Ellen Brown and the Secret of Oz's Hyperinflationary Dreamworld

Chris | InformationLiberation
Oct. 09, 2010

Gary North of Lewrockwell.com wrote an excellent, if not inflammatory, piece on Ellen Brown titled "Cheerleader for Hitler's Economics." In the piece he details how Ellen Brown advocates Hitler's economics, namely a total fiat money standard where the government can print up money at will to sate whatever desire it pleases.

This is part of so-called "greenbacker" economics. It's extremely dangerous because it's entirely wrong and completely backwards. It's advocated in Money Masters, the Secret of Oz, in Ellen Brown's books, and in many articles all over the place.

They have no understanding of Austrian Economics, so they think all economics is some floating abstraction. Money can just be printed at will and social experiments can be done with no adverse consequences. It's the most inflationary ideology I have ever heard, believable only if you think economics is some trivial non-science which has no root in the natural world and can be tampered with without consequence.

The idea you can print your way to prosperity is utterly delusional, printing money creates only one thing, more paper. It does not create one ounce of wealth. At most, it can redistribute the wealth which is already created, but only at the perilous cost of creating inflation.

The man who made the Money Masters movie, Bill Still, advocates the same thing in his new film, Secret of Oz. He thinks the printing press is some magical invention which can create prosperity and wealth for all, just so long as "the people," a.k.a. the government, controls it.

If you saw this Duck Tales episode on inflation, you'd see the error in this logic.

Printing money is counterfeiting. It devalues all the money in circulation and allows whoever controls the printing press practical unlimited powers. To think you can give the government, of all institutions, the total power to print money, yet think it will in any way limit its powers or "only print so much," is utter insanity. That's the same line of logic that because the government is *supposed* to follow the constitution, it will do so and we'll have "limited government." Of course, this is a total myth.

The government as an institution is inherently based on theft, everything it has is stolen from the people it lords over in the form of taxes, to think this institution could be harnessed to "do good" is completely to ignore what the institution inherently is, namely a pillaging and murdering machine.

These crazy economic theories wouldn't be so important if they weren't so widely spread. They are though, and they need to be challenged because they're factually incorrect and inherently outrageously inflationary.

Giving congress the printing press would literally be worse than the Federal Reserve, congress critters are incapable of thinking beyond two to four years, they would print like crazy to suit every special interest group's every whim because their time preference is that of a child's.

The Federal Reserve is a private bank, it has had total power over the money supply for years, seemingly it always would have if it didn't go down the hyperinflationary route, and yet even this private group of bankers can't help themselves but to print themselves into oblivion. That is the nature of fiat money. It is like the ring in the Lord of the Rings, it grants the user total power, drunk on power they become power mad lunatics and seed the fruits of their own destruction. The ring of fiat currencies needs to be cast into the fires of Mordor, never to return again.

Money is not something to be printed. It's scarcity is absolutely essential in order to facilitate trade and have it be a store of value. A commodity based currency is the only solution to our economic woes, the people of the world have historically always chosen gold.
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Chris is an anarcho-capitalist and voluntarist who runs the website InformationLiberation.com. See his recent article on Ellen Brown, Why It's Not 'Time for Helicopter Ben to Drop Some Money on Main Street.'