"The Biggest Scam in the History of Mankind"
This video is pretty neat; it’s racking up views very quickly. It’s very well done, but unfortunately there are a few things that I think they get wrong.
Some of my objections:
==> The guy a few times says “I” when he should say “me.”
==> I understand where he’s coming from, but I don’t think it works to say that the fiat dollar is just currency, not really money. That certainly won’t line up with the Misesian approach to monetary theory; fiat money really
is money. It’s fiat, of course, but it’s money, hence the name: fiat money.
==> I really don’t like the stuff about the government needs to create more money in order to pay interest on existing debt. I walk through the problems with that kind of approach
here. More generally, in
the book I co-authored with Carlos Lara, I acknowledge the truth that yes, there
is a sense in which our modern monetary system is intricately tied to debt, but it doesn’t mean
quite what a lot of the people pushing this line think it means.
==> Finally, at one point in the video they imply that the U.S. Constitution forbids the government from issuing anything other than gold and silver coin. However, the clause is from
Section 10 of Article I, which are prohibitions on the State governments. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the Constitution gives the federal government the authority to issue fiat money, but my point is that it’s not quite right to point to the prohibitions on State governments as the smoking gun for what the federal government is allowed to do, regarding money. (For my views on this stuff, again I point you to my book with Carlos Lara.)
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Partly I’m listing the above objections just because I want to balance my main message, which is that this is a very cool video, and I’m glad to see it gaining so much attention so quickly.
Oh, one last tidbit: Based off of a quote from the video, I realize that
Thomas Jefferson was walking through the issue of government debt burdening future generations even before Nick Rowe had his PhD. It’s pretty sophisticated; check it out.
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