42 YEARS BEFORE ADAM SMITH THERE WAS A DUTCHMAN NAMED JACOB VANDERLINT. IF ONLY BEN BERNANKE KNEW ABOUT VANDERLINT.

Yes, it's true. Forty-two years before Adam Smith and his famed, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), a work highly derivative of the Physiocrats and Dudley North (read: Plagiarism), there was a guy named Jacob Vanderlint. Vanderlint had a work published in 1734 titled Money Answers All Things.   

If only Ben Shalom Bernanke, the Ukrainian-American, and former Chairman of the Federal Reserve had read the work of Vanderlint.

Vanderlint's work is concept-dense. To get a good understanding of the work, you need to know quite a bit about English, especially how a Dutchman would have expressed early modern English in 1734.

Right away, Vanderlint lays down what all should know. Money only ever is coined metal by weight and fineness. Anything made from paper never could be money.

Take notice how Vanderlint nails it when he expresses the idea that money is the measure of contract between any two men. In other words, money is the tally of property for property.

Vanderlint stresses again, that money means gold and silver with this follow up passage:

Notice here but a few paragraphs in, Vanderlint lays down the true quantity theory of money: 

Take note Vanderlint lays down the right quantity theory of money and not the bogus one preached by far too many of total money to total goods. The right one is total money to total population. After all, it's one man who trades with another man according to each of their preferences and not according to the amount of goods produced.

Once a man buys all his limited imagination can muster, any sum of buying power in excess of his fulfilled desires only goes to inflate prices through excess bidding.

Here, Vanderlint says the more money per capita, the higher prices shall be. The lesser the money per capita, the lower prices shall be:

And here, Vanderlint shows the true genius inside him as he reveals that bank credit works the same as money (gold or silver coined) and as long as a strict credit to money ratio gets maintained, credit will lift prices and circulate goods as if credit were money itself:

Vanderlint warns that if too much credit raises prices, it shall raise the cost of production and  thus exporters shall need higher prices to cover their costs. Vanderlint further warns that no amount of raising taxes on imports against superior competitors shall change the situation unless the excess credit gets taken away.

Next, Vanderlint goes on to say that when wage earners have money surplus over their necessaries, trade flourishes. In other words, Vanderlint has said that when buying power rises, or said another way, when true wages rises, trade expands:

...

In the balance of the work, Vanderlint argues to bring forth more land into cultivation to drop prices for food and drink and thus raise buying power of wage earners. The work is quite impressive even for today as Vanderlint has provided data and cited footnotes.

And truly this is the whole of it. Any policy by central bankers should be such to bring higher return to capital by bringing higher return to workers. For it is workers who buy stuff.

No amount of plying individuals with cash and bank credits is going to do anything but raise prices and enrich already entrenched players. Yet, by doing so, every one is made worse off. 

Ben Bernanke might be a genius when it comes to academia economics, but the man is functionally retarded when it comes to trade, banking and real life.

The worst bit about Bernanke is that you are paying for his personal, social experiment as he applied his fanciful academia egg head theories. 

Americans are now in the sixth year of the Greatest Depression as evidenced by the sixth straight year of true decline in GDP. Bernanke touted himself as an expert in the Great Depression caused by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

Had Bernanke only read Vanderlint, Americans might be living in Good Times right now rather than Hard Times.

Vanderlint's genius reminds me of another Dutchman of sorts.