No matter how far you’ve gone down the wrong road, turn around.

That’s what I want to say about our disfunctional banking system and monetary disasters of today. A regulated banking system can support investments into productive outcomes that benefit society and families and individuals. An unregulated banking system only serves the most powerful financial players and it is a disaster to everyone else because although it multiplies the capital holdings of investors it can’t do anything else. Look around at the human suffering and insolvency that has piled up around us. The problems that are growing around us are caused by unregulated banking.

After banking deregulation, we have discovered more government tyranny–that is an increase in government demands about what all of us are thinking and doing. Our voting systems have been compromised. Cars, healthcare, education and homes are too expensive for most people to afford. There aren’t enough jobs for the number of people who want to work. Many of our cities have neighborhoods that are crumbling into rubble. People are becoming more alienated from our workforce because they can’t make the kinds of workplace progress that they expect work to offer them.

We find ourselves listening to foolish fantasies about UBI (universal basic income), and a social credit system that is only about slavery. Financialization, AKA easy-money-policy (low interest loans readily made to many) has led to huge amounts of indebtedness in federal state and municipal governments and among individuals. The promises associated with these programs of UBI and social credit aren’t going to rescue indebted people from their problems. Why? Because there’s no way to protect people’s ownership of their own lives under these imagined programs.

Investment banking isn’t a primary system. It is a secondary system.

What I mean by that is that investment in assets only happens after those assets are created by workers and entrepreneurs.

The notion that financial investment can continue without production is complete nonsense. Also, when the Federal Reserve prints money that isn’t backed by assets, it devalues our currency (it steals the value from dollars created in the past). Currency overprinting can lead to monetary failure and collapse. It’s insane to think that money in an unregulated economy–that is money like we have in today’s Federal Reserve print that isn’t backed up by assets–can accomplish the things money can accomplish in a regulated economy with asset-backed money. It’s just another empty neoliberal fantasy.

Some people suggest that robots can take the place of people in the workforce but there’s a number of problems with that argument. For one thing, who will fix or maintain the robots? For another thing, it was our tax system that made building robots seem appealing in the first place. They are a depreciating asset and human beings aren’t. Robots as a depreciating asset encouraged the mental calculus that led to the manufacture of robots. But robots can’t replace people in any general capacity. Robots are mostly useful within very narrow applications. Their real usefulness isn’t like the fantasy that imagines them as a human replacement.

So whenever someone says that we are merely transitioning to a new and better world where no one has to work, don’t believe it. Restrictions of your freedom are an attack against you and your interests. Over human history, slavery has never been a better system and it isn’t a better one now.

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