"HOARDING"

...JACK BENNY AND SCROOGE MCDUCK

Jack Benny made a fortune with his radio persona: the tightest of tightwads. "Your money or your life," says a robber in Benny's most famous joke. Silence. "I said, your money or your life!" Benny replied, "I'm thinking. I'm thinking."

As part of this persona, he was said to have a vault full of money in the basement. No one was allowed to go into it with him. It was his hideaway.

In 1938, the whole country wanted such a hideaway.

Scrooge McDuck also has a basement money vault. But Uncle Scrooge has it right. It is filled with gold coins. (Many of the stories in the 1970s were written by Vic Lockman, a gold standard cartoonist who once wrote a cartoon booklet on the Federal Reserve System, "The Official Counterfeiter.")

The curious thing was that Benny and Uncle Scrooge were regarded as lovable if eccentric characters. They were not hated by the public. Yet they were clearly money hoarders. The adult listeners and the pre-teen comic book readers would have liked to have a vault filled with money.

Benny and Uncle Scrooge were productive. The public knew this. They were both entrepreneurs. They both knew how to make money. Although they had basements full of money, this did not keep them from making more money. They were not recluses. Uncle Scrooge was always doing deals. He was Donald Trump for pre-teens, but without the weird hair or the wives.

Keynesian economists hate Uncle Scrooge and everything he stands for. He knows how to make lots of money. He stores up gold. He is the essence of the non-consumer. He is an anti-Keynesian – in thought, word, and deed...
Gary North at LRC

-flynn