0:00:08
 
 G

Hello, this is George Caylor and this is our second podcast of Tea With George. When I was asked to do this podcast they asked me to bring on two regular guests and they said they wanted the sharpest knives in the drawer. Now I know I’ve found them. One is Diane Gruber, a retired attorney on the coast of Washington and the other one is professor Steve Putney here in Lynchburg, an old friend of mine. He knows more about the constitution and history than anyone I know, and he’s fun to be with. I want to set the table a little bit before I bring Diane on. A lot of people have been asking about digital currencies. That is, that we have everything digitized. I mean we are in the age of computers. Why not instead of carrying around money, why don’t we just make it all digital. So, Diane would you start this by telling us what digital currency is, and what your take on it is and then we’ll go from there.
 0:01:17

D

Well, digital currency certainly is a lot more convenient. I mean I don’t have to go to the bank and deposit checks anymore. People that owe me money, they just ship it right into my bank account. And then I can take my debit card down and buy my groceries and so forth. Well, that’s fine if that’s optional. But when the nation, when our overlords in Washington D.C. make cash outlawed and force us all into digital currency then they will have complete control of how it’s used and how its spent. Where you can use your money, how you can spend your money, where, when how and so forth and what you can buy and what you can’t buy. You won’t even be able to call it your money anymore because you won’t have control over it. The D.C. swamp will have control over it, eventually. In the beginning they will tip toe around you know, they’ll tread lightly in the beginning. Then in another decade or so, they’ll lower the hammer and they’ll start dictating how and where you can spend it. So, you want to go to the grocery store down the street and buy a steak. They may say no you’re not aloud to shop at that grocery store, or you’re not aloud to buy a steak, or you’re spending too much for that steak and so forth. They’ll be in complete control. And that is the end of our bill of rights, completely the end of our bill of rights. The first thing they will outlaw is the purchase of firearms and ammunition. Which of course, the rest of our bill of rights, civil rights are based upon our ability to stand up to a tyrannical government. Well, that will be gone and so that’s my biggest concern. I believe this is the issue of our time. All the other issues whether you are talking inflation, you are talking immigration, the balloon, the spy balloon, everything pales in comparison to this issue. Cause when the federal government, which they are on fast track right now, the Biden administration wants to make this their premiere success or whatever, a tyrannical success. Once they control all the money, they control us, we are little more than surfs. So, everything else just pales. It doesn’t even matter anymore. You won’t even be aloud to, shall I say, complain about immigration policy or, or whatever because they will control you in some fashion through currency. Like this podcast right now won’t even be aloud. This topic won’t be aloud, because they will find a way to keep the resources that are needed to put on this podcast from flowing to you George, or your technician and so forth.
 0:04:24

G

Diane if I can be the devil’s advocate for just a moment, during my last medical mission to Uganda, we used digital currency down there. When I bought something, I had so many credits on my cell phone. When I bought something, I had so many credits on my cell phone, I would just touch a button and those credits would show up on somebody else’s cell phone. For instance, if I was buying a bunch of bananas or a pallet of water, you know for the clinic, I’d just touch a button and It’d just show up on the other guys cell phone.
 0:04:55

D

Oh, it’s very convenient.
 0:05:02

G

Yeah, it was very, very convenient. Now Steve, you probably know more about the constitution than anybody I know. Tell me about what the constitution says about money.
 0:05:09

S

Well, the background… There’s a great book called What Has Government Done to Our Money. The book was written 60 years ago by an economist, Murray Rothbard. And in that book, he demonstrates how the government and only the government can destroy money on a massive scale and he shows exactly how they go about carrying this dirty deed out. He doesn’t talk about digital currency, cause’ that was far before his time. Nonetheless, we don’t need government involved in the monetary system at all. And when they do get involved, money becomes funny money. As Francis Shaeffer once said, society governs itself, for itself. Going back into the 19th century, Henry David Thoreau said something like, and this isn’t an exact quote but it is the gist of what he’s saying, the government that governs best, governs least. I like that, the government that governs best, governs least.
0:06:26

D

Yes.
 0:06:24

S

So, why do we even need the government involved in money?
 0:06:31

D

Right.
 0:06:31

S

Because what are the characteristics of money? Money is the medium of exchange. That’s its basic or primary function. Now I suppose you could say digital currency is a medium of exchange. Okay, I’ll grant you that. And money is a standard of calculation. It’s the pricing function of money. It allows you to compare apples and oranges if you will, or cars and houses. Because you can calculate the value or the worth of something and compare it to something else. And money is also a store of value. That is its ultimate function. And how do I have control of what’s mine if I don’t have physical possession of it?  If it is lost there in cyberspace someplace.
 0:07:34

