Posted on 09/18/2016 9:13:02 AM PDT by Lorianne
Ken Rogoff is by all accounts a brilliant man. The Harvard professor and former IMF chief economist is a chess grandmaster. His thesis committee included current Fed vice-chair Stanley Fischer. But like many survivors of Ivy League hoop jumping, the poor fellow appears to have emerged punch drunk.
That’s the only conclusion to be drawn from Rogoff’s new book, The Curse of Cash , which, in effect, proposes a ban on paper currency.
It’s terrifying piece of work, for several reasons.
First, the cashless society, which Rogoff proposes in order to make it easier for the US government to confiscate private wealth, in effect, amounts to an admission that Washington can’t pay back its debts.
Second, the fact that Rogoff uses the fight against “terrorism” and “crime” arguments in selling his proposals to the public - justifications which he as a mathematician should know are farcical - suggest that his arguments hide another agenda.
Third, and most important, is the fact that not only would banning cash not achieve Rogoff’s objectives – it could cause irreparable harm to the dollar’s role in the American economy and as a reserve currency.
(Excerpt) Read more at zerohedge.com ...
Rogoff doesn’t want default - he wants even more government control so banks and Fed.gov can steal more from citizens, turn Americans into their tax-slaves.
Fed.gov needs a true bankruptcy, and then return to a non fiat-currency. We still have a Constitution, we still have some semblance of states rights. We can easily start over again.
I believe selling off all of our public parks would go a long way toward eliminating the National Debt.
Look at what our fellow countrymen and women have done to us.
Do you mean public “parks” or “lands?” Fine, sell all the public lands, retire the debt and now what? The whole cycle will start again without reigning in big government. Go back to a constitutional government. Abolish the entitlement mentality, all alphabet agencies, the 13th and 16th amendments, and return to a lean constitutional government doing only its constitutional obligations. We can make it happen, but we don’t have the will. “I have seen the enemy, and it is us.”
I have thought for 30 years that the only way out of the national debt is default. There is no way we can ever tax ourselves enough to actually pay it off. There are two ways we might default: honestly and dishonestly. The first would be to just stiff our (foolish) creditors and face the consequences. The dishonest way is to inflate our currency to the point where we can get to say we “paid in full” with grossly devalued dollars. Our creditors are no better off than if we simply repudiated the debt, but perhaps the immediate political consequences would be less. The office holders at the time of default would save a bit of face.
Either way, the United States Government would lose all access to credit and would have to pay as it went with either a hard currency or other assets of value. Government would be forced to shrink, and those of us who have enjoyed low taxes relative to government expenditures would also have to pay for what we get (or, better, do without it). My hope is that, after a harrowing and unpredictable period of adjustment, that the underlying wealth of our natural resources and the productivity of our citizenry would return us to an acceptable standard of living.
I agree.
Most countries in history have chosen a different form of default.
They stiff foreign creditors and pay domestic ones.
Stiffing domestic creditors is hazardous to government officials’ health—even worse than cigarettes!
Our debt is to the FED, a private banking cartel. The FED creates fiat money out of thin air. The US must pay it back with interest. The interest must be created out of thin air and borrowed from the FED. It has been proposed that the US repudiate its debt to the FED and eliminate the Central Banking system. It could go back to a precious metal based system - with a block chain component and a Treasury Note component.
There needs to be some sort of transition or reset or debt Jubilee for the economy to recover and resources invested back into a productive free market. Of course, you then have problems with aiding the elderly to live if they are unable to work. A lot of paper wealth would go with the FED, but so would the debt.
You can’t sell a lot of the “Public Land.” It has private split estate mineral, grazing and right of way property rights associated with it. They tried to do that once before. There is also questionable title to the lands (fed or state.)
In regards to the land sell - there are private lands sold quite often with the same split on rights. Timber, Oil/Gas, minerals, etc are quite common to have been leased or sold off. I personally look for this when considering a purchase because I want those rights and don’t want anyone intruding on my land for something I didn’t sell.
As to the fiat money solution I concur with you except the block chain - which to me is just another thing created out of whole cloth that can continue to be created. I think it should be a combination of 6 metals: platinum, gold, silver, copper, nickel and aluminum based on current global ratios + a component for oil/gas + a component for arable acerage. Another way to put it would be non-renewable resources, energy, and renewable resources. still have to watch the formula isn’t tweaked (maybe limit it to once every 10 years or something like that), but at least it would be based on something of value.
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