Greens half-drink libertarian Kool-Aid on fiat money

The Green Party's version of "abolish the Fed" is better at start than many L/libertarian nutters' babblings about fiat money. Actually, no, that was pretty much a head fake. 

It quickly goes off into the ditch, starting with the fact that it IS in the same neighborhood of a babbling about fiat money, just without using that term, and without taking the "logical" next step into goldbuggery.

There is no such thing as "debt free money." This is to confuse money with the federal budget.

Second, what's to stop the Treasury from "printing like crazy," just as the Fed eventually does? What's to stop the Treasury from doing quantitative easing?

Third, if you believe Congress can step in and directly control the money? Do you want the same wingnuts who hold the government hostage over debt ceiling limits to do that as well? Oy.

Fourth, if you really are rejecting fiat money? Gold has no intrinsic value. Are you going to back the greenback with oil before the fracking runs out? The uranium that has intrinsic nuclear weapons value, but those are really the fiat currency version of weaponry. (We hope.) And a side note for any L/libertarians reading? "Fiat money" is not necessarily by government fiat; and when Andy Jackson killed the Second Bank of the US, his "pet banks" did not have 100 percent specie or bullion backing for their banknotes, contra a nutter claim on this Reddit post. (Shock me.)

The only think that could have made this more whackadoodle was to fuse this "debt free money" with the "print all you want" of Modern Monetary Theory and then try to reconcile the two.

Seriously, I remember in 2009, during the Great Recession, protesting in front of the Dallas Fed. I firmly distanced myself from a couple of L/libertarians; the most vocal was a Paul-tard. (Ron, not Rand, who hadn't gotten that much airplay yet.)

That all said, when you do teh Google (or teh DuckDuck) on "debt-free money," you'll get a variety of definitions of just what it is and how it's supposed to work. This site says it could include non-government currency, which does exist already for trading within certain local networks but has no value outside that community. Given that "this site" is New Agey, that would fit the modern Green Party well.

More charitably, the GP statement may be thinking of "social credit." If so? First, the piece doesn't spell it out. Second, per the link, social credit is no panacea. It has a quasi-idealistic view of how a modern economy should work. Second, at least in the US, it's been pushed to a fair degree by L/libertarians.