Mixed Mental Arts

While Ben Dyson has argued that we need to take the power to create money out of the hands of bankers and put it entirely in the hands of government (you can here that episode here) Detlev Schlichter goes further arguing that the power to create money should not be given to any group. As he lays out in his book Paper Money Collapse, since time immemorial governments in times of war or other trouble have always created more money. In the Ancient world that meant shaving down coins and diluting the amount of gold or silver in them. In the Civil War that meant printing more and more paper currency. The result was simple: a loss of faith in the currency. In Ancient Rome as the silver denarius dropped in silver content, trade began to dry up and this destruction of the money supply by emperors may well be one of the reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire. Today, governments are not only printing more money to solve short-term crisis; they’re doing it as a long-term strategy. Whereas historically, countries a