Pages

▼

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Douglas Mallette saves Hip Hop

Friday, October 29, 2010

Let the poop throwing begin


Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Peter Joseph being a Socialist

                                  transition = socialism ?
Mixed-messages from Peter


Saturday, October 23, 2010

Seeing Like a State

Seeing Like a State: Why Zeitgeists World-Changing Visions Are A Recipe For Disaster

2010 OCTOBER 23
Posted by Muertos
I’ve blogged several times before about the Zeitgeist Movement.  This bizarre organization, based almost exclusively on the Internet and spawned from the Zeitgeist series of Internet films, is primarily aimed at spreading conspiracy theories, but another objective of the movement is to implement a total top-down reordering of society along the lines of a neo-utopian vision called the Venus Project.  In this blog I’m not going to take on the conspiracy aspects of the Zeitgeist Movement, because I think I’ve covered that topic well already.  Instead, I’m going to discuss their utopian ideology, a subject which hasn’t interested me much in the past; however, a book I read recently did a fantastic job of articulating and fleshing out the doubts I always had about the Zeitgeisters’ ambitious plans for humanity’s future.  Therefore, in this blog I intend to explain why the Zeitgeist Movement/Venus Project’s utopian vision for the future of humanity is, at best, doomed never to get off the ground, and at worst is a recipe for a catastrophe that could potentially claim millions of lives.
First, the basic background.  In the 1970s Jacque Fresco, who bills himself as an “industrial designer,” came up with what he thought was a great idea for human progress: let’s all live in specially-designed circular cities and put computers in charge of the world to distribute resources according to the scientific method.  Since the seventies, and particularly since Fresco fell in with Zeitgeist director and conspiracy theorist Peter Joseph Merola, Fresco and his followers have championed what they call a “resource-based economy” (RBE).  We’ll all be happier, say Merola and Fresco, abolishing our horrible “money system” and living in an RBE.  All needs will be met, all wants pacified, and all desires fulfilled—by robots and computers.  It’s difficult to find a group of utopians with bigger cajones than the Zeitgeist Movement.
In 1998 James C. Scott, a professor who specializes in agrarian studies with a sociological bent, published a ground-breaking book called Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.  (You can find it on Amazon here).  This book, which commanded a great deal of attention from sociologists, agriculturalists, and historians, examines a few of the great social engineering disasters of the 20th century, including Stalin’s forced collectivization in Russia in the 1930s and the Quixotic plan of a dictator in Tanzania in the 1970s to relocate most of his population to efficient, government-run farm villages.  In Seeing Like a State, Scott analyzes the causes of these failures, which are naturally complex but they can be boiled down to a few common elements.  The most important element is what Scott refers to as “high modernist ideology,” which he defines thusly:
“[High modernism] is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.  It originated, of course, in the West, as a by-product of unprecedented progress in science and technology.”
This definition describes the Zeitgeist Movement/Venus Project perfectly.  The departure point of Zeitgeisters’ belief system—aside from conspiracy theories, of course—is the assumption that all the material needs of the world’s people can be provided at our current level of technology, if only we change our social and economic system to allow it.  Zeitgeisters embody Scott’s definition of high modernist ideology in several interesting ways.  First, there is the blind and virtually unquestioning acceptance of the concept of superabundance, which Zeitgeisters believe is technologically created.  Second, Zeitgeisters’ ideology explicitly refers to the “scientific method,” which they say is the bedrock of how their system will organize the world.  Thirdly, they insist that human nature is mutable and will be subordinated to ideology in an RBE order.  Finally, their visions—lavishly illustrated in artist’s depictions of circular cities and YouTube videos—unabashedly wallow in technological and aesthetic fetishism.  Any one of their designs could have been torn from a sketchbook from the 1930s film Things To Come, depicting a utopian future world where denizens of an automated city are pampered by ubiquitous machinery.
Scott’s analysis, however, does not bode well for high modernist projects.  The thesis of Seeing Like a State is that high modernist ideology ignores the complexity, expansiveness, and functional chaos of systems and social structures that develop organically—such as our “money system” that Zeitgeisters want to abolish.  In simpler terms, high modernist projects are doomed to fail because they are profoundly naïve about human behavior, institutions and culture.  High modernists simply assume that people and their behaviors can be neatly crammed into well-ordered boxes that will operate efficiently.  Their contempt for the idea of human nature is a by-product of this myopia.  History shows, however, that these types of projects always fail.  When a high modernist project is undertaken by an authoritarian state, such as the Soviet Union under Stalin, the zeal to achieve unrealistic goals combined with the state’s increasing efforts to streamline the process often results in death and suffering on a colossal scale.
Let’s take an example, one that doesn’t involve mass murder: the city of Brasília.  In the 1950s, the government of Brazil was eager to forge a totally new capital city, one that would be functional, efficient, beautiful and above all ultra-modern.  The government cleared a tract of jungle in the interior and went right to work, utilizing the best city planners who envisioned broad open squares, spacious apartment buildings, and easy access of the city’s residents (mostly government bureaucrats) to places of work as well as cultural facilities.  When it opened in 1960, Brasília was the most modern and remarkable city on the globe.
Sounds great, right?  Well, not so much.  In fact Brasília was a dismal failure.  No one congregates in the broad open squares because there’s nothing to do there—no shops, no places of social interaction, no reason to go there other than to be there.  Everyone hates the apartment buildings because they’re bland, blocky and utterly devoid of any sort of character.  Traffic is a nightmare because the streets are all highways designed for a single purpose: to take people from their homes to workplaces.  There are no side streets, no neighborhoods, none of the character of an urban city.  As a result, Brasília’s residents are frustrated and depressed, and the place has the reputation of being bleak and oppressive, like Batman’s Gotham City if it were designed by Ayn Rand’s fictional architect Howard Roarke.  High modernist planning certainly failed the people of Brasília.
Another and more sinister example: Stalin’s forced collectivization.  In the late 1920s, Stalin wanted to modernize the Soviet Union and streamline its process of agricultural production, thus ending Russia’s age-old problems of feeding itself.  (He also wanted to crush the peasant class, but that’s beside the point).  His high modernism was administrative in nature, involving lumping all the peasants in a village together in one commune with specific production quotas.  The project was a disaster on a virtually genocidal scale.  Millions of people starved to death between 1929 and 1934, and when Stalin’s quotas weren’t met, brutal repression and crackdown were the result.  The Soviet state was ideologically incapable of recognizing that its high modernist ideology simply couldn’t replace the culture, micro-economies and behavior patterns of Russian peasants.  In a conflict between those peasants and ideology, the peasants paid the price.  The soil of Russia today is littered with their bones.
What does this all have to do with the Zeitgeist Movement?  Just this: Zeitgeist wants the entire human race to adopt a high modernist ideology regarding the production and distribution of resources. Peter Merola’s and Jacque Fresco’s plans for the future are far grander than Brasília or even the collectivization of Stalin’s peasant masses.  Zeitgeisters demand nothing less than radical transformation of the entire earth.  Not that this goal will ever come even remotely within their reach, but Scott’s book very clearly explains why the goal itself is naïve, misguided and ultimately dangerous.  It’s the ultimate pinnacle of high modernist folly, and would invariably collapse into a disaster so bloody and chaotic that it would make Stalin’s forced collectivization look benign by comparison.
Scott explains how high modernist projects almost invariably tempt authoritarian measures in their implementation:
“First and foremost, high modernism implies a truly radical break with history and tradition.All human habits and practices that were inherited and hence not based on scientific reasoningfrom the structure of the family and patterns of residence to moral values and forms of productionwould have to be reexamined and redesigned
The sources of this view are deeply authoritarian. If a planned social order is better than the accidental, irrational deposit of historical practice, two conclusions follow. Only those who have the scientific knowledge to discern and create this superior social order are fit to rule in the new age. Further, those who through retrograde ignorance refuse to yield to the new scientific plan need to be educated to its benefits or else swept aside.”
If the Zeitgeisters ever got their way, this would be the inevitable result.  The change they envision for society is so massive, so sweeping and so total that the only way it could ever be implemented would be by force—probably by the force of a large authoritarian government or perhaps multi-national coalition.  To be fair, Zeitgeisters do not now advocate the use of force to achieve their Resource Based Economy, at least so far as I know.  Also, do not misunderstand me as stating that I think Zeitgeisters intend a bloody result to their designs; clearly they don’t.  However, it’s plain that the temptation to use force to achieve their goals lies on the other side of the inevitable realization that a Resource Based Economy isn’t going to happen by itself and that it’s not likely to be adopted voluntarily by significant sectors of the world’s population.  As in Stalin’s Russia, the ideology will inevitably be valued over the people who resist it, whether they resist willingly or by accident.  Zeitgeisters already operate with disturbing ease in the realm of “ends justify the means” arguments—just ask one why it’s justifiable to push demonstrably false conspiracy theories in the service of talking up a Resource Based Economy and you will experience this phenomenon.
Even without the addition of an authoritarian implementation, the Zeitgeisters’ RBE model is a recipe for mass suffering.  High modernist projects that attempt to tinker with peoples’ basic means of food and sustenance are particularly dangerous, because even slight mistakes in the ideological model of distribution usually translate into starving bellies somewhere.  One can easily imagine the RBE model failing to supply food and necessities because the high modernists who thought it up have done so without regard to the way our organic and chaotic system of resource management—imperfect as it clearly is—actually works on the ground.  Zeitgeisters would be reluctant to undermine their own ideology by allowing the old “money system” economics to backstop their bold plans for fear that people would come to rely on the backstopping and that ultimately nothing would change.  Here again the temptation to ignore or rationalize mass suffering to avoid admitting ideological failure is probably irresistible.  Even without any nefarious designs, therefore, the Zeitgeist program for a better world is ominous.
High modernist projects fail because they fundamentally devalue organically-created social structures, and they invariably victimize people because this process of devaluation is, in itself, profoundly dehumanizing.  In high modernist schemes the residents of Brasília, the peasants of 1930s Russia or the farmers of Tanzania are reduced to nothing more than interchangeable cogs in a gigantic machine, designed by people who profess to know better and who demand compliance with their better way.  This is the essence of the Zeitgeist Movement’s social vision for the future.  The pretty pictures of circular cities and neatly-trimmed parks and gardens look great in YouTube videos, but they do not show the profound suffering and staggering human cost that adopting such a lifestyle would necessarily entail.  They don’t show those things because Zeitgeisters are fundamentally incapable of conceiving that their ideology could have that effect.  They’re as blind as the overzealous architects, city planners and Soviet revolutionaries described in Seeing Like a State.  Given the colossal scale of Zeitgeist’s designs, their dangerous naïvete far outstrips any of those examples.
Fortunately, in the real world we don’t have to worry about Zeitgeisters implementing their designs, because they’ll never get anywhere close to achieving them.  Zeitgeist is a fringe movement existing mostly on the Internet.  Oddly, its internal cohesion seems to owe more to its reliance on conspiracy theories than on any conscious unification behind the RBE concept (despite what many of its followers say to the contrary).  Not a single economist, sociologist or government official, to my knowledge, has associated him or herself with the Zeitgeist Movement.  The leader of the movement, Peter Joseph Merola, holds no position of power and isn’t likely to in the future.  But it’s worth thinking about why the Zeitgeist Movement’s defective ideology, and other schemes like it that will invariably be proposed in the future, hold attraction for some people.  High modernist plans have been with us for a long time and will probably continue to be implemented in the future—and they will fail as spectacularly, and often as bloodily, as the past schemes detailed in Seeing Like a State.  What we can learn from these failures, and from Scott’s book, is how to recognize these projects when some future politician, revolutionary or industrial designer proposes them and demands we follow them.  Analyzing the failure of such past schemes arms us with invaluable knowledge on how to resist future ones.  In that sense, Seeing Like a State is a very important book, and one that deserves to be read by anyone who, like the Zeitgeisters, dreams of a bold new future for humanity.  They may learn that the infinitesimal chances of success of such bold futures often come at an appalling and tragic human cost.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Jacque Fresco's cringy "Queer" philosophy


Thursday, October 14, 2010

Peter Joseph gives advice to TZM Members

Two Quick Points

 peterjoseph:
Hello everyone,
I wanted to go through two quick things that I keep seeing around the Internet from both people promoting the movement and denying the movement.

The First Point:
Stop talking about robots and mechanization as though it is THE defining feature of a resource-based economy.

A resource-based economy in and of itself has absolutely nothing to do with mechanization. You will notice that in my second lecture I don't make any comments about mechanization in detail.
Why? Because the system could work perfectly well without mechanization if the values shifted accordingly. A resource-based economy is about resource management and then the re-organizing of labor to be as optimized as possible once the monetary system is removed -- meaning nobody would be forced/enslaved into meaningless occupations which do not have a social role, directly. 

So -- if you encounter somebody who says the zeitgeist movement/the venus project is about robots doing everything, do not defend mechanization or anything else. Simply state that mechanization has nothing to do with a resource-based economy in and of itself - rather it is a natural consequence of technological evolution to apply mechanization -it is applied efficiency. The resource-based economy simply carries the trend forward in a more liberal way.

Second point:
When you break it all down -- the only real argument anyone can come up against the movement is the idea that "human nature" will not allow for such a system regardless of how sustainable because there will always be people who want to "abuse you" or whatever. This is classic capitalist free-market/religious propaganda where the illusion is created that anything outside of belligerent self interest as the driving mechanism will generate serfdom and despotic forms of so-called socialism. This is the modus operandi of many subcultures now who have no understanding of anything outside of an old, outdated religious world that views human beings as defined internally and possibly "evil". This is obviously total bullshit and nothing in the world of behavioral science shows such a "non-causal" predisposition. Nothing. 

Understanding this -- a resource-based economy defines itself and has no relationship to human society at all in its empirical approach. It does not matter how many human beings there are -- it does not matter how distorted the social climate may be -- it does not matter how many resources there are on the planet -- it does not matter how scarce water is --etc.--the tenants of a resource-based economy still holds true, regardless. The methodology is always the same.

From the standpoint of evolution, I find it extremely improbable that we humans have a "nature" which will not allow us to achieve optimized sustainability on this planet. This is like saying that there is an intrinsic flaw within the human organism which will not allow for it to progress and hence it will self-destruct regardless. It is preprogrammed... there is no evidence for this and again it is extremely improbable.

So- keep those two quick issues in mind as they repeat over and over again out there. I'll add more as they arise.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Peter Joseph's insane Pokemon rant

Saturday, October 9, 2010

VTV is all alone

Collections

VTV deletes his female wrestler porn stash

More voiceofreason yahoo sex chats with some girls 3

Peter Joseph on hate groups

 
"Friends,
Below is a recent correspondence I had.
After responding I thought it might be good to post. My response is after."
P

-------- Original Message --------

 Subject: Hate Groups

Date: Sat, October 09, 2010 7:36 am
"Hi Peter,
I'm sorry to bother you and I have heard some talks about some of the issues your audio show but I wanted to ask you about how we should deal with the people who have websites and forums and post hate speech/lies/video towards the movement, the venus project and even yourself. I recently saw Zeitgeist Addendum and decided to join- i think it is the only direction that makes sense. But, while doing research I found an array of just insane lunatic people that really kinda scared me. I found people who say you are a communist satanist which is pushing satanism on one side... while on another side there are these groups which seem to hate anything without reason the zeitgeist movement does and they post mockery videos/blogs which make no sense at all. Is this the government? I have also been visiting forums such as infowars and they seem to make things up out of thin air with regard to the movement and you. Alex Jones, who has a large following has even gone so far as to call you and the group NWO, which I found to be incredible. I recently emailed him but got no response.
I'm sorry if you have heard all this before but i wanted to know if there was any campaign to fight against these disinfo groups. In the end, I have full faith in the movement and none of this distracts me, but I think others might be turned off if they don't know any better or haven't done their homework. thoughts?"
Regards,
Scott

 >>>>>>>>>>>>>
"Scott,

 There is no intention by myself or The Movement as a whole to counter the public display/propaganda issues you have denoted. You have to understand the distorted value paradigm we share at this stage of social evolution and also realize the intense strength of the understanding, intent and hence direction of TZM.
While I used to be bothered by the hate sites/posts/videos and the like, I have found that they are now working in our favor. The general public overall really isn't as stupid and misinformed as the people who produce those propaganda communications think they are. [And no, I doubt it has anything to do with the Government- This is coming from the Self-Appointed Guardians of the Status Quo along with people who have created a grudge against The Movement/Myself for various meaningless personal reasons that have no resolution by their actions]

 Those videos and blogs are closed in their view for the most part and serve to satisfy the disenfranchised/confused few who have the deranged need to condemn others for the sake of their own confidence/beliefs/ego. They make them for each other. You will notice that none of the propagandists actually speak of any aspect of The Movement --- they only attack myself in foundation-less ways; make up lies; create erroneous comparisons and the like. They never, ever address the materials and direction - and that proves, inherently, the falsity and feebleness of their sadly self-preserving intent.

 I get many emails from people who actually start their journey to TZM with the films, then they pass through the sea of Debunkers and Hatefilled blogs and videos, only to arrive in full-force interest in our direction. It isn't working and never did. Alex Jones, for example, can't even talk straight when he brings up TZM - he just babbles in arbitrary negative rhetoric.

 The issue is simple: The detractors have nothing and will never have anything. The train of thought which arrives at the need for a RBE is self-evident - You want to live? You need resources and hence they need to be managed - and hence society needs to be based around them - period. And this direction is currently being reinforced by the failure of the Social System itself which we have been predicting with extreme accuracy. It is simply a matter of time before the tides turn and the masses realize that their survival is, in fact, contingent upon this new sustainable direction.

 So- don't let the small things get to you. Stay focused on the big picture. These pathetic attacks are just the beginning of the real attacks that will occur from the mainstream establishment once this idea hits wide.

 ...you haven't seen anything yet!

 Take Care"
~P

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Dr. Gary North calls out Ellen Brown

Ellen Brown's Web of Debt Is an Anti-Gold Currency, Pro-Fiat Money, Greenback, Keynesian Tract. Here, I Take It Apart, Error by Error.

Gary North

Ellen Brown is the only person in America who could profitably study economics under Paul Krugman.

She built her reputation among naive conservatives as an opponent of the Federal Reserve System. Then in 2010 she switched sides.

I finished my critique of her -- which you can read here -- on November 17, 2010. On November 20, she came out in favor of Bernanke, the Federal Reserve System, and quantitative easing.

Hard to believe? Read it here: //www.garynorth.com/public/7286.cfm

In 2019, she became an open supporter of the Democrats. She published this on Truthdig: "Democrats Can Have Their Progressive Policies and Pay for Them Too."

I spent almost 200 hours over a two-month period refuting this left-wing lawyer, line by line. I said repeatedly that she is intellectually unreliable. She has just proved my case. She has joined the Federal Reserve's cheerleaders.

On November 24, 2010, she followed up with a long article in praise of quantitative easing. She said quantitative easing is the Populist solution. It took me 52 articles and 30 responses, but I finally flushed her out.

In January 2019, she came out in support of government funding of the greens' agenda for energy. She praised the German government's KfW bank. The government owns this bank. She thinks the U.S. government should set up such a bank and adopt such a policy. You can read her article here. She did not discuss this crucial aspect of the bank. The bank's funding shifts capital from consumers in a free market to the beneficiaries: investors in green-friendly manufacturing firms that require government subsidies: bank loans at below-market rates.

Ellen Brown has been a statist all along. This merely became more visible after I wrote this series of articles.

Therefore, the following is ancient history. Here is what this department originally said.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Ellen Brown is devoting her life to a cause. She wants Congress to take over the printing presses and provide 100% of America's money: fiat money, with no gold or silver backing.

She says that if we allow this, Congress can then:

1. Get rid of the income tax
2. Pay off the national debt
3. Pay off Social Security
4. Without any price inflation

To see what she believes in, click here:

//www.garynorth.com/public/7270.cfm

Is she nuts, or what?

Her 2007 book, The Web of Debt, became a best-seller within the Patriot movement. This indicates the extraordinary intellectual vulnerability of the Patriot movement. Its members cannot distinguish conservatism from radical leftism. This book promotes the following:

The Populist economics of America's far Left
A vast expansion of Federal government welfare
Pure fiat money: printing press money
Total Federal government control over money: "Obama dollars"
Legal tender laws that force people to accept Obama dollars
The American Civil War as a great engine of economic growth
Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal as a great economic program
The gold coin standard as a terrible evil that restrains the state

Ellen Brown is the latest in a long line of pro-fiat money, anti-gold currency, monetary statists who have infiltrated the conservative movement.

They have accomplished this for over 50 years by the tactic of wrapping themselves in a flag of opposition to the Federal Reserve System. I call them false-flag infiltrators. I have written about them here:

False-Flag Infiltrators

False-flag infiltrators are remnants of a left-wing American political movement of the late 19th century: the Greenbackers, named after the green currency issued by the North during the Civil War. These paper bills were unbacked by gold. Consumer prices rose by 75%, 1861-65. The Greenbackers were opposed to the gold standard because it kept prices low. They wanted the government to inflate the currency, so that debtors could pay off their debts with cheap money.

They had a small political party for almost two decades, the Greenback Party. It 1878, it merged with a labor Party to become the Greenback Labor Party. It went out of existence after 1888. Its main leader, James Weaver, co-founded the Populist (People's) Party in 1891. It was a farm-bloc party that promoted fiat money in order to let farmers pay their debts with cheap money and also because they thought inflation would raise farm products' prices more than the prices of other goods.

There was never any question of the Greenbackers' politics. They were leftists, and openly sided with government controls on the economy.

Brown praises these left-wing parties on page 13 of Web of Debt. She writes: "They advocated expanding the national currency to meet the needs of trade, reform of the banking system, and democratic control of the financial system." In short, they preached what she preaches.

This woman is no conservative.

The Populist movement went out of existence after 1896, after the anti-central bank, anti-gold standard, radical leftist William Jennings Bryan failed to beat William McKinley for President the first time. He failed again in 1900. The last pro-gold standard Democrat lost to Teddy Roosevelt in 1904. Bryan got one more shot in 1908. He lost. From then on, both political parties were pro-central bank.

The Greenbackers were without any political party after 1896. So, they switched strategies. They allied themselves with the anti-Federal Reserve movement. In the 1930s, the main voice was Father Charles Coughlin, an anti-Semitic radio preacher who was a Greenbacker. His outlook was clear. He was a leftist. He wrote:

We maintain the principle that there can be no lasting prosperity if free competition exists in industry. Therefore, it is the business of government not only to legislate for a minimum annual wage and maximum working schedule to be observed by industry, but also to curtail individualism that, if necessary, factories shall be licensed and their output shall be limited.

When his bishop forced him to quit writing or speaking on politics in 1942, the Greenbackers were left without a major spokesman.

Another Greenback author in the 1930s was Gertrude Coogan. Her books remain in print. She was never known outside of Greenback circles. I have written a free minibook refuting her ideas (and therefore also Brown's): Gertrude Coogan's Bluff.

