“Next to the speed of light which Einstein says is the only absolute in the universe, second only to that I rank money!” — Rod Steiger, “The Pawnbroker”

“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence.” — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Part I: If you could change only one thing to improve the lot of Americans and perhaps the world, what would it be?  And why?

Allow me to present my one thing, but first, for evidence, consider some recent news stories:

— Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake told Maria Bartiromo recently that immigrants crossing the southern border in her state are mostly “fighting-age men.”  “In my opinion,” Lake said, “this is an act of war.”  Who is funding this movement and why?  In the US it’s the Biden administration and their numerous NGO allies, including Catholic Charities and the George Soros’ funded Open Society Foundation, that are paying for it.  The ostensible purpose is to destroy Western culture and create societies more amenable to being told what to do.

— The recent moratorium on the Israeli bombing campaign ended and continues unabated.  Who’s providing Israel its firepower?  According to IDF Major General (ret) Yitzhak Brick, and as reported by Caitlin Johnstone, the US is shipping home-grown weapons to Israel. The Fascinating Animal... Clarke, Ginjer Best Price: $3.90 Buy New $12.73 (as of 02:11 UTC - Details)

— Due to a “last minute” matter, former comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently canceled his video appearance before a Senate and House vote on an emergency funding bill of $60 billion to continue the killing in Ukraine.  Hours earlier Zelenskyy’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak told the US Institute of Peace (not to be confused with Orwell’s cognitively dissonant Ministry of Peace) that without more funding the US would “kneecap” Ukraine on the battlefield.

— A whistleblower named “Winston Smith” working at New Zealand’s Ministry of Health revealed incriminating record-level data about the Covid vaccines, which according to Steve Kirsch “have killed, on average, around 1 person per 1,000 doses,” though this estimate has been challenged as statistically implausible. Nevertheless, as Kirsch writes, “Someone looking to find the truth would be calling for every public health agency to release the record level data.”  But that’s not the world we live in, and “Winston” (Barry Young) was arrested for “dishonestly accessing Te Whatu Ora databases.”

— In late November Kirsch told a gathering at MIT, his alma mater, that according to his research the vaccines produce a “precipitous rise in death rates over time [following] vaccination.”  Kirsch estimates Covid vaccines have killed  670,000 Americans. By comparison, both US military and civilian deaths in World War II are estimated at around 420,000.  As there are those who profit from war, Pfizer’s revenue stream benefited enormously from the shots.

— Breitbart News reports that “rich Elites flew 400+ private jets to the Glasgow COP26 ‘Climate Conference’ to devise strategies to save the planet from people like them.”  Britain’s King Charles III delivered the opening address, telling the UN-funded gathering that “we must change our ways” if we’re to avoid global tragedy.  According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the US is the UN’s largest donor.

— Not to question the King’s expertise on climate, but one of the three 2022 Nobel Prize winners in Physics, John Clauser, points out that climate priests such as Al Gore assume a cloudless earth. Clouds reflect 90% of the sunlight that hits them back into space and constitute the missing variable in their apocalyptic predictions.  For climate zealots, communist China is considered the model for fighting global warming.

— What is far from being news is the unrelenting effort on the part of Democrats, RINOs, and legacy media to keep the highly-popular Donald Trump from becoming president again.  It’s as if no right-thinking person would ever want him in the White House, despite his ability to draw SRO crowds everywhere he goes. In 2020, the presidential election “drew a record $5.7 billion,” with Trump’s campaign raising $774 million, over half of which came from “small donors giving $200 or less, a stunning figure no other presidential candidate has matched.” Sounds suspiciously like democracy at work.

— And while Trump gets attacked from all sides no legal action is yet forthcoming about what the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability revealed were payments, amounting to over $10 million, the White House occupant and his family have received from China and other foreign interests.

— Wall Street and the White House are jubilant about the “5.2% GDP growth in the third quarter. But Peter [Schiff] pointed out that this growth was primarily driven by government borrowing and spending and consumer borrowing and spending.”  Gold hit an all-time record high of $2,135 “early Sunday morning [December 3] before pulling back sharply Monday,” but investors figure it won’t last long.  Investors, however, have been known to be dead wrong.  What if gold is only getting started, as Schiff, who was virtually alone in forecasting the 2008 meltdown, thinks it is?

