by Keith Weiner
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The dollar has been losing its value for a century (though there have been corrections, like the one since 2011). The dollar was once worth 1555mg gold. Now it’s worth a mere 25mg, a loss of 98.4 percent under Federal Reserve management.
Everyone knows about devaluation, yet few realize how far it’s gone. We attempt to use prices to adjust the dollar. The basic idea is to calculate how much less the dollar can purchase today. For example if the grocery bill for milk, eggs, bread, and cheese doubles, then it seems the dollar has fallen by half.
This method of measuring the dollar’s drop is fatally flawed. Companies are constantly cutting costs and, as a consequence, real prices. By measuring only the difference between the rates of descent of the dollar versus real prices, we see a small part of the dollar’s loss. We’ll demonstrate this point with two visual examples.
First, let’s drop two balls from a cliff, one iron and the other rubber. After a few seconds, the iron is down 100m but the rubber has fallen only 80m (due to air friction). Do we say that the rubber ball has gone up 20m?
Second, consider a fat man on a diet. He loses a lot of weight, and now his trousers are loose. We don’t say that the slacks got bigger, any more than we say the rubber ball went up. We can’t use falling objects as a measure of height or dieters as a measure of clothing.
This is obvious and uncontroversial. However, unlike freefalling balls and weight losers, the devaluing dollar is in widespread use as a unit of measure. It’s hard to grasp why we shouldn’t use something we’re using constantly.
The government got its paper dollar into circulation by force. It confiscated the people’s gold and outlawed gold ownership. It enacted legal tender law to force savers to lend dollars. It imposed a capital gains tax to force consumers to pay for goods with dollars.
Then in 1975, gold ownership was decriminalized. Today, there is a movement to legally recognize gold. Yet, there is one more insidious trick keeping us chained to the dollar. We are all indoctrinated to think the dollar is money, and that money means the dollar. It starts in kindergarten and continues through graduate school. Every book, movie and TV show reinforces the dollar edifice. It’s built into law, regulation, and the tax code.
The brainwashing has been almost 100 percent effective. As proof, I offer exhibit A, a Google search for pictures of money.
As exhibit B, I offer the gold bugs. They are convinced the dollar will soon be worthless. But even they think of gold’s value in terms of dollars. Whenever the dollar drops they say, “Gold is going up.”
John Pierpont Morgan could set us straight with just six words from 1912, “Money is gold, and nothing else.” Yet this is both too little and too much. A pithy quote is insufficient to overcome the hardening of belief that occurred over many decades. And it demands a giant leap—a paradigm shift. Few are ready to jump yet.
Much of what we think we know about money is wrong. We’re stuck in the dollar paradigm. To think outside this box, we have to look at the dollar dispassionately. The dollar is just an irredeemable paper currency. It is not money, no matter what the government decrees or what people believe.
Many people believe that the market was free until the Fed’s unconventional response to the crisis of 2008. However, there is no such thing as a free market if we cannot use what we want for money, and the Fed has the power to create and allocate credit by command.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe predicted this confusion in 1809, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
There hasn’t been a real recovery from the crisis of 2008, and there won’t be until we return to the use of gold as money. Please come to this event to hear Andy Bernstein present the moral case for capitalism, and Keith Weiner present the case for the gold standard as the monetary system of capitalism.
This video gives how the Fed enslaves the people.
1 comment
david
2015-08-10 at 13:26 (UTC 2) Link to this comment
Keith,
Excellent commentary–and not just this one! I’ve just discovered your writings and am going through the treasure trove.
Quote (Regarding the CPI): “This method of measuring the dollar’s drop is fatally flawed. Companies are constantly cutting costs and, as a consequence, real prices.”
Yes!! I tell people that the 95% reduction in purchasing power of the dollar since 1913 has been stolen by the government. Hard words, but true. But what about production economies and efficiencies? We’re vastly more efficient than we were in 1913. Wouldn’t this have caused the value of the dollar to increase in terms of its ability to purchase goods and services? Instead of a 95% reduction in purchasing power, we should be looking at, say, a 300% INCREASE.
I tell them: THAT TOO, HAS BEEN STOLEN.
Regards, Dave