After 1952, they gained an outlet when The American Mercury went Greenbacker and anti-Semitic. In a series of articles, later released as a booklet, Money Made Mysterious (1959), the Mercury presented the Greenback case. This magazine was on the extreme Right. One of its occasional authors was the American Nazi Party founder, George Lincoln Rockwell.

Greenbackers began to infiltrate the John Birch Society after 1964, because the JBS switched from anti-Communism to anti-conspiracy and anti-Federal Reserve at the end of 1964 with the publication of Robert Welch's book, More Stately Mansions. They were not successful. Gary Allen, American Opinion's main author on the banking issue, believed in the gold standard. He was a follower of me on the money question, and I follow Rothbard.

They have remained inside the far Right, but they are still Populist radicals, still in favor of pure fiat money, which they call "sovereign money." For a list of about three dozen books by Greenbackers over the last 80 years, click here. Ellen Brown today is their leading author. She begins her book by tracing her ideas back to the Populists.

I am devoting this department to a line-by-line refutation of her book, The Web of Debt, and to occasional responses to her website, www.WebofDebt.com.

I have good news. You do not have to buy her book in order to verify my direct quotations from her book. Google has reproduced 90% of the book. You can read most of it online. Access it here.

Ellen Brown is a lawyer, not an economist. For the sake of her clients, I hope she is a better lawyer than she is a monetary economist and monetary historian. I surely hope she is a better lawyer than she is an historian.

Ellen Brown is a Keynesian, a mercantilist, and a left-wing Populist who promotes the construction of a Federal welfare state by means of fiat money. She is quite clear about what she wants from the Federal government.

The availability of funds for a whole range of government services that have always been needed but could not be afforded under the "fractional reserve" system, including improved education, environmental cleanup and preservation, universal healthcare, restoration of infrastructure, independent medical research, and development of alternative energy sources. [Web of Debt, p. 458.]

This is Nancy Pelosi's vision for America. Is it yours?

Ellen Brown is also the least competent amateur historian I have ever encountered, supporting her entire case for fiat money with bogus quotations. I have devoted two sections of this site to her errors:

Historical Errors
Economic Errors

Anyone who supports what she supports would be wise not to quote her again, and to remove all previous references to her in his writings. There is a real possibility that the the brighter followers of these people will contact them and ask: "How can you defend your position by using anything as bad as The Web of Debt? It's one string of falsehoods, beginning on page one and stretching to page 478." I offer this warning:

The Prophet Isaiah warned the Israelites not to flee the Assyrian empire by fleeing to Egypt. He referred to Egypt as a broken reed (Isa. 36:6). Ellen Brown is a broken reed. Do not flee to her book to support your Populist nostrums.

This infiltration has gone on long enough. 

Historical Response #1: Ellen Brown Believes That Verifying the Accuracy of a Source Is Not Important.

Gary North - October 07, 2010

Here is her first point in response to my criticism of a bogus quote from Sir Josiah Stamp. Here is my article:

//www.garynorth.com/public/6871.cfm

Here is her response:

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

1. A bogus quote from Sir Josiah Stamp on the Bank of England

Here is what I wrote, giving an endnote for reference: "He is quoted as saying in a talk at the University of Texas in 1927: [etc.]" (p 2) He IS quoted as saying that, by many people. Google gives 68,000 results.

This is simply incredible. I proved that there is no evidence for the existence of her supposed speech by Stamp. I pointed to the Wikipedia entry on Stamp. Here, we learn this: "Said to be from an informal talk at the University of Texas in the 1920s, but as yet unverified." But this does not matter to Ellen Brown. What matters to her is that she quoted someone who had not verified it -- a 1995 article in an obscure magazine. What matters is that 68,000 Google hits posted by an innumerable army of crackpot Greenbackers quoted it.

This is not scholarship. This is putting the shuck on the rubes. Her readers are the rubes.

This woman is the Greenbackers' #1 scholar. The movement is intellectually defenseless.

Historical Response #2: Ellen Brown Thinks That by Quoting Herself Again, But Without Responding to My Evidence, She Has Refuted Me.

Ellen Brown replies to my citations from Jefferson's writings, especially his letter to Eppes (which she cited incompletely) which show he hated paper money. She replies by merely by quoting herself, but not mentioning my citations that show the opposite.

Here is my original article:

//www.garynorth.com/public/6872.cfm

Here is her response.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

2. Jefferson was a promoter of unbacked paper money.

Here is what I wrote, and I believe it is correct:

It would be several decades before Jefferson realized that the villain was not paper money itself. It was private debt masquerading as paper money, a private debt owed to bankers who were merely "pretending to have money." Jefferson wrote to Treasury Secretary Gallatin in 1815:

The treasury, lacking confidence in the country, delivered itself bound hand and foot to bold and bankrupt adventurers and bankers pretending to have money, whom it could have crushed at any moment.

Jefferson wrote to John Taylor on May 28, 1816:

I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

Jefferson wrote to John Eppes in 1813, "Although we have so foolishly allowed the field of circulating medium to be filched from us by private individuals, I think we may recover it . . . . The states should be asked to transfer the right of issuing paper money to Congress, in perpetuity." He told Eppes, "the nation may continue to issue its bills [paper notes] as far as its needs require and the limits of circulation allow. Those limits are understood at present to be 200 millions of dollars."

Here is what Jefferson wrote to Eppes, which I cited in my article:

"Specie is the most perfect medium because it will preserve its own level; because, having intrinsic and universal value, it can never die in our hands, and it is the surest resource of reliance in time of war." . . . .

"The trifling economy of paper, as a cheaper medium, or its convenience for transmission, weighs nothing in opposition to the advantages of the precious metals... it is liable to be abused, has been, is, and forever will be abused, in every country in which it is permitted."

These statements refute her argument that Jefferson accepted the idea of unbacked paper money. She did not respond to this information. Why not? Because there is no possible way to interpret his statements that would be consistent with her assertion regarding his views. Anyone can see what he wrote.

She is a lawyer. Imagine this scene. Her client is accused of theft. In her opening statement to the jury, she declares: "My client is innocent. He was never at the scene of the crime. He has an alibi. He was with his friend at 6 p.m. until 7:45 p.m."

During the trial, the prosecuting attorney argues as follows: "His witness has testified, 'At 7:45 p.m., I drove him to the liquor store. Then I drove home.' We also have a time-stamped video of her client robbing the liquor store at 8 p.m." He shows the jury the video.

In her final summation, Brown tells the jury: "I have proven that my client was with his friend between 6 p.m. and 7:45 p.m. He could not possibly have robbed the liquor store." She does not refer to the additional statement from the witness. She does not mention the time-stamped video.

Her client will go to jail.

Why? Because she is treating the jury as if they were a bunch of rubes. "They won't remember any of the evidence. They will remember only what I tell them."

Historical Response #3: Ellen Brown Now Calls Lincoln a "Reluctant Greenbacker." She Has Backed Off Almost Entirely from Her Book.

The main historical myth of the Greenbacker movement is the myth of Abraham Lincoln as a Greenbacker. The Greenbacks are called "Lincoln Money." There is a 1935 Greenbacker book, Lincoln Money Martyred.

I showed in my response to Brown that this is a myth. He hated the Greenbacks. When he signed the 1863 issue of Greenbacks, he wrote to Congress, telling Congress to stop passing these laws. Instead, he called for a new national banking act. That was in January 1863. In February, Congress sent him the National Bank Act, and he signed it.

Ellen Brown writes in her response to my critique:

3. Lincoln promoted debt-free paper money.

Here is what I wrote, which I believe is true; I agree he was a reluctant Greenbacker:

The Greenback system was not actually Lincoln's idea, but when pressure grew in Congress for the plan, he was quick to endorse it. . . . He took the revolutionary approach because he had no other real choice. The government could either print its own money or succumb to debt slavery to the bankers.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

So, she "agrees" with me that he was a "reluctant" Greenbacker. This of course completely misrepresents my position. I did not say that he was a reluctant Greenbacker. I said he opposed the idea and finally demanded that Congress not send any Greenback legislation to him. He handed the country's finances over to Jim Cooke's bank in 1861, and in 1863, he finalized this with the National Bank Act.

She cites her book's statement that the Greenbacks were not his idea. This is disingenuous on her part. She deliberately misleads the reader. The Greenbacks were not only not Lincoln's idea, he opposed them. There was not a hint in her book of Lincoln's refusal to sign any more Greenbacker legislation. Lincoln was in the hip pocket of the bankers, contrary to Brown and the Greenbackers. I provided the evidence of this in my critique of her book. As usual, she has refused to respond to my evidence. See for yourself what I wrote.

//www.garynorth.com/public/6875.cfm

Here is what she wrote in her book:

Popularly called "Greenbacks," these federal dollars were first issued by President Lincoln when he was faced with usurious interest rates in the 1860s. Lincoln had foiled the bankers by funding the government with U.S. Notes that did not accrue interest and did not have to be paid back to the banks. [Web of Debt, p. 15]

That is not all that she wrote.

America had narrowly escaped the fate of the Irish, Indians and China only because President Lincoln had stood up to the bankers, rejecting their usurious loans in favor of government-issued Greenbacks. [Web of Debt, p. 224]

She never mentioned his support of the National Bank Act of 1863. She self-consciously ignores this in her response to my critique. She cannot respond to my critique -- Lincoln as an opponent of the Greenbacks -- without undermining her book. So, she simply ignores my evidence.

This is not scholarship. This is also not intellectually honest. Ellen Brown is an unreliable author.

Historical Error #4: Ellen Brown Denies That She Ever Told a Tall Tale About a Tax-Free, Fiat-Money, Colonial Pennsylvania.

Think of Ellen Brown in front of a jury. The opposing counsel tells the jury that point four in her 52-point presentation was not true. In response, she says: (1) "I never said it"; (2) "Besides, it's true."

She did say it, and it isn't true.

The point in question is colonial taxation at the province level in pre-1755 Pennsylvania. This example is crucial for her book's main thesis. Her book argues that it is possible to avoid Federal income taxes, debt, and inflation by having the Federal government issue unbacked paper money: Greenbacks. She never explains why only the Federal government has this ability to create wealth out of paper and ink. Why not all levels of government? I shall cover this in detail later in this article.

She said in her book that colonial Pennsylvania achieved this goal: avoiding having to impose taxes. How? By issuing fiat money. Problem: it was a mere colony. There was no national government. If a colony has the right to avoid taxation by issuing fiat money, why not a state? A county? A city? She needs to offer an explanation. She never does.

In any case, her historical example does not hold up. That was what I argued in my article. Here is her response:

4. Colonial Pennsylvania avoided taxes by issuing paper money.

I did not say that. You have mischaracterized my statement, and your link does not show that they paid any taxes.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

So, she insists, she did not say this. Did not say what? She doesn't say. So, she insists, I have "mischaracterized" her statement. In what way did I "mischaracterize" her statement? She doesn't say.

Here is what I wrote:

Ellen Brown makes this amazing claim:

From 1723 until the French and Indian War in the 1750s, the provincial government collected no taxes at all. The loan office was the province's chief source of revenue, supplemented by import duties on liquor. During this period, Pennsylvania wholesale prices remained stable. [Web of Debt, p. 39]

What do you make of her statement here? Did she say that the government collected no taxes? Yes. "From 1723 until the French and Indian War in the 1750s, the provincial government collected no taxes at all." Did she contradict this in the next sentence? Yes. "The loan office was the province's chief source of revenue, supplemented by import duties on liquor."

Here is what I wrote in my original article.

Second, there were import duties. Import duties are sales taxes on imported goods. She says these revenues were supplemental. She offers no evidence.

I listed several other mistakes in her analysis. This was my final point:

Seventh -- not a mistake, but deadly for her theory of sovereign money issued by the government -- these paper bills were not legally money. She relies on Alvin Rabushka's 2004 article, "Representation Without Taxation," to make her case. But Rabushka was clear: "From a legal standpoint, colonial paper money was not official paper money. The British government did not allow colonial governments to issue official paper money, mint coins, or even establish local note-issuing private banks."

THE CENTRAL THESIS OF HER BOOK

She used the example of pre-Revolutionary colonial Pennsylvania as an example to support her thesis that government-issued paper money is (1) a substitute for taxation and (2) noninflationary. Here is what she wrote:

The Pennsylvania faction favored a bank on the model established in provincial Pennsylvania, where a state loan office issued and lent money, collected the interest, and returned it to the provincial government to be used in place of taxes. [Web of Debt, p. 8]

As I showed in my original article, the expert whom she cited about colonial Pennsylvania's land loans, economic historian Alvin Rabushka, expressly denied that these loans were money. This leaves her out in the cold. She cited no other example in all of human history of a government that used fiat paper money in lieu of taxation. This was her only proof. This proof collapses as soon as it can be shown -- and it was -- that the land office loans were not money.

Here is what I wrote in my original article:

But this example does not support her case. It was not legally money, and eventually there was inflation from the issue of these loans. For Greenbackers, money that is not lawful money -- issued by a government -- is not money, as she argues constantly. This example disproves her thesis, for this was not lawful money.

//www.garynorth.com/public/6881.cfm

She is quite clear in her book about colonial Pennsylvania before 1755. First, the loan office lent money. (It didn't; the bills were not money.) Second, interest was collected. (Red alert! Red alert! These were loans! Interest was paid! Interest is therefore both legitimate and normal!) Third, these interest payments substituted for taxes. (Then what does the word "supplemented" mean, as in "The loan office was the province's chief source of revenue, supplemented by import duties on liquor.")

Let me spell this out in greater detail. Here is her book's revolutionary thesis.

In the happy ending to our economic fairy tale, the drought of debt to a private banking monopoly is destroyed with the water of a freely-flowing public money supply. Among other salubrious results, we the people never have to pay income taxes again. [Web of Debt, p. 417]

This is "something for nothing." This is utopianism with a vengeance. How do pieces of paper with dead politicians' pictures on them create wealth for the government -- but for no other agency? Why is private counterfeiting not able to do this? Why is printing money by states, counties, and cities not equally productive? Why should we be forced pay state, county, and city taxes, when pieces of paper create wealth? What is it in economic theory that limits this miracle -- something for nothing -- the the national government?

She says that only the national government has the right to issue fiat Greenbacks, thereby creating wealth out of paper and ink. She says it, but she does not offer any economic theory to justify this restriction.

In the interest of preserving a single national currency, state and local governments would not be able to issue new Greenbacks to fund their programs (although they could issue other forms of credit, such as tax credits for fuel efficiency; see Chapter 36). However, the federal government could extend its largesse to state and local governments by offering them interest-free loans for worthy projects. [Web of Debt, p. 432.]

In her book, she argues that the Federal income tax can be eliminated by means of Greenbacks issued by the Federal government. Nevertheless, she insists that the Federal government can buy anything it wants merely by printing up pieces of paper. She does not say that the government can buy only some of the things that it wants, forcing it to impose taxes to purchase the rest of the things that it wants. She states specifically that the government can buy everything it wants with Greenbacks.

If the Federal Reserve were made what most people think it now is--an arm of the federal government--and if it had been vested with the exclusive authority to create the national money supply in all its forms, the government would have access to enough money to spend on anything it needed or wanted. [Web of Debt, p. 425]

On the same page, she hints at the broader implication. "Would that be enough to replace income taxes? How about other taxes?" But her chapter never actually answers the second question: "How about other taxes?" Nevertheless, the logic of her initial statement is clear: "The government would have access to enough money to spend on anything it needed or wanted." No more taxes!

Here is how she introduces her book's thesis.

The federal debt could be paid, income taxes could be eliminated, and social programs could be expanded; and this could all be done without imposing austerity measures on the people or sparking runaway inflation. Utopian as this may sound, it represents the thinking of some of America's brightest and best, historical and contemporary, including Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. [Web of Debt, p. 3]

As I proved in this series, this view of paper money was rejected by Lincoln, Jefferson, and Franklin.

CONCLUSION

Her example of pre-1755 colonial Pennsylvania is the only example in her book of a government that issued paper money instead of collecting taxes. She says of no other government that it explicitly substituted fiat paper money for taxation. But the Pennsylvania example does not hold up, because:

1. The land loans were not paper money.
2. There were no income taxes in colonial America.
3. The colony collected other taxes.

This leaves her book's central thesis without a single historical example.

I am not saying that fiat paper money does not substitute for taxation. I am saying that it is just another form of taxation. Monetary inflation is a tax. She argues that fiat money issued by a national government is not price inflationary. But it is; even when prices in general (a price index) do not change much, they would have dropped, had the fiat money not been printed and spent by the government. Wholesale prices fell in the United States from 1879, when the full gold coin standard was re-introduced, to 1914, when the Federal Reserve went into operation.

Ellen Brown does not understand economics. She also does not understand what she reads. She did not understand Alvin Rabushka when he said that the land office loans were not money. She did not understand my original article.

When a self-proclaimed expert in economic theory and economic history cannot follow simple arguments in price theory and economic history, that person is not an expert.

Historical Response #5: Ellen Brown Admits That Franklin's Bogus Quote on Money Is Bogus.

I pointed out that Ellen Brown used an obviously bogus quote from Benjamin Franklin on colonial scrip (paper money).

//www.garynorth.com/public/6882.cfm

Here is what she writes in response to my accusation:

5. A bogus quote from Franklin on colonial paper money

That quote is not in my 4th edition. I had to restructure the whole chapter to take it out, but I did it, in the interests of accuracy. In fact I had to restructure two whole chapters, a total nightmare; but I did it. I actually think I've spent too much time on details -- I should be writing another book -- but like you, I find it interesting.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

On the contrary, she should have spent far more time doing basic research. Had she done so, her book would be a very different book, which the next edition needs to be.

Let me state the obvious: she should have verified the quotation before she wrote the first edition. Also the second edition. Then the third edition.

She should not be writing another book. She should be re-writing her 2010 edition for publication in 2011 . . . or, if takes as long as I think it will, with 51 additional revisions, 2012. Her motivational mantra should be: "One down, 51 to go."

How can people buy her book? I called Barnes and Noble. They did not carry it. I have to order it, pre-paid. They suggested that I buy it online. I bought the book from Amazon. I was sent a 2007 version. I bought another copy. I was sent a 2008 edition.

Fact: People find it almost impossible to buy the latest edition of any self-published book from retail online booksellers. The seller sends whatever edition is on the shelf. Readers have to buy the latest edition from her site.

When the public cannot buy the latest edition of a non-fiction book from a retail online bookstore, a self-published author has a moral responsibility to post a summary of any revisions on his Website. This is the only way to let the readers know that there have been corrections. Otherwise, a self-published author is responsible for every mistake that he/she has revised. Don't tell us retroactively, "The latest edition corrects that." Tell every reader/buyer this on the site. This is what I do with my site. In Capitalism and the Bible, I post the latest editions. Each edition has the day that the latest edition was posted.

When you call on people to commit to a radical idea in preparation for a major legal reform, you owe it to all of your followers to let them know if your case originally was flawed. To make them keep buying your latest edition in order to be informed of what the earlier editions got wrong factually is wrong morally. It is like asking men to go into battle with faulty weapons that you sold to them.

To understand what she did, imagine that you are Ellen Brown's client. You have been arrested for counterfeiting. This was seven years ago. You said in your defense that you printed only lawful money. Your future is on the line. If she loses her case, you will go to jail.

It took her three years to prepare her case. The trial began three years ago.

In the first week of the trial, she called a witness to the stand. She said he was a world-famous expert. She questioned him under oath on the stand. This point was so important that she spends hours making her case. He said that your counterfeit money has been good for the economy.

Seven years into the trial, someone tells her that the guy is an impersonator. He isn't the world-famous expert she said he was.

Ellen Brown then asks the judge to give her time to re-state her case. She goes over the material again. She revises her case. She does not mention to the jury that her witness was a fraud. She hopes the jury will not remember that witness.

The prosecuting attorney (new on the case) had read the transcripts of the trial. He had recognized how important the testimony of her fake witness was for her case. He immediately had spotted the witness as a fake, along with several others. So, in his summation of the case before the jury, he says this:

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, there is a reason why the counsel for the defense has revised her case. One of her star witnesses was an impersonator. I have shown that several of them were. She should have verified that all of them were exactly who they said they were. She says that she just never got around to this in her first seven years of work. She then came to you with a revised argument, but she never mentioned in her revision that her star witness was a fake. She revised her version of that portion of her evidence without relying on him, hoping that no one would notice. I noticed."

She then says in her summation:

I don't know what all the fuss is about. Yes, I relied on my witness. Yes, I thought he was the real McCoy. I found out late in the trial that he was a fake. I then revised my case. It was just an oversight on my part that I neglected to mention in my revision that my witness had been a fake. And, I assure you, the prosecution's statement that half a dozen of my other witnesses are also fakes is just plain silly. No, I did not verify their credentials, but you can take my word for this: they are experts.

She comes back to the table where you are sitting. You are in shock. She is radiant. "No problem," she tells you. The jury will be convinced by my explanation. You have nothing to fear."

She then adds: "I really have wasted too much time revising this point. I could have taken on another client. But, rest assured, the jury will declare you innocent."

How much confidence would you have in her at this point?

Let us hope that she updates her site, telling her readers about all of her book's revisions and why they were needed. As of mid-October 2010, her site was missing this crucial feature.

Historical Response #6: Ellen Brown Relies on a Phantom Letter Proving That Franklin Supported Paper Money, but She Won't Tell Us Where It Is.

Ellen Brown loves to quote famous Americans who favored unbacked paper money: Franklin, John Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, Garfield. The problem is, none of these famous people favored paper money. They opposed it.

She quoted a bogus quote of Franklin's. She has finally admitted under the pressure of my article that she had already dropped this quotation in her 2010 edition. She had not previously revealed on her Website that she had been suckered by some Greenback author into accepting this bogus quote. She had also not described all of the time and trouble this bogus quote caused her when re-writing those chapters in which she had relied on it to support her case.

I also caught her quoting only part of Franklin's opinion of the paper money "Continentals" during the American Revolution, which fell to almost zero value -- the only hyperinflation in American history. She blamed currency speculators and British counterfeiting for this collapse in value. Benjamin Franklin didn't. He blamed fiat money.

Here is what I wrote about what she wrote.

She quotes a letter from Franklin. Here, she makes a blooper that boggles the imagination: "Franklin wrote from England during the war. . . ."

Folks, Franklin was not in England during the war. Had he been in England, he would have been imprisoned in the Tower of London. There was a revolution going on. He was in France. I am quoting from the 4th printing of her book. Not one of her readers spotted this blooper and warned her. So, she got caught by me. This sort of thing is always embarrassing to any author who expects to be taken seriously. But I digress.

