Money and Power: Fiat Currency, Monetary Corruption, and the Architecture of Extraction

Posted by freedomforall 22 hours, 40 minutes ago to Economics
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Excerpt:
"The corruption of fiat money does not end at national borders; dollar hegemony globalizes it. Because the US dollar functions as the world’s reserve currency, Federal Reserve policy becomes global monetary policy by default. Foreign states must hold dollars to stabilize trade, borrow in dollars to access capital, and absorb the consequences of US monetary decisions over which they have no control. When the Fed eases, capital floods into emerging markets, inflating bubbles and encouraging dollar-denominated debt. When the Fed tightens, currencies collapse, debts become unpayable, and crises erupt. What appears as domestic stabilization at the center manifests as devastation at the periphery.

This arrangement constitutes a form of seigniorage imperialism. The issuing state acquires real goods, labor, and assets in exchange for liabilities it can expand at will. The costs are exported through exchange-rate volatility, debt crises, and externally imposed austerity. Fiat corruption thus scales globally, transforming monetary dominance into an instrument of geopolitical power.

History offers abundant confirmation. From the credit expansion of the 1920s and the deepening of the Great Depression through intervention, to the abandonment of gold convertibility in 1971 and the explosion of debt that followed, to the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath of bailouts and consolidation, the pattern repeats. Each crisis is framed as exceptional. Each intervention becomes precedent. Each rescue increases fragility. The pandemic-era monetary expansion merely accelerated a trajectory already in motion, normalizing levels of creation once reserved for war.

From a Rothbardian perspective, such a system cannot be reformed. Monopoly over money inevitably produces abuse, not because individuals are uniquely corrupt, but because unchecked discretion always is. The problem is not mismanagement; it is structural. Fiat money—insulated from competition and constraint—transforms money from a medium of exchange into an instrument of hierarchy.

A free society cannot rest on a monetary foundation that requires ignorance to function. Constraint is not the enemy of prosperity; it is its precondition. Without it, prices lie, capital misallocates, and responsibility dissolves. Fiat money does not merely finance power. It becomes power. And when money itself is corrupted, everything built upon it follows."


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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 20 hours, 51 minutes ago
    I had to look up the word "seigniorage". Seigniorage is the profit a government makes from issuing currency, calculated as the difference between the face value of money (coins or banknotes) and the cost to produce it.
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