If you and I were to go print up a bunch of dollars right now, we'd correctly be called counterfeiters and thrown in jail.
Yet...
When the Federal Reserve System does the EXACT SAME THING, we call it monetary policy, quantitative easing, stimulus, or some other positive sounding boloney.
Huh?
This really isn’t difficult to understand.
Printing money dilutes the value of the dollars you already worked so hard to earn, thus making everything cost too much.
Any kid who's played a serious game of Monopoly or two, understands the dire consequences of inflating the money supply.
Neither fancy prose, nor elaborate mathematical equations, can change this simple fact.
Jacob Hornberger provides a brief history of paper money in the United States.
Why Do We Have Paper Money?
Since the Constitution prohibited the issuance of bills of credit (or paper money), the federal government’s debt instruments were not permitted to circulate as money. Thus, while debt instruments might be payable on demand — e.g. short-term bills — they remained debt instruments and could not legally circulate as money.
Why did our American ancestors insist on that type of monetary system, one where the money is gold coins and silver coins and not paper debt instruments? Because they knew history. They knew that ever since the invention of the printing press, governments had used paper money to plunder and loot the citizenry.
How did governments do that? By taking control over the issuance of paper money and then printing up as much paper money as they wanted to spend. If they needed more money, they just cranked up the printing press, grabbed stacks of newly printed paper money, and went out and spent it. In that way, public officials could spend money to their heart’s content and without having to raise taxes.
The government’s expansion of the money supply would inevitably reduce the value of people’s own paper-money holdings. That reduction in value would be reflected in the ever-increasing prices of the things that people needed to buy.
... The government’s inflation of the paper money supply was a way to tax people indirectly, without their knowing that they were being taxed. As the value of the paper-money holdings would go down, as reflected in rising prices, people would inevitably place the blame on the businesses raising prices rather than on the public officials who were debasing the currency.
Thus, paper money has always been a dream-come-true for public officials and an absolute nightmare for the citizenry...
Yet, we all know that the federal government prints paper money and makes it legal tender, which the Constitution does not authorize it to do.
And we know that the Constitution has never been amended to permit the federal government to issue paper money and to permit state governments to make paper money legal tender.
I’m curious: What’s the point of having a Constitution that provides for a government of limited powers if public officials are free to ignore it and do whatever they want?
We have paper money because it provides the bankers, the government and the military industrial techno-security complex, a method to transfer wealth from the poor and middle class, into their own already overstuffed pockets.
