"Rather than seeking to liquidate the national debt, Hamilton recommended that government securities pay sufficient interest to be traded at par promoting their perpetual circulation
as legal tender equivalent in face value to hard currency." First Report on the Public Credit, made by Alexander Hamilton to Congress, 1790, Wikipedia
“As often is the case with addictions, the fanciful notion of a gradual discontinuance only provided a comforting pretext for more sustained indulgence.” ― Ron Chernow [on Alexander Hamilton's life of marital adultery]
Fiat credit IS monetary adultery
All adulterers know [or soon learn] that each successive act of deviance makes the real thing worth less ... until it finally becomes worthless ... incapable of functioning as it was originally intended. And this is true whether the "real thing" is marriage or money.
And although history has not provided us with an account of the first act of marital adultery, it does provide us with ample evidence that the practice of monetary adultery ... [mixing public credit in with the public's money until there is no practical difference left between the two] ... was well known and in continuous circulation in Europe [along with syphilis and small pox] prior to the American Revolutionary War. And furthermore, it reports [in careful accounts like William Hogeland's Founding Finance] that Alexander Hamilton, America's first Secretary of the Treasury officed in America's first national capital on Wallstreet NYC NY, heartily embraced the deviant practices of European elites and coveted every opportunity to introduce them to Americans.
Subverting subsidiarity
Eager to experiment with adultery on a grand scale, Hamilton [in what was euphemistically disguised as The Compromise of 1790] seduced Jefferson and Madison [and the South] by promising them that all future acts of American monetary adultery would be officially performed in the District of Columbia ... although everyone understood that they would continue to be orgasmized on Wallstreet ... a sordid, bifurcated practice that continues to this day with the Federal Reserve doing the official act in Washington but Wallstreet [always under the Fed's lustful gaze] transmitting the stimulation to an eroticized cadre of financial insiders who, it is said, are frequently so overwhelmed with bliss that at least some of the good feelings trickle down to a long deprived public. [The amorous George Washington needed no persuasion ... he had long ago turned West ... away from Virginia as his first love.]
In the Compromise, which John Calhoun [only a boy of 8 at the time] would come to rue along with all the Southern States, the federal government assumed the revolutionary war debts of the still-sovereign states ... mixing them with the federal war debts ... in the first official act of American federal financial adultery ... a practice preserved in the form of federal grants to all 50 states [among many other financial trysting partners] and which is set to explode again as states face a world that is increasingly tax-intolerant thanks to the widespread assurance that federal fiat credit is free and unlimited.
Of course, some principled persons will proudly proclaim that they [and the civil or corporate bodies in which they serve] have "balanced their budgets" and that Washington needs to do the same. But this is nothing more than empty talk, for without the benefits of Washington's deficits [directly or indirectly] most of them would cease to exist overnight. They will be quickly and rightly dismissed as unfounded and provincial in their thinking.
Institutionalizing the delusion ... "fiat pecunia" Gen 1:3
"In the beginning" the adulterer thinks [s]he can stop before any lasting harm is done and can thus get away with it. But adultery is hard to stop and, for this reason, hard to hide. And so most adulterers persist until caught in the act and faced with the prospect of judgment and/or cessation. And although some repent in shame and others offer ambivalent excuses, the truly brave [with consciences fully seared] double-down and redefine the real thing to include their deviance. The deviation becomes normative.
Modern Monetary Theory is an example of the redefinition approach to deviance. Its premises have become "self-evident" [veritable natural laws] after two centuries of Hamilton's financial adultery. The federal government, via its sovereign monopoly powers, can forever alternate between being
- a net issuer of fiat money in the form of either currency OR credit for the goods and services it purchases and consumes [or doles out] until a continuously-redefined inflation [the only possible unwanted result] rises too high and
- a net collector of taxes until a continuously-redefined unemployment [the only possible unwanted result] rises too high.
What could be simpler than formally declaring fiat money to include fiat credit ... extinguishing once and for all the distinction between money and credit ... Hamilton's adulterous dream come true ... and NO NEED TO PAY INTEREST ON THE FEDERAL DEBT ... EVER AGAIN. What could possibly go wrong?
That this accommodation of perversion could ever produce other unwanted and unexpected effects has not yet occurred to today's enlightened, elite adulterers [marital and financial]. Their dulled minds [Democrat and Republican alike] are now fully reprobate and can no longer be sociologically reclaimed ... only destroyed in the inevitable, coming collapse of the societal and environmental structures on which civilization currently rests ... the "great reset".
Surely, stagflation is a logical impossibility ... a world of unemployed people facing a rising cost of living ... where robots [owned by an oligarchy of capitalist-elites-in-luxury] do the work while the marked masses fight one another for a share in an increasingly expensive subsistence existence. Rev 6:6
The rise of crony capitalism ... and the fall of democracy
"As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. ... The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of [sociological] destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose. ... [T]hese Governments are fast rendering impossible a continuance of the social and economic order ... [b]ut they have no plan for replacing it." The Consequences of the Peace, JM Keynes, 1920
One order cannot fall without chaos ensuing unless there is another already usurping its place ... and so the seamless collapse of distributed democratic capitalism into centralized crony capitalism was to be expected. That FA Hayek predicted this in his 1944 reflections on Nazi Germany is now little more than an historical anomaly forgotten by some but never known by most.
The future can no longer be in doubt. Deferred repentance has become not only unimaginably painful but ideologically inconceivable. Full-on authoritarianism [monetary and political], with a managed chasm insulating the rich elites from the poor masses, is already taking place.
All that remains is to see if this "brave fiat world" will be taken seriously by God ... or not. Psalm 2
