The central banking system controls monetary policy within a given jurisdiction, including the creation of money itself. The system is a lie and a denial of reality. The lie is political in motivation and content, and the denial of reality is rooted in culture and philosophy.
Also read: Bitcoin Is a Weapon for Free Speech in the Face of Government and Corporate Censorship
Ethical Relativism and Central Banking
The political lie: Central banks are said to facilitate commerce and to benefit customers by connecting them globally. They purport to guarantee money and the safety of transactions. In fact, central banks are a chokepoint for commerce, which benefits the elite at the expense of ordinary people. Their mandated fiat constitutes the largest, longest, and farthest-reaching financial scam ever perpetuated. The fiat-money scam is committed by the political class upon productive people. The central banks’ transactions are the opposite of what is claimed; they betray customers in order to enrich the state with access to the wealth and personal information of average people.
The philosophical lie: To sustain a massive falsehood over time, facts must be constantly denied. Otherwise, people will hold the scam up to reality and check it against evidence. The falsehood needs to blur the truth, or destroy it, so that facts become discredited. If the lie is successful over time, people come to believe that the way things are right now—what they are told is “true”—is the way things have always been and must always be. Nothing but the lie is practical or possible.
How Things Used to Be
It wasn’t always this way, and history is the greatest reality check of all. The depravity of paper money was once common political knowledge, for example. Consider America’s Founding Fathers.
“Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.” George Washington, the first U.S. President.
“Paper money is unjust; to creditors, if a legal tender; to debtors, if not legal tender, by increasing the difficulty of getting specie. It is unconstitutional, for it affects the rights of property as much as taking away equal value in land. It is pernicious, destroying confidence between individuals; discouraging commerce…” James Madison, “Father of the Constitution.”
“To emit an unfunded paper as the sign of value ought not to continue a formal part of the Constitution, nor ever hereafter to be employed; being, in its nature, pregnant with abuses, and liable to be made the engine of imposition and fraud; holding out temptations equally pernicious to the integrity of government and to the morals of the people.” Alexander Hamilton, first Treasury Secretary.
In a May 1788 letter, Thomas Jefferson—author of the Declaration of Independence—used an interesting word to describe paper money: “ghost.”
“There is no saying where this fire [bankruptcies in London] will end. Perhaps in the general conflagration of all their paper. If not now, it must ere long. With only 20 millions of coin, and three or four hundred million of circulating paper, public and private, nothing is necessary but a general panic, produced either by failures, invasion or any other cause, and the whole visionary fabric vanishes into air and shews that paper is poverty, that it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself.” In 1817, Jefferson added that paper money’s “abuses also are inevitable and, by breaking up the measure of value, make a lottery of all private property.”
The Ghost of Money
As accurate as the other Founding Fathers were, Jefferson pointed to a more fundamental issue. Paper currency was “the ghost of money”; coins were the reality. They were opposites of each other, like lies and truth, with one being a phantom and the other being the substance of life. Paper money is not merely an expression of and a pathway to corruption, it is also an existential parallel to free-market money. (“Existential” here means that fiat affirms the existence of money by being a “ghost” of it, even while contradicting money’s substance.)
The challenge for central banks is to make the phantom seem real and the reality seem fraudulent. One way to do so is to question the validity of objective reality itself. After all, if there is no objective reality—if reality is dictated by authorities, the narrative, the majority, or other subjective forces—then there is nothing factual against which to assess anything. When nothing is objectively false or true, a lie is as valid as the truth.
Ethical Relativism
We live in a culture of relativism, which supports the denial of reality—a denial that sustains the pervasive lie of central banking. Ethical relativism argues that there is no absolute truth; no objective standard or empirical evidence underlies ethics and personal judgment. Ethical relativism can be divided into different categories:
- Descriptive ethical relativism studies people’s beliefs about morality, often focusing upon the beliefs of collectives such as tribes or specific societies. It is sometimes called “comparative” because it contrasts different approaches.
- Meta-ethical relativism claims that moral judgments are not true or false in any provable or objective sense; they are relative to a perspective or circumstances—that is, they are subjective. This idea underlies all relativism.
- Normative moral relativism, a subset of normative ethics, asks how people should act. Relativism answers that no moral standards bind all men at all times because right and wrong are not universal. Killing an innocent man is not always wrong, for example.
(The opposite of Ethical Relativism is Absolutism—the doctrine that actions are intrinsically right or wrong. Killing an innocent person is inherently wrong, even if it is done for the greater good or some other perceived benefit.)
A venue in which many people encounter ethical relativism in a pure form is in introductory college courses in philosophy. The professor poses a hypothetical in order to make students re-examine their ethical codes. The scenario usually runs, “The entire nation of France will drop dead tomorrow morning unless you kill your neighbor who is an innocent man. What do you do?” Or:“You can eliminate cancer by pressing a button that will also kill one healthy person who is an innocent man. Do you push the button?”
