That Which Belongs to Caesar

Subservience does not come from a citizen’s obedience to laws or devotion to elected officials. True servility to a nation is derived from the willingness to give over the product of our labor. Taxes are the individual’s real contribution to their government. The currency we hold and transact with indicates where our loyalties lie. Our labor is owed to the sovereign. The money does not belong to us.

“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” This is the response Jesus gave when asked if it was sensible to pay taxes to the Roman Empire. Though it is heavily disputed, Christ did not confess that it was licit under God’s law to forfeit a portion of our earnings to an authority. He clearly creates a separation between that which belongs to the empire and that which can be devoted to no man or government.

The labor we devote to ourselves, our family, and the broader community is aligned with God’s plan and human achievement. The currency, however, is subject to political corruption, misappropriation and inflation that violates natural law.

Today, the people of the world are subservient to a new empire, a new currency, and a new economic system that steals the product of their labor. The depreciating money we work for is divorced from our actual productivity, and thus, is an infringement of God’s law. Render to the banks, the worthless paper that belongs only to them.

As of this writing, more than half of the taxes pilfered from the American people’s income is spent on the interest of the national debt. 51 cents of every dollar spent by the U.S. Federal government is borrowed. The fiscal deficit is annualized to well over $1 trillion which must be serviced with an even higher rate of interest.

This doom loop of debt is more of a recent phenomenon that most expect. The federal government ran a surplus from 1998 through 2001 so it’s far from impossible to promote fiscal responsibility in the modern economy.

Regrettably, the financial hole we have dug ourselves in with two recessions, a dozen foreign wars, and one slightly inconvenient pandemic is simply too deep to dig out of with our current tax revenues. Despite the new administration’s efforts to limit discretionary funding, the burden of previously promised entitlements and rising debt interest are too great.

The legislator will NEVER touch social security, Medicare, or income security benefits without facing hypothetical or actual guillotines.

The office of the presidency has no legal avenues to subvert the monetary system that inflated the currencies of the world into total insolvency.

Elected officials gave away the rights to our currency to the banks over a hundred years ago. This is simply the culmination their debt-based world economy. Economic prosperity measured in altered GDP is a total sham.

The markets are irrational; asset prices in aggregate rise faster than wages; financialization has ruined every industry and each generation is worse off financially (on average) than the prior. If that’s the case, why does it seem like Americans are collectively becoming considerably wealthier?

Just look around at all the modern luxuries accessible to nearly everyone. Supermarkets, vacations, all the fancy stuff and new technology that is clearly making life easier for everyone. Where is the excess poverty that should be tormenting the recipients of this degraded currency?

The system, for all its faults, has incredible mechanism of preservation. New debt in higher increments has a remarkable ability to hide the economic impact of past transgressions. Even the most vicious financial crises or widespread bank failure can be easily covered up with the injection of countless newly printed dollars.

The credit/liquidity crisis of 2008 should have been the end of the fiat monetary system and fractional reserve banking. The major financial institutions overplayed their systematic lending fraud. The subsequent collapse of markets was simply a revert to reality. The subprime loans and overvaluation of assets were far from practical, so the irresponsibility was appropriately flushed out.

We could have started fresh by allowing the banks to fail and reinstituting reserve requirements. The market correction should have transpired in an era of legitimate valuations and proper free markets devoid of the manipulation that comes from cheap debt. Things could have been different.

The actual response destroyed the last semblance of a true free enterprise economy. The ensuing government bailouts and liquidity injections destroyed markets forever and guaranteed that banks could continue their fraudulent activities unabated. This mechanism of modern monetary theory proved that enough debt could solve any problem. Over the next decade, this fiscal policy was perfected by central banks around the world to protect the illiquid banking system from the threat of reality itself.

Generally, this system has worked pretty well. Asset prices are safe from major corrections, inflation is steady, and recessions seem to be a thing of the past. That is of course, if you’re standing on the right side of the equation.

Not surprisingly, new debts from government stimulus are great for the primary beneficiaries. Entities that receive freshly printed currency are not affected by the lagging impact of inflation. Purchasing power does not get degraded until the new supply of money is fully realized in the broader economy. This takes time, but the effect is exponential as the money “trickles down”.

