Honest Money Would Destroy Today’s World
The comments below are an edited and abridged synopsis of an article by George Smith
Honest money is a medium of exchange that comes from voluntary market exchanges and maintains its value from voluntary market exchanges. People once settled on gold and silver as their preferred money but are now prohibited from using them. An employer who pays in gold or silver is subject to prosecution in the US.
It would take a powerful criminal organization to prevent a nation from exercising the freedom to choose its own money, but that’s what has happened. Most people don’t consider this organization as criminal, but as required. This came about through government chicanery and the public’s ignorance and complicity.
Honest money imposes limits on government that it doesn’t like. One way of acquiring more power is to take charge of the money people use. This means monopolizing the supply while jailing others caught competing with them.
The purpose of controlling the supply is to increase it as much and as easily as possible. Paper and digital money make this a breeze. Gold, as Guido Hülsmann wrote, has a built-in insurance policy against political inflation, and people have been groomed to accept this scheme.
With money being easily inflatable, the government employs economists who can rebut skeptics, confuse the public, and support government spending policies.
The government-created central bank has proven invaluable in building a wall around its policies. If Keynes said one thing that was true, it was about inflation disrupting capitalism so much that “the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery,” a process that is incomprehensible to most people.
Today we are so far from the idea of honest money that it’s difficult to discuss the term publicly. “What’s dishonest about the US dollar?” one might ask, forgetting or not knowing that inflation is a technique of defrauding dollar holders by reducing its buying power, and that before being saddled with a monopoly counterfeiter in 1913, the US economy somehow managed to pull through from 1870-1900 while experiencing dollar deflation. Unlike today, people got richer simply by hanging on to their cash.