Guest Post by Ron Paul
Before we get started today, I want to tell you a story about the former military dictator of Uganda, Idi Amin. During his eight years in power, the economy and infrastructure of the nation collapsed thanks to years of neglect and abuse. Amin took a familiar economic approach to his nation’s economic crisis – he had more money printed.
In fact, he personally negotiated a print run of 2 million in banknotes with a British company – at the end of the negotiations, the company’s salesman asked how they’d be paid for this service.
Amin dismissively replied, “Print 3 million and take 1 million for yourself.”
As you might expect, a planeload of new banknotes didn’t help solve Amin’s economic problems. He doubled the nation’s money supply in his last two years as dictator, absolutely flooding the nation with paper money. His people had money, but they didn’t have wealth because prices naturally skyrocketed. (Amin couldn’t really ask for economic advice as he’d had “intellectuals,” along with the former leader of the national central bank, Joseph Mubiru, executed.)
Throughout history, governments and citizens have repeatedly made the same mistake. Money isn’t wealth. And our Founding Fathers knew it…
The Founding Fathers knew what money was
The Coinage Act was passed by the Congress of 1792, which established the silver dollar as the unit of money in the United States. Along with silver dollars, the Act specified three gold coins (a $10 eagle, a $5 half-eagle and a $2.50 quarter-eagle) and smaller silver denominations – half dollars, quarter dollars, “dismes” and “half dismes” (dimes and nickels).
Each and every piece of money circulating in the nation had the backing of real, physicalgold or silver. This guaranteed the nation could never inflate the money supply simply because the money supply couldn’t exceed the supply of gold and silver. Paper money was allowed, as a claim on real physical gold or silver. As Adam Smith said,
the total amount of paper money which the circulation of a country can absorb never exceeds the metallic money which would circulate in lieu thereof.
In other words, you can issue exactly $1 in paper money for every $1 in gold you have on-hand. (The total collapse of fractional-reserve banking pyramid schemes like the Mississippi Bubble taught this lesson.)
The Constitutional Convention of 1787 enacted a provision “forbidding the member states of the Union to emit paper money (bills of credit) or to declare as legal tender anything but gold and silver coin.”
“Bills of credit” was a term synonymous with “paper money” back then – or what we’d think of today as “Federal Reserve notes.” Basically, our founders did not want anyone in government writing IOUs. They wanted to outlaw government spending money it didn’t have.
Why was this so important? Well, our founders believed in fiscal sanity. They believed that forcing the government to spend within its means would preserve the liberty of all Americans, and protect them from being robbed by inflation.
Our founders took this incredibly seriously! So much so that, to quote from my book The Case for Gold:
the Congress of 1792 imposed the death penalty on anyone convicted of debasing the coinage. Debasement, depreciation, devaluation, inflation — all stand condemned by the moral law. The present economic crisis we face is a direct consequence of our violations of that law.
“Debasing” in this sense means substituting some measure of “base metal” (copper or iron, for example) for the gold or silver in coins. Sometimes, we use the term “debasing”metaphorically, regarding Federal Reserve’s actions to destroy the dollar’s value. The crime of counterfeiting also earned the death penalty.
Why were our Founding Fathers so harsh in mandating punishment for these crimes? Why should some poor fellow be hanged for forging a silver dollar?
Money requires trust
In addition to the other jobs money has to do (store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account), there’s an underlying assumption that must be met.
In order to be accepted, money must be trusted.
If a buyer and a seller both trust the money they’re exchanging, they don’t need to trust one another (well, not nearly as much). Money helps to bridge the lack of trust between strangers.
Obviously, this only works so long as the money is authentic and valuable – in other words, if it’s trustworthy. Counterfeit or debased money undermines the trust in money itself. If this undermining gets bad enough, citizens lose faith in money. Trade grinds to a halt, the economy collapses and people find themselves bartering for essentials. (Barter, by the way, is perfectly fine but it doesn’t scale well.)
That’s why the punishment for faking money or devaluing it was so severe. The Congress of 1792 wanted to make sure trust in the American dollar was absolute.
That’s also why I honestly think our Founding Fathers (specifically Thomas Jefferson), were he alive today, would have Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell arrested and tried for destroying trust in the dollar.
If found guilty, well, his replacement would probably behave very differently…
Jerome Powell: on trial for debasing, devaluing, depreciating and inflating the dollar
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again… Since the beginning of the pandemic panic, U.S. dollars in circulation rose from about $15.5 trillion to over $22 trillion:
It’s impossible to add 50% to the money supply without causing inflation. The Federal Reserve did not increase the supply of goods and services available during the pandemic panic by 50%, did they? No – because all they can make is money.
By massively inflating the money supply, the Fed sowed the seeds of massive inflation. (In fact, that’s why it’s called “inflation” – it’s caused by increasing or inflating the money supply.) Not by supply chains or Vladimir Putin – by the Federal Reserve.
Inflation devalues the dollar by reducing your spending power. Not just of your income or wages – but of every single dollar you’ve ever saved your whole life.
This doesn’t just destroy purchasing power, though – it erodes the world’s trust in the dollar as a store of value.
Fortunately, we have alternative stores of value – the very same ones our Founding Fathers selected as the basis for the U.S. monetary system. Physical gold and silver can’t be inflated, can’t be devalued and can’t be equaled as stores of value and safe-haven investments.
Ron Paul is a medical doctor, a retired Captain of the U.S. Air Force, an author who’s published 21 books and former twelve-term U.S. Congressman representing the state of Texas. He’s emerged as one of the leading voices challenging government’s addiction to deficit spending and the Federal Reserve’s wealth-destructive monetary policies. He works with Birch Gold Group to educate Americans about the threats to their financial futures, and how to protect themselves and their families.
