Does voting move us closer to a permanent jailbreak?

People today are voting for more of the same or voting for complete destruction of the same.  It’s not a vote for a particular candidate necessarily, although some of them sound refreshing in their campaign speeches.  Most importantly it’s a vote against the Democrats.  

The Democrats have usurped power to install an anti-life agenda.  They are not the loyal opposition.  They are destroying everything America is — freedom of dissent, freedom of opportunity, freedom from government intrusion, along with peace and prosperity.  They are using everything they can get away with to keep their grip on our lives.    

Democrats are not some crazed religious sect.  They’re a gang with control of the State’s omnipotent powers who have fraudulently acquired the label of legitimate.  It doesn’t matter that Biden is a cognitively impaired, ice cream-licking fool and that Kamala giggles and waves her hands to win affection.  They are number one and number two, with all the power the law assigns those positions plus the power they take on their own.   And they’re directing that power against us, the people who put them in office through a rigged election.

It’s long been said that power itself corrupts those who have it.  Will it corrupt people like Mehmet Oz, Kari Lake, or Joe Kent?  Or Donald Trump? Looking at history we see few officeholders who have been significantly untouched, notably former congressman Dr. Ron Paul and anti-war suffragist Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to hold public office and the only representative to vote against US involvement in both WW I and WW II, and who in 1968 at age 87 mobilized an anti-war protest against the Vietnam War.  Most officeholders, elected or appointed, see the power of the State as the only way to govern society, helping itself to our wealth in the process. 

“If elections changed anything they’d make them illegal,” we often hear.  The state, no matter how dedicated to our welfare it pretends to be, forbids the public from tampering with certain control centers or pillars of society. Two of those pillars are education and money, both of which it controls virtually without challenge.  Part of the educational failing is an understanding of money, and that’s one reason we’re headed for what Gary North has called the Great Default.

Most of you know about Ron Paul and his homeschooling course and opposition to the Fed.  Of the current crop of candidates how many even question government schooling or Fed-controlled fiat money? 

Voting might accomplish a temporary change for the better but if the State’s pillars remain untouched, how long would it last?  We do need government but not the ones we’ve been subjected to: The one we vote for and the other that controls them, the Deep State.

The elected government is a fake, the deep state is a monster, but no one talks about the governing power of the free market.  The first two governments live off of the third. Without its support the other two would not exist.  How did it happen that the most powerful government is also the slave the other two kick around?

 What organizations extract their funding by force? Walmart, Amazon, Apple, Home Depot?  The little girls and their mothers selling girl scout cookies?  If there was such an outfit it would be considered criminal. Why does government get a pass?  A double-standard is indefensible.

Government today is presumably run by experts — experts such as Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Jerome Powell. What do we, who are busy with our lives, know about viruses or foreign policy or monetary issues?  So we listen to experts as they sell us down the river.  We might trash them, but usually fail to criticize the system that makes them possible.  Its absence would mean anarchy, a word made evil by the State, but it is only another term for a society not subjugated by the threat of legalized violence, otherwise known as the free market. 

Does voting move us closer to a permanent jailbreak?  No, because it never gets rid of the jail.  Freedom from today’s government is never on the ballot.   

Let’s challenge it.  Let’s embrace the free market without the meddling of a monopoly State.  Let’s shrug off our oppressor.  For starters see here and here.

 

Honest Money in Dishonest Hands

For those who would find relief knowing the Bible sanctions a market-derived medium of exchange, Gary North’s Honest Money will come as a godsend (no pun intended).  Even for those reprobates who forswear a religious worldview, his book will provide a solid grounding in monetary theory and history.  

North’s vast understanding of money and banking coupled with his lean, no-jargon writing style takes the labor out of reading.  His narrative carries us on a journey from the development of money in its innocent youth, where it was used solely as a means of facilitating trade, to money in its corrupt maturity, where today it also serves to facilitate power and profit for a ruling elite.  

Very importantly Honest Money also includes numerous bullet points at the end of each chapter covering the main ideas.  More good news: The book can be read comfortably in one evening.

Crusoe’s Choices

North begins with the familiar star of economic analysis, Robinson Crusoe.  But rather than the usual pedestrian account of how Crusoe will budget his time, North dramatizes the situation somewhat, as would be appropriate for someone recently shipwrecked on an unknown island.  

While on board a ship slowly sinking, Crusoe makes decisions about what goods to take to shore on his crudely assembled raft.  The various goods and conditions on the island are objective, but his evaluation of the value of each good is purely subjective.  Any gold on board has no value to a man marooned indefinitely on a desert island.  

Gold isn’t wealth. It’s heavy. It displaces tools. It sinks rafts. It’s not only useless; it’s a liability.

This is how North introduces the reader to the distinctions between objective reality and subjective preferences, and to the fact that money arises only in a social context.  With no one to trade with, poor Crusoe had no need of it.