— “Freedom of speech is guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution,” wrote Scott Walker of the Washington Times. “It should be revered on our college campuses. Sadly, that is where it is most at risk.”  Walker penned the article in 2021, but even today invited speakers reputed to be enemies of the Left should prepare themselves for violent opposition.  Investopedia reports that

Colleges and universities, including both two- and four-year schools, receive significant funding from the federal government. In 2023, for example, the government paid $83.9 billion toward higher education.

— Newly released videos of the Capitol “insurrection” of January 6, 2021 show that it was, according to Zero Hedge, “a protest that was turned into a riot by police incitement and establishment spin.”  The videos confirm what was already well-known to many observant investigators.   Meanwhile, the Democrats’ intrigue of November 3, 2020, the cause of January 6, continues to be whitewashed.  Ron Paul’s article, Did Biden Steal The Election? details how the flagging Biden campaign got a boost from a letter fraudulently signed by 50 senior intelligence officials that the Hunter Biden ‘laptop story had all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.’”

— And most significantly, the Federal Reserve, specifically the FOMC, continues its stranglehold on what the economy uses for money, grinding its purchasing power ever closer to zero (see this) as it assists the government and its allies in what is clearly their war against Americans.  Fortunately, Moore’s Law has saved us from a more catastrophic outcome.

Part II: What underlies these and many other news items?  Let’s start with the absence of honest money.

We, as the individuals who compose the American economy, are not allowed to determine what to use for money (cryptocurrencies aside). Government forbids it.  Instead, government assigned that task to a bureaucracy called the Federal Reserve in late 1913.  Since then CPI inflation has soared, especially since FDR confiscated Americans’ gold in 1933.  The stated reason for creating a central bank was to avoid the dreaded Panics of the 19th and early 20th centuries.  The name “Panic” disappeared but not the reality.  And neither did the reality of fractional-reserve banking.

Monetary inflation, a Fed product, not only inflates prices, it inflates government.  And government, given its nature as a territorial monopolist that acquires its revenue solely through force, spends money to secure its power, necessarily at our expense.

“Watch money,” Ayn Rand wrote in Atlas Shrugged.  “Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. . . when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed.” National Geographic Th... Chadwick, Douglas Best Price: $4.86 Buy New $7.11 (as of 02:11 UTC - Details)

Yet most people see money as Rod Steiger’s pawnbroker character did — as something representing humanity’s depravity, as a mockery of virtue. Due to the Cantillon Effect, inflation’s inequalities creates inequalities in the economy, substantiating the phrase “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer” — though in the end when the fiat unit is worthless, there aren’t many “rich” left.

The pawnbroker’s cynicism is well-founded but only because our money isn’t honest — a medium of exchange selected by market participants and free of government influence.  Since 564 B.C. the market’s choice has been gold (and sometimes silver).  But the gold standard was always a government gold standard, subject to its control.

As Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan told the Economics Club of New York in 2002,

Although the gold standard could hardly be portrayed as having produced a period of price tranquility, it was the case that the price level in 1929 was not much different, on net, from what it had been in 1800. But, in the two decades following the abandonment of the gold standard in 1933, the consumer price index in the United States nearly doubled. And, in the four decades after that, prices quintupled. Monetary policy, unleashed from the constraint of domestic gold convertibility, had allowed a persistent over-issuance of money. [My emphasis. Don’t you love the passive voice?]

Mises wrote in Human Action:

The gold standard makes the determination of money’s purchasing power independent of the changing ambitions and doctrines of political parties and pressure groups. This is not a defect of the gold standard; it is its main excellence.

An early version of Keynes said in a well-known passage that when inflation becomes government policy “. . . the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. . . The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.” [My emphasis]

I don’t expect honest money, as herein defined, will ever emerge without a new system of government, one not founded on force.

The Best of George F. Smith