SPRINTING DOWN THE ROAD TO RUIN
Mention the gold standard in Washington or New York and you’re written off as the David Duke of finance. However, when Roosevelt abolished gold money, he opened Pandora’s box. Under the gold standard the money supply grew at the rate that gold was mined (about 3% a year). Under the paper standard all such discipline was removed and discarded. This enabled politicians to introduce a vast array of social schemes that could now be paid for by inflating. It greased the skids for big government and the U.S. brand of socialism known as the mixed economy.
The fate of a nation’s currency mirrors that country’s financial health, prestige and influence. The big picture unfolding over the past hundred years and projecting a century into the future leaves little room for optimism. What grew the country was high savings, low taxes, capital accumulation, limited government and entrepreneurial freedom (laissez faire). Going forward we have low savings, high taxes, capital consumption, cancerous big government and regulatory zeal (interventionism). Instead of expanding what works, we embraced what never works.
Twin Towers – Economic
and Social Collapse
As we careen from one economic crisis to another, our society will begin to unravel. The heavy footprint of government will grow more burdensome. Now laws and regulations will curb our freedoms. Rude civil servants will be even more obnoxious and unresponsive. Tax collectors will more aggressively seek out our wealth and new taxes will be spawned by a government desperate for funds to pay a growing army of the subsidized. Hatred of the affluent will be stoked by populist politicians. In the latter half of this century, the rich will be harassed like the Jews in 1930s Germany.
The government’s reliance on inflating money and credit makes price inflation inevitable. Today’s leftists, radicals and liberals will never see that the social programs they created are the cause of inflation and economic retrogression. Although their vaunted socialistic schemes can never be paid for, they will still demand more. With the help of the media they will elect officials who resort to draconian measures of expropriation. In Argentina the government recently took over the banks and nationalized private retirement plans. A desperate government will do more harm than ever. The U.S. has embraced the monetary policies of a banana republic. Radical socialism is sure to follow.
As the economy collapses civil unrest will become unbearable. Demonstrations, riots, crime, strikes and social hatred will skyrocket as living standards plummet. The productive and the affluent will retreat into enclaves that promise security. Entrepreneurs will move offshore and immigrants return to their origins. Big government, the source of the nation’s agony, will fail in its only important mission, to keep the citizenry safe. Eventually, Washington will become a cesspool of corruption, and New York a decrepit hulk of broken infrastructure populated by subsidized creatures howling for sustenance from the state.
The culture will coarsen further. As the subsidized underclass broadens, their morality and values will infect the media and corrupt our entertainment. Social injustice, poverty and inequality of incomes will dominate the news. Talking heads on TV will overwhelmingly stump for bigger government, higher taxes and more subsidies. Spokespersons for liberal social sympathy and compassionate conservatism will spew our nauseating prescriptions for helping a huge and growing class of ethically-challenged moochers. Rugged individualism and self- sufficiency will be replaced with weak-kneed shirkers who resonate helplessness.
The America we once knew will vanish under the onslaught of economic backwardness, social welfare, stifling bureaucracy, wealth transfer and chaotic behavior. If you think I’m exaggerating, guess again. The current rush into government bailouts and statist economic schemes sounds the alarm bell for this once great civilization. All such government programs and subsidies are socialistic. We have been adopting socialism for 75 years. There is no compromise between free market capitalism and socialism. Instead of trusting the market system, we have piecemeal adopted a left wing agenda. Unfortunately, there’s no middle road. You have capitalism or you have the government fiasco we have today.
Socialism is killing our prosperity. Government rules and regulations have choked off Silicon Valley as the world’s foremost hatchery of innovation. All the governments in the world, working in unison, could not create an Apple, a Google, an E-bay, a Cisco or a Hewlett-Packard. It’s the entrepreneurs and free markets that make wealth and progress, not the politicians ladling out pork at the government trough.
Socialism doesn’t work, can’t work and never will work. Inevitably, it must lead into a new dark ages. That’s where we’re going in America – towards misery, mediocrity and perhaps extinction. Either we roll back socialism or we perish. So it was written by the great economists, so it shall be.