D

Bingo!
 0:07:36

S

There are three things that are important when we think about money. Money must be durable. It must be divisible. And it must be transportable. And then if I can go on in this same thing George. There are four types of money. The earliest form of money is called commodity money. Do you know that in Virginia, in colonial America, tobacco was considered as money. Things were measured in terms of tobacco, or I should say calculated in terms of tobacco.
 0:08:10

G

Actually, salt was too in the very beginning because the word salary comes from the word salt.
 0:08:17

S

That’s exactly right. Roman soldiers were paid in salt.
 0:08:20

G

‘You're worth your salt.’
 0:08:22

S

That’s right. But that’s kind of a cumbersome way. I mean I don’t own tobacco. I don’t want to exchange tobacco. I want something that is common to all of us. So, we move into commercial money. Commercial money is money created by credit, through the banking system. Now, speaking of banks, Thomas Jefferson had no respect for banks. He said, and I quote, “banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.” That’s what Jefferson thought about the banking industry. And then there is fiduciary money. That’s money based on trust, like your checking account. And finally, we end up with fiat money. What’s fiat money? Ooh, this is going to get kind of testy. Fiat money is non-convertible government issued paper currency that is not backed by a physical commodity such as gold or silver. But rather it’s only backed by the government that issues it. What backs the money we carry in our pocket? Two things, it represents debt. You know that’s one reason that the national debt will never be paid down. Because to pay down the national debt you shrink the money supply. And the second is faith and credit of the U.S. government. Once that’s lost then the currency that we carry, and we call our money a monetary system. But it’s really a currency system. I mean because for it to be money it has to be backed by something of value. Now, I can’t explain why, but throughout human history, there is something about gold and silver that it doesn’t matter your cultural background, everyone had respect and valued it highly. And that’s the basis of money, its specie. Well, what does the constitution say about this subject? I refer us to the 1787 constitution. The reason I say that George is because that’s the written constitution. There are many that believe that that constitution is a dead letter. Cause’ we now have a living constitution.
 0:11:06

G

Living?
 0:11:07

D

Yeah, living.
 0:11:10

G

You know that reminds me, how do sailors navigate. Well, they navigate by the constellations, where they are. Now they’re in a fixed position. If we had living constellations, the sailors wouldn’t have known where they were going, how to get there, they would have been lost at sea. America wouldn’t ever have been founded and so on so the living constitution, that is about as wicked of a term as I ever heard. Well, tell us what the constitution says about money.
 0:11:38

S

Alright, it’s addressed in two places, both in article one. Article one is the article of the constitution that addresses the national legislature. It is the longest of the seven articles of the constitution.
 0:11:54

G

Well, give us the gist of it.
 0:11:55

S

Okay, section eight, paragraph four says congress shall have power to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures. Now, it says coin money, to coin money. What does it mean to coin money? It doesn’t mean to print money. It means to mint money. So, the constitution is really telling us that what is money in this new government, this new nation that’s being established is gold and or silver, not paper. And then if you move over to section nine, let’s see... I’m sorry section ten of article one, it talks about money with respect to the states. It says no state shall coin money, nor make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts.
 0:13:10

G

Wow, I’m going to go Diane next. But before we do, let’s have a word from our sponsor that’s paying for this. It’s certified social security advisors. So, let’s hear from them.
 0:13:26

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 0:13:37

G

Diane, this is about digital currencies. Which, it seems about as far from the constitution as you could possible get. Now, Steve was talking about coining money, and I could see the problem with printing money. I was in Brazil maybe 37 years ago and I went into a leather store and I bought a belt. Nice belt, I still have it. I think I’m wearing it now, keeping my pants up. And I paid him 500,000 cruzeiros for the belt. And as he put it in a bag, he said to me, “do you know that you could have waked into a Mercedes dealership and driven away in a brand new Mercedes for that same bill that you just gave me to buy a belt.”
 0:14:29

D

What?
 0:14:30
 
 G

Now that’s printing a lot of money. And by the way, they changed cruzeiros to cruzados to start over again. Well, that’s like making the dollar into a dilly. We have dillies instead of dollars. So, it seems printing money has its own evil side. But Diane it even goes further than that. If you have digital currency. First of all, it sounds to me like you don’t trust the government to do the right thing.
 0:14:59

D

Of course not,
 0:15:02

G

That sounds very unpatriotic of you and tell me why don’t we allow the government to have control over our money by digitizing it?
 0:15:08