Such questions are illusions of a moral dilemma; they are ghosts. They are supposed to pit the moral horror of participating in mass murder against the moral horror of killing an innocent person in order to make a student conclude that there is no correct choice. Morality is relative, not absolute. But the questions are ghosts because they cannot be honestly answered. They postulate a parallel world in which the rules of reality, like cause and effect, have been so dramatically changed that pushing a button cures cancer. This world operates on magic, not objective reality.
The Truthful Response to a False Dichotomy
Actually, there is one honest answer: “Because my ethics and actions are based on the facts and physical rules of the world around me, I don’t know what I would do if those facts and rules no longer existed. If I were in a totally different reality, I’m sure my ethics and actions would be different, but I don’t know how.” This answer is the opposite of what the faux dilemmas are intended to elicit, of course, because it asserts reality rather than blurring it.
And, yet, this sort of question is commonly viewed as a “tough” moral issue. After all, how can the life of one person outweigh that of millions? This query is another intellectual sleight of hand. Morality is being reduced to a numbers game, a cost-benefit analysis, rather than a matter of principle. The subject is now utilitarianism, not ethics, as the professor claims. This is the destruction of objective morality. Into the resulting vacuum, utilitarianism rushes, usually in the company of expert opinion and authoritative pronouncements.
Right and Wrong Are Not All Relative
What is right or wrong is one of the most fundamental decisions a person can make. If the person is persuaded to abdicate his ethical judgment to an authority or a gray zone—if there is no objective morality or reality—then all decisions and judgments are based on relativism.
The implications of this for central banking are twofold: a moral and a metaphysical relativism that benefits lies.
Central banking is immoral. Fiat money and its inevitable inflation are theft; the banking monopoly robs people of opportunity and prosperity; the punishment of financial dissenters, such as black marketeers, negates freedom by denying individuals the use of their own property. This is a problem for central banking because it is an oppressive double standard, and people rebel against blatant injustice. The problem of backlash against a double standard can be eliminated, however, by removing morality itself from the picture. Without objective morality, there is no objective justice. Everything is a matter of authority, expert opinion, circumstance, and utility.
Three-Pronged Propaganda
Central banking is a metaphysical lie that requires the discrediting of fact. Lies are used to establish the superiority of state-controlled finances over a privately-controlled system and so gin up people’s compliance. The propaganda is basically three-pronged.
1) Private alternatives are depicted as either criminal or fraught with danger – or both. The criminal accusations against cryptocurrency, for example, include human trafficking, tax evasion, drug dealing, and money laundering; the accusations are incredibly exaggerated and equally valid against fiat currency. The dangers include fraud, ransom attacks (blackmail), and the free market. Fraud and blackmail are not unique to crypto, of course, and the free-market cure for both is the exercise of due diligence and protective technology.
The demonization of the free market is a different matter; it is political and philosophical. Self-interest and voluntary exchange are vilified for the sole reason that they are antithetical to the state. The free market is the state’s main competition because it actually provides what the state promises but cannot deliver: freedom, prosperity, peace, and a civil society. Competition is not permitted, especially when it is effective.
2) The state argues that its financial institutions are public goods while private alternatives are ruthless, chaotic, and incompetent systems that offer no recourse to exploited individuals. The smear campaign is backed up by a horde of authorities who are a mixture of the scholarly, the bureaucratic, and the heavily armed. Above all, people must be discouraged from comparing the current financial system with alternatives from the past or possibilities in the future that would call the lie into question. As in the philosophy class, the rules of reality must be altered; in this case, the rules of the marketplace must be discredited.
3) Some people always see through the propaganda. These people are targeted and punished for acting on their disagreement in order to discourage others from doing so. This is the point at which propaganda becomes a gun.
Mendacious Money-Printers
The central banks know truth from lies; they know what they are doing. “Dutch National Bank Says Gold Can Re-Start Economy in Case of Total Collapse.” The De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) or Dutch Central Bank recently acknowledged that its system of lies was faltering. DNB stated, “if the [central banking] system collapses, the gold stock can serve as a basis to build it up again. Gold bolsters confidence in the stability of the central bank’s balance sheet and creates a sense of security.”
The statement is a rare admission of reality. Central banking’s structure has become so transparently unstable and fraudulent that people have lost their confidence and sense of security in it. Central banks now pin their hopes on a store of value that is supported by five centuries of history and private choice – gold. Many hedge even this relatively safe bet by forging or incorporating digital currencies, often backed by gold or other hard commodities. Central bankers realize that the smoke they have been blowing into mirrors needs to be rescued by a form of wealth that people trust.
As central banking crumbles, so does the lie. The truth can’t come soon enough.
Do you agree that central banking’s days are numbered? Let us know in the comments section below.
Op-ed disclaimer: This is an Op-ed article. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own. Bitcoin.com is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy or quality within the Op-ed article. Readers should do their own due diligence before taking any actions related to the content. Bitcoin.com is not responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any information in this Op-ed article.
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