Here is what she quotes:

The whole is a mystery even to politicians, how we could pay with paper that had no previously fixed fund appropriated specifically to redeem it. The currency as we manage it is a wonderful machine. [Web of Debt, p. 43]

To this, she added the following: the scrip "evoked the wonder and admiration of foreign observers, because it allowed the colonists to do something that had never been done before. They succeeded in financing a war against a major power, with virtually no "hard" currency of their own, without taxing the people (p. 43). In short, this was something (war) for nothing (no taxes). A miracle of paper money!

She does not tell us where Franklin's statement appeared. I think there is a reason for this silence. Someone might find the original and read all of it. I did. It was easy. Anyone can use Google to search for a direct quotation. I found it in two minutes. It appears in Volume 8 of Jared Sparks's 19th-century collected works of Franklin. It was a letter to Samuel Cooper (22 April 1789).

Read what Franklin wrote before he got to the brief passage that lawyer Brown decided to present to the jury (her readers). Does this sound like no taxation?

I received your valuable letter by the Marquis de Lafayette, and another by Mr. Bradford. I can only write a few words in answer to the latter, the former not being at hand. The depreciation of our money must, as you observe, greatly affect salary men, widows, and orphans. Methinks this evil deserves the attention of the several legislatures, and ought, if possible, to be remedied by some equitable law, particularly adapted to their circumstances. I took all the pains I could in Congress to prevent the depreciation, by proposing first, that the bills should bear interest; this was rejected, and they were struck as you see them. Secondly, after the first emission, I proposed that we should stop, strike no more, but borrow on interest those we had issued. This was not then approved of, and more bills were issued. When, from the too great quantity, they began to depreciate, we agreed to borrow on interest; and I proposed, that, in order to fix the value of the principal, the interest should be promised in hard dollars. This was objected to as impracticable; but I still continue of opinion, that, by sending out cargoes to purchase it, we might have brought in money sufficient for that purpose, as we brought in powder, &,c. &,c.; and that, though the attempt must have been attended with a disadvantage, the loss would have been a less mischief than any measure attending the discredit of the bills, which threatens to take out of our hands the great instrument of our defence.

The Congress did at last come into the proposal of paying the interest in real money. But when the whole mass of the currency was under way in depreciation, the momentum of its descent was too great to be stopped by a power, that might at first have been sufficient to prevent the beginning of the motion. The only remedy now seems to be a diminution of the quantity by a vigorous taxation, of great nominal sums, which the people are more able to pay, in proportion to the quantity and diminished value; and the only consolation under the evil is, that the public debt is proportionably diminished with the depreciation; and this by a kind of imperceptible tax, every one having paid a part of it in the fall of value that took place between the receiving and paying such sums as passed through his hands. For it should always be remembered, that the original intention was to sink the bills by taxes, which would as effectually extinguish the debt as an actual redemption.

It is clear that lawyer Brown's high opinion of the Revolution's paper money was not shared by Franklin.

//www.garynorth.com/public/6886.cfm

(I made a typo, which I have fixed in the original -- and noted that it is a fix. I typed 1789, not 1779.)

Here is her response.

6. Ignoring a negative statement by Franklin on the "Continentals"

Ignoring a negative statement? Please! And the statement you cite is from 1789. The statement I was quoting in their favor was made during the Revolutionary War. We all know they went bad by the end of the war. I also said that one problem with the Continentals was that they weren't all issued as legal tender; many were issued as debt. So at the end of the war, there was a debt owed.

So, my typo made her look even worse. She grabbed onto "1789" as if it were a life-preserver for her case. It is in fact an anvil. She sinks. Franklin's statement was made in the middle of the war. It had two years to go.

Putting "Please!" as a rhetorical gesture does not change the fact that Franklin hated the Continentals from the beginning. Or, as lawyer Brown might say, "Puuulease!"

She says that I was wrong to cite a letter written in 1789. She says that she was citing a completely different source. Notice, however, that her source document could not possibly have existed. She said originally (without a footnote) that the statement appears in a letter written from England. I caught her in the single most obvious blooper in her book. He was in France. She even admits that I got her:

On Franklin being in France rather England, point taken; I'll add that to my errata file, thanks.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

But, if he did not write this from England, then she obviously has no primary source document to support this supposedly independent quotation -- independent of my verbatim citation of his 1779 letter. If she had seen the oroginal letter, she would have known that it was not "postmarked" England.

The exact phrase that she cited in her book -- the currency as we manage it is a wonderful machine -- appears in his 1779 letter. It appears nowhere else. She is trapped. She thinks that yelling "Please!" will let her escape from my trap. It doesn't.

She had no wartime letter from England in front of her when she wrote her book. My guess is that she got the quotation from some undocumented Greenbacker book. In any case, she failed to offer a footnote. She figured that the quote just had to be real. It was real. I showed when wrote it. I directed readers to the complete document, where anyone can read it. In it, he attacked the Continentals. He said that, from the beginning, he wanted the paper money tied legally to interest paid in precious metal coins: "hard dollars."

I caught Brown in a whopper of an error. She still refuses to face up to it. She still does not tell us in what collection of primary sources this phantom wartime letter appears. There is a reason for this: the document in question, with the exact phrase, was written in 1779. If she had a copy of the phantom letter, she would have cited it. That would have shut me up. But she has no such letter. It never existed.

Ellen Brown is not a scholar. She is not a reliable amateur historian. She is a lawyer who is in way over her head on a topic that she does not understand. She is frantically trying to evade my criticisms. She cannot do it.

She cannot hold her own in am open debate. Day by day, I am showing the extent to which she is intellectually defenseless. I shall continue to do so.

I do admit that I was wrong in my original accusation: She Deliberately Skipped Over an Important Quotation from Franklin on the "Continentals". She did not deliberately skip over it. She never bothered to trace down the source of the quotation. She believed some Greenbacker book. However, at this point, her continuing refusal to accept the truth is deliberate. It is also futile. It is downright silly.

Her followers are resting on a week reed. They of course do not want to be told this by anyone, especially not by a gold coin standard-promoting Ph.D. in history who knows how to use primary source documents. Their leader is an incompetent economist and an even more incompetent historian. They don't want to be told this. To have followed anyone this incompetent reflects poorly on their own intellectual vulnerability. Nobody wants to admit that he is one of the rubes on which Ellen Brown has successfully put the shuck.

Historical Response #7: Ellen Brown's Research Policy: "Primary Source Documents? I Don't Need No Stinking Primary Source Documents!"

Ellen Brown loves to use bogus quotes from famous Americans. She thinks they are real because Greenbacker sites quote them. She does not consult primary sources to verify them. She admits this.

7. A bogus quote from John Adams on debt as a means of conquest

I responded to this earlier. Here is what my text says:

"President John Adams is quoted as saying, 'There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.'"

He IS quoted as saying that, by many people. Bing returns 1,870,000 results when queried with that quote, all of the earliest results, at least, attributed to John Adams.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

If you think, "this woman has publicly painted herself into a corner. She now looks silly," you think what I think.

It does not matter that John Adams is said to have said something. What matters is that Ellen Brown has documentary evidence that he actually said it. She offers none.

Harvard University Press has published The Papers of John Adams. This is available in any university research library. These volumes are well indexed. She does not refer to this collection.

Then there is the online collection of his papers. This is hosted by the University of Virginia. This data base is searchable. The search page is here. As a favor to my readers, I conducted a search. Here was the result:

Search for "One is by the sword. The other is by debt." (in notes & documents; all languages) + relevance order > No results

The phrase no results is a way of saying at least one thing: (1) this site has no record of this phrase; (2) the phrase is bogus.

Until Ellen Brown provides a footnote showing when and where John Adams said this, and until I verify this reference, I will continue to assert that the phrase is bogus.

Here is my response to her response: Don't refer to a million links with no documentary evidence. Just offer a single link to the original source document where Adams said it.

What astounds me is that she would regard her response to my accusation as anything but an admission of failure. She thinks that her response is an effective one. I do not. She thinks that an unverified quote, if cited by enough links on a search engine, becomes valid. I do not. How about you? What do you think?

She offers bogus quotes throughout her book. She obviously thought that these quotes helped her case. She thought that they made her case for fiat money more plausible. Yet, bogus quote after bogus quote, I have caught her in errors that no academic historian would have made -- and had she done so, she would be fired, even if she has tenure. Using bogus quotes is correctly regarded as either a violation of professional integrity or proof of incompetence. Either will get an historian fired. But she is not in academia. She is in the Greenbacker propaganda business, and these people have been offering bogus quotes for generations.

She is either putting the shuck on the rubes -- her readers -- or else she is a rube that her Greenbacker predecessors put the shuck on. In either case, you would be wise to distrust everything she writes. Keep this thought in mind as you read Web of Debt: no results.

Historical Response #8: Ellen Brown Admits She Was Wrong, but Objects to My Adjective.

Ellen Brown has trouble understanding what she writes. This is a serious handicap for an author.

Here is what she wrote about the Bible and charging interest.

"Usury" is now defined as charging "excess" interest, but originally it meant merely charging a fee or interest for the use of money. Usury was forbidden in the Christian Bible, and anti-usury laws were strictly enforced by the Catholic Church until the end of the Middle Ages. But in Jewish scriptures, which were later joined to the Christian books as the "Old Testament," usury was forbidden only between "brothers." Charging interest to foreigners was allowed and even encouraged. [Web of Debt, p. 59]

Her words are clear: "Usury was forbidden in the Christian Bible." I responded to this statement in detail. You can read what I wrote here:

//www.garynorth.com/public/6909.cfm

As you can see, I quoted both the New Testament and the Old Testament. I showed that there was no prohibition on interest-taking in the New Testament. The prohibition on interest-taking in the Old Testament applied to charitable loans to fellow Hebrews. It did not apply to commercial loans.

She responds by saying that this is not what she wrote. "That's not what I said," she insists. But it was. She then attempts to switch the reader's attention away from what she wrote. She says she was talking about why Jews were bankers. This is a well-known fact to anyone who has studied medieval history. (One of the fields for my master's degree was medieval history.) I had no reason to challenge her on this point. I initially responded to only two things: (1) what she said the Bible teaches about interest; (2) her account of the origin of the Bible.

Here is her response.

8. The "Christian Bible" Prohibits Interest, but not the "Jewish Bible."

That's not what I said. I was explaining why Jews historically wound up the "bankers." Christians were forbidden to charge interest at all, while Jews were forbidden only to charge interest to "brothers", meaning other Jews. They COULD charge interest to Christians. This is from Wikipedia:

The Hebrew Bible regulates interest taking. Interest can't be charged to Jews but only to non-Jews.

Deuteronomy 23:20 Thou shalt not lend upon interest to thy brother: interest of money, interest of victuals, interest of any thing that is lent upon interest.

Deuteronomy 23:21 Unto a foreigner thou mayest lend upon interest; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon interest; that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all that thou puttest thy hand unto, in the land whither thou goest in to possess it.

You make an interesting point that it's not in the New Testament. Apparently the prohibition only began in the Middle Ages. I see in the Catholic Encyclopedia:

The canonical laws of the Middle Ages absolutely forbade the practice. This prohibition is contained in the Decree of Gratian, q. 3, C. IV, at the beginning, and c. 4, q. 4, C. IV; and in 1. 5, t. 19 of the Decretals, for example in chapters 2, 5, 7, 9, 10, and 13. These chapters order the profit so obtained to be restored; and Alexander III (c. 4, "Super eo", eodem) declares that he has no power to dispense from the obligation. Chapters 1, 2, and 6, eodem, condemns the strategems to which evenclerics resorted to evade the law of the general councils, and the Third of the Lateran (1179) and the Second of Lyons (1274) condemn usurers. In the Council of Vienne (1311) it was declared that if anyperson obstinately maintained that there was no sin in the practice of demanding interest, he should be punished as a heretic (see c. "Ex gravi", unic. Clem., "De usuris", V, 5).

It is a curious fact that for a long time impunity in such matters was granted to Jews. The Fourth Council of the Lateran (1215), c. 27, only forbids them to exact excessive interest. Urban III, c. 12, "De usuris" (V. 19) and St. Louis in twenty-three of his regulations extended the prohibition to theJews. With the exception of c. 27 of the Fourth Council of the Lateran, we know of no canon law which takes into consideration the question of moderate interest; and canon law nowhere states distinctly that interest is, under any circumstances whatsoever, contrary to justice.

Okay, I missed that point. But to call my ignorance "astounding" is still a bit of an exaggeration. My book has sold 23,000 copies, and nobody has pointed that out before.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

The key words here are these: "Okay, I missed that point."

She adds: "My book has sold 23,000 copies, and nobody has pointed that out." I add: So what? She missed at least 51 other points. Her readers missed at least 50 of those, too. (One she says she corrected in the 2010 edition.) That is why I wrote my original critique.

She fills her response with citations from secondary sources. The first source confirms what I wrote, even citing the verses that I cited, regarding the prohibition on interest from other Jews. But it fails to mention that this prohibition was applied exclusively to charitable loans. Second, she cites a long passages on an issue I never mentioned: the medieval church's prohibition of interest.

She thinks my adjective "astounding" is excessive.

Here is what I wrote to introduce her astounding error: Ellen Brown reveals her astounding ignorance about the Bible with these words. I explained why I thought these words were astounding. (Her words are in bold face.)

But in Jewish scriptures, which were later joined to the Christian books as the "Old Testament". . . . On the contrary, the early church adopted as authoritative the Hebrew Scriptures (in Greek called the Septuagint). Only after the four gospels, the Book of Acts, and the epistles were written did these documents become acceptable to the church as documents possessing equal authority to the Old Testament. That she could make a mistake this fundamental is mind-boggling.

I stand by my statement. Why? Because the Christian books were added to the Jewish scriptures. The Jewish books possessed binding authority in the New Testament era church. They were the basis of the church's authority. Peter quoted from Joel 2 in his first public presentation of the gospel (Acts 2). He quoted Joel's prophecy and said that the newly formed church is the fulfilment of Joel's prophecy. This fact of the original authority of the Old Testament for the New Testament-era church is widely known. I found it astounding that she said what she did about the origin of the Bible. The books that were "later joined" were the New Testament's books.

If she thinks my adjective was excessive, she should respond to my point, to which I added "mind-boggling." It surely boggled my mind!

Historical Response #9: Ellen Brown Now Says That Mass Inflation in Medieval China Produced Prosperity.

Medieval Chinese invented paper money. This paper money became mass inflation after it was separated from metal, that is, after it became fiat money -- the kind of money that Ellen Brown recommends.

Ellen Brown says in her book that fiat money in China led to prosperous centuries. I summarized her position as follows: China's Medieval Fiat Paper Money Had Centuries of Success.

//www.garynorth.com/public/6915.cfm

I argued that the fiat money in China produced horrendous price inflation: as much as 1,000%. That is ten to one. In the case of the Mongols, the money failed completely.

I showed in my critique that in the early centuries, China's paper money was not fiat money. It was backed by metal. Ellen Brown's strategy is to talk about China's paper money as if it were fiat money. In other words, she deliberately ignores the distinction between convertible paper money and inconvertible fiat money. This is like calling an American silver certificate a Greenback in 1963.

Then she praises the prosperity of the "silver certificate" centuries and ignores the "Greenback" centuries (or shorter).

In short, she once again tries to put the shuck on the rubes. She assumes that they will not click through to my original article and read it.

Here is her response:

9. China's medieval unbacked paper money had centuries of success.

Here is what I wrote:

In Mandarin China, where paper money was invented in the ninth century, this sort of fiat currency funded a long and prosperous empire.

I did not "make that up," as you suggest in your note. In fact I haven't made anything up. I always draw from sources. I may have sometimes misread them, or my sources may have been wrong, but I actually did quite exhaustive research for this book, and I've corrected errors in subsequent revisions -- more revisions than most books run to, certainly in 3 years. You have a degree in history. I have degrees in English and law. You've got a head start. I'm doing my best here. What I lack in historical training I make up for in writing skills.

Anyway, here's what Wikipedia says under "China." I don't think it contradicts my statement. I did not say China's paper money was not inflationary; I said it funded a long and prosperous dynasty. The population doubled; they needed to inflate the money supply to match:

The Song dynasty was the first government in world history to issue paper money and the first Chinese polity to establish a permanent standing navy. Between the 10th and 11th centuries, the population of China doubled in size. This growth came about through expanded rice cultivation in central and southern China, and the production of abundant food surpluses.

Within its borders, the Northern Song Dynasty had a population of some 100 million people. The Song Dynasty was a culturally rich period for philosophy and the arts. Landscape art and portrait painting were brought to new levels of maturity and complexity after the Tang Dynasty, and social elites gathered to view art, share their own, and trade precious artworks. Philosophers such as Cheng Yi and Chu Hsi reinvigorated Confucianism with new commentary, infused Buddhist ideals, and emphasized a new organization of classic texts that brought about the core doctrine of Neo-Confucianism.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

Let us be clear on this. She writes:

I did not say China's paper money was not inflationary; I said it funded a long and prosperous dynasty. The population doubled; they needed to inflate the money supply to match.

The population did not go up by ten to one. Prices did.

She cites the Song (or Sung) dynasty. So did I. She cites a description of the prosperous dynasty in the 10th and 11th century. That was the period I also discussed. Here is the the document that I cited regarding the paper money of the early Sung dynasty -- a paper money system based on convertibility into metal.

Second, it was not government-issued money initially. Therefore, it was not what she calls "lawful money." They were banknotes.

"Flying cash" was not meant to be currency and its circulation was rather limited. Real paper currency was not introduced until early in the Song (960-1279) dynasty, when it was utilized by a group of rich merchants and financiers in Szechuan, the same province where the art of printing had been invented. Each banknote they issued had printed on it pictures of houses, trees, and people. Red and black inks were intermittently applied; the seals of the issuing banks were affixed; and confidential marks were made on each bill. All these devices made counterfeiting extremely difficult. These banknotes could be converted into hard cash at any time in any of the issuing banks. Widely circulated, they were readily accepted for the payment in debt and other financial obligations. In 1023 these banknotes were withdrawn and only official notes printed by the government were allowed. This new adopted governmental policy was successful at first for two reasons: First, for each issue of paper notes to be put into circulation, the government provided a cash backing. Second, paper notes and standard coins were interchangeable. Moreover, a citizen could buy salt or liquor with his paper notes from the government-owned stores. In short, paper notes were as good as coined money.

Brown in her response does not mention that the paper money of this 10th century and the early 11th century was metal-backed money issued by banks. Then, for over a century, the government-issued paper money was convertible into metal, which was scarce.

I call this putting the shuck on the rubes.

Then what of the later period, when metallic backing was removed, and the currency became pure fiat money: "Greenbacks"? In a 1983 article in the professional economics journal, The Journal of Political Economy, Professor Francis Lui described what happened.

The first inflation on a national scale occurred from around 1190 to the end of the dynasty when the monetary system collapsed.

What then happened to the Southern Sung dynasty? We read on the Website of the University of Minnesota (Monkato):

This period did not last long, as in 1210 A.D. the Mongols began to assault the Song, and in 1279, the Yuan, or Mongol empire began.

Let me review. To prove that the Sung dynasty was prosperous, Ellen Brown described the prosperity of the dynasty when it had a privately issued convertible currency. She failed to mention what happened to the currency and the dynasty after the dynasty adopted a fiat currency issued by the government. As she admits, she is a lawyer, not an historian. As a lawyer, she continues to put the shuck on her readers.

The Mongols copied the Southern Sung dynasty, not the Northern. Under the Mongols, the destruction of money was total. On the website of Washington State University, we read:

Two factors led to the incitement of rebellion in the fourteenth century. The first were the racial distinctions that the Mongols introduced into Chinese government and the inequality that was built from these race distinctions. The Mongol emperors divided China into four distinct groups: Mongols, Se-mu (immigrants from Turkestan and Europeans), Han-jen (northern Chinese, Khitans, and Manchurians), and Nan-jen (southern Chinese, the population of the Southern Sung Empire). In addition to the racial distinctions, which were cause of bitter discontent, the Mongols lived luxuriously and lavishly endowed Lamaist Buddhist monasteries. In order to pay for their extravagances, they forced impossibly hard exactions on the population; this in turn caused uncontrollable inflation throughout the empire. By the end of the dynasty, the paper money of the empire had become completely worthless.

Tyranny and fiat money went together.

The thesis of her book, from cover to cover, is this: Greenbacks need not create price inflation. She says that Greenbacks will provide price stability.

I showed this: in the first case in history of "Greenbackism," meaning pure fiat paper money issued by a government, the result was hyperinflation and the destruction of the currency. In every dynasty in China prices skyrocketed after the dynasty issued paper money unbacked by metal. The failure rate of fiat money in medieval China was 100%.

She does not respond to the figures that I presented. She responds by saying that she never said that there was no inflation in China. I never said that she said there was no price inflation in China. The problem with The Web of Debt in its discussion of medieval China is that the author failed to mention that that there was mass inflation in China as a result of fiat paper money issued by the government. This price inflation undermines the central thesis of her book, namely, that pure fiat money does not lead to price inflation. It did in medieval China. Every time.

For comparison, consider the Byzantine Empire, which had an unchanging gold coin standard currency, from 325 until about 1100. Prices did not rise for 800 years. She never mentions the Byzantine Empire anywhere in her book.

Historical Response #10: Ellen Brown Now Re-Defines "Fiat Money" to Match How Economists Define "Non-Fiat Money."

Ellen Brown does not understand monetary theory. This puts her at a great disadvantage in replying to me.

To understand this reply, you must understand my original article. It is based on both historical facts and economic analysis. It deals with an aspect of medieval taxation, the tallies. Read my article here:

//www.garynorth.com/public/6916.cfm

When a man paid his taxes, he wanted a receipt that would prove that he had paid. This is simple to understand.

When a man owed taxes for a year, but taxes were collected twice a year, he wanted a receipt for what he paid early in the year. Then he could prove that he had paid half when he brought his coins to pay the second half.

People were illiterate. So, they needed receipts that did not involve writing.

When a taxpayer brought his first batch of coins, the sheriff took the coins, split a stick, and put notches on both sticks as to how many coins he had brought. The sheriff had a receipt (he paid me; he still owes me), and so did the taxpayer.

At the next tax day, the taxpayer brought his stick (here's what I paid; here's what I owe) with the coins he still owed. The sheriff put the two sticks together. They matched. He checked the notches on his stick with the taxpayer's stick. They matched. He took the coins. End of transaction.

Simple? Very simple. The half stick that the sheriff handed to the taxpayer was the functional equivalent of a canceled check to the Internal Revenue Service.

The sheriff took the coins to the king. He also took the tally stick. This was an IOU from the taxpayer. It was an IOU for future money.

Did the king want his payment now? (Do governments want to wait to spend taxes?) Of course not. So, how could he get ready cash? It was illegal for Christians to lend money at interest. That was the law of the church -- a really bad law. Here is what he did, as I quoted in my original criticism.

