The Origin of Money. Does Government Create It? Putting the Theory to the Test

The Origin of Money. Does Government Create It? Putting the Theory to the Test A Life Raft with Barbara Streisand, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush and Michael Jackson Leaves Them All Stranded on a Small Remote Island Lex Loeb Contributor Network . Four people crash land on a remote deserted island in an emergency life raft, Babs, Hillary, George and Michael. They realize they all need to get to work to create shelter and find adequate food and water. Two of them are professional politicians and two are professional singer-entertainers. The entertainers want to be on welfare so they can spend most of their time singing. The other two want to govern. All four believe in having powerful leadership the same way Politicians and Hollywood do in real life. So they have an election for island president and with only one Conservative out of four on the Island that means Hillary becomes the Island president and as president that makes her the entire government of the island. The three others are forced by necessity to go to work finding food , building shelter and their government stands around telling them what to do , how to do it , what and when. It is important to save the island environment and to prevent global warming so Hillary has her work cut out for her. She needs a power palace built so she can enhance the value of her authority and her constituents are obligated by conscription to work on the palace. That happens before there is any money on the island. Once the palace is built there is more time to develop a monetary currency for the island. Hillary spends her time on the beach collecting sea shells. Michael becomes an efficient fisherman because when he sings to fish underwater they jump in his nets. Babs turns out to be a great basket weaver and makes entire woven huts for housing. George finds native cannabis growing on the island and creates the biggest cash crop industry on the island for lack of his regular martini. One day , President Hillary announces the advent of money. She has decided that the sea shells she has collected will be the unit of money and only she will be allowed to collect them. It is counterfeiting for anyone else on the island to grab shells on the beach unless they hand them over directly to the treasury Hillary controls. She has a big vault, a hole she dug in the ground she covers with a big rock, to store the sea shells . The shells are to be called Hillaries. She decides that all transactions on the island are to be priced in Hillaries. A standard fish from Michael is to cost 2 Hilarius, George's cannabis is to be 4 Hillaries and a Babs woven tract house is to be 2000 Hilaries based on the time it takes her to weave a full size home. President Hillary is gaining weight and she needs 4 fish a day and she needs to relax so she needs 10 bunches of cannabis a day. She goes to her vault and gets 48 sea shells to pay for those. She wants Babs to build her a major addition to the presidential palace and shells out another 5000 sea shells as advance payment. She grow to be 400 lbs like the typical tropical island chieftain does. The other three can no longer carry her on her litter. The government has an emergency so it needs more revenue but president Hillary can no longer get up to go the beach to collect sea shells so she , as elected island leader , decides that the island needs a tax so she can continue to maintain her excessive weight. By proclamation and declaration she tells the others that they must go to the beaches everyday and collect at least 7 sea shells each to pay the treasury. It is part of a stimulus program. The tax causes the other three island citizens to take off time from their ordinary industries to go out and collect shells so they harvest and create less of what they would otherwise do. Hillary gets the shells she needs so she can still use them to get fish, cannabis and baskets. This arrangement leaves the other three with less since they are producing less to find the sea shells to keep the government running for their benefit. Hillary announces a social security program that will be unfunded to make the continuation of the shell tax seem more palatable to the other three. They all agree and re-elect Hillary with only George abstaining as usual since he is a separate minority party of one. The way social security works is if anyone one gets sick or disabled and can't work, or grows old and retires, she will dip into the sea shell vault and give them 15 sea shells a day as part of the new deal. Everyone likes the system until George retires after an accident smoking too much cannabis. That means that the other two workers need to go out and spend some of their time cultivating the cannabis to make up for loss of George and because Hillary is getting even fatter they also have to each harvest an extra 7 and 1/2 new shells a day to pay for George's care as the islands only welfare recipient. Babs and Michael have to work three times their normal hours to make their production quota and to pay the high shell taxes. Unfortunately these are the people who like to sing and would rather be on welfare and are about to go on strike. Hillary realizes she won't get to eat if she does not provide the the singers an incentive to do actual work to feed her and George so she collects rocks and gives them to George to throw at the other two when they quit working. She calls the rocks "incentives". George does not mind throwing the rocks . He gets to eat too. The Island economy is now a shell economy with rock hard incentives. The question is who is creating the money on the island? .