What is this “the market” you speak of, if not a series of government grants and privileges?
Without the Treasury honoring the Federal Reserve’s obligations, there is no “the market.”
You want competing currencies? Get a time machine and go west. We tried it. It sucked. Every other day another bank went bust, and took a whole bunch of worthless currency and overhyped bullion promises with it. Turns out private sector currency manipulation makes Keynesian governments look like boyscouts.
So we tried to print all our own public currency at the Federal level, and that didn’t work so well either. Well.. a big part of the problem was that we ended up in the middle of a crazy civil war, so maybe we should also remember that two governments operating with purely public and purely fiat currencies were able to raise the largest industrial-era armies the world had ever seen. Just imagine if they had skipped the war and gone straight to building railroads?
But alas, the public currency died at the demands of the British financiers who made loans to our shattered republic in the aftermath of destruction. They insisted we abandon our current corporate regulations to adopt their concepts of limited liability and government sponsored cartels that evolved directly from the hereditary privileges of those aristocrats chartered to do the crown’s royal business. Upon securing favorable loan and regulatory terms with the U.S. Congress, they funneled huge sums of cash to Rockefeller, Morgan, and other would-be “barons” who could successfully corner and monopolize essential industries.
The restoration of the financial nobility’s control over America was set to be codified in 1913, but there was just one fatal flaw in the Federal Reserve System: It was too effective.
By 1929, consolidation of the nation’s wealth and inequality had reached such a peak that it made 1850’s slave plantations look like a bunch of egalitarian hippy communes.
But a strong economy can’t exist unless a lot of people have discretionary income: When you consolidate all of the country’s capital, no one has anything left to spend. Sure, you can build an incredible palace here or there, but the rest of the economy collapses and you end up with pissed off peasants at Blair Mountain or something.
So we came up with one more solution in the 1940s. It was incredible. It put every other innovation to shame.
We kept the effectiveness and price stability of the Federal Reserve System, but we stripped it of the rich-right wing WASP conspiracy to “get as fucking rich as possible and fuck everyone else” by recovering a large part of the profits of those who were most able to manipulate it for their own benefit.
We took that money and we built transportation networks and schools that were the envy of the world! And you know what happened next? Those kids growing up in those schools grew up to know a lot of stuff about how to build stuff and make even more money! The economy boomed! We went to the goddamn *moon*!
Since then? Well, a lot of the banks attached to those old names, Chase-Rockefeller, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs… well, they own everything again. The economy’s shit. The peasants are getting pissed off, and they’ll probably only continue blaming the Muslims for so long…