Lindsay Perigo
The Politically Incorrect Show - 15/02/2000
[Music - Die Fledermaus]
Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Tuesday February 15, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd, the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit, & excellence, against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.
[Music up, music down!]
I see Richard Prebble has made the most interesting suggestion that New Zealand should adopt the US dollar as its currency on the grounds that the kiwi is too volatile & exporters are unable to know from one day to the next whether they're coming or going. I warmed to the idea when I heard Trade Union Federation Secretary Michael Gilchrist opposing it, on the grounds that:
"Without a Reserve Bank in New Zealand which can co-ordinate monetary policy with other policy goals, the Government may as well pack up & go home."
Getting rid of the Reserve Bank & having the government, at least in its present form, pack up & go home have been quite high on my agenda for some time. However, simply abandoning our national currency & substituting for it that of the United Police States doesn't strike me as getting to the root of the problem here.
I have another idea. I propose that like-minded individuals & companies in New Zealand & all over the world make a decision to ignore their respective national governments, cease dealing in their respective national currencies & instead set up a new one of their own. This would have the effect of setting up an international equivalent of the underground economy, independent of governments. It would be a way of bypassing tariffs & subsidies & so bringing the benefits of free trade into effect immediately. It would mean that those dealing in this new currency could ignore the screechings of those who panic when the official economy, in the artificial form of NZ Inc, imports more than it exports. Nations as such simply won't enter into the equation any more; it will just be case of individuals & groups of individuals dealing with other individuals & groups of individuals all around the world, who would pocket and/or reinvest the money they earned from each other as they saw fit. Either way, they would pocket all of it; governments wouldn't be taxing it.
What precisely should this currency be? Well, that's for those who make the decision to deal in it to decide. They would presumably want it to be something that made transactions as safe as barter without the inconvenience of barter, something that served as a rock-solid means of exchange & store of value simultaneously, something itself easy to store. They would probably find it easier if it were something already universally respected. It shouldn't be something so plentiful that vast quantities could easily be released, way out of kelter with the amount of goods & services being produced, thus rendering it worthless. There are those who say gold has filled the bill before & could so again. Again I say, it wouldn't be my decision.
Governments would never allow this, you say? Well suppose we did a deal with governments. Suppose we said, look, you guys just back off & we'll give you something useful to do. To make what we're proposing work, we need some basic rules & someone to enforce them, otherwise we could just end up with a bunch of Mafias running around as in Russia. Why don't you guys do that? Outlaw murder & theft & fraud & assault, & see that contracts get upheld. We'll give you a cut of the enormous amounts of money we're going to make just so that you CAN do that. And stop all that other stuff you're doing. That way everybody's happy.
Suppose we did that, & it came to pass. The old saying, "It's a free world," would finally be true in reality.
Now wouldn't that be something??
Politically Incorrect Show, thinking outside the square - 309 3099.
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