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Legal Counterfeiting I'm not sure it really matters, though. What the world uses for money is already "counterfeit" by any legitimate definition. Beyond that, the U.S. government hardly requires any assistance in weakening the dollar. It appears to be quite capable of accomplishing that task all by its lonesome. Good ol' Webster's tells us that counterfeit things are "made in imitation to be passed off fraudulently or deceptively as genuine; forged." For most of the first century of our country's history, Americans enjoyed the benefits of real money, i.e., gold. This medium of exchange not only facilitated trade intra- and internationally, it further benefitted society by helping keep in check the tendency of the State to spread its suffocating blanket of control across the land. Money is the life's-blood of the State, but not money in-and-of-itself. The ability selectively to spend largesse provides the State with one of its primary means of achieving its ultimate goal: coercive power over its citizens. The State, of course, produces nothing. Every cent it spends, it first extracts from those producers who move civilization along its path of uncertain progress. Before the abomination of the federal income tax tainted the Constitution in 1913, the State was severely limited in how much mischief it could create. True, its devious machinations still produced corruption of our economic and political system, but those depredations were largely self-limiting. The positive consequences of the chains shackling the State were numerous. Throughout most of the Nineteenth Century, the purchasing power of the dollar (the name for a certain amount of real money, i.e., gold) held steady or increased. That is, someone could buy more — rather than less — of a given good as time progressed. Imagine that... Except for computers and their kin, what goods and services cost less now than they did thirty years ago? Damned few. The marvels of that brand of deflation — increasing productivity with decreasing prices — stymies the academics who pass for popular "economists" today. Except for marginalized Austrian-types, these overeducated, under-knowledged folks are ignorant of how free enterprise business can produce and sustain such wonders for decades at a time. The Twentieth Century, however, witnessed the destruction of money. The sordid tale has been told elsewhere in detail, but — in addition to the open robbery of the income tax — the creation of the Federal Reserve Board and its manipulations of the money supply; the unconscionable outlawing of and confiscation of gold and the repudiation of gold-clauses in contracts by that smiling thug FDR; the prohibition against privately-issued, gold-redeemable money substitutes; "legal tender" laws that forced private citizens to accept the feds' fiat money; all these unconstitutional and/or immoral actions provided the State with the weapons it needed to steal not only our money but the whole of our economic system. No longer did money serve the producers. Now, money served the State. In its never-ending quest for control, the State eventually cut even the most tenuous connections between the pieces of paper we use for economic exchange and the gold that should be backing them. Over the past century, the State has diluted our money to the point where a dollar today buys only what a penny or two would before the invention of the automobile. Either through the obvious expediency of speeding up the pace of the printing presses or the more subtle avenue of increasing the ability of banks to make loans, this twisted magic act has managed to confiscate tens of trillions of our wealth. A while back, a story made national headlines when a pharmacist diluted chemo meds for cancer patients in order to boost his profits. He was rightly pilloried and held up for public disgrace for fraud, theft, and placing his clients lives in danger. Would that Americans felt the same outrage regarding the rampant counterfeiting practiced by the State. The toll from the State's depredations outstrips that of the pharmacist like a supernova outshines a light bulb. Gresham's Law — the idea that "bad" or bogus money drives out good money — can be applied to much more than just our monetary system in which pieces of paper (legal counterfeit backed by nothing) routs gold. The State is the greatest forger in history, defrauding and deceiving those whose lives and property and rights it is supposed to defend. We need real money: gold. What we get is pretend money: ink on paper. We need real free trade: zero barriers against voluntary economic exchanges among private parties. What we get is sham free trade: "fair" trade and "free" trade that are permitted only by the consent of the State, trade that is hindered and chained with endless rules, regulations, tariffs, boycotts, and reams of politically-correct nonsense. We need real security: nonintervention in foreign lands, the peace that flows from free trade, and the ability of individuals to defend themselves against the depredations of criminals here at home. What we get is mock safety: a standing army stirring up hornets' nests around the world; a PATRIOT Act that grants carte blanche to the State to invade our privacy; a War on "Terrorism" that generates a growing abundance of terrorists eager and willing to attack us; a War on "Drugs" that makes criminals of peaceful citizens and kingpins of violent ones; banning and regulation and registration and confiscation and licensing of firearms that leave decent people helpless and swells the confidence of the human animals let loose by the State's own policies. We need justice: courts and police who arrest, try, and punish only those who initiate coercion against others. What we get is feigned justice: police who are "only obeying orders" in enforcing such unconstitutional acts as drunk/drug checkpoints and seat belt and helmet and child carrier and victim disarmament laws; legislators and executives who drill into every crevice of our lives as they pass shelves of laws and regulations and controls over any and all possible minutiae, no matter how trivial or private those areas might be; judges who legislate from the bench, who treat constitutions as toilet paper to be used or ignored upon a whim, who suppress knowledge that jurors have the right to judge the law as well as the fact, who are petty bullies indulging their egos against hapless "criminals" who have harmed no one. We need compassion and welfare: private citizens helping deserving others through voluntary charity. What we get is pretend compassion and simulated welfare: a welfare system that breaks apart families, eliminates incentives to improve on one's condition, leaves recipients mired in helplessness and despair; a brand of compassion based on coercion rather than true generosity and concern, that cares nothing for why someone is in trouble, that claims you must help others regardless of your own values, that provides health care and medicine as a right rather than as earned values. We need morality: a respect and protection of individual choices and the consequences that result. What we get is spurious morality: a society that legislates private moral choices through both prohibitions and mandates while simultaneously declaring that no one can judge anyone else's choices, that morality is relative and nonobjective, that no one is responsible for what they do even as we incarcerate more and more of our citizens for no good reason. We need freedom: the capacity to choose and act upon our own decisions in any peaceful manner that we decide or agree to. What we get is fake freedom: politicians mouthing homages to liberty while offering us impostor images masking the chains and manacles they slip around our limbs; ersatz rights that obliterate real rights; hollow promises that lead us deeper into the thickets of tyranny. But don't worry. These criminals will never be caught, never be punished, never be hung or shot or imprisoned. For, you see, every heinous thing these despicable people do is perfectly "legal" . . . . . . because they get to make the laws.
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