Politics is an insiders’ game, and the playing field is anything but equal. Look at how Obama cheated the American voters with sweet words and powerful rhetoric of “Change”. But nothing has changed. The same old Washington puppet-masters and Wall Street power-brokers are still calling the shots. Elections only replace one group of rascals in power with another group in a perpetual game of musical chairs. Any political party that aspires to power needs funding from the power-brokers, and the money comes with strings attached.
As the saying goes, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Governments the world over today have either grabbed, or been given in return for promises of ever more ruinous welfare, too much power. They have become so corrupt, so venal, so irresponsible, and so beholden to vested interests that they are beyond redemption.
All governments maintain their hold on power by means of two monopolies – (1) that of force and (2) that of legal tender. To challenge the former is suicidal. However, we can safely challenge the latter if only enough people understand what real “money” is.
Indeed, governments’ monopoly of force is contingent on their monopoly of legal tender. Without the ability to create by printing or borrowing (otherwise known as creating inflation) the necessary funds to pay for the “forces of law and order” to enforce their edicts, governments will have to rely entirely on taxation. But taxation is too obvious, and a point is soon reached when it becomes too onerous and people start to revolt. This is why governments much prefer the invisible tax of inflation through printing and borrowing (selling sovereign bonds). This is also why governments must have a monopoly on what society is allowed to use as a medium of exchange.
Of all kinds of medium of exchange, gold and silver are the best by nature as they are of limited supply and cannot be multiplied at will. For this very same reason, gold and silver are the least desirable in the eyes of all governments. By contrast, paper money, and better still, electronic or virtual money, are the most favored by governments as their supply can easily be monopolized and they can be created at will with no cost to the government, because all the cost is being fully paid for by the ever diminishing value of the savings of ordinary people.
This is why in 1933, four years after the Great Depression, the United States government under Franklin Roosevelt confiscated the people’s gold and outlawed its use, thus allowing itself to start printing money to “stimulate” the economy – something that it had been unable to do previously. Does that not sound all too familiar today? In fact, ever since then, governments the world over have been doing exactly that – creating money out of thin air to “stimulate” economic growth. But the resulting economic “growth” has only been an illusion, for the only real growth has been in inflation and in government and personal debt.
In 1975, in the aftermath of the currency crisis brought on by the United States government’s unilateral decision to renege on its international obligation to foreign governments to exchange the dollars they held for gold at a fixed exchange rate of US$35, American citizens were once more allowed to own gold. Since then, the price of gold has gone from US$35 to US$1,200, in spite of everything that governments and international banks have done to suppress its price through brainwashing by docile academics and the mass media, and by the creation of highly leveraged paper products to entice people to buy these derivatives rather than physical gold.
Once people understand how much governments loathe and fear gold, they will also see that of the two monopolies so dear to governments, the monopoly of legal tender is the more crucial, and yet at the same time, the more vulnerable. Unless and until governments the world over make possession of gold illegal (a remote possibility given the degree of revulsion generated by governments and their debt worldwide), real money is every government’s Achilles heel, but it is the people’s most powerful weapon.