Since the king (as is generally the case) couldn't be bothered to wait until taxes fell due, and could not borrow money at interest, he would sell the tallies at a discount. The holder of the tally could then cash it in when the taxes fell due, making it (in effect) a fixed-term government bond.

This is how kings and money-lenders got around the church's silly law -- a misinterpretation of the Bible. The tallies functioned as money, but only because they could be sold at a discount -- a subterfuge to avoid the church's law.

That was what I wrote in my original critique. Does Ellen Brown understand any of this? No. She writes:

10. England's medieval wooden "tallies" were interest-free money.

Your argument in your link is:

"If an IOU is a receipt for payment in money -- coins -- then is the IOU fiat money?" If your answer is "no," then it agrees with my answer.

I disagree with your premise. ALL fiat money is paid by the government as a receipt for something delivered to the government. What else is the government going to do with it but pay for something? A "receipt" is not an "IOU." It's an acknowledgment of value received. If it's used as a currency, the receipt can then be traded in the marketplace for other goods and services.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

She writes: "ALL fiat money is paid by the government as a receipt for something delivered to the government."

This is the opposite of what fiat money is. Fiat money paid by the government is proof that nothing was delivered to the government. This is the very definition of fiat money.

Let me explain.

Let us assume no fractional reserve banking, which is what she and I both want. Let us also assume that the bank is owned by the government, which is what she wants and I do not want.

A gold coin owner comes to the bank and hands over the coin to a teller. "I want paper money." If he deposited a one-ounce coin, he is handed a paper bill for a one-ounce coin. This receipt is called paper money. It is not fiat paper money. It is a warehouse receipt from the government. It is a government IOU. It circulates as money, but only if people trust the government.

There has been no increase in the money supply. The coin is taken out of circulation. The paper money substitutes for the coin.

This is not a fiat money currency system. This is a gold coin standard. The receipt (paper money) is an IOU for something delivered to the government (the coin). Simple.

Ellen Brown does not any of understand this. So, she says that fiat money is a receipt for something delivered to the government. This is the definition of a commodity-backed currency system.

Fiat money is issued by the government because nothing has been delivered to the government.

In The Web of Debt she argues the following: by issuing fiat money, the national government can stop imposing an income tax. What is a tax? It is money delivered to the government. Your canceled check from the tax collector is a receipt of payment. This canceled check is not money. (Sorry about that!)

Conclusion: if fiat money lets the government avoid imposing an income tax, then fiat money is not a receipt for anything delivered to the government.

Fiat money is an increase in the money supply precisely because it is not an IOU from the government for something delivered to the government in the past or to be delivered to the government in the future. That is, fiat money is fiat money: money created out of nothing. Well, not quite nothing: the government uses paper and ink. It means autonomously created money. "Fiat" is defined as follows:

1. official sanction; authoritative permission
2. an arbitrary order or decree
3. literary chiefly any command, decision, or act of will that brings something about
[C17: from Latin, literally: let it be done, from fieri to become]

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fiat

This should be simple to understand. Ellen Brown does not understand it.

She does not tell the reader that the tallies served as money only because they were IOUs to coins. The government did issue tallies, but these were IOUs to coins. You can read about this here. Therefore, tallies were not fiat money. They were backed by coins.

The existence of tallies does not prove her case in favor of fiat money. For decades, Greenbacker authors have used the tallies to prove their case. They do not understand what tallies were. The tallies support the case made by the opponent of Greenbacks. Tallies were specie-backed money, not fiat money.

If you are a follower of Ellen Brown, and if you have had no difficulty understanding what I have written here, you are thinking to yourself, "This just can't be. She can't be this confused." Yes, she really is.

She wrote a 500-page defense of fiat money, yet she does not know how to define fiat money. She defines it in the way that an economist defines a gold standard, or a silver standard, or a commodity standard monetary system.

The Web of Debt is conceptually wrong, historically wrong, and self-contradictory. Her replies to my criticisms reveal that she does not know what she is talking about.

She did not honor the old rule: "When you're in a hole, stop digging."

Historical Response #11: Ellen Brown Responds by Not Responding Regarding Her Bogus Quote by Nathan Rothschild.

Here is Ellen Brown's response to my criticism of a bogus quote from Nathan Rothschild:

11. A bogus quote from Nathan Rothschild

You're quoting from an old edition. My current edition says:

Nathan Rothschild, who controlled the Bank of England after 1820, is quoted as declaring:

I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply.

This is quite true, as you note; you got 40,000 hits on it yourself.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

She is a lawyer. She cannot resist using lawyer's tricks.

Trick: she says that I am quoting from an old edition. This seems to make me look bad.

Fact: What I quoted, except for one word, was exactly what she writes in her latest edition. Here is what I wrote:

If you want to excite readers of pulp fiction conspiracy books, offer a quotation from a Rothschild. Ellen Brown wants her readers to get excited.

Nathan Rothschild, who controlled the Bank of England after 1820, notoriously declared:

I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply.[Web of Debt, p. 65.]

As you can see, what I quoted from the 2008 edition is almost exactly what she says she wrote in her 2010 edition. All she did in 2010 was to add the adjective "notoriously."

Trick. She asserts, without any support: "This is quite true, as you note; you got 40,000 hits on it yourself."

Fact: I wrote the following:

She offers no footnote.

To help her out, I hereby offer tens of thousands of footnotes. I got them from Google. I searched for "Rothschild" and "I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England." I got over 40,000 hits.

I did not look at all of them. I looked at several dozen. There was no footnote to a primary source document.

Take a look at the academic quality of these sites. See which ones you would trust. There may be one. I did not spot it.

By the way, he did not control the Bank of England. There is no primary source evidence that indicates that he did. His grandson did sit on the board of directors, beginning in 1869.

Once again, lawyer Brown is putting the shuck on the rubes: her readers.

//www.garynorth.com/public/6917.cfm

I say it again: "Once again, lawyer Brown is putting the shuck on the rubes: her readers."

In her response, she did not offer a citation from a primary source document that indicates that he ever said this. She merely repeated what I had noted: there are many cases of this quotation on the Web. My point was simple: they are bogus, too.

She has also not responded to my claim that Nathan Rothschild had no connection to the Bank of England.

She is obviously desperate. She is so desperate that she offered this really silly response to my original critique of her use of a bogus quote. She did not need to offer this self-incriminating verbal smoke screen to prove me wrong. She needed only two things:

1. Primary source evidence that Rothschild said this.
2. Proof that he controlled the Bank of England.

Ellen Brown is faking it. She faked it in Web of Debt, and she is faking it in her responses.

Historical Response #12: Ellen Brown Admits That Her Jefferson Quote on Banks Was Bogus.

Ellen Brown admits she has dropped the bogus Jefferson quote.

12. A bogus quote from Jefferson on banks

That quote has been omitted from my 4th edition, after it was pointed out to me that it was apocryphyal.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

But the thousands of people who read her first three editions did not know that the quote was bogus until she posted her 31 responses to my criticisms of her historical research. She has yet to publish a list of her previous use of bogus quotes in a department on Page 1 of her website. She should.

She did not do her homework. That quote was obviously bogus. Here is what I wrote.

Ellen Brown loves to quote from the Founding Fathers. It's a shame that so many of her quotations are fakes. Here is one.

Jefferson is quoted as saying:

If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property, until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied. [Web of Debt, p. 76]

It took me about two minutes to track down this whopper. This, of course, was way too much time for lawyer Brown to invest. I found it on Wikiquotes.

If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency (instead of Congress), first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied.

Attributed to Thomas Jefferson, letter to then Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, 1802. The book Respectfully Quoted says this is "obviously spurious", noting that the OED's earliest citation for the word "deflation" is from 1920. The earliest known appearance of this quote is from 1935 (Testimony of Charles C. Mayer, Hearings Before the Committee on Banking and Currency, House of Representatives, Seventy-fourth Congress, First Session, on H.R. 5357, p. 799)

//www.garynorth.com/public/6918.cfm

It took a sharp-eyed reader to spot this one, as she admits. This was three years after the first edition.

An author is supposed to verify the evidence before publishing a book. Ellen Brown never bothered. This is why I have identified 31 historical errors and 21 errors in economic theory in her 2008 edition.

Her responses have me 31 additional opportunities to demonstrate that she did not know what she was talking about when she wrote The Web of Debt.

I hope she responds to my 21 challenges to her economic theory.

Historical Response #13: Ellen Brown Still Does Not Prove That Jefferson Helped to Stop the First Bank of the U.S. from Being Re-chartered.

In order to demonstrate that Ellen Brown plays lawyer games with this criticism, I must reprint my original criticism.

Ellen Brown has a terrible problem with calendars. They make no sense to her. We can see this in her discussion of the First Bank of the United States (1791-1811). We will see it again in her discussion of the Federal Reserve System.

Jefferson was instrumental in Congress's refusal to renew the charter of the first U.S. Bank in 1811. [Web of Debt, p. 76.]

She offers no footnote. This is understandable, since Jefferson left office in 1809.

His successor and long-term collaborator, James Madison, decided to switch sides and support the bank's recharter in 1811. The move failed by one vote in the House and one vote in the Senate: a tie-breaker from the Vice President.

Then she compounds her error.

When Congress later renewed the Bank's charter, Andrew Jackson vetoed it. [Web of Debt, p. 76]

Well, no. Jackson fought the Second Bank of the United States (1816-1836). It had been chartered by Congress because James Madison wanted to replace the First Bank of the U.S.

She knows this. She explains it on the next page. But she does not pay attention when she writes. Her mind wanders. This is not good for a lawyer.

//www.garynorth.com/public/6919.cfm

Here is her response:

13. Jefferson and Jackson fought the 1st Bank of the U.S.

This is what I wrote:

Opposition to the First U.S. Bank was led by Thomas Jefferson, the country's third President; while opposition to the Second U.S. Bank was led by Andrew Jackson, the country's seventh President. (p 73)

It does not say this on page 73 of the 2006 and 2008 editions. It does say this on page 75. My point was clear: she does not remember what she has written. Her statement on page 76 is muddled. She wrote this: "When Congress later renewed the Bank's charter, Andrew Jackson vetoed it." But she has already said (accurately) that Congress failed to re-charter the First Bank. Therefore, the Bank that Jackson fought was not the re-chartered First Bank, which her words imply. It was a brand-new Bank. This is why I wrote: "But she does not pay attention when she writes. Her mind wanders. This is not good for a lawyer." I stand by these words.

She continues in her rambling response:

I was talking about the Second U.S. Bank with Jackson, not the First. On Jefferson, this is from Wikipedia:

The establishment of the bank also raised early questions of constitutionality in the new government. Hamilton, then Secretary of the Treasury, argued that the Bank was an effective means to utilize the authorized powers of the government implied under the law of the Constitution. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson argued that the Bank violated traditional property laws and that its relevance to constitutionally authorized powers was weak.

I was, as I said in my earlier response, trying to make economics interesting, and for that I was using imagery from the Wizard of Oz. I tried to open every chapter with a quote from that story, and my opening quote for this chapter was this; I agree it was a bit of stretch applying it to Jefferson and Jackson, but I was running out of quotes (I had 47 chapters) --

Chapter 7

WHILE CONGRESS DOZES IN THE POPPY FIELDS:

JEFFERSON AND JACKSON SOUND THE ALARM

The Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, not being made of flesh, were not troubled by the scent of the flowers. "Run fast," said the Scarecrow to the Lion. "Get out of this deadly flower bed as soon as you can. We will bring the little girl with us, but if you should fall asleep you are too big to be carried."

-- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,"The Deadly Poppy Field"

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

Allow me to summarize this incoherent response.

It is important that readers not hold me accountable for accuracy. That would be unfair. I write things that I really don't mean. Therefore, I do not intend to respond to North's assertion that Jefferson was not instrumental in blocking the re-chartering of the Bank in 1811. The fact that North was talking about Jefferson's influence in 1811, for which I offered no evidence, and still do not, is irrelevant. What is relevant is that Jefferson opposed the Bank in 1791.

She fails to mention the section of her book on Jefferson vs. Hamilton in 1791. Here is what she wrote:

Jefferson remained suspicious of Hamilton and his schemes, but Jefferson also felt strongly that the new country's capital city should be in the South, in his home state of Virginia. Hamilton (who did not care where the capital was) agreed on the location of the national capital in exchange for Jefferson's agreement on the bank [Web of Debt, p. 52]

So, according to lawyer Brown on page 52, Jefferson capitulated on the Bank in 1791. This is historically inaccurate. He tried to persuade President Washington to veto the bill to charter the Bank. Here is his written opposition. The issue dividing Hamilton and Jefferson over which the nation's capital city was the trade was the assumption of state debts by the Federal government. That was in 1790, the year before the battle over the Bank.

She has dug herself deeper into a hole. She wrote on page 52 that Jefferson was instrumental in getting the Bank chartered, by means of his silence. According to her on page 52, Jefferson did not oppose the Bank in 1791, when he had influence. So, her citation of Wikipedia regarding his opposition to the Bank is irrelevant to her defense of what she wrote on page 76. Wiki gets the story right. She got it wrong on page 52.

Let me say it again: Jefferson was not involved in 1811, when the vote to re-charter the Bank was held. That was my original point. Lawyer Brown filled her response with fluff about making a book readable and the Wizard of Oz. She also quoted a Wiki article on what Jefferson's views were in 1791. All of this is irrelevant: smoke to cover the obvious fact that Jefferson was not instrumental in the 1811 vote on re-chartering the Bank.

The goal of a non-fiction author, above all, should be accuracy. The second goal is clarity. The other goals are way down the list.

Ellen Brown is inaccurate. She is also unclear. In her response, she did not remember what she had written on page 52 about Jefferson and Hamilton in 1791. Her response cited a Wiki article that undermines what she wrote on page 52. Wiki is correct about Jefferson in 1791. She is not. Furthermore, she is not accurate about Jefferson's influence in 1811. Finally, she is not accurate about Jackson's opposition to the First Bank of the United States: "When Congress later renewed the Bank's charter, Andrew Jackson vetoed it" (p. 76). Congress did not renew the Bank's charter.

She is correct about Andrew Jackson on page 75. He fought the Second Bank of the United States. But she is wrong on page 76 -- the point I made in my original criticism. That is why I wrote this: "But she does not pay attention when she writes. Her mind wanders."

So far, it is still wandering.

Historical Response #14: Ellen Brown Says That the Major Economic Historian of the American Civil War Is Wrong. So There!

Ellen Brown argues that the Civil War's inflation -- meaning the North's inflation -- was good for the American economy. As such, she is a defender of what is called military Keynesianism.

I provided evidence to the contrary. I cited Professor Roger Ransom of the University of California, Riverside, who has held positions in the department of economics (his Ph.D. is in economics) and the department of history. His 2010 article is posted on the Website of the Economic History Association, which is the main academic professional association of American and British specialists.

//www.garynorth.com/public/6923.cfm

Ellen Brown dismisses Professor Ransom's conclusions as ill-informed.

14. The Civil War's paper money made survivors richer.

I disagree with your conclusions, and I believe I have cited plenty of authorities for my position in that chapter. See, e.g., the section beginning on p 86 titled "Did Greenbacks Cause Price Inflation?"

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

So, let us examine her expert witnesses.

Page 86 begins with the expert testimony of Vernon L. Parrington. Parrington was a professor of English. He wrote a literary history of America in 1927, Main Currents in American Thought. He had no training in economics or economic history. But he had very strong opinions. In 1918, he wrote:

With every passing year my radicalism draws fresh nourishment from large knowledge of the evils of private capitalism. Hatred of that selfish system is become the chief passion of my life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_Louis_Parrington

He summarized the opinions of Ellen Brown's favorite economist, Henry Carey. Who was Carey? A defender of Henry Clay's "American system" of government subsidies and high tariffs (sales taxes on imports). He was a self-taught economist whose main work was published in 1859, two years before the Civil War began.

Next, on page 88, we find her section, "Did Greenbacks Cause Price Inflation?" Here, she quotes Irwin Unger's 1964 book, The Greenback Era. That book is 46 years old.

Then she quotes Greenbacker non-economist Stephen Zarlenga, who quoted one sentence by James Randall. Randall was not an economic historian. In any case, the unidentified statement is 73 years old: 1937. What did he say? That Civil War inflation was not so bad as World War I's inflation. He said nothing about whether inflation made the survivors richer after 1860.

Zarlenga then quoted one sentence from John Kenneth Galbraith, the Left-wing Harvard economist and senior price control economist during World War II. The sentence made no statement regarding inflation and its supposed wealth-creating effects. He did not say that inflation made the survivors richer.

Then she quotes Thomas Edison, the inventor and non-economist. He said nothing about the Civil War in this quote.

Anyone else? No. You mean that's it? That's it.

She thinks this totally refutes Professor Ransom. After all, what does he know?

Once again, Ellen Brown demonstrates for all to see that she does not know what she is talking about.

Historical Response #15: Ellen Brown Says We Should Respect This Bogus Lincoln Quote Because the Idea Is True.

I have caught Ellen Brown repeatedly citing bogus quotes. She thinks that using bogus quotes is perfectly legitimate, just so long as she introduces them with these words: [Famous person, widely respected] is quoted as saying. . . ." Example:

15. A bogus Lincoln quote on men and wages

Your link quotes this:

Lincoln is quoted as saying, "The wages of men should be recognized as more important than the wages of money." [Web of Debt, p. 85]

Your link then acknowledges that 800+ references quote him as so saying, so he obviously is quoted as saying that. The sentence would be neither more nor less true if Lincoln said it. It stands on its own merits. It is true, and that was the point I was making. Money should be issued in return for wages, not to non-producing middlemen.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

Desperate, isn't she?

Here is what I had written:

This quotation is a well-known fake. I found a reference on Wikiquotes. This took me about 60 seconds.

//www.garynorth.com/public/6924.cfm

The readers obviously should not trust this woman. She has no conception of historical scholarship. In this response, she is blind to how silly she looks. She repeatedly uses this defense of her bogus quotes: "Well, I said the person was quoted. I did not say that he actually said it. But he clearly was quoted. So, I'm off the hook, intellectually speaking."

Every one of her "is quoted as saying" quotes should be introduced by this: "has for years been falsely quoted as saying. . . ."

Think of her in front of a jury. She keeps introducing evidence with these words: "It is widely known that my client has an alibi. He could not have committed the crime."

The prosecuting attorney responds: "Counsel did not provide any testimony, taken under oath, that her client was somewhere else."

Brown faces the jury and says: "There are thousands of people who say that they heard a rumor from an unknown source that my client was somewhere else. That's good enough for me. It ought to be good enough for you."

Her client is going to jail unless the jury members are all imbeciles.

I have never come across any author like her. I hope you haven't, either.

Historical Response #16: Ellen Brown Says That Lincoln's 1863 Statement Against More Greenbacks Meant Nothing.

Ellen Brown reads an argument, refuses to understand its words, and declares victory. In a courtroom, this would not fool a jury. She expects it to fool her readers.

Throughout her book, she promotes the Greenbacker myth of Lincoln as a promoter of the Greenbacks. He was not. He hated them. Initially, he signed the three laws Congress sent to him, but he rebelled the third time. He sent a letter to Congress in January 1863 telling Congress not to pass any more Greenback bills. He told Congress he wanted a national bank act. A month later, Congress sent it to him. He signed it. There were no further issues of Greenbacks. I reported in all this here:

//www.garynorth.com/public/6875.cfm

His resistance in 1863 means nothing to Ellen Brown.

16. Lincoln favored the Greenbacks over Union debt to banks.

Your own entry makes my case. You quote a letter from Lincoln saying, "He accepted the third and final issue of these fiat bills, but he sent a letter to Congress, in January 1863, in which he expressed his "sincere regret that it has been found necessary to authorize an additional issue of United States notes."

Why did he find it necessary? Because otherwise they were going to be paying 24-36% interest on a crippling debt. I acknowledged that debt was also used to fund the war. I wrote:

Greenbacks were not the only source of funding for the Civil War. Bonds (government I.O.U.s) were also issued, and these too increased the money supply, since the banks that bought the bonds were also short of gold and had no other way of paying for the bonds than with their own newly-issued banknotes. The difference between the government issued Greenbacks and the bank-issued banknotes was that the Greenbacks were debt-free legal tender that did not have to be paid back. (P 86)

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

Lincoln finally said, "no more Greenbacks." My article did not make her case. It undermined her case. But she pretends that this is not the case.

Earlier in her list of responses, she backtracked. She admitted that she has decided to revise her book's presentation of Lincoln as a promoter of the Greenbacks. She called him a "reluctant Greenbacker."

//www.garynorth.com/public/7117.cfm

He was not merely reluctant. He became openly opposed. He wanted a national bank system, which Brown and the Greenbackers oppose. The Greenbackers have long chosen to ignored this fact. They have preferred to invoke the name of Lincoln, as if he had been a promoter of their cause. He was not. The true story is in the definitive 1903 book on the Greenbacks by Wesley Mitchell. They still ignored the fact that Lincoln openly opposed any more Greenbacks in 1863, preferring to fund the war with huge issues of debt, which the banks bought.

There comes a time to abandon convenient myths. Ellen Brown should openly abandon the Greenbackers' myth of "Lincoln money." But she still clings to it. There is no trace in her book that it was never true. It is time for her to revise her book . . . on 31 historical errors and 21 economic errors.

But then it would be an Austrian School book, not a Greenbacker book.

Historical Response #17: Ellen Brown Confuses Legal Language With Economic Reality--Civil War Greenbacks as Pure Fiat Money.

Ellen Brown says that Civil War Greenbacks were pure fiat money. I say they were not.

What is the dividing issue? She says that the language of the law was. I say that economic practice was. She says that the absence of a promise to redeem Greenbacks for gold identifies them as pure fiat money. I say the sellers' willingness to sell goods for Greenbacks was in part based on their hope of post-War redemption in gold. Because of this in part factor, the Greenbacks were not pure fiat money.

In my critique, I pointed to the obvious fact that the gold standard was re-established in 1879 at the 1861 price for gold. People holding Greenbacks could buy gold from the government at $20 per ounce.

Here is what she writes in response:

17. The Greenbacks were pure fiat money unrelated to gold backing.

You cite some 1993 source which says:

Did people believe that the government would eventually redeem Greenbacks for gold? As Unger [1964, p.16] noted, "Little had been said on the subject of redemption when Congress debated the Legal Tender" issue. However, all the available evidence indicates that the public believed that at some future date, convertibility would be reinstated, and all Greenbacks would be redeemed in gold.

The cite acknowledges that redemption was not discussed. The fact that "all the available evidence was that the people believed" something does not mean that the notes were not pure fiat money. They bore no promise to redeem in gold.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

When she wrote "cite," she obviously meant "citation." (I don't think she meant "site.")

