Framing Platinum Coin Seigniorage: A Working Document

By Joe Firestone

Jack Foster proposed a framing document for High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage, in a recent comment he made on one of my posts. In response, I posted a six-part blog series to accommodate readers who prefer the blog format.

Some, however, will want to read or reference a single framing document, rather than six separate posts, and I prefer it in that form myself because it facilitates seeing the whole picture provided by the many and diverse objections to PCS and HVPCS. So I’ve provided one here. I think the full picture provided by the many objections is that of opposition grounded in a fierce unwillingness to change familiar ways of performing Federal deficit spending requiring debt issuance, even though many of those offering objections know very well that the Government is perfectly capable of creating its own high-powered money without selling debt instruments, and even know that all money creation in our financial system is ultimately, if most often indirectly, based on the constitutional authority of the Congress, and its delegation of that authority to other parties.

What can one say about this except that it is mere conservatism and grounded in fear of the unknown at best, or worse, grounded in a desire to continue to benefit from the financial system in one’s own, rather than the public interest? I’m not saying that conservatism is never rational, or that it is unjustified in all cases. But I think my evaluation in the series, and the full framing document indicates that many, and perhaps all of the objections that have been offered to HVPCS reflect a transparent bias to preserve the present system and are relatively easy to turn aside, because they are a stretch reflecting the bias of the people offering the objections.

In any event, that’s my view of the matter, and I leave it to others to read the framing document and to evaluate for themselves, whether the pattern I’m drawing out of the objections makes sense to them. In doing that I hope others will join me in continuing to gather objections to HVPCS I haven’t covered here, and to record these in comments, so that the document may be kept up to date and may become the primary reference for objections and replies to HVPCS. Let’s try to transform this into a crowd-sourced document, so that it becomes a true community document. I’ll be looking forward to your comments and your contributions!

(Cross-posted from Correntewire.)

9 responses to “Framing Platinum Coin Seigniorage: A Working Document