With global tensions spiking, thousands of Americans are moving their IRA or 401(k) into an IRA backed by physical gold. Now, thanks to a little-known IRS Tax Law, you can too. Learn how with a free info kit on gold from Birch Gold Group. It reveals how physical precious metals can protect your savings, and how to open a Gold IRA. Click here to get your free Info Kit on Gold.
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The honesty and truth that you do NOT HEAR from any other politician. Happy birthday Ron.
The problem with Amin is that he tried to get rid of the Jewish stranglehold on the Ugandan economy and of course he expelled the Asians who were easier to handle. Just like history has proven it doesn’t end well for any leader who takes on these parasites. Amin is the best leader Uganda ever had.
I know this,my wife know this,my friends all know this…..you can’t MAKE people care,and until they do…….what I mean to say is you can’t stuff 12 yrs.of education into a 15 min.conversation to do any good to most people,the ignorance is deep……they are also too ignorant to KNOW there is a problem!
Mix em’all together ………
The best president we never had.
Who was assailed by ‘everyone’ as “The Do Nothing president’?
Probably “The Best”, all things considered.
Inflation isn’t the only danger. Nope, it’s what the government can do with a fiat currency. Just imagine, for a moment, ALL THE THINGS THE GOVERNMENT COULD NOT DO if all they had to spend was the taxes they take in.
DARPA comes immediately to mind.
DARPA, indeed …
At least Ron Paul calls it ( kind of) what it is – crime. Ron Paul doesn’t go far enough though because EVERY ‘government’ employee is in breach of their duty to that law as well. That was the only reason I didn’t vote for Ron Paul, he served, got paid in unlawful tender and instead of suing the treasury for fraud in order to force them to pay him in lawful tender or turning himself in to a grand jury for violating his oath by accepting an unlawful tender for payment of the debt of his time in service, he violated the law while calling out the violations but not forcing the issue through court action and calling out the ‘judges’ active law violations along the way.
Every ‘government’ employee is actively in violation of the law and their acts of theft is their gain made by our loss – an actual ongoing injury. All of them should be indicted and put on trial by specially appointed judges and prosecutors who are not actively in violation of the constitutional tender laws and be tried for their breach of duty and the fraud being committed through conversion, extortion and other terrorism they commit upon the people for their own gain.
We can know that Americans have not awakened until all criminals fraudulently claiming to be ‘government’ employees are formally accused to our grand Juries and criminal indictments issued to all of them simultaneously. When examining the true state of affairs through the lens of the law one realizes that Grand Jury indictments for all ‘government’ employees for violations of constitutionally required tender for that capacity is the only lawful option remaining to remedy the ongoing crimes that has left the government capacity entirely empty, void of any lawful officers.
Their crimes are so heinous, so injurious that it is clear that their claims of being lawfully within a government office are fraudulent because they are breaching their duty every working day. Their claims would be laughable in any actual court of law if the pain they are inflicting were not so deep.
To all of you ninnies, gimmies and slimmies actively claiming an official government capacity know this – you are in breach of duty for accepting an unlawful tender in payments of the debt of your time you claim is constitutional official capacity and therefore no longer lawfully remain in any official capacity, you stand totally liable for your OWN criminal acts. It is self evident fact that one cannot be in breach of duty and honorable within that capacity simultaneously. You have no valid defense to this accusation whatsoever because YOU OBLIGATED YOURSELF TO THAT LAW that you now gain from while you actively violate it. Sorry, can’t take you seriously anymore. You are law violating criminals not an ‘authority’ or any official title – you are only criminals who fraudulently claim those titles. Protecting your ongoing crimes is exactly why you are blocking equal access to our grand juries – blocking our access to grand Juries are just more criminal acts of obstruction of justice and misprision of felonies by you to protect your ongoing criminal racket. If you are law abiding and haven’t done anything wrong then why don’t remove your terror from our path to our grand Juries? Could that be because you might end up in prison or get the death penalty? You KNOW the implications for you if the exact letter of the law is upheld. Some of us know the facts and know every pitiful foreign precedent and mental gymnastics you will attempt to use to justify your ongoing crimes. We know your excuses will fail once the full scope of the evidence is revealed along with every other crime you commit to prevent yourselves from being brought to justice. You have been notified. Regardless of your claims you are in breach rendering your claims of official capacity FALSE.
It should be noted that Idi Amin put Uganda on Team 109, which is why history is prevented from saying anything nice about him.
The plandemic was created to accelerate the destruction of America and the free world.
Maybe they want us busy picking through the ashes instead of permanently removing the threat.
That headline is already about 3 years old … Schwab and his cronies at the WEF were already publicizing the (not so) great reset in 2018 … and the FauciFlu, for all intents and purposes, began in 2019 …
Charles Hugh Smith has an interesting take on Nixon and 1971….
The Real Story of America Abandoning the Gold Standard
It’s widely held that all of our financial woes are the result of abandoning the discipline of the gold standard in 1971. The premise here is that if the U.S. had maintained the gold standard, the excesses of the fiat currencies regime could not have arisen.
The real story is the U.S. was hemorrhaging gold in the 1960s at such a rate that America’s entire gold reserves would have disappeared by 1976 – 1978. Other nations converted their dollars into gold as a furious pace, draining America’s gold reserves. Once your gold is gone, you can’t have a gold standard. (see chart below.)
The point here is the U.S. was only a few years away from going off the gold standard anyway. President Nixon ended the convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold (a.k.a. “closed the gold convertibility window”) i.e. abandoned the gold standard, to preserve the remaining reserves, officially listed as around 8,100 tons.
https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-real-story-of-america-abandoning.html?m=1
Exactly. That is why ft. knox is ‘brimming’ full to this day! 🤣