D

Oh stop it…Well, because they’ll have control over us. They will never, I mean look at all of the abuse they have heaped on us just in the last two years. I’m not even going to talk about my lifetime. Just in the last two years look at how they have abused the American, well the American worker, that’s for sure and just honest, law-abiding Americans. Right now, the swamp doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Americans. They are doing everything for their own benefit. So, even if we had a bunch of angels running our government, they still should not have the right to tell us, to control OUR money, money we have worked for. Because once we go to digital currency, that is exactly what will happen. There is going to be a central bank where all the little cyber money is held and the big bank is going to decide how and when we can use our own money. And at some point, I suspect it won’t be too long after that, that they will be giving allowances out. It won’t matter how much you work, or what you earn with your employment or anything. You will get X amount of money based on what the government in D.C. considers your worth. So, in other words, we will be on an allowance schedule. And if it were the Biden administration you know perfectly well who would have the higher allowance. That would be the liberals and the conservatives would have a lower allowance. People with certain skin hues would get more money in their account every month to spend than people with other skin hues. I mean it is a nightmare. It is an absolute nightmare of how they will control us and dictate our every move. And they will know everything you do.  The privacy issue is a whole separate issue to that. The whole concept of privacy will be dead within a generation after we go to digital currency. Because the government will know everything there is to know about you, how the money is spent.
 0:17:25

G

Well, Diane I was listening to an excerpt from Biden’s state of the union address the other night and he was talking about everyone should get a living wage. Now, the digital currency seems a good way to give everyone a living wage. What is wrong with a living wage?
 0:17:47

D

Bingo!
 0:17:48

G

Talk to us.
 0:17:50

D

Your talents won’t matter. Your abilities won’t matter. The government will tell the employer, and will tell you what you are entitled to. There will be no marketplace out there that you can negotiate your skill, you’ve got a special skill of some kind or you’re just an average ordinary person that works a lot harder that the average and ordinary person next door. You will all, everybody will be bland. Everybody will be treated exactly the same. There won’t be any distinction made for different types of talents and how hard you work. Pretty soon all of us will, well what’s the point of having a work ethic for example. If everybody gets the same allowance that the government says you’re supposed to get.
 0:18:40

G

You know I started this podcast by saying that they asked me to bring in the sharpest knives in the drawer. I guess under the living wage concept I could have brought in a couple of drunks and they would have satisfied the governments needs for this podcast instead of having you and Steve.
 0:19:00

D

You could have brought in Hunter Biden.
 0:19:05

G

No, I didn’t want anybody that drunk, or that useless.
 0:19:11

D

Brain damage.
 0:19:13

G

At any rate, Steve talk to us some more about the constitutionality of the living wage if you would. What’s on your mind about all this?
 0:19:21

S

All kinds of thoughts are swirling around in my head based on what Diane has already told us here. And it is rather disturbing when you think of the potential complications, and I shouldn’t say complications, of the economy in general. I mean if no one has an incentive to do better, then things are going to get worse economically for all of us. Which I don’t think they are worried about. I think that’s really what they want cause’ they want it all for themselves. I used to tell my students there are three revolutions that have taken place in the western culture in the last 500 years. And the third one was a change in social arrangements. The west used to be made up of this system arrangement called interdependent individualism, where we did things cooperatively, cause’ no man is an island unto himself. But we did so voluntarily. We worked together voluntarily. We weren’t coerced to do such and such with other people. We weren’t forced in any way by persuasion or whatever other means, less of the sword. We all improved our lots. But we shifted from this notion of an interdependent individualism to a collectivism. Where the individual is expendable for the so-called good of all mankind. For this to take place it requires coercion and control. And that’s what Diane has been talking about. They can control everything about us. If they control our store of value, if you will, which is one of the functions of money. You know, this collectivism, and it can take many forms, whether we are talking about leftists in general in the west, or Fabians, or if we go to Europe, well they are here too, Marxists, socialists, communists. They are all about creating this perfect world if you will. But that perfect world is a world of horror for the masses. But this perfect world, in their view, will be achieved when all civil, social, and economic power is in the hands of an enlightened, elite few… if you will, a political aristocracy. Everyone else, and I think Diane used this word, that hasn't already been ushered off life’s stage will be slaves or surfs who will own nothing and be happy in the process. And that is what I see crypto currency and potentially being, a means of controlling all of us. And like she says it won’t be bringing the hammer down all at once. It’ll be like putting the frog in a pan of water that’s the same temperature of the pond you just took him out of and then just gradually increase the heat until you boil him and he is gone. Marx talked about this. One of his planks in the communist manifesto. If I can say this about that George, I used to give a quiz the first day of class. I wanted to see what the worldview and the mindset was of my students and I took the ten planks of the communist manifesto and I kind of jazzed them up in contemporary language and made this as a quiz to my students. And it was shocking, we are talking about kids coming from an evangelical background, how their minds and their perceptions were to the left rather than to the right. But Marx said he wanted centralization of credit in the hands of the state by means of a national bank with state capitol and an exclusive monopoly. He didn’t know about crypto currency. But I think crypto currency certainly falls in that category.
 0:23:59

