The Strange World of Patent Propaganda and Virtual FraudUse Patents

commentary by Roger Erickson

DailyKos has just received feedback from one of the authors of the original Platinum Coin legislation, publicized years ago by Ellen Brown in a book.  A key passage from DK is worth repeating.

* In minting the $1 trillion platinum coin, the Treasury Secretary would be exercising authority which Congress has granted routinely for more than 220 years. The Secretary’s authority is derived from an Act of Congress (in fact, a GOP Congress) under power expressly granted to Congress in the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8). What is unusual in this case is that the law gives the Secretary discretion regarding all specifications of the coin, including denominations.

* The accounting treatment of the coin is identical to the treatment of all other coins. The Mint strikes the coin, ships it to the Fed, books $1 trillion, and transfers $1 trillion to the treasury’s general fund where it is available to finance government operations just like with proceeds of bond sales or additional tax revenues. The same applies for a quarter dollar.

* Once the debt limit is raised, the Fed ships the coin back to the Mint, the accounting treatment is reversed, and the coin is melted. The coin would never be “issued” or circulated and bonds would not be needed to back the coin.

Philip N. Diehl, 35th Director, United States Mint

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Of course, this just echoes what students of currency operations have long said, from Warren Mosler back to John Law. Even the Greeks and Sumerians either created Nomisma, or simply kept bills of credit to track flexible and unpredictably intersecting transaction chains. Given reality, social liquidity is always a function of distributed wit and group-intelligence.

Now we have yet another demonstration that social liquidity is simply group investment in teamwork, i.e., social credit. So, if we can mint and melt purely symbolic coins at will, why not just damn the purely symbolic T-bonds instead?

Why not indeed! It's only because the semantics of coinage & bondage run through the bank lobby, which claims to have a Virtual FraudUse patent, held off the books, of course. What is a virtual FraudUse patent? It's what clever frauds perrennially use to separate foolish populations from their real resources and dynamic options. VFUs usually involve some form of propaganda used to impose and maintain the virtual patent. The usual intent of a VFU patent is to wall off group access to dynamic assets which groups would otherwise utilize, as indirect paths around the limits imposed by personal hoarding of static assets.

Astute readers will instantly recognize that social evolution is the progressive transition from local hoarding of static assets to distributed hoarding of dynamic assets.  Gold bugs, by definition, do not grasp the dynamics of growing organization, nor the concept of "return-on-coordination."  Citizens of a democracy, however, always balance a "Be or Do" choice.  Be personally "wealthy" by sequestering static resources from your neighbors, or do something for  your country by increasing net dynamic assets.  How do YOU define patriotism?  How far your country reaches is a distributed function of how far YOUR vision for it reaches.