Academic Lays out the Left-Wing Plan: First Your Guns, Then Your Cash

Then the day long bread line for you, comrade!  Death to the kulaks!  Imagine the glorious socialist GULAG archipelago that could be constructed in Alaska and the Northwest Territories!

The article below might be a bit more exercised over the threat of this statist professor’s call to ban the accumulation or use of large amounts of cash than I might be, on the face of it, but how many major leftist assaults on individual liberty have started just as small and grown into terrifying significant and intrusive phenomenon?  Why on earth ban cash and bills beyond $10 unless one desires to control people and curtail their freedom of action?  The gains from such a draconian act would be trivial, if they even exist.  But recall that the original gun control legislation passed in this country was all sold as being directed solely against criminals like the inner-city gangsters of the Al Capone and Lucky Luciano type, but very quickly expanded into something quite different indeed.

I’d say this definitely bears watching:

Russian philosopher Fyodor Dostoevsky in the 1800s said, “Money is coined liberty.”

Ken Rogoff, economics professor at Harvard (and previously an economist at the IMF and at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System), wants to take that liberty away.  He has a new book out on the wickedness of cash, calling out the usual suspects – tax evaders and other criminals – to justify doing something about it.  I’m surprised he didn’t claim that Ben Franklins have been known to kill small children or poison the water in Flint, Michigan.  His solution is to eliminate all denominations of currency above ten dollars.

This sounds suspiciously like the argument for taking away firearms from law-abiding citizens to keep criminals from using guns.  It makes no sense unless your ultimate goal is to disarm the population – or, in this case, take one more step to tracing, taxing, and then controlling the spending habits of law-abiding citizens.

The plan is quite devious.  It is probably backed by credit card companies.  Rogoff’s answer is to create state-run banks that provide the services of a Citibank for free or a small fee.

First government got control of the health care industry.  Now this economist wants to give it control of the banking industry as well?

Rogoff generously recognizes that there is something to be said for cash as a guarantor of privacy and by extension liberty, as Dostoevsky proposed so eloquently in just four words, although he is more enamored of the possibility of the Federal Reserve implementing negative interest rates as a way to “stimulate” the economy.  He even matter-of-factly suggests the possibility of  rates as low as negative two or three percent.  Consider that as long as citizens hold cash, they can hedge against the government charging for the privilege of controlling our earnings and savings in the form of negative interest rates.

The Progressive endgame proposed by Mr. Rogoff follows the Communist plan: take away the guns.  Gain control of health care.  Indoctrinate the next generation through control of education curricula.  Demonize Judeo-Christian beliefs.  And then take away currency from the people, thus allowing government control of the flow of funds.

What Professor Rogoff isn’t mentioning in his argument is that this is the same control the Castro brothers have over Cuban currency and how the Kim regime of the DPRK manipulates its citizenry with its currency policies.  It is also the ultimate dream of the Federal Reserve.

In Cuba, they have two separate currencies.  There is one for the government and foreigners and one for the citizens.  Ordinary citizens are not allowed to hold and trade in the much more valuable convertible pesos, or Cuban dollars.  They must use only the virtually useless peso for their everyday needs.

I think we can safely assume that the hundreds of millions of dollars the Castro brothers have accumulated – all in the name of socialist fraternity and equality, no doubt! – is not in worthless Cuban internal currency.  No, it’s in American dollars, British pounds, or other currencies that, at least as far as the international money market is concerned – carry a real value.

It is the same in China and other socialist paradises, as well, of course.  North Koreans may starve and be killed off in their millions, but the Kim family lives very well, indeed.  In the old Soviet Union, party apparatchiks had Zil limousines, private shops with well-stocked shelves including the latest Western wares, personal dachas in the countryside paid for at state expense, and many other perquisites.  They didn’t stand in line for hours to browse almost barren shops.  The left always takes care of its own, that is, those that don’t become inconvenient and don’t fall into the category of useful idiots (almost all), which they kill off without a second thought.

In reality, Leftism, and the transnational global one world government movement, is all about the ascendance of a new, and thoroughly amoral, aristocracy.  The aristocracy of old, tied to the land, at least somewhat Catholic, and bound by tradition and custom to have something of a concern for those landless peasants under their care (that was by and large the case, there were, of course, exceptions) was a far cry from the new one that is being stood up by self-anointed elites.  They don’t care a whit for anyone but themselves. Ideology is all to them, but they see no contradiction in maintaining all the wealth and comforts of advanced 21st civilization for themselves, while denying them to everyone else, all in the name of whatever leftist ideology they care to cite.

But communism/leftism has always been riddled with far more “internal contradictions” such as these than the capitalist system communists like to deplore.  In truth, leftism is really more of a religion for deeply disordered and aggrieved individuals than it is a real economic or governmental philosophy.  It’s really the perfect self-justifying philosophy.  All the founders of the modern Left were deeply disturbed men, Marx among the worst.  A total failure at life all he could do was abuse those around him and rail against the world for not recognizing his “greatness.”  I sense a lot of the same sentiment abroad in our country today – Bernie Sanders has been in his life, and was in his campaign, almost the perfect personification of this.

Well, Orwell said that oligarchical collectivism was simply the revolt of a bureaucratic/technocratic class against a previous highest class and its institution of itself as the ever-ruling oligarchy.  He was just a bit early in prognosticating when it would come about.