“Inflation is the Opium of the People…”
Shane March 2nd, 2008
The supposed ‘Free Market’ system that Bush and all politicians promote goes against how our monetary system works at its core. Here is a quote:
Inflation is the opium of the people. And this is precisely its political function. It is because inflation confuses everything that it is so consistently resorted to by our modern ‘planned economy’ governments… Like every other tax, inflation acts to determine the individual and business policies we are all forced to follow. It discourages all prudence and thrift. It encourages squandering, gambling, reckless waste of all kinds. It often makes it more profitable to speculate than to produce. It tears apart the whole fabric of stable economic relationships. Its inexcusable injustices drive men toward desperate remedies. It plants the seeds of fascism and communism. It leads men to demand totalitarian controls. It ends invariably in bitter disillusion and collapse.
-Henry Hazlitt, “Economics in One Lesson”
People ask themselves, how are we paying for Iraq? When you go to the store and pay $.50 more for a loaf of bread, you have your answer. Inflation. You and I pay for Iraq, meanwhile the war profiteers are getting rich, while we suffer. I wonder if before Iraq happened, what people would have said if they were told that everything would get expensive because of the war? Do you think most people would care about Hussein, if they knew their standard of living would drop as a result of the war?
I need to do more research, but the above quote makes me wonder…
Discourages all prudence and thrift. I would think this is saying that if the government could not ‘print money’ they would be a little more careful with their budgets.
Encourages squandering, gambling, rechless waste of all kinds. Again, do politicians care about a new law that will cost the government billions, if they understood the system, and we could not inflate the currency?
It often makes it more profitable to speculate than to produce. Three words. Hedge Fund Manager.
Its inexcusable injustices drive men toward desperate remedies.Many times I have heard guys joke that they should just go sell drugs to make ends meet… not realizing that the reason their $10 an hour paid the bills 2 years ago, but now does not, is because of our inflationary system. The poor cannot work their way out of a hole, because the hole is always getting deeper and deeper, and they don’t know it.
It plants the seeds of fascism and communism. It leads men to demand totalitarian controls. There are articles all over the Internet about how the US is leaning towards Fascism. Did you know Central Banking, which is what our system uses, is one of the 10 steps to Communism in the Communist Manifesto? Strange, isn’t it? This system only started in 1913… And of course the system promotes totalitarian controls. As people get poorer and poorer, they ask the government to step in, now knowing it is the core of our system that is working against them. Minimum wages! Fix the problem! We need the government to step in! And so the government makes more and more laws, and coincidentally gets more and more control…
In case anyone reading this does not understand inflation, it basically means printing more money, increasing the amount of money in circulation. Originally, people used gold. You couldn’t just make gold (although you could mine for it, which did cause inflation if there was a huge find actually) but once people started using paper money as a convenience, whoever was in control of the money for a nation would soon realize that there were only two reasons not to just print money for themselves, and not tell anyone.
1: if all citizens tried to turn in their monetary notes to get their gold, there would be more notes than their was gold, and people would realize that the king or banks had actually stolen their money.
2: it would cause prices to rise. This is because as each citizen gets more money, he buys more, which increases demand, and so raises the price.
If a King though wanted to go buy cannons to arm his ships for war, where could he get the money? Raise taxes? This irritated the citizens, which was not too bad for a King, but as time went on, elected Politicians were often not reelected if they raised taxes. So what to do? Just print more money, and go buy cannons. As long as you did not print too much, the inflation would not rise too fast, and people would not notice. And so you basically taxed the people, but without their knowledge. Sneaky, isn’t it? And when prices go up you can just tell people that it is all due to some country in Asia getting industrialized of course, even though the country has been industrializing for 20 years, and only in the past few years has inflation been a problem.
And then if you are really sneaky, you would export all of your factories so that while you inflated the currency, the prices of most goods would not increase too much, since you could abuse the poorer, Communist workers and pay them $.10 a day.
Unfortunately, things that were not produced outside of the country would show the effects of inflation like say…housing? Healthcare? University tuition? Hey wait a minute…