She is writing as a lawyer would write -- a lawyer with no understanding of economic theory. I am writing as an economic historian. I consider people's beliefs and their behavior as more relevant for understanding what money is than what Congress failed to write into a statute. I wrote this:

So, the North's public believed that the Greenbacks would be redeemed at par value with gold after the War ended. This faith was rewarded. In 1879, the gold standard was re-established at the pre-War price of gold. A person could buy gold with his Greenbacks at the government-guaranteed price.

//www.garynorth.com/public/6939.cfm

She is saying that what the public believed is economically irrelevant. She insists that the Greenbacks were pure fiat money, because of what the law did not promise. I say they weren't pure fiat money; they were partial fiat money.

Here is my logic. From 1862 to 1879, the year of redemption, sellers of goods accepted the Greenbacks in exchange for goods and services. Why? They were taking a risk. The Greenbacks might never be redeemed in gold at any price, let alone $20 per ounce. The money might fall to zero value, just as Confederate money did by 1864. On the other hand, it might not. It might rise in value because of resumed gold convertibility. This very uncertainty offered a profit opportunity: "Buy low, sell high." Accept depreciated money today, when gold's market price was far above $20 an ounce, and convert it to more gold later on. (Just for the record, gold's price in dollars peaked in July, 1863. Lee retreated from Gettysburg on July 3, and Vicksburg surrendered on July 4. After that, it looked as though the North would win. Gold's price fell.)

The North's retailers sold goods at ever-higher prices: 75% higher by 1865. For the actual sellers of goods, it was worth the risk. They could take the Greenbacks and buy goods and services. They could also invest the paper currency, or even hoard it, on the expectation that it would be worth more after the War. Those who waited until 1879 were proven correct. The money was redeemed for lots more gold than it was worth in 1862-65. They did not have to wait that long. The price of gold fell close to $20 before then.

Ellen Brown insists that there was no legal promise of gold redemption made by the government. That is obvious. The economic issue, 1862-78, was not the absence of a promise; rather, it was the possibility of redemption at $20 an ounce. That possibility came true in 1879.

I am saying that there is an economic distinction between pure fiat money -- what the dollar became on August 15, 1971 -- and partial fiat money: what the Greenbacks were, 1862-78.

Ellen Brown sees no difference. This indicates that she is conceptually blind. She sees what she wants to see, not what the public saw in 1862-78, and not what three economic historians saw in 1993.

I prefer believing the economic historians, not Ellen Brown. How about you?

Historical Response #18: Ellen Brown Says That by Adding the Words "Is Quoted as Saying," She Escaped All Responsibility to Verify Any Quote.

I have caught Ellen Brown is a series of mistakes. She has cited bogus quotations by famous people to support her economic theory of fiat money, yet these famous people never said these things.

Now she says that she had no responsibility as an author to verify any of these quotes, because she added the words "is quoted as saying." She is saying, "See? I never said that he actually said it." She keeps saying this. This response makes look like a charlatan. She does not care.

Here is one more example:

18. Two bogus quotes from Bismarck on European bankers

I've said he is "quoted as" saying that and have given my historical source.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

Her historical source was (1) a 1921 article in a French journal, written by (2) a man who said Bismarck personally revealed his assessment of European banking to him when the man was 15 years old and (3) living in the United States.

Extracts from this article were originally cited by an antisemitic crackpot Russian "Count" whose book has been reprinted by a Greenbacker publishing company: Omni.

//www.garynorth.com/public/6940.cfm

This was nuts in 1921, and it is nuts today.

It is incumbent on an author to verify the sources, as surely as a lawyer is supposed to verify the identities of the witnesses. Ellen Brown does not believe this as an author. Presumably, she does not believe it as a lawyer.

I can imagine her final summation before a jury. "It's true that my witnesses were actually impostors. But lots of people told me they were who they said they were. It's not my job to verify their identities." Would she win the case? Only with a jury filled with idiots.

Historical Response #19: Ellen Brown Admits She Was Wrong About Lincoln's Supposed Defeat by the Bankers in 1863.

The Greenbackers' story of Lincoln's defeat of the bankers in 1862 never had any evidence. Neither does her story on their defeat of them in 1863. I challenged here here:

//www.garynorth.com/public/6941.cfm

Ellen Brown has conceded defeat on this.

19. International bankers defeated Lincoln in 1863 with the National Bank Act.

Point taken. I'll fix that in my next revision.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

To fix this, she must expose him for what he was: a tool of the bankers and the Illinois Central Railroad. Will she show the her heroes, Lincoln and his hero Henry Clay, were defenders of central banking and debt money? Of course not, because that would mean abandoning her book's underpinnings.

She promotes Clay's "American system" of high tariffs (sales taxes on imported goods), government-funded improvements (boondoggles), and the central bank, but without the central bank. But it is not possible to remove the central bank from the American system and make it work. Clay understood this. Lincoln understood this. Ellen Brown does not understand this. Neither do her readers, who know as little economic theory and American history as she does.

In 1832, Lincoln made his first entry into politics. That was the year of the battle over the Second Bank of the United States, which Clay had begun, believing that Jackson was politically vulnerable, because of his hatred of the Bank. Here is how Lincoln summarized his politics.

"My policies are short and sweet, like the old woman's dance. I am in favor of a National Bank, I am in favor of the Internal improvement system, and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. If elected I shall be thankful; and if not, it will be all the same."

http://www.nps.gov/liho/historyculture/newsalem.htm

It is not enough for Ellen Brown to drop her ludicrous claim that Lincoln was defeated by the bankers after 1862. She must make it clear that Clay and Lincoln were both agents of the bankers. They were opponents of Jackson, who fought Clay and defeated the Bank in 1836 -- the first and last year in American history in which the United States government had no debt.

As John Wayne said in The Searchers, "That'll be the day."

Historical Response #20: Ellen Brown Admits I Was Correct About the Bogus Quote by Garfield.

Ellen Brown says that someone else had altered her to the bogus nature of this quote. She had already decided to remove it.

It is a shame that she never verified all of these quotations. She has relied for three years on her readers to spot them. This is the second bogus quote that she says she had decided to remove before I wrote my 31-point critique of her book's historical material.

It took three years for a reader to spot this one. It took me about 30 seconds.

//www.garynorth.com/public/6942.cfm

She writes:

20. A bogus quote from Garfield on the control over money

I was already alerted to that. Garfield is no longer mentioned in my book.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

Better three years late than never, but not much better.

Historical Response #21: Ellen Brown Still Refuses to Offer Statistical Evidence Regarding Money and Prices on the Island of Guernsey.

Ellen Brown cited a beloved myth of the Greenbackers, the island of Guernsey, which supposedly has had fiat money and no price inflation for 200 years. I pointed out that she offered no proof. Here is what I wrote.

The Greenbackers have cited Guernsey for over 70 years. They picked a tiny island for which no detailed price studies exist, and then drew huge conclusions. If you go to Wikipedia's article on Guernsey's currency, you will read this.

Until the early 19th century, Guernsey used predominantly French currency. Coins of the French livre were legal tender until 1834, with French francs used until 1921. . . .

In 1827, the States of Guernsey introduced 1 pound notes, with the Guernsey Banking Company and the Guernsey Commercial Banking Company also issuing 1 pound notes from 1861 and 1886, respectively. The commercial banks lost their right to issue notes in 1914, although the notes circulated until 1924. Also in 1914, the States introduced 5 and 10 shilling notes, also denominated as 6 and 12 francs.

So, Guernsey used French money in the era of "no inflation." It also used commercial bank notes. The Greenbackers always neglect to tell us these details. The story of Guernsey's pure fiat money flies away into the land of convenient and unverifiable legends.

//www.garynorth.com/public/6945.cfm

In short, I said that the Greenbackers have never offered any statistical proof for the existence of this supposedly debt-free, government-issued, pure paper money nation that has never experienced price inflation. Guernsey is a fairy tale for grown-ups. It is fake. I think my position was is clear. She tries to make it unclear.

21. The island of Guernsey had fiat money without inflation.

Your link is bad.

What are you claiming I said, it had no price inflation or there was no inflation of the money supply? Here is how my text reads, and I believe it is correct (a modest price inflation is not considered "troublesome"):

During that time, the money supply has mushroomed to about 25 times its original size; yet the economy has not been troubled by price inflation, and it has remained prosperous and stable.6

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

First, she said that I provided a bad link. She did not say which one. I offered two links. Both were live when I posted them. I checked today (Nov. 2, 2010). Both are live.

Second, in her response, she still offered no evidence. She did refer to her original footnote #6. Let's pursue this.

She originally cited a 2001 article by David Kidd. She gave its title in the footnote, but no book or magazine where it was published. She offered only a link. That link is dead.

http://dkd.net/davekidd/politics/money.html

She posted her response to me in early October 2010. By then, she knew the original link was dead. How do I know this? Because, in an August 4, 2010 article on the Left-wing Huffington Post site, she referred to the Kidd article. She put a link to it from the Archive.org cite, which is a repository of dead articles. Here is the link:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010714001752/http:/dkd.net/davekidd/politics/money.html

Third, what evidence did Mr. Kidd offer back in 2001? None. He wrote only this:

A little place that has escaped the clutches of the banks by issuing its own interest-free money is the little island of Guernsey. By controlling its own money supply from 1816 onwards, Guernsey was able to avoid the century old trap of borrowing when it didn't have to. The island has had a stable and prosperous economy for over one hundred and fifty years. Guernsey's income tax is only a "flat" 20%. It has no public debt, no GST, no VAT, no inheritance tax, no capital gains tax, and almost no inflation.

Greenbackers quote each other, as if this were proof of anything except their lack of primary source documentation.

Who is David Kidd? Just another Greenbacker. He also wrote:

Government Issued, Debt Free Credit: Most problems would be overcome if the government simply issued credit, like it does with banknotes and coins, debt free. Especially when the government itself is the borrower. It already has the constitutional power to do so. Why it should have transferred this lucrative right to privately owned banks is difficult to understand unless things like bribery and blackmail are considered. Conspiracy theorists point out that two American Presidents, Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy were both assassinated whilst they were attempting monetary reform.

Nationalising the Banks -- bringing them under government ownership and control - appeals because amongst other things it could result in banking profits being shared by all the people.

This is the same old stuff: Abrahan Lincoln, the Greenbacker (not true) and President Kennedy, the Greenbacker (not true).

Is Kidd an economist? No. Is he an historian? No. He is supposedly an engineer and a computer programmer. http://dkd.net On his personal page, in his long list of interests, he does not mention monetary theory, nor does he say where he graduated from college as an engineer. There is a picture of him driving a go-kart. http://dkd.net/davekidd/dkiddp.html

Fourth, her other source is a brief reference to Guernsey in an obscure book on America and Third World debt, written by a British Greenbacker. He cited no primary sources on the statistics of Guernsey's money supply and its price level, as denominated in the local currency and the other currencies that were used in Guernsey.

Once again, I am calling for evidence that is based on a detailed history of Guernsey's monetary statistics and prices, written by a trained economic historian or a statistician. Until then, the story of Guernsey's 200 years of debt-free pure fiat money -- government-issued paper, not bank notes -- and stable prices remains a fantasy tale promoted only by Greenbackers.

Historical Response #22: Ellen Brown Reasserts Her Support of the Far Left Movement 19th-Century Known as Populism.

The Populist movement was a Left-wing radical movement of the late 19th century. Ellen Brown is an advocate of Populism. She would like to see its restoration by means of its favorite panacea, fiat money.

The Populists came in the name of the common man. It demanded a huge expansion of Federal power. It argued that the free market's system of wealth distribution is unjust. What is needed, they said, is wealth redistribution by the Federal government: more taxes, more regulation, and more fiat money. This is what Ellen Brown calls for today.

I pointed out all this in my original critique. Here, she responds.

22. Populism defended the interests of the common man.

Nothing in your comment refutes my point. You conclude, "The Populists wanted their share of government loot. They wanted big government for their interests." Quite right! Government of the people, by the people, for the people. That is the very definition of "populism" -- "for the people"!

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

The reason why I quoted their national political platform was to show that they wanted an income tax, in an era when Americans recognized that an income tax was a threat to their liberty.

//www.garynorth.com/public/6950.cfm

Populism was not "for the people." It was a movement of inefficient farmers who could not compete with efficient farmers. It was a movement of industrial workers who could not compete with other workers and who then used union violence to exclude those workers from the local market. It was a movement of debtors who wanted to pay off their debts with fiat money: cheating on a massive scale.

Ellen Brown promotes fiat money as a way to avoid the income tax. She never shows how this is possible, as I showed in my critique, but that is her promise. Hers is not a call to reduce government spending. It is a call for something for nothing: a large and growing Federal government paid for, pain-free, by pieces of paper.

She is a Left-wing utopian.

Historical Response #23: Ellen Brown Backs Off from Her Reference to a Phony 1892 Manifesto of Unnamed Bankers, but Not the 1934 "Update."

Ellen Brown backs off from another obviously phony document by saying that she never said it was a valid document.

The document in question is the so-called Bankers' Manifesto of 1892. I showed that it is bogus.

//www.garynorth.com/public/6951.cfm

Here is her response:

23. A bogus document: "Bankers' Manifesto of 1892?

I acknowledged that it was of questionable derivation. Here is what I wrote (p 105):

A document called "The Bankers Manifesto of 1892" suggested that it was all part of a deliberate plan by the bankers to disenfranchise the farmers and laborers of their homes and property. This is another document with obscure origins, but its introduction to Congress is attributed to Representative Charles Lindbergh Sr., the father of the famous aviator, who served in Congress between 1903 and 1913.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

Read her words carefully. She said that the document is "obscure." Note: the word "obscure" is not the same as "questionable derivation." In any case, the document is not obscure. It's obviously bogus.

She originally said that "it is attributed" to Lindbergh, Sr. It is? By whom? Where? So what?

She did even not have his dates of service in Congress correct. She never verified anything about this document or Lindbergh.

Question: Why did she cite it at all? Question: Why wind up looking like the kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar? Answer: because she thought she could get away with it. She is a lawyer, after all.

She conveniently neglected to respond to my other challenge.

Then she adds fuel to the fire. On page 147, she quotes from The Bankers Manifesto of 1934, an update of the 1892 manifesto. There is no original source documentation for this manifesto, either. I dare her (or anyone else) to provide it.

She did not provide it in her response. She did not even mention it. In her book, she offered no warning against it, not even the word "obscure."

She has grabbed every phony document that she could extract from previous Greenbackers' books, whose authors did the same with earlier Greenbacker books. She has presented a case for Greenbacks based on phony documents. Then, because I called her out in full public view, her repeated response is, "I never said the evidence was true."

Here is the scholar's rule: "If the evidence is not verifiable, don't refer to it."

The lawyer's rule is different: "If you can fool the jury and get away with it, you win the case. Nothing else matters."

For three years, she got away with it. Then I showed up.

She is an incompetent scholar. Don't trust her.

Ellen Brown Responds to My 31 Historical Criticisms. Now It's My Turn Again.

Gary North - October 14, 2010

Ellen Brown, the Greenbacker, has posted a reply to me. It is addressed to me: an open letter.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north-2

I do not intend to reply to her directly. I will address my comments to her victims: her readers.

I will not be posting my responses on the home page in the future. I don't want to bore most of my subscribers out of their skulls. I will post each response as a separate article in the department, Ellen Brown: Greenbacker.

//www.garynorth.com/public/department141.cfm

If you are interested in my responses, you can check there daily. I will respond by posting one article per day.

Before I begin, let me say this. I identified 31 major historical errors in her book. I also identified 21 major errors of economic theory. I devoted considerable space to most of them. Some articles are the equivalent of a chapter in a book. She has replied in a series of brief paragraphs.

I am very serious when I go after someone in print. Ellen Brown is not serious about scholarship at all. Let me quote from her response.

The book is 565 pages long and contains 40 pages of endnotes in fine print. I drew from my sources. I could not check the source of every source; in fact they generally didn't give sources. Of your list, I found perhaps four that were valid. Four in 565 pages I think is a remarkably good track record. I have no proof reader, no staff, the book is self-published, and I did much of my own formatting, which was a serious challenge.

First, I listed 31 errors, and I was correct in all 31, as I shall prove over the next 30 working days.

She admits that she drew from "my sources." My point was that her historical sources are totally unreliable. She thinks that she is off the hook because she quoted from some nutty source. She isn't.

She is a lawyer. Can you imagine her in front of a jury? If she loses, her client may go to jail. The prosecuting attorney demonstrates that 31 points in her defense were based on bogus sources and inaccurate statements. In her summation before the jury, she says that she did not have time to verify the sources.

Her client is going to jail.

Second, I typeset my own books, too. I also have no staff. I have written over 50 volumes of books. I strive to verify every fact, every footnote. Any serious author does.

What you're not noticing is what a really good read it is; many people have said so. That took a LOT of work. I was trying to make economics exciting and understandable for the average reader, and I believe I did that. You could put decades into footnotes and fact-checking and you would just be wasting your time if you didn't come up with prose people wanted to read.

I have never seen an admission like this, at any time, by any non-fiction author. This is unprecedented. This is simply beyond belief!

The issue is not whether her book is a "good read." The issue is whether it is accurate.

Back to the courtroom analogy. She informs the jury, "It's not the accuracy of the facts that I presented in my defense of my client that matters. It's whether I entertained you, right?"

Her client is going to jail.

She made Greenbackism exciting and understandable: for ignorant people who think Hitler's National Socialism was based on economics.

Here is my first response.

//www.garynorth.com/public/7110.cfm

Ellen Brown Switches Sides, Praises Bernanke and the Federal Reserve, and Calls QE2 the FED's Self-Redemption.

Gary North - November 22, 2010

Ellen Brown is a lawyer. Lawyers are trained to settle a case when they are losing. Brown just settled with me.

She has just switched sides. Instead of becoming an Austrian School critic of the Federal Reserve, she has become its cheerleader.

This is Bernanke's loss and the Tea Party's gain.

In my criticism, I kept saying that she is a leftist. She wants a welfare State funded by zero-interest loans from the government. She wants a big Federal government. She does not care how we get it. Now that the FED will inflate enough to pay for it, she has switched sides. Her primary commitment was always to the welfare State, not the battle against the FED.

In my detailed critique of her economics, I made it clear that she was never a conservative. Now she proves it. She praises Bernanke and the FED. She says that QE2 is not fiat helicopter money, and that Bernanke is not "Helicopter Ben," which he obviously is.

Hard to believe? Let me quote her.

A Bold Precedent

QE2 is not a "helicopter drop" of money on the banks or on Main Street. It is the Fed funding the government virtually interest-free, allowing the government to do what it needs to do without driving up the interest bill on the federal debt -- an interest bill that need not have existed in the first place. As Thomas Edison said, "If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good, makes the bill good, also."

The Fed failed to revive the economy with QE1, but it could redeem itself with QE2, a bold precedent that might inspire other countries to break the chains of debt peonage in the same way. QE2 is the functional equivalent of what many countries did very successfully before the 1970s, when they funded their governments with interest-free loans from their own central banks.

Countries everywhere are now suffering from debt deflation. They could all use a good dose of their own interest-free national credit, beginning with Ireland and Greece.

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22014

As the kid said to Shoeless Joe Jackson after he threw the World Series, "Say it ain't so, Joe." (In the interest of historical accuracy, this quotation cannot be verified, but a non-exchange between a silent Joe and a group of boys did take place, and the words of one of them were close.)

Ellen Brown initially stood with the Greenbackers in their call to end the Federal Reserve. She parroted the Greenback Party line. She said that the FED is private, which is not really true. The Board of Governors is a government agency, as its website address reveals. It ends in .gov. She said that the government -- Congress -- should print money without interest rates.

Now that Treasury bond rates are low -- but not at zero percent, contrary to what she implies -- she has scrapped it all in full public view. She now says that the FED is on the government's side. "It is the Fed funding the government virtually interest-free, allowing the government to do what it needs to do without driving up the interest bill on the federal debt -- an interest bill that need not have existed in the first place." She wants the present enormous Federal government to continue doing "what it needs to do." She is a welfare State leftist, which I kept saying in my criticisms of her economics.

She praises QE2. She calls it "a bold move." She writes: "The Fed failed to revive the economy with QE1, but it could redeem itself with QE2, a bold precedent that might inspire other countries to break the chains of debt peonage in the same way." Got that? QE 2 is self-redemption.

If she tries to defend herself by saying, "This is consistent with what I have always said," then she is dumber than dirt, or else she thinks her followers are dumber than dirt. If she says, "Yes, I switched. So what?" then she is just another lawyer.

[Note: November 26. On November 24, she took this approach.
Gary North, who purports to be an expert on the errors in my book "Web of Debt," has evidently not actually read it. In an article posted on the Market Oracle on November 23, he says that in calling QE2 a "bold precedent," I have switched sides. He apparently missed the chapter I wrote on this subject, first published in "Web of Debt" in 2007, saying exactly what I am saying now. . . .]

In The Web of Debt, she repeatedly quotes Greenbacker Stephen Zarlenga as the world's expert in money. As I pointed out, Zarlenga posted a critical review of Brown, saying that she was a compromiser. He did not write it, but he posted it. I called attention to this review here:

//www.garynorth.com/public/7253.cfm

Here is what the reviewer said.

Brown is clearly saying here it is banks lending "the use of something the lenders never had to lend" which "is a fraud" because people are made to think they're borrowing money that's there to be lent. Surprisingly then, Brown ends up wanting to enshrine this "fraud" by inserting it into the U.S. Constitution. Furthermore, Brown would enthrone the biggest Wall Street banks inside the U.S. Government to continue perpetrating it on the people. . . .

In summary, the book is very disappointing (from a monetary reform perspective) because Brown's conclusion proposes a non-solution: to keep the unsupportable debt-based system in place and consolidate it by embedding the fraudulent 'debt-money' accounting mechanism within the apparatus of government.

That's not effective reform and certainly not a "paradigm shift". Instead, Brown proposes to entrench the very same system she's been "shocking" us with. This is not "how we can break free" -- it's the same trap.

Now she has proven his case. She never had a clue about economic theory or monetary theory. She has therefore switched sides with ease -- we might call this intellectual quantitative easing.

Her only hope now is to insist that she never meant anything like this. "No, no, no, I meant something completely different. It's all a big misunderstanding." A lawyer who can't make herself clear needs to find another career -- maybe as an economic guru.

I have received many emails from Tea Party people telling me I am an economically ignorant fool for having criticized Brown publicly. These poor souls were her targets from day one, as I said repeatedly in my series. I called them victims. I said over and over, she was putting the shuck on the rubes. But they had committed to her emotionally. They refused to listen to my warnings.

This is what happens in every movement. Followers become committed emotionally to some guru, and will not listen to anyone who criticizes the guru. This is always a mistake. They risk winding up like Max Keiser.

The Tea Party movement claims to be a free enterprise movement, but its members have so little economic knowledge that they are vulnerable to loose canons like Ellen Brown. These naive people are sitting ducks.

Ellen Brown has now publicly set sail on board the cruise ship QE2 just as Captain Bernanke takes it out of port. She will be lost at sea.

