Space Jesus
A Piece about Human Transcendence through An Honest Look at Taxes.
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Despite claiming access to universal truths, Christians, as a whole, have no vision.
There’s no future there. No goal.
No raison d'être.
People continue to labor under the extremely mistaken impression that their taxes “pay” for things.
The source of an essentially infinite amount of public consternation.
“My tax dollars are being spent on that!?” The conservative screams. “Elon isn’t paying his fair share!” The liberal insists. On the assumption that government programs, welfare, education, Medicaid, and other such things are paid for by taxes, groups of voters are endlessly pitted against one another and, likewise, the notion that money spent on the military could, in principle, be otherwise spent “helping the poor”, refuses to die.
Allow me then to disabuse you.
Your taxes pay for nothing.
Not one damned thing.
That’s not how money works, but admitting that would put you at odds with God, so you don’t know about it. Nobody tells you, and you persist in a kind of dream-like illusion. We collectively agree to forget, so we can continue pretending to be small.
Think about it for half a second. Does the U.S. government really need you to give them U.S. dollars? Does that make sense? They already have U.S. dollars and, in fact, are the only ones who can make them. You do not “make” money. You never have. Money does not need to be “made” through labor. No. You get money. Somebody gives it to you. The actual manufacturing of money is entirely not your concern and involves someone at the Federal Reserve typing digits into an Excel spreadsheet. Money is poofed into existence out of thin air.
You know this.
Also you don’t.
Everyone with half a brain who’s been interested in politics for more than a few minutes, long ago learned that dollars are fiat currency. That they are brought into existence simply by man’s declaration and not by anything more “real” than that, like physics, labor, math, or God. Nonetheless, the implications of this are so staggering that we refuse to confront them, and instead persist in useless ideas and fears about the government “running out of money” and needing to collect taxes in order to be able to afford things. Again though, money is CREATED FIRST. It is earned second.
Think on it.
When the government was first created, and nobody had dollars in circulation, how did they get dollars out into the public? Well, they had to print them, out of nothing, and then hand them out to the public so the public could later pay the dollars back in taxes. By definition, the public cannot create U.S. currency, so the U.S. government is not, and has never been, reliant on the public for that currency. The public only has money because the government creates it and hands it out. There is in principle therefore, I stress, infinite money. It doesn’t even not grow on trees. It’s easier than that. Like Athena sprouting from Zeus’s skull, money manifests, fully formed, out of Jerome Powell’s head.
“But inflation!”
What inflation?
“If we print too much money the economy will collapse!”
When?
When will this happen?
We’ve been printing money non-stop at ever increasing rates since World War 2 and the U.S. economy has never been more dominant. It completely obliterates and eclipses every other economy in the world, China being a distant second, which also prints its own currency like mad. All the hard-nosed “economists” who “understand money” and who are such “realists” about inflation… they’ve predicted 85 of the last 2 recessions, and the catastrophic scenarios they lay out never come to pass.
“But… but… Weimar Germany! Zimbabwe!”
Yeah… but those countries were doing something different. Something stupid. Like most of Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa today, they were working under the mistaken assumption that money had to be “real.” That it had to, somewhere, at some point, connect to something tangible.
Stupid.
This is naught but a religious belief, and it is a false one.
The U.S. knows better. We’ve grasped hold of something many claim was not ours to grasp.
The confusion is not your fault. Washington is very interested in you not understanding money and, to be honest, I don’t think most politicians understand it either. Dishonesty and confusion around money is played to great effect in America and, in the U.S., we have this crazy thing called a “debt ceiling” which is the source of semi-routine government shut-downs. It involves congress performatively refusing to grant the government the funds it needs for the budget that congress itself already approved.
Flagrant theatrics.
Never amounts to anything.
It’s a political football to harvest votes and outrage, to needle at the anxieties of the elderly about the safety of their healthcare and 401ks. Never once has the “debt ceiling” not eventually been raised. Never once is it for anything more than show.
Worse than that, the public has been taught, for decades, from the highest levels of government, that the government’s “debt” is analogous to the kind of debt you personally hold at home. That it’s something they have to “pay back” and “make good on”. “Look at this graph!”, they scream. “Look how ludicrously high the debt has climbed! Oh. Oh we’re in it now. We’ll never be able to pay that back. Extreme measures are needed! We have to balance the budget! Cut spending! Lower the deficit!”
But how silly.
How silly the idea that the U.S. government is somehow going to run out of U.S. dollars.
Remember, they can make as many of them as they want. Forever.
Mind you, THE ONLY THING that makes the above coin not a trillion dollars is that it says “no legal tender” on it.
That’s it.
If someone had, instead, printed “Legal Tender for All Debts, Public and Private” on it, literally if someone had just changed the typing on the coin, it would be worth a trillion bucks.
That’s it.
That’s how money works.
It’s words. Just words. “Abracadabra.” “I create as I speak.” “Fiat” ain’t just whistling Dixie brother, and dollars exist because they’re declared to in writing by the U.S. government. There’s nothing more behind them than that. They have no more “reality” than words.
You being in debt, your house running at a net negative, that matters because you can’t create your own currency to pay people off in. If all you had to do to settle with someone was to write “I.O.U.” on a piece of paper and hand it to them, then you could have anything you wanted. All your money troubles would be solved. And you see, that’s all a dollar is. It’s a government I.O.U. Legally. Factually. A banknote is simply a bond with zero coupon and no maturity. When the government hands you a ten dollar note they’re saying, in essence, “I owe you ten.”
Okay. Ten what?
Well, ten dollars. Ten units of a thing created by declaration.
