Honest Money

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their  currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks...will deprive the people of  all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” -Thomas Jefferson

"There is nothing left now for us but to get ever deeper and deeper into debt to the banking system in order to provide the increasing amounts of money the nation requires for its expansion and growth. An honest money system is the only alternative." -- Frederick Soddy, M.A., F.R.S., Nobel Prize Winner, 1921.

Gold Standard

Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. Under a gold standard, the amount of credit that an economy can support is determined by the economy's tangible assets, since every credit instrument is ultimately a claim on some tangible asset. But government bonds are not backed by tangible wealth, only by the government's promise to pay out of future tax revenues, and cannot easily be absorbed by the financial markets. A large volume of new government bonds can be sold to the public only at progressively higher interest rates.

Thus, government deficit spending under a gold standard is severely limited. The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit.

We have allowed our own, and our children’s futures, to be mortgaged by the state, to finance the results of past and present political self interest, blunders and excesses. The state attempts to sweeten the bitter pill with promises of jam tomorrow, while holding our noses to ensure that we don’t detect the smell of rotting fruit. We must educate ourselves and our children so that they are better equipped to understand, deal with, and hopefully create the conditions for a better and freer world.