I don't know how much of a scam it is outside of outright violence. Regardless of whether it's a decent system or not, understanding how governments create and give value to money is vital to making useful decisions about it. Most people don't just have bad ideas about macroeconomics, they have opposite ideas: what they think will inflate will deflate, what they think we boost the economy will crash it, and what they think funds it doesn't.

If we're going to understanding how to create money without government, we need to properly understand how the government does it in the first place.