The core beneficiaries are of course the politicians who get to spend the money to exemplify their own power in addition to the individuals or corporations that receive it. All the defense contracts, social programs, and foreign governments are able to utilize the new currency at its total uninflated value. By the time these supposed benefits reach the average consumer, the money has already lost a major portion of its value.

The secondary beneficiaries are the buyers of this debt. Every dollar “printed” is really just borrowed from a variety of multinational financial institutions using the checking accounts, pension plans, retirement funds and other sources of capital derived from actual productive work. The banking institution gets the insane benefit of holding interest bearing liquid assets (U.S. government debt is considered a cash equivalent) in exchange for other people’s money.

The economic benefits derived from the new debt will eventually reach the average person via higher wages, home values, or retirement benefits, but not after first seeing every other expense rise first. The biggest losers of inflation are those who do not have flexibility to respond to increasing prices in the same way that corporations can push the costs down to the consumer. Asset and equity holders win while the renters and wage earners lose.

The flow of money is never equal, it can be contained in specific asset classes or even apportioned into particular regions. Coastal cities, industrial hubs, and preferred political demographics may see wealth protections not bestowed upon rural areas or certain racial groups.

Ironically, the greatest purveyor of income inequality is the very socialist wealth redistributions intended to alleviate the inequality. It’s simply impossible to ensure wealth flows equally across the economic environment when political favoritism and corporate lobbying is prevalent. The larger the government and more widespread the economic movement, the wider the disparities become.

Economies of scale do not work in governments because economic participants are not ubiquitous. Businesses can increase their output to diversify risk and bring down costs because they serve a single predetermined demographic of target customers. Governments are reliant on the confidence of voters, corporations, and foreign nations with different income levels, priorities, competencies and productive yield. It is impossible to serve everyone equally, especially in a democracy.

There is no solution to the issues embedded in a geopolitical empire. The inflation and inequalities suffered in the American Empire are same ones experienced in the Roman Empire as well as each one preceding and following. Jesus understood that the existing ruling empire and its associated currency were fallible. Unlike God.

Humans were always prescribed to live and work in small communities. Expansionism and large governing bodies always require the same misallocation of resources.

The world’s current economic empire is of course the most efficient in human history. That does not mean that it is exempt from the fallacy of unrestricted scale. The best performing economies are those that are isolated and fully competitive free enterprise systems with homogenous populations. This is extremely rare at large scales which is why the real solution is diversified currencies.

Contrary to popular belief, there is only one currency in the world – the U.S. dollar and its various currency pairs used in global trade. Every asset, business, and raw material is valued relative to the dollar.

The dollar itself is totally worthless without malicious usury practices forced onto third world countries. This practice puts a higher value on underlying financial instruments than the resources themselves.

It is archaic. It needs to end and be left in the past forever.

Just like the Roman Denarious, the U.S. dollar is destined to fail and be replaced by a new reserve currency that will purvey the same imperialistic drivers of inequity before being inflated into obscurity.

There is a shelf life for mediums of exchange that defy natural law. There is a defined limit to the systemized abuse of currency. The supply of money must appropriately match the amount of goods and services in an economy. Otherwise, its relative value will be horribly skewed and become bad money that no one wants to use.

The answer is a fixed supply of easily exchangeable units that are valued by the economic output of localized economy. In simple terms, think of a small town with its own easily defined supply of people and resources. The town will utilize the labor and raw materials that it acquires through natural means to produce goods and services traded within or exported abroad. This currency be worth a specified unit of measurement (i.e. an hour of work, pound of silver, kilowatt of electricity, etc.) in relation to the total output of the town. The money could never be printed or counterfeited and would always be valued in relative to the town’s economic needs.

Inflation and deflation would be appeased by real free market pressures. Production and consumption levels would adjust to meet the populations capacity. Trade with other towns would be fair and according to supply and demand. Currency would be stabilized internally and compete with other towns currency while still being freely and fairly exchanged. Nothing would be equal, but everything would be fair according to the ability to produce real value.

Antithetical to the utopias devoid of individual effort, this system would require constant work by market participants and strictly reward collective output. A true meritocracy that favors creators and innovators. The fruits of all labor would be equal and passed down to kin without forceful redistribution. It’s the system that no one wants but everyone deserves.