Balanced budgets for unbalanced minds

The incessant chatter on Treasurer Wayne Swan’s upcoming May budget austerity shows the majority of media and political commentators to be economic illiterates, exclaimed CEC leader Craig Isherwood today.

“Balanced budgets are for unbalanced minds, and this insanity totally ignores the principle of National Banking”, said Isherwood. “A national budget should never be run as a zero-sum game or household budget balancing income and expenditure.

“Fools calling for budget surpluses are actually calling to slash the real economy and people’s welfare to hoard some useless paper money. We must dump this monetarist doctrine and grow the physical economy instead.

“The actual wealth of our economy has nothing to do with money, but is rather a product of our creativity to perform actions which transform our lives for the better.

“As the once government-owned Commonwealth Bank is now privatised and the Reserve Bank is independent of government, our federal government is now incapable of implementing sane monetary policy and is blindly following the orders of the private banksters for fiscal austerity.

“To regain our economic sovereignty, we must return to National Banking by reactivating the powers which the Commonwealth Bank once had. Our federal government must have the power to issue bills of credit for subsequent monetisation into new paper currency in the Treasury.

“We need a capital works revolution, so new money printed must be directed to wealth generating capital such as infrastructure for water, power and transport. The only limit for the issue of new credit will be governed by our creativity and ability to deploy and reskill our labour force to build the physical economy.

“We must deploy monetary policy around real constraints in the physical world—not an obsession around balancing paper money, which has no intrinsic worth at all. We only use money because bartering is unworkable in an advanced economy.

“Under the present private central banking system, money printing is directed to financial speculation and bailouts for the banksters. This has caused inflation, slashing our living standards—actually massive hyperinflation, as evidenced in the $17 trillion of derivatives held by Australia’s banks.

“Money printing under National Banking won’t create inflation because it must only be directed into wealth generating capital. As we grow our physical assets, the additional new paper money will be required in circulation anyway because of our increased productive capacity.

“Taxation is still required to service non-capital expenditure for the general welfare in areas such as health, education and pension payments. However, with National Banking and a growing physical economy, we will have more well-paid skilled workers contributing to government revenue ensuring government can fulfil its general welfare obligation.

“Join the CEC”, Isherwood concluded, “and fight for this National Banking principle.”