The Counterfeiter and the Banker

[Johnny_Trotter]

An interesting article that I saw linked from today’s (UK) Telegraph on how money works:

@Darius Guppy of the Telegraph

In the year 1994 there resided in the cell next to mine a certain ‘Tommy.’

Now Tommy had been imprisoned for counterfeiting Dutch Guilders to such a high standard that he had fooled the banks themselves.
As was customary among prisoners who became friends, Tommy allowed me to read his legal papers and I quickly became fascinated by the Judge’s sentencing speech, the gist of which was that Tommy’s activities had been parasitical. By creating money out of little more than thin air he had reduced the purchasing power of more deserving members of society. What would happen if everyone behaved like him?

Immediately I thought of arguments used, in a different context, by Thatcherites and neo-liberals in general regarding inflation. Inflation, just like counterfeiting, dilutes the value of the community’s hard-earned wealth and as such constitutes a terrible social evil. Creating too much money - ‘real’, just as much as ‘fake’ - can wreck an economy. Such indeed was the reasoning of the Nazis when, during World War Two they came up with a plan – that came close to implementation - to ruin Britain’s economy by flooding the country with near perfect counterfeit bills.

A lot of nonsense has been written and said about the world’s current economic woes - how the crash is the fault solely of the banks and how, by implication, Governments are blameless and in particular how it could all have been avoided and will indeed be made right by greater financial regulation, and so on. All of which constitutes a classic example of what the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre terms “the fallacy of managerial expertise”: an attempt by ‘experts’ to blind us with science in order to justify their own over-paid existences and mask their confusion. After all, if they had been so skilled, then why is it that not one of them - either politician or finance minister or financial journalist or just plain financier - was able to predict the current debacle?

There is more >>>

The first (oldest) comment says “A quite extraordinary vindication of the prison system.”!!!