There have been times when the value of paper currency could be counted upon to buy the same today or next year, or it could be deposited at the bank to buy even more in a year or two. However, I would suggest that if your retirement plan is being measured in paper money these days, you probably need a new “financial advisor”.
Money, whatever it’s form, whether rubber banded roll of bills or the ubiquitous plastic, or in digital form, is mainly useful as a temporary store of value. A convenience really, and that is all it really is. A light went on, probably in some woman’s head a few thousand years ago, and she thought, “why am i carrying this heavy cow around with me everywhere? Why not rather just a scrap of paper that says i own a cow?” That first scrap of papyrus was the first convenient temporary store of value. Pretty much useless for anything else but a convenient temporary store of value.
If any of us began producing this temporary store of value on a 3D printer in the basement at home, well… do you look good in orange? And yet, central banks print it up all the time in enormous amounts, legally. Must be nice to own a central bank or two, hm?
There are legitimate arguments for printing new currency of course: to replace that which gets lost or damaged or destroyed in a fire, or to replace worn out currency with new. But to “stimulate the economy” is the worst possible argument for artificially expanding the money supply I can imagine. Because it is scarcity which makes a thing valuable, not abundance!
Imagine your whole town covered in stimulating one hundred dollar bills 6 feet deep and then swimming through that stimulus all to take one of them to the local kwiky mart to buy a half a loaf of air and some spam. Why would anyone want your hundred bucks when there is a plague of the stuff everywhere and it’s being destroyed by city crews just to clear the streets of it so people can move around again?
Money is a tool, and those who print it have the power of life and death. Sensing this, they make their decisions accordingly, propping up this tin pot dictator and letting another fall to his political or literal death. Must be a heady experience, living at the top of the food chain, the ultimate predator of the predator class, controlling whole populations of people and their governments in various countries all over the earth…
Can we escape their power over us by forsaking their temporary store of value? To an extent, yes! Totally? Not so much. This is so because governments typically do not accept taxes in the form of cauliflower grown in your garden. So we are forced to deal in their currency to the extent necessary to cover taxes and fines, buy our permission slips and production penalties. Taxes can be minimized by limiting your income and fines can be minimized by appearing to their minions to obey all the laws they create, most of which sadly are nothing more than mere revenue laws.
When we grow a carrot in a pot in our apartment, pull it up, wash it off and shove it down our carrot hole, what do central bankers get from that, or your local potentate for that matter? Nothing. Nada. This little small tiny factoid-example might give us something that could possibly be a clue to regaining control of our own lives, and how neat would that be?
If you sell that carrot for cash, and take that cash to the kwiky mart for a snack, you instantly involve a whole army of accountants and lawyers and comrades and bankers who want their share of that transaction: the owner of the store, the tax department, the guy who bought the carrot with his visa and the interest he will pay on it. Can you see how that convenient temporary store of value we call money is the tool being used to control us? The leg irons keeping us in the chain gang? The flat tire keeping our car in the driveway? The big snag in our fishing reel? The….oh the hell with it.
When we do our own work, fix our own car, build our own house, catch our own supper in the local river, pick a pail of wild fruit, we bypass all those grasping sanitized paws and live a better more satisfying life. Then, when we want to favor someone, we make the decision of who that someone will be, not having some regal senile artifact of an overlord in a $5,000 suit make that decision for us.
Does it really matter all that much if your income is 10,000 bucks a year if you have a freezer full of meat in a home you built yourself, all the fresh produce you want in your greenhouse, a reliable vehicle in the yard for those rare times you need it, enough food to share? Bypassing fiat money altogether, not having more of it, is the best way to free yourself from the tyranny of the day.
Nisutlin Outfitting 