She has always been intellectually lost at sea. This latest switch is part of her original lack of understanding. I offered 52 pieces of original evidence and 30 responses to prove it.

//www.garynorth.com/public/department141.cfm

Can you hear me now?

Bait-and-Switch: Ellen Brown Announces That "QE2 IS the Populist Solution." Her Followers Just Sit There.

November 26, 2010

In my November 22 article announcing Ellen Brown's defection to the Federal Reserve, I wrote this:

If she tries to defend herself by saying, "This is consistent with what I have always said," then she is dumber than dirt, or else she thinks her followers are dumber than dirt.

She responded on November 24 with a long article saying that this was no defection.

[Note: after I exposed her on this, she pulled her article down. Remember: she is a lawyer. But you can still find it on the Web. Click here.]

Gary North, who purports to be an expert on the errors in my book "Web of Debt," has evidently not actually read it. In an article posted on the Market Oracle on November 23, he says that in calling QE2 a "bold precedent," I have switched sides. He apparently missed the chapter I wrote on this subject, first published in "Web of Debt" in 2007, saying exactly what I am saying now.

The Federal Reserve is finally using its "quantitative easing" (QE) tool to good purpose, and I'm endorsing that, not just for our central bank but for any central bank anywhere that would be so bold.

We are back to these two choices: (1) she is dumber than dirt; (2) she thinks her followers are dumber than dirt. I really can't decide whether it's #2 or both #1 and #2.

I have never before argued publicly with anyone this intellectually ill-equipped. I have been at this for 45 years, and Ellen Brown is really, truly defenseless intellectually. Anyone who goes through my 52 original criticisms and my 30 responses to her responses will see why I make this judgment.

At this point, it is time for me to move to my next phase of criticism. My articles smoked her out. She finally came clean. She is -- and says she always has been -- a supporter of mass monetary inflation, no matter who prints the money. If the central bank does this, that's fine with her.

Having smoked her out, I now go to the next stage of my criticism. Ellen Brown is the Pied Piper of Greenbackism. Her goal now is to lead the Greenback faithful back into the camp of the Federal Reserve System.

She positioned Web of Debt as an anti-FED book. The cover pictures the FED as a spider.

Bait-and-Switch: Ellen Brown Announces That QE2 IS the Populist Solution. Her Followers Just Sit There.

If we are to believe her now, this was fake from day one. She never cared who does the inflating, she now says. If Bernanke will do it, that's fine with her, she now says.

In all my years of reading leftists -- and she is a leftist -- I have never seen anything like this. She built a following on this theme: "The Federal Reserve System is evil, because it is part of the fractional reserve banking system. The FED is privately owned. It does not issue real money. Real money is issued only by Congress." Then, in the space of four days, she tells her followers that the Federal Reserve is doing the right thing. It is in fact the model for all other central banks.

When you click through to the page where her latest article is posted, you will also find a posting by a reader who calls her on QE2's inflation. He cites TANSTAAFL: there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Here is her answer -- the monetary theory of her book, as I explained from the beginning.

We're not getting something for nothing. The government gets goods and services and pays for them with dollars, which represent claims on the American people for an equivalent sum in goods and services. The American people have received value and acknowledge that they owe value in return. That's what money is, and it should originate with the government, not with banks. It should, but our government won't do it, so the next best thing is to borrow from our own central bank, which creates the money and lends it interest-free. Rolled over indefinitely, that amounts to the same thing.

I have never seen anything like this. She built a large following with her book. Her following came to her because she was a forthright critic of the Federal Reserve System. Now she says that, while it is best to have Congress print the fiat money, "our government won't do it, so the next best thing is to borrow from our own central bank, which creates the money and lends it interest-free. Rolled over indefinitely, that amounts to the same thing."

Got that? The Federal Reserve System is "the next best thing."

It does no good to pursue her on this. Ellen Brown is beyond my powers of psychological analysis.

But what about her followers? They joined her because she was the most visible opponent of the Federal Reserve who was not a gold coin standard person, i.e., not an Austrian School critic of the FED. She seemed to have all the answers. She had that neat book cover, with the FED as a spider. But now, in just four days, she says there is no big difference between the FED's fiat money and Congress's fiat money (Greenbacks). The seeming differences, she says, "amount to the same thing."

They do? You mean the book cover was a huge fraud? You mean that the FED is not the evil spider? That is exactly what she means.

BETRAYAL

This is betrayal. I have never seen anything like this.

I have seen people switch. When Chicago School economist-judge Richard Posner went Keynesian in 2009 at the age of 70, overturning all of the work of a lifetime, he set the standard. But he has now been eclipsed by Ellen Brown. She switched, yet says she hasn't. This says, loud and clear, "I sucked you in, you dumb clucks!."

My guess is that most of her followers will not bat an eye. "We're with you, Ellen!" They are, indeed. They are now neutralized. They will say no more in criticism of the Federal Reserve System. The FED has now been baptized by the high priestess of fiat money. It is now sacrosanct -- second only to Congress in the Holy of Holies.

This is fate of every crackpot movement. It attracts people who are upset with the world. They don't know exactly what is wrong, but something is. Then the crackpot comes with THE ONE TRUE ANALYSIS and the inevitable ONE TRUE ANSWER. Implement this solution, and the nightmare will end: no muss, no fuss.

There are always naive, trusting people who will join the ranks of the "liberated" hard core. They feel that they are part of SOMETHING REALLY BIG. They are part of THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE. The Communists attracted such people for over a century. Their brave new world went down in less than a year. It left them high and dry.

The Greenback movement has always been led by crackpots offering THE BIG SOLUTION. It has attracted people who want a leader. They don't care what the creed of the "church" is. They just want leadership. They want to follow.

They are sitting ducks.

Ellen Brown gave them hope: hope in fiat money issued by Congress. Now she has announced a bait-and-switch. She brought them into her circle by positioning herself as the FED's #1 critic. Then, three years later -- 72 hours after I finish answering all 30 of her responses -- she announced that the FED is the next best thing.

What does a person do who has been attracted to her by her forthright stand in The Web of Debt? She has just called him a fool. How? By calling me a fool.

He apparently missed the chapter I wrote on this subject, first published in "Web of Debt" in 2007, saying exactly what I am saying now.

He also failed to see this. He committed himself intellectually and emotionally to her, and now she calls him a fool, a chump, a rube. She calls all of her followers chumps.

"Stick with me, chumps. You have no idea where I'll lead you next. But you will follow. All of you will follow. I have led all of you into the land of Oz. I, in fact, am the Wizard. I can turn night into day. I can turn opposition to the FED into support of the FED. Above all, I can turn paper money into wealth. I said that from day one. You swallowed that, chumps. There is no limit to what you people will swallow."

Ellen Brown Says She Has Not Spent Time Reading My Theories of Money. True. She Has Ignored All of My 21 Criticisms of Her Economic Theories.

Gary North - January 17, 2011

The Daily Bell did an interview with Ellen Brown.

It is a follow-up on two highly critical articles on her fiat money system.

The Rise of Brownianism
Brownian Schism

Here is a brief extract from the interview.

Daily Bell: Hard money economist Dr. North has made many criticisms of your work. How do you respond?

Ellen Brown: I haven't actually spent much time reading Dr. North's theories. He said in an email that I was a threat to the Tea Party movement, that his intent was to destroy me, and that there would be no compromise, so I've decided that arguing with him is an unproductive venture. He can have his theories and I'll have mine; may the best human win. If you want to present me with a particular criticism, I could respond to that. ***

She has decided not to argue with me because I destroyed her position on 31 historical facts. She responded to those, and I refuted her on every response where she did not admit that I was correct.

She has remained deathly silent on my 21 criticisms of her economic theory.

She admitted in the interview that she has had no training in economics.

As Mike Whitney says, I'm really just a writer in search of a good subject. My first degree was in English literature from Berkeley, but when I figured out that I couldn't make a living as a writer in my twenties I went to law school (UCLA). I married another law student, practiced civil litigation for 10 years in L.A. and had two delightful children. My husband (now ex-husband) finally burned out on Beverly Hills law and signed up to be a lawyer for USAID, taking us abroad for 11 years -- to Kenya, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua -- giving me a chance to try my hand at writing again. I wrote 10 books on health and the politics of health, including one co-authored bestseller that sold 285,000 copies ("Nature's Pharmacy").

I jumped from there into economics after reading Ed Griffin's "World Without Cancer," linking the pharmaceutical cartel to the banking cartel, which actually got its power through the private creation of money. When I discovered that "The Wizard of Oz" was written as a monetary allegory, growing out of the populist money reform movement of the 1890s, I had the plot line to make a dry subject interesting, and I proceeded to write.

I spent six years exploring the issues and perfecting my prose, until the two Bear Stearns hedge funds collapsed in June 2007, when I figured it was time to forget about art and rush to press. "Web of Debt" was in print two weeks later, self-published by print on demand through Lightning Source.

She is just another self-published Greenbacker. They have been around for 140 years.

I have been their one published critic in the libertarian-conservative movement since 1973. I started with a long paper written for my father-in-law in 1965. No one else thought they were worth the time or trouble.

Ellen Brown says she does not think responding to me is worth her time or trouble.

She is making money on her self-published book. As an entrepreneur-publisher, she is making the correct decision. As someone promoting an international banking reform position, she is a gutless wonder and a fraud.

She is Bernanke's cheerleader now. My view: her decision to switch sides is Bernanke's loss and conservatism's gain.

Peter Schiff Takes on Ellen Brown in an Interview. She Should Have Declined the Opportunity.

Gary North - January 17, 2011

Peter Schiff interviewed Ellen Brown. I can understand his motive: to defend free market monetary theory. Why she accepted is a mystery. Here is the interview:

http://schiffradio.com/pg/jsp/charts/audioMaster.jsp?dispid=301&pid=51349

Ellen Brown Calls for Massive Government Spending Increases. She Says the Government Can Mint $1 Trillion Coins to Do This.

Gary Noth - August 08, 2011

Ellen Brown in late November, 2010, became Bernanke's cheerleader. She loved QE2. She wants more of the same. Way more.

She wants more government spending. Way more spending. Gigantically more spending. She wants it NOW.

Austerity -- reduced government spending -- is bad, she says.

The Market Has Spoken: Austerity Is Bad for Business

It used to be that when the Fed Chairman spoke, the market listened; but the Chairman has lost his mystique. Now when the market speaks, politicians listen. Hopefully they heard what the market just said: government cutbacks are bad for business. The government needs to spend more, not less. Fortunately, there are viable ways to do this while still balancing the budget.

Anyone who doubted my accusation that this woman is a hard core leftist needs to read more of her solution.

On Thursday, August 4, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 512 points, the biggest stock market drop since the collapse of September 2008. Why? Weren't the markets supposed to rebound after the debt ceiling agreement was reached on Monday, avoiding U.S. default and a downgrade of U.S. debt? So we were told, but the market apparently understands what politicians don't: the debt deal is a death deal for the economy. Reducing government spending by $2.2 trillion over a decade, as Congress just agreed to do, will kill any hopes of economic recovery. We're looking at a double-dip recession.

Does she sound like Paul Krugman? Yes.

She adopts the Keynesian concept -- fallacious -- of the multiplier. She cites some unknown writer who produces stage plays and music CDs. He wrote this for Truthhout. To find out about Truthout, click here.

The figure is actually more than $2.2 trillion. As Jack Rasmus pointed out on Truthout on August 4th:

Economists estimate the "multiplier" from government spending at about 1.5. That means for every $1 cut in government spending, about $1.5 dollars are taken out of the economy. The first year of cuts are therefore $375 billion to $400 billion in terms of their economic effect. Ironically, that's about equal to the spending increase from Obama's 2009 initial stimulus package. In other words, we are about to extract from the economy -- now showing multiple signs of weakening badly -- the original spending stimulus of 2009!

What we need is more fiat money! It seems that QE2 was not enough. We need QE3. As she writes: The Problem Is Not Debt But a Shrinking Money Supply.

Only about $2 trillion of this shrinkage has been replaced with the Fed's quantitative easing programs, leaving a $3 trillion hole to be filled; and only the government is in a position to fill it. We have been sold the idea that there is a "debt crisis" when there is really a liquidity crisis. Paying down the federal debt when money is already scarce just makes matters worse. Historically, when the deficit has been reduced, the money supply has been reduced along with it, throwing the economy into recession.

So, how can we get more money? Just don't pay off the debt!

The federal debt has not been paid off since the days of Andrew Jackson, and it does not need to be paid off. It is just rolled over from year to year. The only real danger posed by a growing federal debt is the interest burden, but that has not been a problem yet.

There is a solution: QE3.

The interest burden will increase if the federal debt continues to grow, but that problem can be solved by mandating the Federal Reserve to buy the government's debt. The Fed rebates its profits to the government after deducting its costs, making the money nearly interest-free. The Fed is already doing this with its quantitative easing programs and now holds nearly $1.7 trillion in federal securities.

But that's too conventional. There is a better way: the U.S. Mint can crank out a few $1 trillion coins!

Another alternative was suggested in my book Web of Debt in 2007: the government could simply mint some trillion dollar coins. Congress has the Constitutional power to "coin money," and no limit is put on the value of the coins it creates, as was pointed out by a chairman of the House Coinage Subcommittee in the 1980s.

She says this idea is taking hold.

Today the idea has gone mainstream. It is covered by NY Magazine, CNBC, and The Economist. Even Nobel economist Paul Krugman of the NY Times has weighed in. Annie Lowrey of Slate discusses it as one of several gimmicks the government could use to resolve the debt-ceiling debacle. Krugman added:

"These things [like coin seigniorage] sound ridiculous -- but so is the behavior of Congressional Republicans. So why not fight back using legal tricks?"

This will not increase prices, she says.

On the inflation question, just because the Treasury has money in its account doesn't mean it can spend the funds. It needs the usual Congressional approval. To keep a lid on spending, Congress just needs to be instructed in basic economics. They can spend on goods and services up to full employment without creating price inflation (since supply and demand will rise together). After that, they need to tax --- not to fund the budget, but to pull excess money back in and avoid driving up prices.

Wait. This is Keynesianism. More taxes! More spending!

In an economic downturn, the government needs to spend more, not less, as history shows. This can be done while still balancing the budget, simply by taking back the government's Constitutional power to issue money.

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/the-market-has-spoken-austerity-is-bad-for-business

Keynes was a monetary crank. He cited monetary cranks favorably. I gave a speech on this issue to the Mises University on July 27.

Ellen Brown's Greenbacker forefathers got there before Keynes did. Gertrude Coogan was promoting Brown's position in 1935: a year before Keynes' General Theory. You can read my critique of Coogan here. So, I guess we should give Brown credit -- interest-free, of course.

For my detailed analysis of her scholarship, go here:

//www.garynorth.com/public/department141.cfm

Ellen Brown: Hitler's Cheerleader

Gary North - October 08, 2011
Printer-Friendly Format

Ellen Brown is a lawyer by profession, a Greenbacker by confession, and a fan of Adolph Hitler's economics by consistency.

She is quite open about her support for National Socialism's economics, as I shall demonstrate. What is depressing is this: she is getting a respectful hearing in Tea Party circles. Her book, The Web of Debt (2006), is widely cited on the World Wide Web. As of early October, 2010, a Google search for "Ellen Brown" and "Web of Debt" generated close to 600,000 hits. This is huge.

Here is a tactical problem. For two generations, conservatives have been shouted down by the Left with this accusation: "Fascist!" Ellen Brown is now making this accusation plausible. Yet the great irony is this: Ellen Brown is a Leftist. There is nothing even remotely free market or conservative about The Web of Debt. It is a call for a Federally funded welfare state. She praises the New Deal. She praises John Maynard Keynes. She has only one objection to their recommended programs: governments borrowed money to fund them. She wants a welfare state that is funded entirely by paper money printed by Congress. She is about as conservative as Nancy Pelosi.

How could her ideas be getting a hearing in Tea Party circles? It's a long story. Let me summarize it.

THE GREENBACKERS

Brown is a Greenbacker. She is open about this. Most people have never heard of Greenbackism. It has been a fringe movement in American political life ever since the 1860s. The Greenback Party in the 1870s was the first American political party to come out in favor of a pure fiat money economy, a paper money system controlled by Congress with currency irredeemable in gold coins or silver coins.

The Greenbackers are committed to paper money. They are opposed to any form of gold standard. They are opposed to fractional reserve banking. They are opposed to central banking, unless the central bank is 100% owned and controlled by Congress.

They were part of the non-Marxist Left during the late 19th century. In the 1930s, they divided. Some of them attempted to enter the anti-Roosevelt Right. An example was Gertrude Coogan. She was not well known. I have written a minibook on her economics, published by the Mises Institute: Gertrude Coogan's Bluff. You can download it for free here.) Others joined the anti-Roosevelt Left. The most famous example was the radio preacher, Father Charles Coughlin, who later broke with the New Deal because he thought it was not sufficiently committed to the welfare state. He called the New Deal "the Jew Deal." He favored the economic policies of Hitler.

In a strange amalgam, Leftist-Populist Congressman Jerry Voorhis in 1943 persuaded Devin-Adair Books to publish his Greenbacker book, Out of Debt, Out of Danger. In the post-War period, this tiny publishing house became one of the three conservative publishers, along with Caxton and Regnery.

In the early 1950s, the Greenbackers gravitated to the Right. A Greenback publisher gained editorial control of The American Mercury, by then a far-Right magazine that had originally been founded by H. L. Mencken. One of its writers was George Lincoln Rockwell, who later founded the American Nazi Party.

A series of tiny publishing houses began issuing reprints of 1930s-era books, plus new ones. (For a short bibliography, click here. They made little headway into the conventional Right. But within certain fringe groups, especially antisemitic groups opposed to "the International Jewish Bankers' Conspiracy," they gained a foothold.

This obscurity has all changed. Their market has grown exponentially since 2008. Two reasons are Ellen Brown and Ron Paul, both of whom are opposed to the Federal Reserve. Their opposition gave negative publicity to the FED. This rallied the Tea Party troops. A third reason was the economic crisis in the fall of 2008 and the Federal bailouts of the banks. The Greenbackers are riding the growing wave of opposition to the Federal Reserve System.

The strategic problem is this: the Tea Party movement is filled with people who have no economic understanding. They cannot distinguish Ron Paul's opposition to the FED, based on the gold coin standard, from Ellen Brown's opposition, based on a fiat money standard. They are intellectually defenseless.

GERMAN NATIONAL SOCIALISM

In 2006, Brown's 500-page book appeared. By 2008, it was in its 4th printing. It is an attack on fractional reserve banking and the Federal Reserve System. It began getting a hearing on the World Wide Web.

The book does not initially appear what it really is: a call to set up a government-funded welfare state. But there are brief statements to this effect in the early pages. Only on page 234, halfway through the book, does she get to the point: the Nazi economy.

The German people were in such desperate straits that they relinquished control of the country to a dictator, and in this they obviously deviated from the "American system," which presupposed a democratically-governed Commonwealth. But autocratic authority did give Adolf Hitler something the American Greenbackers could only dream about--total control of the economy. He was able to test their theories, and he proved that they worked.

At this point, anyone with an IQ above 90 should begin to smell a rat.

The Greenbackers are big advocates of Abraham Lincoln. Why? Because he allowed the banks to suspend payments in gold in 1861. Then in 1862 and 1863, he signed into law a system of unbacked fiat money called Greenbacks. They see him as the creator -- a would-be national savior who was thwarted by the bankers, who had him assassinated.

They never discuss the fact that Lincoln was an advocate of fractional reserve banking. They never mention that in January of 1863, he signed the bill authorizing a second issue of Greenbacks, but sent Congress a letter deploring the law. He called for a national bank act. Congress gave it to him a month later.

With this as background, I return to Brown's discussion of National Socialism.

Like for Lincoln, Hitler's choices were to either submit to total debt slavery or create his own fiat money; and like Lincoln, he chose the fiat solution. He implemented a plan of public works along the lines proposed by Jacob Coxey and the Greenbackers in the 1890s. Projects earmarked for funding included flood control, repair of public buildings and private residences, and construction of new buildings, roads, bridges, canals, and port facilities. The projected cost of the various programs was fixed at 1 billion units of the national currency. One billion non-inflationary bills of exchange, called Labor Treasury Certificates, were then issued against this cost. Millions of people were put to work on these projects, and the workers were paid with the Treasury Certificates. The workers then spent the certificates on goods and services, creating more jobs for more people. . . .

Within two years, the unemployment problem had been solved and the country was back on its feet. It had a solid, stable currency and no inflation, at a time when millions of people in the United States and other Western countries were still out of work and living on welfare. [Web of Debt, p. 234.]

The German economic system was run by the central government. It preserved the illusion of private property, but it was a socialist system. The government controlled the means of production. The government issued fiat money, and it established price and wage controls. It set up a system of 1,600 cartels in 1933-36. Beginning in 1934, government officials set the prices of commodities, and this resulted in shortages of most domestic commodities. The government also expanded the power of the government over the affairs of everybody in the society.

There have been only two major studies in English of the German economy since 1939. One was called The Vampire Economy, and it described the details of this centralized economic system. It was published in 1939. You can download a copy of it free of charge here. The other is Adam Tooze's massive study, The Wages of Destruction (2006). They both tell the same story. (Oddly enough, both were published by Viking.)

Dr. David Gordon reviewed Tooze's book. Here are selections from his review.

As Adam Tooze has noted, Hitler in 1932 indicated his interest in job-creation programs, and this of course required government spending. But once in power, his interest shifted from job creation to rearmament. This required even more government spending; and armaments rapidly increased.

The Nazi party did not adopt work creation as a key part of its programme until the late spring of 1932, and it retained that status for only eighteen months, until December 1933, when civilian work creation spending was formally removed from the priority list of Hitler's government … [Work creation] was in sharp contrast to the three issues that truly united the nationalist right . . . the triple priority of rearmament, repudiating Germany's foreign debts and saving German agriculture … It was Hitler's action on these three issues not work creation that truly marked the dividing line between the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. (Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, Viking, 2006, pp. 24-5). . . .

In effect, Germany had embarked on a Keynesian policy: government spending became increasingly important in guiding the economy into the military channels that Hitler wanted. . . .

Keynes himself viewed the Nazi efforts with favor. In his preface to the German edition of The General Theory, dated September 7, 1936, Keynes indicated that the ideas of his book could more readily be carried out under an authoritarian regime:

Nevertheless the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of the production and distribution of a given output under conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.

Hitler was the head of a political party. In English, it was called the National Socialist German Workers Party, or "Nazi Party" for short. It was not called socialist for nothing. To imagine that this system was anything other than socialism is to parrot the Party Line of the Left ever since 1923. "No, no, no: the Nazis were not really socialists." Well, if they weren't, their policies surely resembled socialism. They believed in centralized control over the economy, and when they got into power in 1933, they established that control. This control grew even tighter after 1939, because of World War II.

