By CCN.com: Hold onto your bitcoin. Stephanie Kelton, U.S. economist and senior economic advisor for Bernie Sanders 2020, just declared war on the U.S. dollar, tweeting:
“The carpenter can’t run out of inches. The stadium can’t run out of points. The airline can’t run out of FF miles. And the USA can’t run out of dollars.”
Banks printing more money would only lead to hyperinflation, which would open the floodgates to bitcoin investing as it has done in countries such as Venezuela.
Yeah, good luck with that.
As Morgan Creek Digital Co-Founder Anthony Pompliano stated, “bitcoin is the general population’s attempt to stop the madness.”
This is a terrible analogy and not very clear thinking by a university economics professor.
The carpenter has no shortage of inches but has to fill them with a scarce resource – building materials – and most importantly the carpenter’s expertise and labor.
Athletes in a game can earn as many points as they’d like, sure. But they have to work for them. The referees don’t just start awarding more points and say the teams have done better. And neither does the airline just start handing out frequent flyer miles for nothing. It gives them to frequent fliers in return for their continued business.
The airline would go bankrupt if it did with frequent flier miles what Bernie Sanders’ economic advisor Stephanie Kelton not to mention Alexandria Ocasio Cortez advise we do with the economy.
This is frankly a terrifying thing for an advisor to a major presidential candidate to say. Anyone with a firsthand or even cursory knowledge of the history of hyperinflation knows what a total catastrophe this kind of thinking is in practice.
In Germany, hyperinflation ravaged the economy when the government decided to monetize its war debts after World War I. This directly led to the horrifying nightmare of World War II by leaving Germans poor and desperate. Times of economic uncertainty are opportunities for totalitarian dictators. Ambitious would be despots never let a good crisis go to waste.
In Zimbabwe in the 1990s, the government printed up so much money that trillion dollar bills became as common as twenties are in America. That episode of hyperinflation made Zimbabweans all trillionaires, but it definitely did not make any of them richer.
In Venezuela right now, the hyperinflationary, print-and-spend policies of Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolás Maduro, have led to rampant economic devastation. There can be no doubt that the socialist money printers like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez pattern their economic thinking precisely after the tenets Chavist socialism.
That’s not to mention the hordes of adoring socialist celebrities who back socialism in the United States even though it failed so catastrophically when practiced by Hugo Chavez.
The important thing to remember is that Bernie Sanders isn’t very radical to think this way. The difference between Sanders and Trump, Obama, or Bush is only a matter of degree.
The U.S. government does spend dollars as though they can never run out; thanks to the Federal Reserve system, it can’t. This is why more and more savers and investors are looking to protect their wealth in inflation-proof savings like gold and silver, real estate, and deflationary cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.