Spree
By Mitch Berg
John Stossel has a column up called “Free Stuff,” where he adds up the cost of Democrat presidential candidates’promises. They run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and he points out that the nation could ever afford to tax everybody enough to pay for it.
Except that’s not the plan. Democrats like AOC honestly believe money is obsolete. The government doesn’t have to print paper bills, ship them to warehouses, stuff them into ATMs and distribute them to the poor. Instead, government simply makes an electronic entry in the computer, which is electronically loaded to your EBT card, or electronically credited to your bank account, and suddenly, everyone has money.
There’s no need to balance a budget, it’s all electrons and electrons are free.
It’s like having a credit card with no limit and they never send you the bill.Why wouldn’t you spend as much as you could, buying everything you can imagine? What’s the downside?
Joe Doakes
When Margaret Thatcher said that the problem with progressivism is that you always run out of other peoples’ money, the unspoken corollary was that they never believe they’ll run out of other peoples money…
August 1st, 2019 at 6:58 am
Europe, and Scandi-land especially, is way beyond the US when it comes to electronic money. They are literally discussing the abolition of anything but electronic money and may well have the technology already to impose it. This means two things.
The first is what Joe/Mitch writes above; something I hadn’t realized before, so I learned something. The second is that all financial transactions can be tracked. Every one. No more paying for things in cash – it’s an easy thought experiment to consider what that means. The adage to follow the money thus becomes a metaphor for keeping tabs on everyone.
August 1st, 2019 at 10:04 am
Reading some of the endorsements of loose monetary policy, you would think that the Democrats–the party that compares everyone they don’t like to Hitler–had never learned what happened with the Reichsbank in the Weimar Republik.