GUNS, NOT BUTTER

The secret of the Nazi economy was spending on war. In a study of Nazi fiscal and monetary policy, economist Albrecht Ritschl concluded in 2000,

A critical reassessment of deficit spending during the Nazi recovery reveals a surprisingly small role for macroeconomic policy. Both the descriptive evidence and the results from multivariate time series forecasts suggest that recovery from the Great Depression was mainly driven by a rebound effect that was visible in the data already by late 1932. Up to around 1936, the German recovery was no more advanced than that of Britain or the United States, where far less expansionary fiscal policies were followed. However, even in Germany the fiscal impulse generated by the budget deficit was too small to be consistent with Keynesian demand stimulation under an income/expenditure mechanism. In order to explain the very high, at times two-digit growth rates of GNP during the recovery, deficits would have had to be two to five times higher than they actually were. Apparently, recovery was due to forces other than fiscal and monetary policy, just as in the cases of Britain and the United States. . . .

Nazi recovery appears less spectacular than was hitherto believed. Our results also indicate that government spending was dominated by war preparation already in a very early phase of the Nazi recovery. I find little justification for the popular interpretation that recovery was sparked off by non-military work-creation and the construction of the autobahn network. Investment in the autobahn reached sizable magnitudes only in 1936. All these projects pale in comparison with the rapid build-up of military expenditure, except for the year of 1933 when rearmament had not yet really begun. To secure the desired high speed of war preparation, the Nazi administration took early, often draconian steps to crowd out private demand. The growth in consumer spending fell short of the increase in national product, and the contribution of private investment to the recovery remained unimpressive.

Strict control of private expenditure was partly achieved by maintaining taxation at the high levels reached during the depression years. [Deficit Spending in the Nazi Recovery, 1933-1938: A Critical Reassessment, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zurich, pp. 16-17.

In short, the government created jobs in factories preparing for war. Then it taxed workers so that they could not spend their income on consumer goods.

Hitler was no advocate of economic growth. He was an advocate of military expansion. Professor Tooze summarizes.

This backdrop is essential if we are to understand Hitler's refusal to accept the liberal gospel of economic progress. Economic growth could not be taken for granted and Hitler was by no means the only person to say so. As we have seen, the doctrine of economic life as a field of struggle was already fully formed in Mein Kampf and Hitler's 'Second book'. And this Darwinian outlook was only encouraged by the subsequent Depression. Given the density of Germany's population and Hitler's insistence on the inevitability of conflict arising for export-led growth, the conquest of new Lebensraum was certainly one means of raising Germany's per capita income level. Hitler could hardly have been more emphatic or consistent in his advocacy of this position. As we have seen, he made a point of reiterating this belief in the very first days of his new government in 1933. An aggressive foreign policy based on military strength was the only real foundation of economic prosperity (Wages of Destruction, pp. 145-46).

Hitler was a mercantilist who believed in expansion by military conquest.

A PACKAGE DEAL

Ellen Brown adds this:

While Hitler clearly deserved the opprobrium heaped on him for his later military and racial aggressions, he was enormously popular with the German people, at least for a time. [Web of Debt, p. 235.]

Her message: Hitler was a man of the people! She wants the United States to follow his lead . . . but only in economic policy, of course. Not the concentration camps. Not the war.

She does not draw the obvious conclusion, namely, that the centralized power of the government over money, business, and labor was basic to the power which that government imposed over the Jews and other minorities. It is almost as if his racial tyranny and military aggression were completely divorced from his economic views and the government's economic policies. It should be obvious that these policies were a package deal. Without the centralization of power over the economy, the German government could not have exercised the tyranny that it did exercise in all other areas of life. This was the argument of F. A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom (1944). It is unfortunate that Ellen Brown does not believe in the arguments presented in that book. She dismisses all such free market arguments as "the British System" of Adam Smith.

Her happy-face and utterly mythical welfare economy of Nazi Germany, with its high employment, is the economy that Ellen Brown wants to see established in the United States. She is very clear about her intentions. Anyone who thinks that she is anything but a National Socialist in her economic outlook does not take her words seriously.

Her ignorance of National Socialist economic practice and its results -- war and concentration camps -- is monumental. It matches her ignorance of monetary theory. Her ignorance is a package deal.

GREENBACK ECONOMICS

To get some sense of what Greenback economics is all about, let me survey a few of her economic errors. I list them in the order in which they appear in Web of Debt. I do not refute them here. I have devoted one article per error. Click any link to see the direct quotation from Web of Debt and my refutation.

1. Governments should get out of debt by printing paper money.

2. There is not enough gold to facilitate trade.

3. Economic scarcity is the result of greedy bankers.

4. Mercantilism's state-run economy is harmonious; the free market isn't.

5. Keynes was correct about money.

6. The New Deal made Americans richer through public works.

7. The New Deal's price controls on food were good for America.

8. Keynes was a great economist because he promoted budget deficits.

9. Rothbard's monetary theory is wrong (when you misquote it).

10. The New Deal allocated capital better than the free market did.

11. A monetary system is a national contractual agreement.

12. Falling prices and increasing productivity cause recessions under a gold standard.

13. The government can pay off its debt with paper money with no price inflation.

14. The government can pay off Social Security with paper money with no price inflation.

15. Americans should trust Congress to regulate the monetary system.

16. The government should build a larger welfare state with fiat money.

17. The banking system should be run like the Post Office.

18. Banking should be run on a non-profit basis.

19. If Congress prints money, there will be no need for an income tax.

20. Gold's price fluctuates too wildly for it to serve as money.

21. It is possible to have civil government without taxes, debt, and inflation.


GREENBACK HISTORIOGRAPHY

As implausible and garbled as Greenback economics is, it is Nobel-Prize material when compared to the Greenbackers' version of American history.

I have been reading their books, off and on, for over 45 years. I have found the same false stories over and over. Greenback authors rarely verify them. They simply repeat them.

In terms of the number of utterly bogus stories, Ellen Brown's Web of Debt surpasses anything I have ever read. It is filled with bogus quotes from famous people. It also has its share of bloopers. Let me begin with my favorite. She argues that the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Benjamin Strong, met secretly in February of 1929 with the head of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman. Together, they concluded that a collapse of the stock market was inevitable. They decided to take no action to prevent this. She cites no evidence for this meeting, but she assures us that "the evidence suggests" it (p. 143). I can think of a crucial piece of evidence that calls the story into question. Strong died in 1928.

With this as background to Ellen Brown, historian, I now offer 30 other examples.

1. A bogus quote from Sir Josiah Stamp on the Bank of England

2. Jefferson was a promoter of unbacked paper money.

3. Lincoln promoted debt-free paper money.

4. Colonial Pennsylvania avoided taxes by issuing paper money.

5. A bogus quote from Franklin on colonial paper money

6. Ignoring a negative statement by Franklin on the "Continentals"

7. A bogus quote from John Adams on debt as a means of conquest

8. The "Christian Bible" Prohits Interest, but not the "Jewish Bible."

9. China's medieval unbacked paper money had centuries of success.

10. England's medieval wooden "tallies" were interest-free money.

11. A bogus quote from Nathan Rothschild

12. A bogus quote from Jefferson on banks

13. Jefferson and Jackson fought the 1st Bank of the U.S.

14. The Civil War's paper money made survivors richer.

15. A bogus Lincoln quote on men and wages

16. Lincoln favored the Greenbacks over Union debt to banks.

17. The Greenbacks were pure fiat money unrelated to gold backing.

18. Two bogus quotes from Bismark on European bankers

19. International bankers defeated Lincoln in 1863 with the National Bank Act.

20. A bogus quote from Garfield on the control over money

21. The island of Guernsey had fiat money without inflation.

22. Populism defended the interests of the common man.

23. A bogus document: "Bankers' Manifesto of 1892"

24. "Robber Barron" Capitalists raised prices and lowered quality.

25. Benjamin Strong (d. 1928) plotted with Montagu Norman in 1929.

26. Milton Friedman said that the Federal Reserve caused the Depression.

27. Hitler's National Socialism ended the Great Depression in Germany.

28. Germany's hyperinflation (1921-23) happened only after the central bank was privatized.

29. Foreign currency speculators caused Zimbabwe's hyperinflation.

30. Gold's price rose in the 19th century

31. Shays' Rebellion (1786) took place after the Constitution was ratified (1788).


CONCLUSION

Ellen Brown has achieved what no other Greenbacker has achieved ever since Father Coughlin: a large national audience -- though nowhere near the size of his audience at its peak. Her book, Web of Debt, is universally regarded as authoritative by Greenbackers. She does not share his antisemitism, but she shares his economic views.

Those of her disciples who read this article and who click through to see my evidence of her errors will have a problem. They can verify for themselves that she does not know what she is talking about in two areas: economic theory and American history. She has used bogus quotes to bolster her weak economic case. She cannot be trusted. Will they back away from her and her book? Will they search for some other book that proves the Greenback case? Or will they simply drop Greenbackism?

As for Ellen Brown, she now has four courses of action.

1. Pretend that she never read this article, on the assumption that her followers will not see it. (Intellectually dishonewst.)

2. Burn all copies of her book and write a revised one that corrects her oversights. (Hard work, and then I will get to reply.)

3. Burn all copies of the book and stop promoting Greenbackism. (Do authors ever do this?)

4. Reply to me, point by point, on her Website, showing that I am 100% wrong. (Impossible, and then I will get to reply.)

Lawyer Brown now has an opposing "counsellor": me. From now on, I will be her lifelong tar baby. If she replies and sends me a link, I will reply in my department: Ellen Brown: Greenbacker.

I have spend 45 years dealing with monetary cranks. She is by far the most vulnerable of them all. It is not just that she understands neither economics nor the basics of historical research. None of them does. What makes her so vulnerable is that she is so visible . . . and so consistent. She finally did what was implied by them all after 1935, but which only Father Coughlin had the courage to do. She came to the defense of Adoph Hitler's economy. I have waited for a target like her for 45 years.

This is going to be fun. For me.

* * * * * * * * * * *

After the publication of this article on LewRockwell.com and my site, she ran for cover. She said that she would no longer use Hitler's economy as an example. Nevertheless, she said that she still believes her analysis was accurate.

//www.garynorth.com/public/7100.cfm

This is a totally pragmatic woman.

Ellen Brown's War on the Constitution

Gary North - November 15, 2011

Ellen Brown leans so far to the left that her left shoulder scrapes the pavement.

That this extreme leftist should get a hearing within the grass roots conservative movement is just one more bit of evidence that tens of thousands of members of the grass roots conservative movement do not know "come here" from "sic 'em."

She has already praised Ben Bernanke to the heavens for QE2. You can read about this here.

Now she comes out four square behind Franklin Roosevelt's most radical speech just before he died. She then praises Martin Luther King for attempting to implement FDR's vision.

She has called for a New Bill of Rights. She means a New Deal Bill of Rights. She refers back to Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union Address. This was the most radical call for a centrally planned economy in the history of Presidential addresses. Here is a sample.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights--among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however--as our industrial economy expanded--these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America's own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

I ask the Congress to explore the means for implementing this economic bill of rights- for it is definitely the responsibility of the Congress so to do. Many of these problems are already before committees of the Congress in the form of proposed legislation. I shall from time to time communicate with the Congress with respect to these and further proposals. In the event that no adequate program of progress is evolved, I am certain that the Nation will be conscious of the fact.

The 1791 Bill of Rights granted rights that are immune from state interference. FDR's bill of right was a laundry list of voters' rights to government subsidies and guarantees.

Obama has never come close to a list like this. But it was FDR's vision of the future.

It is also Ellen Brown's vision of the future.

WOMB TO TOMB

As always, she blames everything on fractional reserve banking. She quotes Henry Ford, as if Ford knew anything about economic theory, politics, or history.

Henry Ford said, "It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."

What evidence was there that Ford understood any of this? If he did, why didn't he lead a revolution?

We are beginning to understand, and Occupy Wall Street looks like the beginning of the revolution.

Occupy Wall Street is not Occupy Wall Street is not Occupy Liberty Street, meaning the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. These kids and aging hippies have no program. They have no economic theory. They have no influence. They have weird back-and-forth chanting led by well-organized Leftists.

She then quotes some woman with a degree in planning. The woman is a promoter of the same Greenback fiat money inflation that Brown is.

According to Margrit Kennedy, a German researcher who has studied this issue extensively, interest now composes 40% of the cost of everything we buy. We don't see it on the sales slips, but interest is exacted at every stage of production. Suppliers need to take out loans to pay for labor and materials, before they have a product to sell.

For government projects, Kennedy found that the average cost of interest is 50%. If the government owned the banks, it could keep the interest and get these projects at half price. That means governments--state and federal--could double the number of projects they could afford, without costing the taxpayers a single penny more than we are paying now.

Who is Margrit Kennedy, and why should anyone pay attention to her? We read on Wikipedia:

Kennedy is an architect with a Masters Degree in Urban and Regional Planning and a Ph.D. in Public and International Affairs from the University of Pittsburgh, and has worked as an urban planner in Germany, Nigeria, Scotland and the United States. In 1991, she was appointed Professor of Ecological Building Technologies at the Department of Architecture, University of Hanover.

She has stated that her work on ecological architecture in 1982 led her to the discovery, that it is "virtually impossible to carry out sound ecological concepts on the scale required today, without fundamentally altering the present money system or creating new complementary currencies".

Margrit Kennedy offers no theory and no evidence for her statement. She wrote a 57-page booklet without a single footnote or reference. She wrote another booklet in which her main supporting expert was Silvio Gesell, the former Minister of Finance for the one-week Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919. Gesell was promoted by John Maynard Keynes in The General Theory (pp. 354, 371).

Interest rates today are at all-time lows in the United States. Banks have $1.6 trillion on deposit with the Federal Reserve, held as excess reserves, earning about 0.25%. Treasury bills are around 0.1%. Yet this planner wants her readers to believe that 50% goes to banking. No one except Ellen Brown is silly enough to believe her.

This opens up exciting possibilities. Federal and state governments could fund all sorts of things we think we can't afford now, simply by owning their own banks. They could fund something Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King dreamt of--an Economic Bill of Rights.

As I have said for over a year, Ellen Brown is a hard-core Leftist.

She offers what she calls "A Vision for Tomorrow." She begins with Roosevelt's 1944 speech. "Roosevelt's own vision reached its sharpest focus in 1944, when he called for a Second Bill of Rights." She quotes a portion of the section of speech that you have already read.

She then goes far beyond FDR. She presents her case for the government's take-over of the country's economy.

First, government health insurance, i.e., Obamacare.

Health needs have changed too. In 1791, foods were natural and nutrient-rich, and outdoor exercise was built into the lifestyle. Degenerative diseases such as cancer and heart disease were rare. Today, health insurance for some people can cost as much as rent.

But wait! There's more!

After World War II, the G.I. Bill provided returning servicemen with free college tuition, as well as cheap home loans and business loans. It was called "the G.I. Bill of Rights." Studies have shown that the G.I. Bill paid for itself seven times over and is one of the most lucrative investments the government ever made. The government could do that again--without increasing taxes or the federal debt. It could do it by recovering the power to create money from Wall Street and the financial services industry, which now claim a whopping 40% of everything we buy.

There is of course no evidence that Wall Street absorbs 40% of what we buy. If there were, where would we earn a living to buy it? What about the 40% that government takes? She never mentions that. So, Wall Street plus government get 80% of everything we buy. This is nuts. But she expects people to believe it.

So, how can we get all these free goodies from the government? Why, by printing money!

Governments--state and federal--could bypass the interest tab by setting up their own publicly-owned banks. Banking would become a public utility, a tool for promoting productivity and trade rather than for extracting wealth from the debtor class. Congress could go further: it could reclaim the power to issue money from the banks and fund its budget directly. It could do this, in fact, without changing any laws. Congress is empowered to "coin money," and the Constitution sets no limit on the face amount of the coins. Congress could issue a few one-trillion dollar coins, deposit them in an account, and start writing checks.

It's all so simple! Just let Congress print up pieces of paper with politicians' pictures on them! That will create wealth for all!

But why should we hold to FDR's vision? Because Martin Luther King recommended it.

After President Roosevelt died in 1945, his vision for an Economic Bill of Rights was kept alive by Martin Luther King. "True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." MLK too has now passed away, but his vision has been carried on by a variety of money reform groups. The government as "employer of last resort," guaranteeing a living wage to anyone who wants to work, is a basic platform of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). A student of MMT declares on his website that by "[e]nding the enormous unearned profits acquired by the means of the privatization of our sovereign currency. . . [i]t is possible to have truly full employment without causing inflation."

But what about the United States Constitution? It did not grant the right to government-funded security to Americans. She has the answer -- the same answer that the Left has offered ever since 1900. The Constitution is old fashioned. It is out of date.

What was sufficient for a simple agrarian economy does not provide an adequate framework for freedom and democracy today. We need an Economic Bill of Rights, and we need to end the privatization of the national currency. Only when the privilege of creating the national money supply is returned to the people can we have a government that is truly of the people, by the people and for the people. (http://bit.ly/BrownFDR)

CONCLUSION

Ellen Brown is taken seriously by thousands of confused, angry Tea Party people. They say that want small government. They say they believe in the Constitution. Yet this Leftist has recruited a following within the Right, as generations of Greenback Leftists have ever since the 1930s. These poor souls want a guru so badly that they are willing to abandon everything they believe about the Constitution and Limited government. She can get them to swallow the Left's agenda because they hate bankers so much.

This is bad news for the Tea Party. It has enemies with the rank and file.

Ellen Brown: Still Leftist After All These Years

Gary North - December 29, 2017

I devote an entire department to the fiat money Greenback lawyer Ellen Brown. She doesn't understand economics. She also doesn't understand historical documentation. I proved this in 2010. You can read the proof here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/department141.cfm.

She still publishes articles on her website. Occasionally, they are picked up by Left-wing sites. The article I analyze here is an example. It was posted on Truthdig. Truthdig is a Leftist site.

Incredibly, people who regard themselves as conservatives cite her as an authority. In the case of Max Kaiser, he actually brings her on his show. He has been doing this for a decade.

GOVERNMENT-FUNDED HIGHER EDUCATION

She is a big promoter of government-subsidized higher education. She thinks higher education should be free of charge to the masses.

She does not believe in personal debt for higher education. She regards all debt as slavery. As a Greenbacker, she believes that debt is unnecessary. The federal government can simply issue pieces of paper with Presidents' pictures on them. It can subsidize the voters. Therefore, nobody has to go into debt. Ever. This has been the Greenback party line ever since the 1880's. (There actually was a Greenback Party in the 1880's.)

To persuade readers of this, she begins with a quotation. As is the case with so many of her quotations, it is bogus. You can find it only on Greenback sites. You cannot find any reference to this document in a collection of documents published by a professional historian. She cannot cite it from anything like an official collection of documents. So, she hedges her language. She uses the weasel word, "reportedly."

The advantages of slavery by debt over “chattel” slavery—ownership of humans as a property right—were set out in an infamous document called the Hazard Circular, reportedly circulated by British banking interests among their American banking counterparts during the American Civil War. It read in part:

Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and chattel slavery destroyed. This, I and my European friends are glad of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages.

She posted a link to a book published in 1895 by somebody nobody had ever heard of. This is standard in her approach to historical documentation. If you want more evidence for my statement, go here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/department142.cfm.

Then she gets to her main point: student debt for higher education.

Unlike mortgage debt, student debt must be paid. Students cannot just turn in their diplomas and walk away, as homeowners can with their keys. Wages, unemployment benefits, tax refunds and even Social Security checks can be tapped to ensure repayment. In 1998, Sallie Mae (the Student Loan Marketing Association) was privatized, and Congress removed the dischargeability of federal student debt in bankruptcy, absent exceptional circumstances. In 2005, this lender protection was extended to private student loans. Because lenders know that their debts cannot be discharged, they have little incentive to consider a student borrower’s ability to repay. Most students are granted a nearly unlimited line of credit. This, in turn, has led to skyrocketing tuition rates—because universities know the money is available to pay them—and that has created the need for students to borrow even more.

All this is true. This is because Congress intervened to single out student debt as the only form of debt not subject to the bankruptcy laws. Debt was increased under President Clinton. The revision of the bankruptcy law was done under President George W. Bush. But skyrocketing tuition rates began a generation ago. Federal loans were part of the reason. There is nothing new about this. This is the inevitable result of government intervention into the free market.

She is also correct about the following.

Students take on a huge debt load with the promise that their degrees will be the doorway to jobs that allow them to pay it back, but for many the jobs are not there or are not sufficient to meet expenses. Nearly one-third of borrowers today have made no headway in paying down their loans five years after leaving school, although many of these borrowers are not in default. They make payments month after month consisting only of interest, while continuing to owe the full amount they borrowed. This can mean a lifetime of tribute to the lenders if the loan is never paid off, a classic form of debt peonage to the lender class.

There have been thousands of articles in the media about this foolishness, but exposure has not changed much of anything. Parents still approve. Students take on this debt. Fact: we cannot protect stupid people against making stupid decisions. This is a fundamental teaching of free market economics.

The fact that a student can earn a bachelor's degree from an accredited distance-learning college or university for under $15,000 should be obvious to every student and every parent, but even among parents and students who know about this, they pay no attention. I speak from experience. Over 125,000 people have viewed my 2006 video on this, but I have received only one letter from a student who said that he took advantage of my advice. Parents just don't care. They prefer to spend tens of thousands of after-tax dollars on low-return liberal arts degrees for their kids. Other parents encourage their kids to take on $100,000 of debt. Stupidity is as stupidity does.

What is Brown's recommended solution? Massive printing of paper money by Congress in order to finance free college education for everyone.

It hasn’t always been this way. Until the 1970s, tuition at many state colleges and universities was free or nearly free. Education was considered an obligation of the public sector, and costs were kept low.

After World War II, the federal government invested heavily in educating the 15.7 million returning American veterans. The goal of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, or GI Bill, was to facilitate their reintegration into civilian life. By far its most popular benefits were financial assistance for education and housing. More than half the veterans took advantage of this educational provision, with 2.2 million attending college and 5.6 million opting for vocational training. At that time there were serious shortages in student housing and faculty, but the nation’s colleges and universities expanded to meet the increased demand.

The GI Bill’s educational benefits helped train legions of professionals, spurring postwar economic growth. It funded the education of 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors and 22,000 dentists, 14 future Nobel laureates, two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices and three presidents of the United States. Loans enabled by the bill also boosted the housing market, raising home ownership from 44 percent before the war to 60 percent by 1956. Rather than costing the government, the GI Bill turned out to be one of the best investments it ever made. The legislation is estimated to have cost $50 billion in today’s dollars and to have returned $350 billion to the economy, a nearly sevenfold return.

