DISHONEST MONEY
It’s come to the point where the U.S. pays half its bills with newly created money. We’re printing $550,000,000,000 a year. This debt monetization will ultimately destroy the value of the dollar. If you do not prepare for this likely outcome you could face destitution. Many will. Financial suffering will be of epic proportions. Years ago the noted banker and economist John Exter (1910-2001) warned, “The marketplace is a crime and punishment world, and this Federal Reserve credit expansion is the greatest monetary crime of all time. Accordingly the punishment will be far and away the greatest punishment of all time.”
The late professor Hans F. Sennholz (1922-2007), an articulate economist of the Austrian school wrote, “The ultimate destination of the present road of political fiat is hyperinflation with all its ominous economic, social, and political consequences. On this road, no federal plan, program, income policy, control, nationalization, threat, fine or prison can prevent the continuous erosion and ultimate destruction of the dollar.”
Nowadays the book stores are full of volumes warning about the dangers of inflation and the doom of the dollar. I like to base my thinking on the writings of those who first warned about the dangers of fiat money and inflating. Foremost among these was the leading thinker of the Austrian School of Economics, Ludwig von Mises ((1888-1973). Many consider him to be the ranking economist of the twentieth century. He had first-hand experience with hyperinflation during the Weimar inflation of 1921.
He wrote “Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe.” He explained further, “Inflationism cannot last; if not radically stopped in time, it must lead inexorably to a complete breakdown. It is an expedient of people who do not care a whit for the future of their nation and its civilization.”
We are inflating now more than ever. The government requires this money to pay for our exploding welfare state. Talk of cutting those expenditures is meaningless. We have passed the point of no return on entitlements.
A great Austrian economist and one-time Newsweek editor Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993) wrote of this dilemma, “The tendency of welfare spending in the United States has been to increase at an exponential rate.
“The causes of this accelerative increase are hardly mysterious. Once the premise has been accepted that the ‘poor,’ as such, have a ‘right’ to share in somebody else’s income – regardless of the reasons why they are poor or others are better off – there is no logical stopping place in distributing money and favors to them.
“Once the premise is accepted that poverty is never the fault of the poor but the fault of ‘society’ or of ‘the capitalist system,’ then there is no definable limit to be set on relief, and the politicians who want to be elected or re-elected will compete with each other in proposing new ‘welfare’ programs to fill some hitherto ‘unmet need,’ or in proposing to increase the benefits or reduce the eligibility requirements of some existing program.”
Our taxes are paying for greater levels of welfare socialism. In addition we borrow and print money to foster more socialism. The philosopher and economist Leonard Read, (1898-1983) knew what it was all about when he wrote, “Inflation makes the extension of socialism possible by providing the financial chaos in which it flourishes. The fact is that socialism and inflation are simultaneously cause and effect; they feed on each other.”
Of socialism Ludwig von Mises wrote, “It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build; it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it.” “A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.”
The economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006) famously said, “There is no free lunch.” It’s true that everything has its price. Nations have to pay that price too. The economist and author Virgil Jordan (1892-1965) wrote, “Ultimately with God’s aid, Truth always emerges and finally prevails supreme in its power over the destiny of mankind, and terrible is the retribution for those who deny, defy, or betray it.”
