a whole career on a pretty hilarious little book with that premise, called ‘Coogan’s Bluff’.
But later things became a little more complicated. People started to wonder about the Gold Standards of the past. Weren’t these just banker operations? Don’t the bankers own all the gold? Haven’t they controlled Gold throughout modern history? And how about these Government controlled Gold Standards? Can’t Government just change the fixed price and mess up everything that way? And can we really trust them to indeed have the Gold they claim they have?
The whole Gold Standard idea became untenable. So the Austrians came up with something that was closer to their world view anyway: a free market for currencies!
Of course, Austrian Economics is well known for its trust in the magical ‘freedom’ of the market. First it has Government declare a ‘free market’, then it has Government enforce the contracts in this ‘free market’ and third it has Government look away if a few monopoly capitalists take this market overnight. Of course Government should not interfere if these capitalists show such wonderful ‘human action’ and gobble up the whole thing. Surely these capitalists would not win, were they not doing something right.
And so it will be with the so called ‘free market for currencies’.
The minute Government creates this ‘free market’, it will be quickly conquered by the Money Power with its vast resources. It will have thousands of independent journalists and professors discuss the wonders of Gold as currency at its media outlets. It will pour in billions to open up thousands of ‘competing’ Gold banks, providing Gold based credit. The one at 4,9%, the next at 5,0%. Many of these outlets will actually believe they are really competing.
The Money Power will bribe politicians to only accept Gold coins in taxes.
Meanwhile, nobody will be investing one cent in Mutual Credit based facilities. Because there is nobody with the necessary resources.
So this ‘free market for currencies’ is just a silly label, not unlike ‘liberty’ itself. It means nothing, unless we have a clear idea of what will really happen.
And if there were real competition?
Of course, would there be real competition, Gold would be absolutely irrelevant in a free market.
As we explained earlier (here and here), if Ron Paul’s “”Free Competition in Currency Act” (HR 1098)” (which would end legal tender laws and end taxing metals) would ever be enacted, nothing would happen.
Everybody would continue to hoard Gold and pay with Federal Reserve notes.
It’s called Gresham’s law: bad money drives out good money. It’s no use discussing this: just check it out for yourself: would you pay with your Gold coins or with your notes?
The second issue is, that would there be Mutual Credit Facilities competing with Gold banks, they would be offering credit at 0%, while the Gold banks would want 5% for their mortgages.
Where would you go for your loan?
Is it really any use discussing this further?
Conclusion
The ‘free market for currencies’ is just a ruse, made possible by Austrian Economics’s standard way of ignoring market power. They only look at Government intervention, but they always ignore the elephants monopolizing the helpless ‘free market’.
Should there be a ‘free market’ for currencies, especially if the Federal Reserve Notes would be phased out, the massively funded and promoted Gold dealers would quickly gobble it up and tightly controlled specie, easily inflated and deflated and taxed with interest, would provide the Money Power with the de facto Gold Standard it wants.
Related:
Faux Economics
How the Money Power created Libertarianism and Austrian Economics
Gary North’s Bluff: the Lie he’s been sitting on for 50 years
What Gary North is not telling you about Interest
Discussing Gold and Interest with the Daily Bell