We’re in the money.
Come on, my honey,
Let’s spend it, lend it, send it rolling along.
What’s money, anyway? It’s a store of value and a medium of exchange. You might say it’s like light, or Schrodinger’s cat. It’s only there if you’re looking at it.
Rich people want money to be permanent, to be physical, to hold its value for their grandchildren. That’s why gold was money 100 years ago. The people around Franklin Roosevelt saw money as a medium of exchange, a way to run the economy. A little inflation is not a bad thing.
The current government consists of Hooverites. They got theirs. They want money to be permanent, a noun. The last century has shown that even gold is just a commodity.
The Hooverites see Bitcoin as the way to make the transformation happen. The supply of Bitcoin is constrained, by math, at 21 million. There can never be more.
The trick to pushing everyone into Bitcoin, so that only the rich have money again, is to render the dollar useless. They call it “fiat currency,” and it is produced to the government’s order, based on economic conditions and what’s needed to keep people trading. The Yuan, the Euro, all currencies are fiat currencies.
But most of this money supply is constrained by local economies. The dollar isn’t. Or it wasn’t, it hasn’t been. That’s because the dollar is a “reserve” currency. It’s used for trading beyond the U.S., and its value is thus underwritten by that trading. That’s why American budget deficits haven’t mattered that much. They’re covered.
The Plan
By driving everyone else crazy, making people hate America and its dollar, the Hooverites hope to destroy it. If other countries don’t trade in dollars, the deficits we can produce are limited to those supported by the American economy. What was a manageable problem will quickly become unmanageable. Cherished promises like Social Security must then be ripped up because they’re “unaffordable.” The idea that Americans might prefer to spike our military doesn’t occur to them. They’re in power so it doesn’t have to.
Getting rid of Social Security, which was FDR’s greatest achievement, along with all the other safety net programs that followed it, will make Americans dependent again on the largesse of the wealthy, as they were in Hoover’s day.
As Randy Newman wrote in the song Louisiana 1927:
Isn’t it a shame. Wash them away. That’s the little fat man’s policy for all of us. That’s what the Bitcoin boys want for the rest of us. Make money into a noun and make the world beg at wealth’s feet.
It’s quite insane, really.