And then, when you give the I.O.U. back to them in taxes (as would be the case if you were to issue a personal I.O.U. to a friend and then that friend handed it back to you), the debt is considered “redeemed”. Canceled. Erased.
Effectively, when a dollar is collected as tax, that is the end of its lifecycle. It stops existing once the government gets it back. It doesn’t pay for anything. It vanishes from existence, just as simply and easily as it was created.
In fact, at various times in history, this has been handled extremely literally. In both England and the U.S., banknotes (or the historical equivalent) collected in taxes were sometimes just taken out behind the courthouse and burned. Today, nothing so drastic. The money simply disappears off a certain balance sheet in the bank.
Poof.
Dollars are not recycled.
…
… … …
Okay but, if that’s true… why isn’t it clearer? Why don’t most people (or at least most government officials) understand it?
Well.
Because it’s really embarrassing.
It’s upsetting.
…
It’s even theological.
We’re very, very reluctant to acknowledge what it is that we’re really doing.
Okay so, years ago, this all made a lot more intuitive sense, back when we were on the gold standard I mean. Back then, one dollar was an I.O.U. from the government for a certain amount of gold. Actual, physical metal. Time was, you could walk into any bank in the country, give them some dollars, and receive physical gold in exchange for it. That was money and, in that context, it makes complete sense that the dollars would be destroyed after being turned in for gold. Right? It’s an I.O.U. for X ounces of gold, you’ve turned it in, gotten your gold, and so now the I.O.U. is no longer valid. The slip of paper it was on, the banknote, needs to be destroyed because the debt it represented is gone.
Okay, and so then we just kept doing that but just… stopped… saying… it was attached gold.
…
Or to anything.
All the rest continued on you see. I.O.U.s (dollars) continued to be issued, people continued to turn them in , and they continued to be destroyed upon receipt because when you turn in an I.O.U. you’re saying the debt has been paid. You can’t use an I.O.U. over and over again. The only difference was that now, the underlying tangible reality beneath this game, the physical metal, was no longer there.
And somehow it kept going.
And this makes everyone very, very uncomfortable.
Why?
Because it feels wrong.
Because Mankind is deeply, firmly committed to the belief that nothing is for free. TINSTAAFL. “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” In our heart of hearts we believe we must be “grounded” and “realistic.” Tethered to hard, physical constraints. Make no mistake though. The current prosperity, flights around the world, endless gasoline, stores stuffed with food and McMansions from sea to shining sea…
All of that is because we threw off such shackles.
Because we just started making wealth out of nothing.
Conjuring it into existence out of pure belief.
Everybody hates this.
It’s a secret that cannot be known.
Wealth has been untethered from God’s creation for almost a hundred years now, and we’ve had to work overtime at pretending this isn’t so to keep everybody happy. The language of politics is always one of scarcity. It’s always about how funds are being abused, or stolen, or misallocated, or about how we’re going to run out and won’t be able to afford things. The Collective Consciousness of the people needs that. It needs to pretend that we’re limited. That we’re dealing with things that are scarce and finite. People need this for exactly the same reasons that the Climate Alarmists need to believe that soon we’ll all surely pay for “living out of harmony with Nature” and that the Sustainability Hawks are always predicting the end of this or that resourse. “Peak Oil!” they promise, screaming with all the fervor of a street preacher proclaiming the end is nigh. “No more fish!” “The end of natural gas!” “Helium is running out!”
Look here.
No resource has ever run out.
Again. I will reiterate. Please, try to hear me.
No resource… has ever… run out.
Look around.
In the year 1800, the population of the world was about a billion people. Today, approximately eight times that.
Nothing has “run out.” Zero things.
In fact, exactly the opposite.
In 2026, there is more food produced today, in one month’s time, than there was in centuries of the ancient world’s agriculture. There never isn’t any milk. There’s never a run on bread. More chickens exist in Iowa, right now, than have probably ever existed before in the history of the world, and there are approximately 225 pounds of beef for every human in existence. More lumber than has ever existed, exists right now. More oil. More gas. 200 million tons of fish are farmed or caught every year, approximately 273 million items of clothing are produced every single day. Natural gas is abundant. Any mineral you want, we have a mine. We are today swimming in so much material prosperity that our dogs have velvet beds and the average Joe can decide to fly through the air at 600 miles an hour on any given Tuesday, an impromptu trip to Paris or Hong Kong.
Ain’t no peak oil.
Ain’t no Gaian Earth Mother retribution from spewing tons of shit into the sky.
We don’t need God’s metal for the trading of goods and services, and we don’t need his Bible for defining right and wrong.
… … …
There are no limits and we are gods.
… … …
And nobody can accept it.
Literally, nobody.
Hand wringing. Worrying. Mousy, timid fretting about “consequences” and finger wagging about being “responsible”. “One day!”, conservatives keep telling us… “One day! One day all this spending is going to catch up to us! Just you wait! One day soon God is going to knock us down off our little high horses for being irresponsible, or for doing whatever we want in the bedroom, or for our impudent, blaspheming tongues!” And liberals, perhaps even worse, earnestly believe in their heart of hearts that soon and very soon all this consumption and greed and extravagance is going to come around to bite us. Them metaphorical chickens are going to come home to roost! The oceans will rise and the sky will burn if we don’t curtail our hubris. If we don’t stop seeking to impose our will on Nature and learn to live in harmony with Mother Earth like the noble savage.
Never happens.
None of this ever happens.
Year after year after year they predict the same old things like the oldest, brokenest clock that’s ever been, and they’re not even right twice a day.
Everything they predict literally never happens.
And so,
How long does it have to keep not happening before you consider that maybe you were wrong?
Recently, in my post regarding A.I. and my disagreements with the tech skeptical, Paul Kingsnorth took up the position…
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