STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Shock: Powerful British Money Man Calls for Central Bank Currency to Be Handed Out to 'the People'
By Joe Jarvis - February 13, 2013

A breakthrough speech on monetary policy … Wednesday night may have marked the "emperor's new clothes" moment of the Great Recession, in which the world suddenly realizes its rulers are suffering from a delusion that doesn't have to be humored … That such economic fatalism is nonsensical is the key message of a truly historic speech delivered on Wednesday by Adair Turner, chairman of Britain's Financial Services Authority and one of the most influential financial policymakers in the world. Turner argues that a virtually surefire method of stimulating economic activity exists today and that politicians and central bankers can no longer treat it as taboo: Newly created money should be handed out to the citizens or governments of countries that are mired in stagnation and such monetary financing of tax cuts or government spending should continue until economic activity revives. – Reuters editorial

Dominant Social Theme: If we give monopoly central banking money directly to the people, then they will be rich and the system will be perfected.

Free-Market Analysis: Among very few publications, we've been covering what we considered to be a dominant social theme regarding paper money and the state's ability to print directly for "the people." Along the way, we've received vicious attacks because, as has hard-money economist Dr. Gary North, we've pointed out that this is a fascist proscription.

We've explained as well that it is an elite dominant social theme because the current version of central banking is failing. The tiny group of elites that wants official global governance is desperate to maintain monopoly central banking, as that is the source of their unfathomable funding.

And we realized early on that they would do anything to sustain some form of central banking and had likely launched a subtle campaign to create central banking alternatives that would maintain their Money Power.

We realized one way they would try to do this would be to suggest that central banks could be utilized to print money that would bypass banks and be directly credited to individual accounts.

A whole false history of money was created to generate this potential money manifestation.

That's how directed history works, after all. If the elites want something they begin a campaign to get it via various helpful facilities. People are recruited – wittingly or not – to promote the theme. It builds like a musical composition until finally it is big enough and has reached enough people to be acted on.

And perhaps now is the moment. Perhaps now we are reaching the proverbial "critical mass."

We can see in this excerpt from a Reuters editorial by Anatole Kaletsky, above, that Adair Turner, chairman of Britain's Financial Services Authority "and one of the most influential financial policymakers in the world," has adopted the meme as his own. He is arguing that central banks should print money that is directly handed out to citizens.

Why are we not surprised? The smell of blood is in the air.

We've tracked this meme from Stephen Zarlenga, to Ellen Brown, to UN sponsored LETS (alternative currency) programs and through numerous others who have promoted it dishonestly in various guises, denying that such distributions were actually forced coercions of the kinds that Hitler and the National Socialists preferred and ultimately implemented.

But that's no surprise. The entire national socialist enterprise was organized by Western elites, from what we can tell. Elaborations have included non-usury provisions, giving yet more power to the state. The idea has been given a pedigree via various crackpot monetary theorists such as Major Douglas and Silvio Gesell, both apparently involved with the notorious Fabians.

They hated each other, of course, as such people inevitably do. Douglas called Gesell's idea for depreciating state-sanctioned money the most heinous tax ever developed. Recently hallowed Gesellian implementations of his depreciating currency have been debunked, as well they should be.

The state should not be in the charge of money. That path is paved with bones and leads directly to the charnel house. The Fabians, of course, were dedicated to the destruction of Britain and the world via socialism; state-mandated printing of monopoly central banking money is a certain way of continuing and expanding that destruction.

It cannot be emphasized enough that this idea that the all-powerful state can print and hand out money "to the people" – as Gesell and Douglas among others demanded – is the last step on the slippery slope to totalitarianism.

The state, so empowered, will devour every trace of free markets. Don't take our word for it. See for yourself:

Turner argues that a virtually surefire method of stimulating economic activity exists today and that politicians and central bankers can no longer treat it as taboo: Newly created money should be handed out to the citizens or governments of countries that are mired in stagnation and such monetary financing of tax cuts or government spending should continue until economic activity revives.

The idea of distributing free money to end deep recessions has been promoted theoretically by serious economists since the 1930s, when it was one of the few practical policies that Keynesians and monetarists agreed on. John Maynard Keynes proposed burying money in disused coal mines to be dug up by unemployed workers, while Milton Friedman suggested dropping money out of helicopters for citizens to pick up.

Friedman also argued in a 1948 paper that governments should rely solely on printed money to finance their regular cyclical deficits. More recently, as conventional policies to revive growth have faltered, with widespread disappointment about the impact of zero interest rates and quantitative easing, proposals for distributing money directly to citizens have been quietly gaining traction among critics of orthodox central banks.

I discussed this trend, sometimes described as "quantitative easing for the people," in several columns last year. A simple thought experiment shows why such "helicopter money" policies, which Turner calls overt monetary financing (OMF), would be far more effective than the conventional QE practiced by central banks today.

Consider the U.S. Federal Reserve. At present the Fed prints $85 billion of new money monthly and distributes it to banks and Wall Street investors by buying government bonds … Now suppose instead that the Fed divided its $85 billion monthly money production into 300 million checks of $283 each and sent these to every man, woman and child in America …

Despite its obvious effectiveness – or perhaps because of it – public discussion of helicopter money has been taboo among economic officials. The one exception was a speech by Ben Bernanke in 2002, before he became Fed chairman. This speech offered the most detailed and eloquent justification of monetary financing prior to Turner's, and it earned Bernanke the Wall Street nickname "Helicopter Ben." Since then, however, helicopter money has never been seriously mentioned by any senior official in any advanced economy. Until this week.

Ten years after the Helicopter Ben speech, Turner has broken the taboo about monetary financing. The effect on economic debate around the world could be irreversible and profound. Turner's 70-page paper presents the arguments for the many variants of helicopter money with unprecedented academic sophistication, financial detail and historical context.

Now that Turner has broken the taboo on helicopter money, the sound of monetary salvation should soon be heard round the world.

Nothing will destroy society more effectively and quickly than monopoly central bank printing of fiat paper delivered to homes across the land. The editorial also mentions that Turner manages a trick of logic by denying that such a methodology would cause tremendous inflation and then hyperinflation.

If this is the future of the monetary argument, then the power elite is desperate indeed to maintain its central banking franchise. What began as a whisper has now escalated to an insane howl, enabled by all of those who babble about mathematically perfected economies and pour their considerable scorn on free markets and free-market ideas.

This gambit is the sum result of what seems to us to be a deliberate campaign to introduce this nonsensical and dangerous idea to the general public. Just because one group of genocidal maniacs has stuck their hand into the public till doesn't mean it should be replicated for everyone else.

Sure, money COMPETITION is a good idea and would soon resolve itself, as it has before, into the circulation of gold and silver among other historical systems. And if so, we would mercifully hear less about the martyrdom of Abraham Lincoln and nonsensical claims for Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia currency, which he himself apparently admitted would ultimately cause significant inflation.

No man can figure out how much money an economy needs. Give man the ability to print as much as can, and he will. And in doing so, he will utterly level civilization and create bloody destruction all around.

This is exactly what the top elites seem to want, of course. They can utilize the destructive chaos to declare a world government of some sort. Those who promote such monetary schemes are their enablers … though we will give them benefit of the doubt by surmising that at least some do know – or understand – what they do.

After Thoughts

The rest, who understand but promote their noxious systems nonetheless, are despicable.

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