That educational feat could be repeated today. The government could fund a public education program, as Lincoln did, by simply issuing the money or having the central bank issue it as a form of “quantitative easing for people.” Infrastructure funded with government-issued U.S. notes in the 1860s included not only the transcontinental railroad, but also the system of free colleges and universities established through federal land grants.

This woman is a standard Lefty. Her recommended models are European welfare states.

Meanwhile, university tuition is still free in many countries in Europe, including Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Norway, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Sweden and Turkey. But providing an affordable education for the next generation is evidently not a priority with our government. Only 3 percent of the federal budget is spent on education—not just for college loans, but for school programs of all sorts, from kindergarten through graduate school. Compare that with the outlay for military spending, including the Veterans Affairs and other defense-related departments, which consume more than half the federal budget and is an obvious place to cut. But there are no signs that our government is moving in that direction.

She never bothers to mention this crucial fact: median college debt is around $13,000. By median debt, I mean debt that is right in the middle: half the debtors owe more, and half owe less. In other words, it's about the amount of debt that somebody takes on to buy a used car.

Reporters cite higher levels of debt. They cite average debt. Average debt is skewed upward: Pareto's 20/80 distribution. About half of college graduates owe $20,000. This means that half owe less. Average debt is about $30,000. Here was reality in 2013. It has not changed much.

Research by Beth Akers and Matthew Chingos at The Brookings Institution revealed much about the student loan debt reality. While the average student loan balance is $29,000, that is only for the minority of people with any student loans (36 percent of those between 20 and 40). In other words, most young people have no student loan debt. Also, the average balance is greatly inflated by the presence of a few people with large balances. In fact, only four percent of households headed by people between 20 and 40 years old have student loan debt of over $36,000 per person and two-thirds of those have a graduate degree to show for that debt.

In short, $30,000 is the amount of debt that a family accepts to buy a new minivan. The lifetime economic return on a new minivan is a lot less than the lifetime economic return on a B.A. degree, even in sociology.

Ellen Brown, in the name of a level of debt equivalent to buying a used car, wants to socialize all of American higher education. This can be done free of charge, she says. Congress will not have to raise taxes to fund this. She maintains this position because she also argues that it really isn't taxation when the United States Congress prints pieces of paper with Presidents' pictures on them, and then spends this newly counterfeited money on government projects. This is really something for nothing. This is the gravy train of the welfare state. Some conservatives nod their heads in agreement. She speaks for them.

I regard this as a clear indication that portions of the conservative movement are intellectually adrift. The fact that this woman gets a hearing in any conservative circles indicates that some conservatives can't distinguish liberty from the welfare state. It's all the same to them.

I hope it is not all the same to you.

------------------------------------------

Update: January 8, 2018

Brown wrote on January 7 in The Huffington Post:

The public banking movement is now gaining ground in cities and states across the country. A number of cities have passed resolutions to pull their money out of Wall Street banks that practice fraud as a business model. In New Jersey, Governor-elect Phil Murphy has made a state-owned bank the funding basis of his platform, with student loans one of three sectors he intends to focus on. If that succeeds, other states can be expected to follow suit.

We need to free our students from the system of debt slavery that has financialized education, turning it from an investment in human capital into a tool for exploiting the young for the benefit of private investors. State-owned banks can make the loan process fair, equitable and affordable; but their creation will be fought by big bank lobbyists. An organized student movement could be an effective counter-lobby. Historically, debt and austerity have been used as control mechanisms for subduing the people. It is time for the people to unite and take back their power.

Dr. Gary North passed away on February 24, 2022.

His obituary, written by a close family friend is here: Gary North, RIP.

Craig Bulkeley - February 26, 2022

When Gary Kilgore North passed away on February 24, 2022, at the age of 80, he left behind a massive storehouse of Christian scholarship without parallel in the modern church. For nearly fifty-five straight and solid years he applied himself as a craftsman with single-minded devotion to researching, writing, and speaking about God’s world from the perspective of God’s Word. While he lived his work benefited his large readership around the world. For generations to come it will be of great use to the Church of his Lord Jesus Christ.

The Formative Years

North was born in 1942 to Peggy North, a homemaker, and Sam W. North, a World War II veteran and FBI Special Agent. In the idyllic “American Graffiti” era of 1950’s southern California, he excelled in high school and developed skills in research, writing, public speaking, and photography. He served as president of the school’s California Scholarship Federation chapter and was elected to the statewide office of “Superintendent of Public Instruction” at California’s prestigious Boys State. In his senior year he was elected president of the student body of 2000 students. He also learned business and music working at the local record store. Under his father’s influence, he developed a healthy sense of discipline and responsibility that he carried throughout life. North’s experiences in his youth helped develop in him a sense of self-confidence. At the age of 18 he came to faith in Jesus Christ which led him at the age of 21 to devote his career to the development of biblical economics.

While a student at the University of California, Riverside, North became increasingly more aware of the essential connection between various social and academic ideologies and their foundational philosophical and theological principles. In the spring of 1962 he read R. J. Rushdoony's Intellectual Schizophrenia: Culture, Crisis, and Education (1961). It was a penetrating critique of public education and a systematic dismantling of the notion of academic neutrality. After corresponding they later met at an academic conference where Rushdoony was teaching on economics. The following year Rushdoony hired him as a summer intern with the newly formed Center for American Studies. North lived that summer and the next with the Rushdoony family. His job, for a good salary, was to read full-time. He read Murray Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State (Fall 1962), The Panic of 1819 (1962), and America's Great Depression (Spring 1963). He learned the monetary and free market theory of Ludwig von Mises and Austrian economics. He also attended a conference that year where Mises was teaching.

Having completed his undergraduate work in history North did a year of graduate work at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. There he studied under Cornelius Van Til, the godfather of anti-neutrality. Rushdoony had shaped his books on education from Van Til's early essays on education.

North returned to UCLA in the fall of 1964 but within a month became disillusioned with the prevailing Keynesianism and Chicago School economics. In the spring of 1965 he transferred back to the University of California, Riverside, to study history, specializing in economic history and Puritan New England. His summer reading had prepared him for the work. He also studied Western intellectual history and social theory under Robert Nisbet who later held a distinguished chair at Columbia University. He completed his dissertation, The Concept of Property in Puritan New England, 1630-1720, and in 1972 received his Ph.D.

The Cultural Crisis

But North can be rightly understood only by understanding the times in which he lived. By the mid-1970’s, now in his thirties, North saw clearly that America was far down the fast track of radical transformation and on its way to ruin. The tranquil 1950’s had given way to the turbulent 1960’s and been transformed into the full-blown chaos of the 1970’s. Vietnam raged. Decades of Keynesianism and Socialism were crippling the economy. Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974. While the U.S. Supreme Court had banned Bible reading and prayer from public schools in the early 1960’s, in 1973 it doubled down, overturned state laws across the country, and legalized the killing of babies in the womb. Organizations like the National and the World Council of Churches were promoting “situational ethics” and an apostate “Christianity” throughout America’s mainline churches. Having been taught not to bother polishing brass on a sinking ship, Bible-believing Christians and conservatives were watching the world they took for granted be dismantled before their eyes as they waited for the Rapture. Society’s bedrock foundations were crumbling and the whole social structure with it. The rot was going to the roots and it was bearing very bad fruit.

North (and Rushdoony) saw and understood the crisis and were on the leading edge of working not only to expose the unbiblical ideologies driving this transformation but, more importantly, to articulate the biblical foundations, principles and blueprints necessary for a revived social order. Rushdoony had already established the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965. In February 1967 North published his first article for pay. It appeared in The Freeman, the monthly magazine of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), the only libertarian think tank at the time. The Freeman was mailed to some 25,000 readers. It was the first of literally thousands and thousands of articles he would write over his career.

Other organizations were beginning to emerge in an effort to stand against the onslaught of the antagonist atheism. In 1972 Phyllis Schlafly founded Eagle Forum. In 1973 The Heritage Foundation was established by Ed Fuelner and Paul Weyrich. In 1974 Howard Phillips founded the Conservative Caucus and Weyrich started the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, later called the Free Congress Foundation. In 1976 Bill Richardson founded the Gun Owners of America and in 1977 the near century-old NRA redirected its focus to politics. In 1977 Pat Robertson launched the CBN cable network and Dr. James Dobson founded Focus on the Family. In 1978, Beverly LaHaye established Concerned Women for America (10 plus years behind the National Organization of Women, founded in 1966). In 1979 Falwell and Weyrich founded the Moral Majority. Not to be overlooked, in June of 1974 the remnant of Austrian school economists, including North, Rothbard, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman and many others, met in Vermont. In the face of a relentless humanism, conservatives and Christians were beginning to organize and take action.

But the Christians had some limitations. Generally they had a common goal: live as lights in a dark world and pray “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.” They also generally shared a common motive: love of God and your fellow man, particularly by sharing the gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ. But in the area of content or standards they had little of real substance to offer. “The Bible has the answers for all of life,” was the common refrain. But other than the general command to “love,” the Christians had few if any specific biblical answers and solutions to offer for the myriad of specific problems facing society on so many fronts. Christians – the Church – had come to take for granted the predominantly Christian character of their culture and were almost wholly ignorant of the biblical principles on which it was built. More rigorous analysis and deeper study of the Bible had to be done in order to set forth those truths.

Rebuilding on Biblical Foundations

In September 1971, North joined the senior staff of FEE. When Leonard Reed, FEE’s founder, informed him that any money he made writing or speaking would have to go to FEE, North decided he would not stay long.

In 1972 he married R. J. Rushdoony’s daughter, Sharon. He would say that if it were not for her, “you probably would never have heard of me” and “the only reason that I was successful was that my wife was patient with this lifestyle.” Understanding her father’s intense academic lifestyle, she could adapt to and support North in his. In addition to being committed to their children and providing an excellent family environment, she was an excellent accountant and operations manager.

In March of 1973 Sharon suggested he write an economic commentary on the Bible, verse by verse. After 4 years of work on the project and believing the pace to be inadequate, he took a vow. To complete the work he would devote 10 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, until his 70th birthday. He was then 35 years old.

In the spring of 1974 he and Sharon also began publishing a newsletter at the suggestion of someone who heard him speak at a conference. They named it Remnant Review, a testimony to be faithful in the calling and trust in the promises of God. Around 1976 North founded the Institute for Christian Economics and began publishing through it. He handled the writing. Sharon handled production (subscriptions, printing, filling envelopes, mailing, and even running the mechanical dog tag stamping device for addresses). She did it until the mailing list approached 2,000 subscribers. She also kept track of the money, never losing a dime.

In 1977 North published his first direct-mail book. It was based on a compilation of Remnant Review issues. His ad for the book led to the sale of some 20,000-30,000 copies from 1977-79 at $10 each ($40 in 2022). Those sales led to 2,000 subscribers. In 1979 he wrote another ad. It grew the list from 2,000 to 22,000, at $60 ($245 in 2022) per subscriber. He had become one of the few economists (and historians) actually making “real money” from his knowledge of economics and history.

His newsletter led to a job in Washington on the staff of one of his subscribers, a medical doctor from Texas named Dr. Ron Paul who had been elected to Congress. He hired North. Later in 1976 Paul lost reelection by 268 votes out of 192,802. North helped close down his office at the end of what would be just the first of Dr. Paul’s many terms in Congress.

North continued to produce. At the core were his convictions concerning certain fundamental truths.

First, man is God’s creation and inescapably subject to his authority. He is in a covenantal relationship with his Creator and, therefore, the status of that relationship is of absolute and paramount importance. As a consequence of his sin, he became an enemy of God and a stranger in God’s world. But based on Jesus’s perfect life and on his death, burial and resurrection, God brought redemption to anyone who would call upon him in repentance and faith. Based on the finished work of Jesus Christ alone, God would declare a condemned sinner forgiven and righteous and renew his relationship with his Maker.

Second, God had made man free and designed him to fulfill the Creation Mandate: subdue the earth and have dominion over it. Though the “first Adam” and his posterity failed because of sin, the “second Adam,” Jesus, would succeed. He would redeem his people, restore them to their created calling, and empower them by his Spirit to fulfill that mandate throughout the world on his behalf and to his glory (“Dominionism”).

Third, North believed that Jesus gave his disciples the Great Commission to make disciples and teach throughout the world all that God had revealed. Jesus declared that he had “all authority” in heaven and earth and that he would build his church and even the gates of hell could not stop it. Based on his Word and promise, despite the conflicts and troubles in the world, the nations of the earth would eventually bow before the King of kings, and his kingdom would be realized in history in significant measure and on a vast scale before his return (“Postmillenialism”).

Fourth, North believed that God’s Word governed all of life and that mankind would either suffer or be blessed in rejecting or following it. Whether it concerned man in his psychology, sociology, economics, philosophy, history, science or any other area, the Bible was the absolute standard. No professor, politician or “public intellectual” knew better than the Bible. This applied even in the areas of the political order and the law (“Theonomy” – God’s law).

Based on these truths, man was called to engage in the great task of working to see the fallen world reconstructed to God’s glory according to the Bible (“Christian Reconstruction”). North was committed to this calling.

As North would work out these principles in his writing, chief among his influences were Cornelius VanTil (philosophy/theology), Rushdoony (law), Ludwig von Mises (economics), John Calvin and John Murray (theology), and Robert Nisbet (social theory). Each was an exceptional scholar and produced critical writings with tremendous insight. North would follow in their train and his production would be nothing less than astounding.

It is noteworthy that among those influences, neither Mises nor Nisbet were professing Christians. What concerned North was not whether one claimed to be a Christian; there was no shortage of ministers and so-called Christian academics promoting unbiblical teaching like evolution, Keynesianism, and socialism. What was critical was the quality of the scholarship and whether the ideas the individual taught were consistent with the Bible or provided valuable information and insight to help understand it. In so many areas the writings of Mises and Nisbet did this. The same could be said for scholars like Rothbard, Harold Berman, Jacques Barzun, Martin van Creveld, James Billington, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and so many others whose work North admired.

North made great strides in laying out the biblical foundations, principles and blueprints for a revived social order.

As Marxism was becoming entrenched in American universities in the 1960’s, North wrote Marx’s Religion of Revolution in 1968. In 1972 he began to consolidate his views on economics and published An Introduction to Christian Economics. In 1976 he published and edited The Foundations of Christian Scholarship: Essays in the Van Til Perspective. It was a groundbreaking collection of essays by PhDs and experts in a variety of disciplines: economics, psychology, sociology, history, education, political science, mathematics, theology, and philosophy. Each had as its central focus the truth that the Bible, God’s revelation, was the ultimate standard for understanding each field. No field was “neutral.” None, ultimately, was even understandable apart from that revelation. Even when they did function in some measure, they had in fact borrowed and presumed biblical truths despite their formal antagonism to Christianity.

North continued to produce Remnant Review and eventually brought it under his website GaryNorth.com which he began in 2005. Over its 17 years North published four articles a day, six days a week, every week. The range of topics was encyclopedic and topics were treated in depth and detail. With his 23,000+ articles he was constantly trying to encourage his readers to excel in their jobs and callings, provide insights and tools to help them do it, and give them a greater understanding of their relationship to the movement of history. His website also had active and robust forums where subscribers could and would engage with him and each other on how to apply the information to their individual circumstances.

Amazon’s Alexa service ranks the popularity of websites, of which there are estimated to be over 200,600,000 that are active. The lower the number the more popular the website. Ranked lower than 500,000 (top .25%), the website has some influence. Lower than 200,000 (top .1%), it is significant. Lower than 100,000 (top .05%), it is widely read and influential. Before North’s illness bore down on him, his website ranked around 36,000 (top .018%). No website for any evangelical news magazine, news site, theological seminary, church denomination, or publisher was even close. Only John McArthur and John Piper, now established in well-staffed and promoted organizations (Grace to You and Desiring God), had similar web traffic. Among web magazines, only the 66-year old socially liberal and marginally evangelical Christianity Today had similar web traffic. Ligonier Ministries ranked around 80,000. Few were ranked lower than 150,000, and most, far higher, some near 2,000,000. As to time spent by visitors on the websites, the numbers are not even close. Readers of North’s website spent five to seven times more time on his than readers did on any of the others.

In addition to his newsletter and website, North published almost 100 books, half of which he wrote. Most he financed with his own money. The vast majority of what he published he has provided to the public free of charge at Free Christian Educational Resources, https://www.garynorth.com/freebooks/.

In 2012, after nearly 40 years of work on the project, North fulfilled the vow he had taken in 1977 and completed his 31 volume economic commentary on the Bible. It was a remarkable achievement, accomplished only with resolute commitment. He then synthesized his years of economic study into six volumes: The Covenantal Structure of Christian Economics (2015, 2018), and a four volume series titled Christian Economics: Vol. 1: Student Edition (2017, 2020), Vol. 2: Teacher’s Edition (2017, 2020), Vol. 3: Activist’s Edition (2017, 2020), and Vol. 4 (in 2 volumes): Scholar’s Edition (2020). His books just on economics can be found here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/department180.cfm.

North also wrote extensively on history. Among his many books was the masterpiece Crossed Fingers (1996), a 1000-page detailed account of deceit used by theological liberals to capture the northern Presbyterian Church during the 20th Century. Ever a lover of footnotes North provides over 900 in just the first 300 pages.

To beat it all, North was a superb writer in every respect and a treat to read.

With his practical understanding of Austrian and Keynesian economics, North also knew how to interpret and benefit from market conditions. Just one example will suffice. When between 1999 and 2002 England’s worst Chancellor of the Exchequer in a thousand years persuaded the nation to systematically sell off 401 tonnes of its 715-tonne gold supply for an average price of $275 per ounce, North told his subscribers to buy. They bought. By the time of his death, gold was over $1,900.

North was also a frequent contributor to the two primary organizations that promoted Austrian economics and libertarian ideas. He provided many articles for the popular website LewRockwell.com and was a frequent speaker at the Mises Institute, particularly for its gathering of young scholars. His lectures on Mises, Keynes, and Rothbard alone were exceptional. The increasingly higher profile of the Mises Institute and Lew Rockwell’s website encouraged North that it was only a matter of time before defective ideas would fail and sound ideas would prevail.

Aware of the dismal condition of public education, North was also concerned that young people have access to top quality curriculum. After Ron Paul ended his service in government and his final campaign for President of the United States, he and North reunited to establish The Ron Paul Curriculum. Paul had spoken to massive crowds and received over 2,000,000 votes in the 2012 presidential primary. Families across the country would be eager to have their children educated consistent with the fundamental biblical principles Paul was articulating. North could create the material and organization to provide that education. Recruiting the teachers, preparing his own courses, and running the institution, North created an online K-12 school that has trained thousands of students across the country.

North’s interest in educational curriculum was not limited to grade school. Even up to his final months, he was working on plans to create a free seminary curriculum designed particularly for pastors working in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.

North was also concerned about evangelism. His 2005 website Sustained Revival: A Comprehensive Plan for a Comprehensive Christian Revival, provided material focusing on that work. https://www.garynorth.com/public/department132.cfm.

North was also concerned to help those in financial trouble. For people wanting to get out from under the weight of debt he developed the website Deliverance from Debt, https://deliverancefromdebt.wordpress.com/. While he lived in the areas of Tyler, Texas and Memphis, Tennessee, he worked with Kairos Prison Ministry International. Some prisoners were soon to be released. Others would never be released. He taught them the gospel and that wherever they might be God had valuable work for them to do and they could serve him anywhere. During that same period he worked with a ministry that helped people learn how to get and keep a job.

Advice for the Future

North followed some important principles that enabled him to stick to his knitting, stay out of trouble, and be as productive as he was. At least 11 are worth mentioning. They are applicable to everyone.

First, a person must know his life’s calling: the most important thing he can do in which he would be most difficult to replace. North settled on his early: developing the field of biblical economics.

Second, remember the prophets. Isaiah’s job was to speak even when people would not listen and the work appeared fruitless. Elijah’s job was to speak even when he seemed to be the only one left. Jeremiah’s job was to speak but still conduct business (buy the land) knowing God’s plan for the future will prevail.

Third, forget trying to be in the “Inner Ring,” as C.S. Lewis called it. Do not yearn to be in the “in” group. There really isn’t any inner ring.

Fourth, stick to your knitting. Do not get sidetracked. Press on.

Fifth, work to serve. Meet a need. Provide or do something useful. If someone will pay you for it, better still. Provide it for free if needs be, particularly if it’s consistent with your calling.

Sixth, discipline your time. It is the one resource that cannot be replaced. Once it’s gone, it cannot be recovered.

Seventh, strive to be the best, but don’t worry if you are not No. 1. There is plenty of room at the top for success and every expectation that you will surpass your peers if you simply apply yourself wisely and stick to your knitting.

Eighth, understand that you can’t fight something with nothing. Christians cannot just curse the darkness. They must pursue a positive biblical understanding and plan. When the world, suffering and at its wits end, asks Christians for help, they should be able to give biblical answers of substance.

Ninth, don’t pay too much attention to your critics. Some of North’s critics accused him over the years of having a poison pen, of being uncharitable, sharp and harsh. North’s piercing critiques, however, were usually reserved for those who held themselves out to be experts in a field, “teachers of the law,” so to speak. As they sought to persuade and lead others, he would challenge them if he thought they were leading people into error and trouble. If their work was shoddy or suspect, North was likely to expose it and in colorful terms. Some took the lead and criticized his work first. In addition to lacking depth and rigor in general, his opponents were generally short on historical background and real world understanding. When the exchange ended they were likely to find themselves on the losing side and unable to respond; they slipped quietly away. His most disingenuous critics simply misrepresented his positions and raised straw man arguments, the most uncharitable kind of all.

Tenth, be confident in God’s power and his plan to change the world. God’s kingdom would not likely come in a single generation. Nor would it come from some sudden political takeover, a centralized government, or vigilante violence. It would not come from the top down. But it would come. It would come gradually, over time, from the bottom up, as God moved in people’s hearts and they embraced a biblical worldview and system of law.

Eleventh, pay your tithe. It reminds a person that he owes everything to God.

Finally, North hoped his work would help lay a solid foundation, not be the final answer. He hoped others would take up where he left off and improve on his work. As he concluded his Christian Economics: Scholar’s Edition (2020), he wrote: “Finally, count the cost. If you then decide to become a Christian economics scholar as a calling, I offer this strategy. Correct my errors, extend my breakthroughs, write several monographs, produce videos, recruit and train followers, and do not become sidetracked. It is easy to become sidetracked, especially by money. Also, if someone asks you what kind of economist you are, never say ‘Northian.’ ‘Northist’ is even worse. Say that you are a covenantalist. Now, find your calling and get to work.” https://www.garynorth.com/public/20635.cfm

May there be many who will pursue their own callings as North did his. The world will be a better place for it.

His work is done. His rest has begun.

North was preceded in death by his son Caleb who suffered from a rare illness. He is survived by Sharon, his wife of 50 years, and their other children Darcy North, Scott North and his wife, Angela, and Lori McDurmon and her husband, Joel, and eight grandchildren.