Wednesday

For all the glaring faults and failures of paper money, it is the more subtle effects that are the most damaging. The emphatic truth is that paper money only exists because of the desire of politicians to inflate the money supply in order to buy votes and to wage wars. There are no other reasons. The vote-buying passes under the innocuous title of ‘welfare’. This, the most egregious of malpractices, the degradation of the commercial means of exchange, is presented as a generous blessing provided by the State.
The largesse of the State is, via welfare, used to buy allegiance from self-created groups. The more that societies can be fragmented, then the more and larger the groups that politicians can buy and the more successful that politicians can be in terms of seizing and holding on to power.
From the perspective of the groups, the larger the group can become, the more influence the groups’ leaders can have with politicians. Each person who receives a welfare cheque comes to regard it as an entitlement. An entitlement is inseparable from resentment. The resentment is directed against those who are perceived to have more than them and also those in the same group, for if there were not so many the government would be able to give each more. The more fragmentation can be created, the greater each individual’s sense of alienation from society.
The upshot is a near total breakdown in the concept of not only society, but self- responsibility. The very survival of the welfare recipient is delegated to another entity – the State. The State becomes the friend. Others in society (everyone else) becomes the enemy.
Whereas real money, Gold, acts to create wealth and build strong societies, pseudo money achieves the opposite. It destroys wealth, destroys societies and, ultimately, when welfare can no longer suffice to provide food and shelter, is used to finance the Great Distraction – war.
Welcome to the Twenty-Twenties.