NOTE: This is not an article about, or necessarily in support of Bernie Sanders.  Please don’t read it that way.  He is just emblematic of the larger point being made herein and therefore has to be referred to multiple times…

A very common criticism about Bernie Sanders—or more broadly, anyone who suggests helping the common man before the corporations—is that he proposes giving people lots of “free stuff.”   But everybody knows that nothing is ever really free.  Someone, somewhere has to pay for it.  No free lunch, and all that.  So the upshot of this criticism, sometimes expressed explicitly, sometimes not?  That Sanders (as well as others who share his populist views)  is lying and neither he nor anyone else can deliver on “free stuff.”

For his part, Sanders will often point out that the U.S. somehow always has money for war and can come up with it easy-peasy no matter how big the national debt is, and no matter how high the poverty level is, etc.  Here is one such example of Sanders saying just that:

These same critics of “free stuff” for the people tend to withhold this criticism when “free stuff” that we can’t afford and that somebody has to pay for is being discussed as a gift to the military-industrial complex.  They justify “free stuff” (that somebody has to pay for) to the military with one word: “terrorism.”  Yet they can’t—more accurately, won’t–justify “free stuff” (that somebody has to pay for) with one word: “poverty.”

News Flash—The money will come from thin air, just like always

What both camps—Sanders (and his ilk) and his detractors—fail to grasp is that we can have it all.  We can have it both ways.  Neither Sanders nor his detractors will cop to what they have to know to be true, which is this: all money is created out of thin air.

This is not controversial in the least.  It is admitted to by the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, and major economists of all political persuasions.  Even Time Magazine has done reports on this fact.  It’s not a secret.  At all.  It’s just that almost nobody knows it (or pays attention to it), kind of like, I don’t know…the atom.  The atom was always there, not a secret, just doing its thing—Democritus even told the world about atoms in the 5th Century B.C.E., but no one paid any attention until literally 2,000 years later!  Maybe we could come to our senses about money in a little bit shorter time span than between Democritus and Dalton, like say right now.  To help shorten the time, check out that Time Magazine report:

Fox: “[The Fed] can create dollars out of thin air.

Narrator: Money out of thin air?  Sounds like magic to me.

Fox: OK, that’s magic.  They do it in this really simple way, it’s just down at the New York Fed, which is this big building down on Wall Street.  There are a bunch of people who call up banks and say, “Hey, I wanna buy some bonds from you.”  And when the Fed buys say, $20 million worth of debt securities, they basically have this magic checkbook.  The Fed just suddenly says, “OK, we’re sending you $20 million.”  Those dollars suddenly show up in the bank’s books.

But those dollars weren’t anywhere before, it wasn’t like the Fed actually had this stash of dollars in its checking account.

Narrator: Annnnd that magic checkbook?  Don’t try this at home.  Only the Fed gets the magic checkbook.  Think of the chair as a financial Gandalf.

Fox: That is the great, mystical power we bestow upon the Federal Reserve System.

Now will everyone please, pretty please with sugar on top accept this already?  The source of the info cannot get any more mainstream than Time Magazine!  It’s true, I tell you!  All you have to do is accept it.

And once you do, you will no longer be able to roll your eyes and derisively say, “Yeah, but where’s all the money gonna come from to pay for Sanders’ ‘free stuff’?”  You will know that the money will come from thin air, in any amount needed, just as Alan Greenspan testified before Congress:

Why not have that “somebody” Greenspan is referring to above be you and me?  Greenspan—not me—says there is nothing that can stop that from happening.

I understand why you don’t want to accept it, but…

But maybe Greenspan was wrong about that, in one sense—there is something that prevents that from happening.  And that is, that many people refuse to accept that money is created out of thin air and fake, because they think of money as something that they have to work 40+ hours for.  And so such people don’t want other people getting “something for nothing.”  I get it, I really do.  But that is the divide and conquer method that is used by the elites to keep us from having the federal government—which is supposed to be you and me, remember—do exactly what Greenspan says.  Printing as much money as we want and paying it to ourselves.  Like I say, I get it:

“In other words, money is fictional.  Imaginary. Think about that for a minute, particularly if it sounds wrong or nonsensical to you.  Let it sink in.  Try not to let what you’ve been told your entire life about money get in the way of understanding this very simple concept.

I know you don’t want to believe it.  You can’t believe it.  After all, if it were true, that would mean…all the hard work…all the long hours…for something imaginary?  And that would mean all the hounding of the debt collectors and the shame and the guilt and the worry and the sleeplessness and the suicide or thoughts of it…were for something imaginary?

The truth hurts.  But it is still the truth.  And once we understand this truth, we face more difficult, painful questions, i.e., why should we let this continue?  How best to get out of this false reality?”

And this is the main impediment to the equality that most of us at least give lip service to.  We don’t want people who don’t work as many hours or as many jobs or as physically demanding jobs or as skilled jobs as we do to somehow get one over on us.  Because we’re taught from birth that money is the reward for hard work and exists only in a limited supply that we have to cut each other’s throats (if necessary) to get.

But that isn’t true, and never was.

And that’s what I see in the sneers over Sanders’ proposals—no one really seems to have a problem with education and health care for everybody.  They just don’t believe that the money is available to pay for it.

But as you can plainly see from this article, citing the most mainstream of sources, the money is available.  The idea that we can’t pay for “free” education and healthcare and child care for everyone is completely false.

Accept the truth—listen to Democritus.  Don’t make your children and your children’s children wait until Dalton comes along.  Democritus and Dalton are contemporaries for the purposes of money creation—we already know the truth and it’s confirmed in spades.

All you have to do is accept it, even if every atom (!) of your education, upbringing, political affiliation, experience, bias, and so forth cry out for you to reject it.