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The Emperor Has No Clothes

I have to comment on last night’s debate. I told myself I wasn’t going to watch it and participate in any post debate commentary. I lied. I flipped the debate on last night and I couldn’t look away.

The debate last night was akin to two people fighting on train tracks with a locomotive fast approaching in the background. We have large problems in this country and none of those problems were raised or discussed by either candidate. That being said, fuck was that shit entertaining. Trump looked terrible last night and if you’re actually one of those people who let debates influence who you’ll vote for I imagine you’d be pushed toward Biden. Trump was an ass who couldn’t shut up.

It really doesn’t matter. Whoever gets elected will just take us closer to the end of the American Empire and Dollar Supremacy. Personally, I think I’d prefer Trump get elected because Biden would advocate for more Covid Lockdowns. I really don’t think either one is too different, however.

The American Empire is ending. All empire’s begin to crumble when they move from republic’s to empire’s. Some empire’s can last longer than others and America’s has lasted quite a while. There are many people who can articulate this better than I but I will give it a shot.

American’s were getting taxed heavily by the British in the Colonial Era and revolted to escape this tyranny. The revolution was ultimately successful and was lead by a cast of liberals (in the David Ricardo and Adam Smith sense of the word). George Washington was a great leader of men but wasn’t incredibly schooled in liberalism or philosophy. He was a great and successful war general. He was seduced by the smooth talking Hamilton.

Hamilton was interested in bringing the mercantilism and elitism of Britain to America. He was quoted as saying the corruption is what makes it work. Or something like that, I’m not going to find the quote. Jefferson was a true liberal when it came to his political philosophy. When it came to his private life and his life in office he was not. Power corrupts, as it turns out.

Hamilton was in favor of the first central bank for this reason. He wanted the elites to have an interest in protecting the union and the politicians running the union. He saw what was happening in France with the Jacobin revolution and feared that would happen in the United States. Jefferson, oddly enough, was in favor of the revolution in France and didn’t realize it would be his head on a stick if it were to occur in the US. History is nuanced, neither of these guys were perfect.

In a free society people usually use the most marketable commodity as money. I’m not an expert on this but read “Theory of Money and Credit” by Mises if you’re interested. The most marketable commodity tends to be gold. There are many characteristics of gold that make it this way. Bankers and the financial elite are interested in nations developing central banks because it benefits their own interest. Robert Morris was a major financier of the Revolution and also a good friend of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton was interested in developing a Central Bank and legal tender laws.

Legal tender laws require businesses to accept the currency printed by the Central Bank as payment for their goods or services. Ultimately, Hamilton was successful in having the US develop a central bank. The only way to get congress to go along with this was to adopt a gold standard. This was a promise that the currency was backed by gold to prevent bank runs and hyperinflation. This made the central bank acquire gold for every piece of currency it printed.

For the first century of America’s existence there ideological battles about the central bank. Andrew Jackson ended it. Lincoln took the US off the gold standard to fund the Civil War. This put the United States into large amounts of debt after the Civil War. After Lincoln, Johnson actually repaid the debt but Lincoln had already laid the groundwork for the Federal Reserve with his centralized Fractional Reserve Banking System.

The Industrial Revolution came about in the late 1800’s and lifted almost all American citizens out of horrible poverty. This produced wealth humans had never experienced before. While this went on, the politicians and bankers became ever more entrenched. This lead to the progressive era and the creation of the Federal Reserve. The great entrepreneurs, like Roosevelt, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt, lifted humanity out of horrible impoverishment but were made out to be villains. The Progressive Era made it harder to do business in the US.

The US, however, was still of the most liberal and business-friendly countries despite the Progressive Era, so it remained remarkably productive. At the same time, the cronies in Washington were hard at work. The Federal Reserve was founded in 1913 under Woodrow Wilson. This led to rampant credit expansion in the 1920’s and gigantic economic bubbles.

The US was the forefront of the business world and businesses from all over the world were trying to gain exposure. With artificial credit expansion comes malinvestment. Malinvestment cannot continue and leads to recession and sometimes depression if it is continued for long enough. This bubble popped in 1929 and is colloquially known as “the Great Depression”. FDR was elected in 1933 to remedy the economy.

Some economists claim that the Great Depression ended in 1941 when the US entered WWII. Austrian economists believe that this thinking is flawed. Some economists claim that the Depression ended in 1941 because GDP shot up and unemployment went down. If you analyze GDP during this time you would see that all of the “Gross Domestic Product” increase was from weapons and military manufacturing. The decrease in unemployment rate was due to taking 10 million young men out of the labor force and sending them to Europe and Asia to fight a war. Hardly a more wealthy and productive economy.

The war ended in 1945 and the Bretton Woods agreement came about in 1944. More or less this stated that the currencies of the world would be backed by the U.S. Dollar and that the U.S. Dollar would be backed by gold. This gave the U.S. Dollar what is known as ‘reserve currency’ status. World War II turned America into the Empire it is today. Our troops have never really returned home from that war.

The US was embroiled in more and more wars after WWII. Including, but not limited to, the Korean War, Vietnam War, and regime change efforts in the Middle East. In the 1960’s Lyndon Johnson rammed the Great Society programs through and entered the US into the Vietnam War. These efforts were bankrupting the United States.

Richard Nixon was elected in 1969 and supported the Vietnam War. Charles De Gaulle saw the US participating in all of these efforts and began to question the validity of the Dollar. In 1965 he announced his intentions to exchange all of his Dollars for gold bullion. This put large amounts of pressure on the US financial system. Eventually this led to Nixon taking the US off the gold standard in 1971. The world is still using the Dollar as the reserve currency but for how much longer?

We are living in that world now. The United States is mired in debt and its military is based in over 150 countries. Why is the military in all of these countries? To keep dollar supremacy. Why did the US invade Iraq even though there was no proof of WMD’s? Iraq stopped trading oil in dollars and turned to the Euro. Our currency isn’t backed by gold or a balanced budget and prospering economy. It’s printed by banksters and produced the greatest inequality gap in the history of the world. Look at the percentage of wealth owned by the top 1% prior to 1971 and what it is today. Rest assured this won’t continue for much longer.

Buy Gold. Buy Bitcoin.