You can have it all. We all can have it all. Nothing prevents it other than our own ignorance.

How is your imagination? Imagine a world in which:

1. We have no poverty
2. We have is no violent crime
3. We all can afford the best health care
4. We all can afford as much, and as fine an education as we wish
5. There is no air, water, or land pollution, nor shortages of pure water
6. Global warming does not exist
7. Our entire infrastructure is kept current
8. Our government is run to benefit all of us, not just the very rich

We actually do have the power to create this paradise on earth. We can have it all.

Background: The Problem Begins With Poverty

Money is not the root of all evil. Lack of money is.

Have you noticed that street crime — robbery, burglary, assault, murder, rape, shoplifting, drug-pushing — is most prevalent in impoverished neighborhoods? Of course, you have.

Before becoming a resident of Florida this year, I lived 60+ years north of Chicago, in what locally is known as “The North Shore.” It includes mostly upscale, “bedroom” communities, one of which is Wilmette, Illinois, where I lived.

According to “Neighborhood Scout:” 

Wilmette home prices are not only among the most expensive in Illinois, but Wilmette real estate also consistently ranks among the most expensive in America.

Wilmette is a decidedly white-collar village, with fully 94.76% of the workforce employed in white-collar jobs, well above the national average. Overall, Wilmette is a village of professionals, managers, and sales and office workers.

Wilmette is home to many people who could be described as “urban sophisticates”. Urban sophisticates are people who are both educated and wealthy, and thus tend to be older, richer, and more established than young professionals.

“Urban sophisticates” is not just about being educated and well-off financially: it is a point of view and state of mind, one that you might call ‘urbaneness’. But such people can and do regularly live in small towns, suburbs and rural areas, as well as in big cities. They read, support the arts and high-end shops, and love travel.

Do you have a 4-year college degree or graduate degree? If so, you may feel right at home in Wilmette. 83.23% of adults here have a 4-year degree or graduate degree, whereas the national average for all cities and towns is just 21.84%.

The per capita income in Wilmette in 2018 was $87,576, which is wealthy relative to Illinois and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $350,304 for a family of four.

Can you visualize Wilmette?

Google “Murder in Wilmette,” and you might possibly find a half dozen references from the past 50 years. Here is what violent crime looks like in Wilmette, in Illinois, and in the whole United States.

Get the picture?

What is the fundamental difference among Wilmette, Illinois, and the U.S., which can account for the massive differences in crime rates, education rates, and home prices?

Money.

No people are born murderers, rapists, robbers, burglars, and attackers. But lacking money, people are far more likely to grow up as street criminals.

And please spare yourself the anecdotes about impoverished kids who ultimately became pillars of society. Yes, there are plenty of them, and somewhere in their lives occurred fortuitous events that led to their achievements.

Perhaps nature provided them with the necessary brains or brawn to succeed, despite the odds. Or some mentors took them under wing and provided them with the leadership to find success.

And yes, there are rich people who commit crimes, though most often of the white-collar variety. Scant exceptions do occur, but the relationship between poverty and crime, especially violent crime, cannot be denied.

I am as opposed to the proliferation of guns as anyone, but I now do not believe guns are an important cause of crime, though they are an important facilitator of crime (and an even more important facilitator of suicide).

I have come to the conclusion that America could enact the most draconian gun laws on the planet, and that would not solve our crime problems. 

We are at the stage in which gun ownership is an addiction, similar to alcohol and drug addictions. The time long has passed when we legally could prevent gun ownership and usage, any more than we were able, via laws, to prevent alcohol ownership and usage during Prohibition, or prevent drug ownership and usage during the “War on Drugs.” 

We once could have prevented the disease, but now we are too infected for a cure.

We simply cannot stop gun crime by using the brute force of prohibitive laws. That mule will not respond to the stick. At long last, we must learn to use the carrot — the federal government’s infinite ability to create dollars– and thus cure the poverty that is the root cause of violent crime.

Our primary problem is: People who are not impoverished resent the government giving to the poor. It’s a state of mind that each day is fostered by wealthy propaganda.

Additionally: 

The U.S. federal government has the financial power to provide a generous form of Social Security to every man, woman, and child in America, instantly eliminating poverty. 

The U.S government has the financial power to eliminate not only most federal taxes (including the onerous, regressive FICA tax), but importantly to reduce the need for state and local taxes — those sales and use taxes that disproportionately affect the less wealthy — by simply giving state and local governments money.

The U.S. government has the power to eliminate the financial impoverishment caused by lack of insured health care, simply by providing no-deductible, comprehensive Medicare for All.

The U.S. government has the financial power to provide schooling to all Americans who want it — grades K through advanced education, thereby not only reducing the costs of college, but by reducing the need for local K-12 school taxes.

The U.S. government has the financial power to reduce global warming by supporting not only net-zero energy use and production, but also by supporting carbon-removal technology usage, research, and development

The U.S. government has the financial power to support water recycling and desalination usage, research and development. There is plenty of water on earth, but too little is fresh, drinkable water, and we rapidly are reducing those supplies.

The U.S. government has the financial power to repair and modernize our infrastructure — our roads, bridges, dams, sewers, electric grid, telecommunication, tunnels, transportation, parks, beaches, etc.

Many of the above initiatives are being attempted by elements of local government and the private sector, all of which have limited funds,

But, for the federal government, money is unlimited and free, created at the touch of a computer key.

