This really is my last blog. Hardly anybody reads this stuff anymore anyway. I’ll say no more here until I’ve got a finished Constitution for a new state and a renewed people.
So I’ll get on with it.
Today is the anniversary of Orville Wright’s flight to over 1000 feet; another first for the Wrights, and humanity. Comte de Lambert of France beat that record just sixteen days later. From there our machines went further and faster beyond the speed of sound and past the solar system…all within a hundred years. It took thousands of years to go from stone to bronze to steel.
It’s good to recall what engineers and scientists and entrepreneurs have done for our present comforts and longevity in just the past hundred years. Because, too often, politicians take credit for what should be properly attributed to refrigerated food supplies, antibiotics, time/labor-saving devices, and information technology from printing presses to Twitter.
By the work of our finest minds and hands, we should have much more leisure, much more wealth, much more productive and happy lives than we do. But we’re working longer and harder for less and less because we’ve never learned the lessons of I Samuel: 8, and we have, with our hands and minds and votes said, “In Politicians We Trust.”
The terms “conservative” and “liberal” have swapped and morphed and devolved so much that it’s now pointless to discuss what these terms mean today. Ditto the groups we call “Democratic Party” and “Republican Party;” the labels are actually implying the opposite of what they did a hundred years ago. So let’s just throw those labels in the dustbin for a while.
For the past hundred years, despite all the innovation and produce of our age, almost all politics can be boiled down to two key groups asking only two questions:
- How can I get Free Money (FM)?
- How can I get Other People’s Money (OPM)?
As far as I can tell, the FMers believe in magic. I’ve spoken to many FMers who actually believe that government can simply print money with no ill effects. And despite what most Republicans would say about themselves, they mostly fall into this group. They believe in political management of economics just as much as the OPMers do, and are more prone to put on blinders of faith and zealotry in defense of the indefensible. (C’mon…how can anybody defend George W Bush, let alone vote for him…twice?)
On the other side, the OPM-addicted want income redistribution because they think they understand human evil, and want to punish it. Rich OPMers know that poor people are fools and don’t know what to do with their money. Poor OPMers know that rich people are evil, and don’t deserve their riches. Both sides are more right than they’d like to believe, as in this case, it takes one to know one. Rich folks are fools if they think that brains and hard work alone got them where they are today; and poor folks are evil in coveting their rich brethren’s wealth.
While the constitutional convention of 1787 was a power grab, and socialism was born in Indiana some nine score and ten years ago, the seeds of our current destruction were actually planted about a hundred years ago, when powerful investment bankers began hatching a plan to take over the nation by turning a previously independent-minded, mistrustful and self-reliant populace into a Rob Peter to Pay Paul, FM versus OPM.tug of war.
And by 1913, it was all fact. Our money was stolen and replaced with “fiat currency” IOUs.
This is why I admire Ludwig von Mises. He wrote this about fiat currency in 1953:
“It is certainly possible to go on for a while in the expansionist routine of deficit spending by borrowing from the commercial banks and supporting the government bond market.
But after some time it will be imperative to stop. Otherwise the public will become alarmed about the future of the dollar’s purchasing power and a panic will follow. As soon as one stops, however, all the unwelcome consequences of the aftermath of inflation will be experienced. The longer the preceding period of expansion has lasted, the more unpleasant those consequences will be.
The attitude of a great many people with regard to inflation is ambivalent. They are aware, on the one hand, of the dangers inherent in a continuation of the policy of pumping more and more money into the economic system. But as soon as anything substantial is done to stop increasing the amount of money, they begin to cry out about high interest rates and bearish conditions on the stock and commodity exchanges. They are loath to relinquish the cherished illusion which ascribes to government and central banks the magic power to make people happy by endless spending and inflation.”
We’ve been inflating the monetary policy bubble at least since 1913, and probably in truth since about 1909, when bankers started to play the market like a fiddle and gain key allies in politics, support for income tax grew wings, and Taft’s list of errors laid the groundwork for Wilson’s victory in 1912.
It will indeed hurt a great deal when we are forced to stop the money presses, and I believe that is about to happen.
But I also must personally eat a little crow.
During the 2000 gubernatorial campaign I’d predicted that we’d get the Great Smack-down within ten years. During the 2008 campaign I’d said that it’d happen by the end of this summer or at least by late fall. But I think I’m wrong.
It’s my opinion that our fiat currency is held aloft by force and intimidation. I’d thought that by now the USA would have been so badly rotted from the inside and indebted to the outside that surely other global powers would’ve pushed us into the dust bin. Maybe I’d underestimated how screwed up other nations really are, and how their own internal rot and debt has sunk all ships of state down into the muck of debt-currency malaise. Maybe I’ve missed some screamingly important facts that elude me still.
But this is good news. Up to now I’ve been depressingly right in the broad brushstrokes of economic and social decay, and in the specifics of timing. But if I’m so off base about the collapse of the dollar, at least in my timing predictions, then maybe there’s hope where I have lately seen none.
Maybe voters aren’t terminally thoughtless and blind after all. Maybe we’ll snap out of our entrancement with the Great Golem of State, and recall how this nation started…and who we once were.
But just as with our nation’s founders, it will take pain. Lots of pain. More than we feel now. Our overly-revered founders had to get shot at and oppressed in ways we can scarcely imagine from our comfortable view of the world.
And that, I am more convinced than ever, is just around the corner.
Prepare.
