The Power of Ideas for the Fiat Age
Politics / Fiat Currency Jul 02, 2015 - 03:38 PM GMTIn every aspect of daily life people are searching for the best arguments; where to buy the cheapest and best quality washing powder, or internet provider, or car insurance or gym membership or whatever. The list of possibilities is infinite. People also like to acquire the best arguments, covet them and use them for personal gain, mostly without the consent of the owner. This is merely human nature, as the desire for intelligence sets us apart from the animals. If you don't believe me just consider the billions spent worldwide by intelligence agencies of various countries to obtain the arguments that others do not have.
As well as having the best arguments, the timing of their delivery has substantial influence on their value. They are important when they are required most. The timing of them is crucial. A propagandist must deliver the required arguments at the most opportune time, usually when the market for them is at extremes, at points of either over confidence or extreme weakness. At these times, the marketplace wants and needs change, and thus is most open and vulnerable to a perceived truth.
The right ideas and arguments, when used for good, must include, but not exclusively, the following prerequisites: They must be complex but simple, radical yet rooted and facts must be indisputable. This triptych precludes the fakers, spivs and chancers in any particular field.
The best arguments in the marketplace are so valuable because they contain truth, which, although transitory and sometimes illusionary, strike a chord in the hearts and minds of those who hear, read or see them. Just like you cannot unsee an image or unhear a proposition, an accurate and truthful argument enters the psyche of the recipient and becomes their own truth to be used forthwith. That's why governments have always wanted to monopolise access to them.
The likes of the Stasi are long gone but the desire to manage the “mainstream” or “accepted truth” still remains, evident in institutions from the BBC to the The Wall Street Journal. Both call it the battle for public opinion, but both effectively suppress a Thomistic based philosophy of truth. These insecure and paranoid positions are held primarily because of their own treatment of the most important subject on earth, money and economics. The BBC in particular have always suffered from an abusive and amoral view of the world with Fabian socialist tenancies and unbecoming relationships with eugenics and the likes of Jimmy Saville, so its hardly a surprise they propagate the deviant side of economics while riding the gravy train of state resources.
The subject of money and economics is the pre eminent issue du jour for this new century. It's mainstream coverage can be viewed as either a designed deception or an incompetent attempt to translate an issue of perceived complexity. I will leave it to you to deicide on the most likely scenario, but for me, the problem is that orchestrated obfuscations create relationships which are based on deceit and foster a mindset emblematic of mistrust. As a result, the consumer of such content is driven into a cul de sac of their own cognizance, unable to distinguish between the facts and the fiction, finally collapsing tamely into a gaping void of ignorance.
All arguments come down to the relative practices surrounding money; people and societies have been arguing about it for thousands of years, so why expect things to be different now? For example, Islam has been trying to up hold the Sharia diktat of not charging interest on money with increasingly less success, and I suggest this is the root cause of the recent rise of the Islamic State, Syria being merely the conduit. The mainstream media would consider that supposition an unspeakable truth, but how we bridge that fundamental divide is a crucial geopolitical quandary of the age.
I hope your sitting down, because what I’m about to say now may scare you. All intelligent people know the current fiat economic system has the characteristics of a thinly veiled ponzi-style, pyramid scheme of debt which requires propaganda and obfuscation to protect and conceal it. Those who don’t are the flock on board the ship of fools, who are to be fleeced.
Money is legally created by banks to be lent to borrowers as “new money” or “new debt”, such as corporate loans, mortgages or car loans. This used to be managed through a mechanism called fractional reserve, which limited money created to a function of customer deposits. Now this is merely an arbitrary and opaque accounting practice. Politicians and others continually fall into the trap of conflating debt with wealth. Debt is only wealth if your a bank. Debt issued or money lent, is found on the balance sheet of a bank as an asset. For the borrower, all debt is a liability. So, they are either surreptitiously working for the interests of the banks or are uninformed or both. When banks lend money to the real economy, the effective money supply is increased and economic activity increases and so do prices for real assets. Banks effectively control inequality and asset prices by limiting the amount of money it creates and allows into the real economy and who gets access to it. Things only failed causing the 2008 US housing market crash because banks couldn’t find any more borrowers who were able to finance the repayments at the inflated prices. The classic failing of a pyramid ponzi-style scheme.
Debt, by definition, is spending the future today, it is bringing forward economic activity from the future. Because the money created by the banks today has no intrinsic value without the Gold Standard, its actual value is now made up from the work, or economic activity, the borrower has yet to do in the future. The process of debt and money creation is actually an illusion of time.
In return for passing the laws which legalised this process of fiat money, Governments, via politicians, were compensated by the banks by facilitating and financing the issuance of their own debt, in the case of the UK, called, ironically, Gilts. It must also be noted that Governments have become special case borrowers because unlike most, history shows they don't pay back their loans. This fact leaves Governments wide open to the accusation of direct inter-generational transfers of wealth. When all the loans are aggregated the debt adds up to the effort that future generations are yet to make, so when they conflate debt and wealth they actually mean wealth spent today built on the backs of the future generations, those who have no say in the matter. Which ever way you look, it is an egregious state of affairs.
It has been said that you only have to evacuate the truth once for it to become true. Is that concept fact or fiction? Could others take on an idea for wider dissemination using their own individual slant or style? If so, how can that theory be tested? The following articles were published and distributed around the web over the last year and represent the opportunity to test cause or causality. You decide whether they have the ring of truth, the intelligence to provide the arguments the marketplace craves, the fuel it requires to form its desired outcomes.
You can read more in my new book "Propaganda in the 21st Century" available on Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1514621096
By Tom Naysburn
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