Thank you for bringing up these notions @George Law. What is a word to describe the fact of calling something red blue? Or the assumption made that someone is, say, a pilot because they said they were a pilot when they weren't necessarily one?

If government controls banking, it is doing a poor job with respect to electors as the recession has been extremely costly on both sides of the big pond. Banks are not your friend, especially in having caused the instabilities of the 1840s and the great depression as a factor in WWII. If socialists are the "useful idiots" of big government, free market proponents may be the "useful idiots" of this cartel.

It's no coincidence if money AND private debt has kept expanding since 1971, a transformation that a certain Richard Duncan calls creditism in being rather sensationalist in attempts to attract the attention of pro-Austrians as to the root problem.

Central banks enabling unlimited money creation would make sense but could simply be a band-aid according to this other POV with fears about very specific cases of hyperinflation unknowingly forcing people to depend more and more on debt-based money since 1948.

Btw, the deposit guarantee is an illusion and the EU passed a bail-in directive meaning that depositors will foot the bill in the next crisis.

Am familiar with free banking. Do you know how long the average free bank stayed in business and why do think central banks appeared?

If all banks refuse to lend or incapable of doing so how do you compensate for the money removed by downpayment of loans? Today's banks are not businesses in the conventional sense since they can create money on the fly and insolvency isn't for the same reasons. Bailouts and QE did fund recklessness in a sense but the "crime" of governments has been laissez-faire which is a free market principle.

And yet the Bank of France claims that the state imposes a currency to allow money from different banks to be interchangeable. Legal tender simply means something that is legally recognised to extinguish a debt. A central bank may lend to a bank but banks in themselves emit most money out there through credit.

It says on Wikipedia that a central bank MAY introduce new money but "most of the money supply is in the form of bank deposits, which is created by the fractional reserve banking system". The only instances of public money creation have been quantitative easing with smaller preventive "money market operations" going back to when the Bank of England was formed. So basically official currencies are under the control of an oligopoly with a central bank being the lender of last resort when reckless lending ends up wreaking havoc.

Why "by the govt" when it is banks that create their own money in the form of digital 1s and 0s? This money just happens to have a $, € or whatever slapped onto it because they have a bank licence. All central banks do is attempt to control credit expansion through imposed interest rates and the money multiplier is apparently a myth.

You focus on taxes but what would say if someone told you that an average of 30% of the price on things you purchase goes directly into someone else's pocket? This is a consequence of rising total debt and taxes partly go towards paying back debt to credit markets. I've calculated that around 40% of tax revenue in my country goes solely towards paying down public debt.

Oh, and since money is credit, private property is an illusion subject to the willingness to synthesise sufficient money to compensate the amounts destroyed when debts towards banks are paid back. A cynic might say that recessions are convenient for "credit harvests" when collateral is taken and businesses in difficulty provide bargain deals for those with lots of money to spend.