The Bank Tax and Bastiat's Theory of Plunder

"When a portion of wealth passes from the person who has acquired it, without his consent and without compensation, to someone who has not created it, whether this is by force or fraud, I say that there has been a violation of property rights and that there has been an act of plunder." ` Frédéric Bastiat, "The Law," 1850.

Whether or not the brilliant mind of Bastiat was receptive to the bitter irony of his theory and its sharp contrast to the neoliberal banking policies he would've likely supported is a known fact; he was not. Indeed, the famous Proudhon-Bastiat debate of the turn of the decade from 1849 to 1850 gives us a clear window into Bastiats thoughts on, in particular, interest. Proudhon, to put it lightly, lost his temper, referring to Bastiat as a "dead man" for whom "logic does not exist." In our contemporaneous era the genius of both of these pioneering men are widely recognized as simple fact. However, through the usage of dialectics stemming from the anti-usurious and radical positions of Proudhon, and the Theory of Plunder as formulated by Bastiat, a synthesis can be made which reveals the economic fact of the non-consensual Bank Tax, which in turn reveals a severe flaw in the basis of neoliberal thought which hitherto was utilized to defend its banking policies.

The Banking Contradiction

The primary issue with central banking and banking on the whole is its fundamental insubordination to the so-called "Invisible Hand" and the free market. Private business naturally follows a set of principles, interests and goals pursuant to its monetary profit that are, indeed, completely different from the interest and goals of both the private individual and the nation as a whole. Money is a vital tool for the daily life of any member of a national collective; the passing of money management to an entity explicitly operating on principles counter to the well-being of the people of the nation, through both usurious practices and also the restriction of sovereignty of a currency to a private cabal rather than the sovereign nation it is designed and issued exclusively to benefit, serves as the penultimate stage of the evolution of banking. Moreover, as a matter of objectivity, we have seen such behaviors with private banks vertically integrated into the overarching national economy such as the Federal Reserve; the application of interest on loans which gradually results in an increasingly untenable degree of loan-taking and money-printing. Essentially, the natural order of private banking is the enslavement of the free market or the sovereign people it was chartered to protect; the usage of money against the creditors in real estate markets, the usage of stored money to further the interests of the bank at the expense of the creditor who actually owns the money, and the expansion of the broader money supply through speculative measures that result in minimal, if any, tangible result. Private banking and private markets are seemingly two sides of the same coin, but it is clear that one cannot exist if the other is present; one must eventually eclipse the other.

The Bank Tax and the Theory of Plunder

The issuance of more credit into the economy acts as a tax which the people have not consented to; it is a plunder. The devaluation of currency already in circulation is paired with a loss of value absorbed by newly issued and unbacked credit. This is textbook inflation. Moreover, the issuance of state bonds, which is only repayable as a part of the national tax input, consequently means that a significant portion of taxpayer dollars will absolutely never see the light of day again. In fact, their value essentially becomes liquidated as soon as the state takes out yet another loan. State services and infrastructure therefore receive gradual neglect (a fact illustrated by the detiorating and generally abysmal state of American infrastructure) as taxpayer dollars are absorbed by the banking system. Interest on state bonds are, by definition, plunder. The peoples of a nation are forced to pay taxes on a system designed to fail them. If we are to follow even the most liberal of definitions regarding the Theory of Plunder as formulated by Bastiat, the dialectics do not falter. Indeed, private banking is overall incompatible with any school of thought that wishes to account for both personal liberty and the sovereignty of the people. Banking is a legal plunder, a portion of wealth acquired through the enslavement of the free market for the purposes of pimping and profiteering off the sovereignty of the host nation. 

The Solution

Proudhon, in his admittedly infinite hubris, once declared the following: "Property is Theft!" I am not to be outdone in this radical notion. The solution is simple; kill the banking system. A banking system without interest and profiteering is the antithesis of a banking system. If the reversal of the banking system directly leads to the elimination of two of the most pressing issues of our economic epoch, then that is the order of the day. I promised you a dialectical synthesis, and you shall get one: Banking is both plunder and theft. In our era, it is the banks or the people. In our era, it is liberty or it is death.