Chilling plan from the Fed

Just when you think you’ve heard every bone-chilling totalitarian
proposal from the U.S. government and its orbit of unaccountable,
quasi-official satellite agencies, along comes something straight out of
Orwell.

How else can you categorize Federal Reserve official Marvin
Goodfriend’s plan to track possession of dollar bills in private hands?

That’s right. Goodfriend, senior vice president at the Federal
Reserve Bank of Richmond, delivered a paper to a Federal Reserve
conference in Vermont that calls for U.S. currency to include tracking
devices that would allow the government to tax private possession of
cash, according to a report by Declan
McCullagh in Wired News. I’m not kidding.

The Goodfriend plan suggests that the longer you hold currency
without depositing it in a bank account, the less that cash would be
worth. In effect, the cash would be tagged with expiration dates.

“The magnetic strip could visibly record when a bill was last
withdrawn from the banking system,” Goodfriend wrote. “A carry tax could
be deducted from each bill upon deposit according to how long the bill
was in circulation.”

Ingenious, huh?

The 34-page paper argues that a carry tax of this kind would
discourage “hoarding” of cash, deter black market and criminal
activities and boost economic stability during deflationary periods.

And just so you don’t think this is some far-out futuristic
pipedream, the paper explains that the technology is available right now
to make this scheme possible.

“Systems would have to be put in place at banks and automatic teller
machines to read bills, access the carry tax and stamp the bills
‘current,'” the report says.

Remember, folks, any cash in our pockets today has, presumably,
already been taxed several times by several layers of government
bureaucracy before it even got there. Now, you can see, that government
never has enough of your money. The state is never satisfied. It’s a
greedy monster whose appetite is never quenched. In fact, quite clearly,
the government does not acknowledge that you own any of your own money.
You are simply borrowing some of its resources. That’s the premise under
which current U.S. economic policy operates. But, proposals like this
one show us it will only get worse without radical change in the
relationship between the people and government.

Can you imagine the audacity of such a notion? The fact that ideas of
this kind would even be entertained by such powerful institutions as the
Federal Reserve is reason enough to abolish them.

The trouble is, there is no political will to take on such
institutions head-on. Oh yeah, there are a few courageous and
well-grounded members of Congress, such as Rep. Ron Paul, who understand
our tenuous grasp on freedom. But the overwhelming majority on both
sides of the aisle are strangling the last vestiges of liberty in the
United States with an ever-tightening noose.

This plan may only be floated at this time as a trial balloon — to
test just how lost Americans really are. But hideous proposals of this
kind are coming too fast and furious for us just to laugh them off.

Don’t Americans get it? Don’t they realize it’s long past due to get
the government’s hand OUT of our pockets? Would our fellow citizens
accept an idea like this? I’m afraid the timing is more than
coincidental.

The economies of the United States and the world are about to go into
the tank. This will be blamed primarily on those who prepared for bad
times by holding on to some cash and other vital necessities of life in
anticipation of Y2K. The Goodfriend proposal comes at a moment banks are
panicky about customers withdrawing cash.

You can bet that we have not seen the last of this plan. Something
like it will be rammed down our throats in the next year, unless
Americans wake up and begin demanding that their constitutional rights
and freedoms be respected. The assaults on them must be stopped —
especially when they come from unaccountable super-agencies like the
Fed.