The Nut-Case Greenbacker Responds
Feb. 23, 2012
I don't think it is wise to draw readers into personal squabbles. They don't care, nor should they.
This squabble is not personal. I do not know the kid who runs the Greenbacker blog, Real Currencies.
I posted my response to his preposterous article on the Illuminati and libertarianism. I did it mostly for fun. I don't see anything this far over reality's edge very often. Here is his website:
One way I assess the impact of any site is to check with Alexa.com. Alexa ranks sites in terms of traffic. There are several ranking sites that do this. They all have flaws. So, I check for direction.
Here is the site's ranking. The higher the number, the lower the ranking.
It is well below a million. In short, it's irrelevant.
I will say this. It is slighly higher ranked than Ellen Brown's blog.
Three months ago, my Tea Party Economist site was around one million. Here is the latest ranking.
The 100,000 limit is the access point for Alexa. If you break into it, Alexa supplies more detailed information.
You can see my site's move over three months.
With this as background, here is the kid's response. I will highlight the choice bits.
Far from dispelling anything claimed in our article, Gary North as a first hand witness corroborates major elite funding of Libertarianism.
Read my article. See if you think I corroborated it with respect to Mises, Rothbard, and the Mises Institute, which is what my response dealt with.
Gary North's main function in the Libertarian movement is to maintain internal party discipline.
I like that: "internal party discipline." The libertarians? A party? Like the Communist Party? Internal party discipline is a euphemism for "herding cats."
By lashing out at people opposing Austrian Economics's many glaring failings, the more feeble minded multitude within Libertarianism are discouraged from asking too many difficult questions. After all, who wants to be called a crackpot by Gary North, right?
Feeble minded. I see. Not the people I have spoken with at Mises Institute gatherings. I spent my years in grad school working alongside such feeble-minded people. The attendees I have dealt with at the Mises Institute are of equal or better caliber.
That's why he opens his 'rebuttal' by trying to insult both me and Ellen Brown with "Let me say, before I begin, that the author of this article is the only person I have come across who could profitably study with Ellen Brown."He can rest assured. I have studied Brown and benefited immensely from it, like millions more. I always read her latest articles, providing insight into the dynamics of the banking industry and their minions. Here is her latest excellent piece of work, exploring some of the dynamics behind the Euro Crisis.
I can barely imagine how informed he was before he became lawyer Brown's disciple.
Like all Greenbackers, he never goes to primary sources. He searches the web for quotes, and finds them: on Greenbacker sites. I showed how Ellen brown did this repeatedly in her book, The Web of Debt. She never found an instance where she had an original source for any citation I showed was fake.
For Greenbackers, primary source documents are irrelevant. Scholarship is irrelevant.
But just for the fun of it, however, let me ask you this: spend 30 seconds on Google and try to find Otto Kahn's quote that I provided in the article.Here it is again: "You say that Marxism is the very antithesis of capitalism, which is equally sacred to us [The Money Power] It is precisely for this reason that they are direct opposites to one another, that they put into our hands the two poles of this planet and allow us to be its axis. These two contraries, like Bolshevism and ourselves, find their identity in the International." Otto Kahn, Investment Banker
Please tell me: did you succeed? Did you find the source? So how come Gary North and his meticulous research comes up with the conclusion 'there is no source'?
There is no primary source. Kahn never said it.
He accused Volker of being a Jew. I cited a section from his biography that shows that the family was Lutheran. His response:
Also funny to see North quote Volker's biography. Yes, a really good Christian family, not? Well, perhaps this is the level of thinking in the circles that Gary North hangs out with, but where I come from we have a little problem with this fairy tale: The Money Power does not care about religion and Marrano Jews have been among those messing up our affairs for quite some time.
Where is the evidence that the Volker family came from Marrano stock -- a category that comes from 14th- and 15th-century Spain? (Note: Marranos were Jews who converted to Catholicism. The expert here is Benjamin Netanyahu's father.)
The kid made it up.
The article was about the power elite. The Volker Fund was never part of the power elite. It was part of the powerless elite. It doled out tiny stipends to obscure writers in the 1950s and early 1960s.
The Volker Fund got a wonderful return on their 1963 investment paying North 500 bucks per month to read their drivel.
Yes, it did.
He has been promoting the same boring crap ever since.
By the way, he calls me a foul mouth.
Gary North is well known not only for his foul mouth, but also for his 'detailed' work.
He ends with this:
In the mean time, I'm still awaiting a meticulously researched and detailed response to What Gary North is not telling you about Interest.
I responded first to the Greenbackers in 1973 in a chapter in my book, An Introduction to Christian Economics. I wrote it as a private paper in 1965. The Mises Institute has published an update:
Since 1965, I have seen them come and go. One thing is sure: their scholarship never improves.
When you find an author who tells you that the world can run without an interest rate, you are dealing with the equivalent of a high school dropout who tells you that there can be a perpetual motion machine. He may even tell you that some oil company has the plans for a machine that does this, but it has suppressed the production of it.
You are not dealing with anyone to take seriously.
I have a little fun with them once in a while. I am the only person trained in economics who does. I have been doing this since 1965. It's a hobby. Economists ignore Greenbackers, and have for well over a century. They have no influence politically. They have no one in their camp with a teaching position in a university, and have. Why respond?
I do it out of amusement, to remind myself and others that such desperate, fearful, and usually hate-driven people exist. I warn readers: don't get sucked in.