Suppose you were the government spending money you don’t have?
By Jon Rappoport
The state government of Illinois is heading into bankruptcy. California has present and future liabilities of close to $500 billion. The federal government of the US has been underwater since (pick a date from the remote past).
Suppose you were the government.
You’re on a buying spree. You purchase a Ferrari and a Pacific Island and five monster yachts, and pretty soon all your cards are maxed out and your bank account shows a hefty negative balance. You consider the situation unfair. You should be able to spend indefinitely.
So you arrange loans with shady characters, and you also go into your garage where you have a printing press. You turn out money. Day after day. You use the fake money to pay back a few of the more pressing loans—the ones where big guys show up at your door with weapons.
To gain moral and other types of support, you give away money to all sorts of people in your city, including the mayor and the cops, but also to people who are poor and don’t have printing presses. You pay for schools and parks and new corporate projects. You fund far-flung companies that build tanks and planes. You pay for people to come to your country from all over the world.
You’re in hock up to your eyeballs, but you stay steady, because you can keep borrowing and printing money. However, you notice that no matter how much cash you give away, there are more and more people who want money from you. They see you have it or can manufacture it, and they want it.
So you come to a logical conclusion. Why keep figuring out who to give money to, when you can give it to everybody on a regular basis? You’ll guarantee a universal income. Any person who can fog a mirror with his breath will receive a check every month to pay for housing and food.
That should do it.
But it doesn’t.
Many, many people who are receiving checks want more. If you’re giving them what you’re giving them, why can’t you invent more to give them? The whole system is arbitrary. What difference does it make whether the monthly check is X or Y?
Now things begin to get slippery. The big creditors with guns aren’t coming to your door anymore. Instead, there are mobs out in the street in front of your house. They want, for starters, double what you’re giving them. Some of them, in fact, want to change places with you. It’s matter of justice. You should have to live on their checks, and they should be able to take over your printing press.
You hire the biggest PR agency in the world. How can I sell a ceiling on how much free money other people should have, you ask. And the PR people laugh at you. Never talk about a ceiling, they say. No one will sign on to it. Just as no advocate of open borders would ever agree to a top figure on the number of immigrant allowed into the county before the doors close. It’ll never happen. People will hate you for suggesting a ceiling.
But there must be a ceiling, you say. This can’t go on forever and expand forever.
However, as soon as you say it, you think, why not? Why can’t you give away an infinite amount of money? Why can’t any person who wants to be billionaire be a billionaire? What’s the problem?
Flash forward a few years. There are now six billion billionaires on the planet. As long as everyone consents to this wild money system, and no one who has power tries to stop it, it’ll work.
Want to be a billionaire? Here’s a check.
Fifty years later, of the 1265780945090873245605467 vital production and infrastructure systems on Earth, all but a few are entirely automated, which means that virtually no one has to work. All the billionaires can spend and buy.
Of course, they’re mostly buying from other billionaires, so the whole arrangement becomes superfluous.
Therefore, everything will be free for everybody. Money will go away.
Most of the people who choose to work are busy designing new products and new technologies.
Thus, progress is assured.
Would you like to see a world like this?