Will so much federal spending cause inflation? No, as we have demonstrated here, and here, and here, inflation is not caused by federal deficit spending. Inflation is caused by shortages of goods and services, and often can be cured by federal deficit spending to reduce shortages.

Will so much federal spending be a burden on future taxpayers? No, federal taxes do not fund federal spending. The Monetarily Sovereign federal government pays for its spending by creating dollars, ad hoc. The sole purpose of federal spending is to control the economy by taxing what the government wishes to discourage, and by giving tax breaks to what the government wishes to encourage.

(This is different from state and local government taxes which do fund state and local spending.)

Will so much federal spending be socialism? No, socialism is not funding; socialism is control.

Consider Social Security. It spends billions but it is not socialism. It doesn’t control. It merely funds.  Similarly, Medicare has very little control over your medical services other than the amounts it funds.

It does not tell you what doctor to see, what hospital to visit or what medicines to take. It does not control what your doctor diagnoses or treats. Medicare does not fund every procedure, but it does not control your financial ability to have the procedure.

Being Monetarily Sovereign, the American federal government has the financial ability to create paradise on earth. We lack only the knowledge and the will to do it.

The populace has been led to believe slogans like “Too good to be true,” and “No such thing as a free lunch,” which replace facts with a world of disinformation and cynicism, making us surrender before we begin.

From the standpoint of federal financing, nothing is “too good to be true,” and yes, federal spending is a “free lunch.”

As for the will, the government is blocked by the very rich, whose “Gap Psychology” goal is to widen the Gap between the rich and the rest. No matter how rich they are, the rich seem always to want to become even richer, and that requires ever-widening the income/wealth/power Gap. — and that requires pushing down those who are not rich.

In Summary:

The more you experience life’s failures, the more you tend to believe cynically, that a perfect world cannot exist, and that attempts to create perfection are fruitless, wasteful, naive, and even harmful. You have grown to expect disappointment.

So, when you are told the U.S. federal government has the infinite power to create U.S. dollars, and do it without adverse side effects, your knee-jerk response is to deride the idea. Thus, the “too good to be true,” and “no such thing as a free lunch” responses.

Yet, when you are told the U.S. government has the infinite power to create laws, and that U.S. dollars are nothing more than legal creations, not physical creations, you may pause that knee-jerk response.

Just as a federal law can say anything the federal government wishes it to say, the U.S. dollar can be anything and worth anything the law says it is, i.e. anything at all.

Throughout American history, federal law has stated that U.S. dollars were worth varying amounts of silver and gold, a process one hopes finally will have ended in the Nixon year 1971. But the U.S. government could pass a new law stating that the U.S. dollar is worth anything at all — a 1-carat diamond, or a pound of salt, or a quart of pure water. The value of the dollar, i.e. inflation, is in the hands of the government.

Beginning in 1971, the government has allowed the U.S. dollar to “float,” i.e. to allow the public to decide the exchange rate (vs. other currencies) of the dollar. 

For that reason, there now can be no real answer to the question, “What is a dollar worth?” You can express it only with regard to other currencies, whose worth is equally vague. 

Because a dollar is, in reality, a debt owed by the U.S. government, its value, like the value of all debts, is determined by its collateral, and the full faith and credit of the debtor, the U.S government. 

Without gold, (or even with gold), the real collateral for the U.S. dollar is the full faith and credit of the U.S. government — not our “spacious skies or amber waves of grain” — just our full faith and credit.

If you were to try to drill down below exchange value to find the “real” value of the U.S. dollar, you would have to determine the “real” value of the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, an impossible task.

All of the above is meant to show you the truly amorphous nature of the U.S. dollar. It is what the government says it is, and it is worth what the government says it is — and there is no limit to the number of dollars the government can create. The dollar is the offspring of the government’s laws.

In short, there is no limit to what the government can spend to purchase paradise.

This simple fact makes a mockery of the President’s and Congress’s “struggles” to pass spending legislation, against those who falsely claim the government cannot or should not spend so much money.

In addition to interest rate control, which affects the market demand for money, and Federal Reserve bond purchases and sales, the federal government can revalue or devalue the dollar, at will.

We created a Monetarily Sovereign federal government and gave it all the power it needs to make America a paradise on earth. It is not constrained by money. It has infinite money and infinite control over the value of its money.

Our world is constrained only by our intellect, our imagination, our will, and our honesty. Barring a meteor strike or the sun failing us, we always will have exactly the world we create for ourselves — exactly the world we deserve.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty
Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty
Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell Monetary Sovereignty Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

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THE SOLE PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT IS TO IMPROVE AND PROTECT THE LIVES OF THE PEOPLE.

The most important problems in economics involve:

1. Monetary Sovereignty describes money creation and destruction.
2. Gap Psychology describes the common desire to distance oneself from those “below” in any socio-economic ranking, and to come nearer those “above.” The socio-economic distance is referred to as “The Gap.”

Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics. Implementation of Monetary Sovereignty and The Ten Steps To Prosperity can grow the economy and narrow the Gaps: Ten Steps To Prosperity:

1. Eliminate FICA
2. Federally funded Medicare — parts A, B & D, plus long-term care — for everyone
3. Social Security for all
4. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone
5. Salary for attending school
6. Eliminate federal taxes on business
7. Increase the standard income tax deduction, annually. 
8. Tax the very rich (the “.1%”) more, with higher progressive tax rates on all forms of income.
9. Federal ownership of all banks
10. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99.9% 

The Ten Steps will grow the economy and narrow the income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and the rest.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY