Every four years the Democratic and Republican conventions knock our favorite reality shows off the air. But WTF goes on inside them? And can we go? I answer that question in this week’s Civics in a Minute from TakePart.
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All great republics throughout history cherished sound money. This meant that the monetary unit was a commodity of honest weight and purity. When money was sound, civilizations were found to be more prosperous and freedom thrived. The less free a society becomes, the greater the likelihood its money is being debased and the economic well-being of its citizens diminished.
Alan Greenspan, years before he became Federal Reserve Board Chairman in charge of flagrantly debasing the U.S. dollar, wrote about this connection between sound money, prosperity, and freedom. In his article “Gold and Economic Freedom” (The Objectivist, July 1966), Greenspan starts by saying: “An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is an issue that unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense…that gold and economic freedom are inseparable.” Further he states that: “Under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy’s stability and balanced growth.” Astoundingly, Mr. Greenspan’s analysis of the 1929 market crash, and how the Fed precipitated the crisis, directly parallels current conditions we are experiencing under his management of the Fed. Greenspan explains: “The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market — triggering a fantastic speculative boom.” And, “…By 1929 the speculative imbalances had become overwhelming and unmanageable by the Fed.” Greenspan concluded his article by stating: “In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation.” He explains that the “shabby secret” of the proponents of big government and paper money is that deficit spending is simply nothing more than a “scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth.” Yet here we are today with a purely fiat monetary system, managed almost exclusively by Alan Greenspan, who once so correctly denounced the Fed’s role in the Depression while recognizing the need for sound money.
The Founders of this country, and a large majority of the American people up until the 1930s, disdained paper money, respected commodity money, and disapproved of a central bank’s monopoly control of money creation and interest rates. Ironically, it was the abuse of the gold standard, the Fed’s credit-creating habits of the 1920s, and its subsequent mischief in the 1930s, that not only gave us the Great Depression, but also prolonged it. Yet sound money was blamed for all the suffering. That’s why people hardly objected when Roosevelt and his statist friends confiscated gold and radically debased the currency, ushering in the age of worldwide fiat currencies with which the international economy struggles today.
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Do religion and politics mix?
Many people recently have made a point to me that religion and politics should not be mixed and that I should not vote for someone based on their religious preference. I have a few problems with this, the first of which being the foundation of this thought process actually working against itself. Most people who take this view point would be taking this view point because they think it is wrong to force your beliefs on another person, or expect another person to adhere to your personal set of morals, and by telling me I shouldn’t vote for someone because of their religious preference they are expecting me to adhere to that view as well as trying to force their beliefs on me and becoming a hypocrite. At the end of the day politics is made up of some very controversial issues and my religion likely has something to say about those issues, so when I am considering a candidate to elect I will likely vote for someone who has the same worldview as myself.
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We learned something new today. Er.
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Video of the Day: An Illinois Lawmaker’s Epic Freak-Out
Speaking in the Illinois State House Tuesday, Mike Bost lost his marbles during a discussion of pension reform. Like Beale, the longtime Republican representative from a southern Illinois district was mad as hell and he wasn’t going to take it any more, unleashing an epic rant mic drop. Also worth noting: the faces on his colleagues around him, trying to maintain a sense of dignity, except the woman in the burgundy behind him who seems willing to indulge her amusement.
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“This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and that’s not sustainable,” Mr. Hayden said. “I have lived the life of someone taking action on the basis of secret O.L.C. memos, and it ain’t a good life. Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a D.O.J. safe.”
— Michael Hayden, CIA Director under Bush II, discussing the White House assassination list. -
“We missed the press release from Trump, Palin, and Hoekstra demanding Romney come clean with his long-form birth certificate. Maybe they sent it to the wrong address? I’d just hate to think that this four-year-long muckraking quest for more documentation of the President’s place of birth was all just a cynical race-baiting ploy or something.”
— Mitt Romney released his birth certificate yesterday, in advance of his summit with Donald Trump. We sort of felt like that warranted a rant. -
Makes sense, it’s not as though Florida has ever been at the center of a presidential election controversy before.