G

I think he would have loved it. I’m going to let Diane wrap this up for us today. But you talked about the constitution, you know in the days of James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, the Rothschilds of Europe were already global money moguls, and they still are. And we also have some global money moguls on our federal reserve board. People think they are Americans. Now, a couple of them are Americans and the others are foreigners, who run our currency. And the original Rothschilds said, it really doesn’t matter who controls the country. It matters who controls the currency. That just came to me after you were talking about the constitution. I think Madison and Jefferson, by the way he had his summer home right here outside Lynchburg. We are about a mile from it right now. They already knew about the Rothschilds and how wicked that kind of control could be. But Diane would you wrap this up for us? Why don’t you give us a plan of action.
 0:25:16

D

Yes, I’d to wrap it up, okay we’re not helpless. I would like to wrap this up on a positive note. Yes, a plan of action. We can slow down this, this decent into tyranny and serfdom by limiting our use of our credit card and debit card now. Spend cash as much as possible. Go to your bank periodically, while you still have ATM machines because they are taking those out, get cash. Buy your groceries with cash. Use cash as much as possible, number one. Number two, Get your money, get your bank accounts out of the big banks and put them into the small independent banks and credit union. It will be harder for the federal government to consolidate the whole system. See when they do the central bank thing, when they finalize it, they have to suck up the money in all the accounts everywhere. Well, it’ll be a little bit harder for them to do that with independent banks. So, get your money out of Wells Fargo, and Bank of America, Key Bank, City Bank, get your money out of there. Get your accounts set up in small, local independent banks and credit union. And spend cash as much as possible, never mind the inconvenience. Your liberty is more important. You can tolerate a little inconvenience. I started doing this a little over a year ago. I go periodically to the ATM machine or I walk into the bank branch and I get cash and that’s what I spend. That increases your privacy for one thing. The federal government doesn’t know what you bought, when you bought it, and where you bought it. And also, that shows… the more cash in the system, the better. You’ve got to do it. That is something you can do to hold back this tyranny that they are setting up for us.
 0:27:07

S

Diane, can I ask you a question here. Would you include checks with that, personal checks, or simply U.S. government-issued currency?
 0:27:18

D

Oh, I see what you are saying. I don’t know that to be candid with you. I think just cash. If somebody gives you a check, don’t deposit it. Walk into your bank or their bank and get cash for it. That’s one thing I would do. Right now, I pay my major bills online. I tend to continue doing that. I’m not sure. I don’t know enough about the technical end of this. To whether, if I just wrote checks and put them in the mail instead of doing the online paying my bills, you know my utilities and whatnot. I don’t know if that will help or hinder them putting together this serfdom for all of us. I just know cash, and cash as much as possible, as many things as you can in your day to day life. This will help. And do it every day, all day. I’ve been doing this for a year now. We closed our accounts with a major bank that we had been with for 30 odd years. We closed those last year and moved to a credit union, a small, local credit union. I mean that’s one thing all of us can do, you know there is over 300,000 america… whoops, 300 million Americans. Did I get that right?
 0:28:37

S

Yes.
 0:28:38

D

There’s millions of us. If we all did it, if we all did it from now into eternity this will slow down what they are going to do to us. You won’t want to live in their world once digital currency is required and cash is outlawed
 0:28:54

S

That’s true.
 0:28:53

D

You won’t want to live in their world. So, to answer your question about checks Steve,I haven’t got a clue. I mean I am fairly new to this and I don’t know about well enough to add to that.
 0:29:04

G

Some of our listeners might be able to come up with some other ideas on this.
 0:29:09

D

Excellent!
 0:29:10

G

We’re at the end of our half hour. This sure went fast cause you two are just fascinating and knowledgeable and I can’t wait till the next podcast. But thank you both, professor Steve Putney and Diane Gruber Esquire for coming on here and talking about digital currencies and the dangers thereof. Tune in next week to Tea With George, where we’re going to be talking about another important topic of the day that affects your life. So, goodbye to our listening audience and goodbye to Steve and Diane. Thanks again.
 0:29:49