What is money and where did it come from?

In subsequent chapters he builds on these ideas.  Money is a universally-accepted medium of exchange.  Originally, it was not imposed from above but evolved from competition with all other goods on the market, as the good most acceptable in trade.  Over the centuries, gold and silver became the most commonly used monies.

What about the supply of money?  Who determines that?

If we have honest money, the market controls its supply.  In today’s world it’s a committee.  Just as we wouldn’t want a committee to set prices for us, North says, “why should it be allowed to control the supply of money in which all prices are quoted?”

A complacent public

But what about the hapless public under this monetary regime?  Will they ever revolt?

Not very often. The public decides that paper money is money, not pieces of shiny metal. If paper is acceptable by the store down the street, then who cares? Who cares if prices go up, year after year? What’s “a little” price inflation? We’re all doing better, aren’t we? . . . .

“Inflation can’t hurt anyone too badly” is a delusion of fully employed younger workers. It can hurt everyone who isn’t staying ahead of it with pay increases, and I mean after-tax pay increases.

Inflation acts as a turbocharger for the progressive income tax.  The latter was passed in 1913 with rates so low and applied to incomes so high that almost no one worried, just as no one worries about a little inflation.  The average family made $1,000 a year, but the tax didn’t kick in until the $20,000 level, and even there it was only 1%.  Those few who made $500,000 or more were “soaked” at only 7%.

But once the law was in place the politicians changed the rules.  Imagine that.  In 1916, while Woodrow Wilson was bragging to voters about keeping us out of war, the top rate was bumped to 15%.  The following year, while Wilson was shipping American men “over there,” the bottom bracket plunged from $20,000 to $2,000 while the top rate reached 67%, then 77% a year later.  

As Rothbard has noted, 

As luck would have it, the new Federal Reserve System coincided with the outbreak of World War I in Europe, and it is generally agreed that it was only the new system that permitted the U.S. to enter the war and to finance both its own war effort, and massive loans to the allies; roughly, the Fed doubled the money supply of the U.S. during the war and prices doubled in consequence. 

Inflation is another name for counterfeiting.  Counterfeiters create money from nothing then spend it.  The private counterfeiter and the government counterfeiter have the same goal: to get something for nothing.

The public doesn’t trust private counterfeit money. The public does trust government counterfeit money, at least for a long time, until people’s trust is totally betrayed (mass inflation).

What is the difference in principle between private counterfeiting and government counterfeiting?  None.

A Tale of Three Counterfeiters

One of the most memorable parts of Honest Money is North’s tale of the counterfeiters.  Although counterfeiting is a swindle it acquires a high moral luster if it’s practiced in plain sight by the right people. 

In North’s tale three men counterfeit and are discovered.

The first one is a businessman with an offset printing press who prints 500 $20 bills and spends them into circulation.  

The second man is an employee of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing who prints a million $20 bills, and the government spends them into circulation.

The third is the chairman of a major New York bank that has loaned a billion dollars of fractional-reserve money to Pemex, the oil company owned by the Mexican government.  Pemex cannot meet interest payments on the loan because the price of oil has collapsed. 

What happens to these three men?

The businessman is convicted of counterfeiting and sent to prison.

The government employee continues to print money until he reaches age 65, when he retires and collects a pension.

The bank chairman calls the Fed, who in turn calls the Mexican government to get them to issue a bond for $25 million.  The Fed subsequently creates $25 million to buy the bond.  The Mexican government sends the money to Pemex, which then sends it to the New York bank to meet its quarterly interest payment.  “The chairman of the New York bank gets a round of applause from the bank’s board of directors, and perhaps even a $100,000 bonus for his brilliant delaying of the bank’s crisis for another three months.”

The $25 million then multiplies through the U.S. fractional reserve banking system, creating millions of new commercial dollars in a mini-wave of inflation.

The World’s Most Powerful Insurance Company

Counterfeiters need protection if they are to succeed.  The biggest counterfeiters, the major banks, sought and established the protection they wanted in 1913, with the Federal Reserve System.  

The Fed’s public purpose was to prevent banking panics, as recessions were once called.  It was to create an elastic currency to meet the needs of business, through dispassionate and skillful management of the money supply. 

Under its watch, the economy has experienced at least 11 recessions over the last century, including the longest one on record, 1929-1945.

One of the greatest services the Fed does for government is monetize its debt.  When the federal government can’t raise taxes without facing a tax revolt and borrowing from private sources would entail high interest rates, it calls on the Fed to buy its debt on the cheap.  

Conclusion

Honest money is not necessarily a gold - silver standard, North says.  “The only standard that matters is the no fractional reserves standard, coupled with the no false balances standard.” 

As long as the Fed is around, we will never have honest money.  The purpose of the Fed is to inflate for the benefit of its friends: the big banks and government.  In light of this situation we should never question the success of government schooling.