Fight Club (rated G for genius)

A young friend of mine in Roanoke posted this today on his FB page.  It reminded me of the storyline in Fight Club, but without all the nastiness and with way more enlightenment.  And of course, my friend is part of the Ron Paul revolution!

“The small pleasures of a humble service-sector job: If you’ve ever worked as a waiter in a restaurant then you know it’s dangerous territory for the sake of your tips (and any restaurant’s welcoming atmosphere) to engage in political discussions with your patrons… but I ventured out on a limb with this one. As I served a group of 10 people, I found myself privy to a lively exchange surrounding the nature of our national debt. A couple of high school-age boys told the adults how their government teacher had explained to them that it wasn’t really important that our debt is so gargantuan, because–get this–we really just owe the debt to ourselves (and some foreign debt owners like China), and so it’s really just a kind of trick of numbers that could go on forever without tremendous consequences! Ah, the astounding feel-good fallacies of Keynesian economics; and there was I, witness to the brainwashing of our youth by their trusted instructors. I couldn’t help myself, and asked politely if I might offer a short point. All eyes turned toward me in a show of silent–if not somewhat astonished–assent that I may interject my thought…. “It’s not really true that we owe ‘ourselves’ this debt,” I said. “Actually, our debt is owed to a private corporation that acts as our central bank and issues our currency, called the Federal Reserve System. It is a private financial corporation whose parent organization is the International Monetary Fund, which is kind of like the international central bank. We owe our debt plus interest to this private for-profit corporation, and our income taxes actually go directly toward payment to this entity on the interest accumulated by our debt. They are international bankers making a killing off our indiscriminate spending.” While I could have continued, I had my job to do and felt I had gone far enough. I smiled while looking into the eyes of the bewildered youth in front of me. The whole table sat in stunned silence for just a moment, clearly taken aback by the swift, cogent lesson in politics/economy given them by their lowly waiter. After just a few very long seconds where I worried I had disturbed my chances at a happy table and a good tip, the head of the table uttered decisively, “he just hit the nail on the head.””

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7:35 pm on January 31, 2013