Week of Dec. 27. Genesis 47:15 And when money failed…..for the money faileth. Gosh, they did it back then without a Fed? Yes, Virginia, Santa and money failing go way back. Who knew? Like it says elsewhere in the good book, there’s nothing new under the sun. Well, how’d they handle things back on those days? They hired a really sharp Jewish fella to be their Secretary of the Treasury (or was he the Treasurer?), and he put the whole country on a strict savings program. Notice he also confiscated pretty much all the land and livestock. Talk about austerity! Then he taxed the daylights out of them, put them back to work sowing in the same fields that they had sold to him for bread, and then gave them the seed they needed to plant in those same fields. Took them a couple of years, but the plan apparently worked. The Pharaoh got a fifth up front and the people got the other four/fifths. HHHHmmmm, a 20% tax, flat rate. Curiously, that’s the same figure I came up with 3 decades ago when I was writing my book, “America’s Monetary Mess”.
Another curious thing, I predicted 30 years ago that the states and municipalities would be going broke, and gosh, they’re going broke. The Federal government would not go broke, I said, because they thought (wrongly) that they could just print fiat, illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, paper, and get away with it. Not so fast. That illegal game can just go on for just so long, and then the purchasing power would be destroyed, along with low interest rates. In my article, “Prices and the Prime” (Futures magazine), I showed how interest rates tracked the rising prices that accompanied inflating (increasing) of the so-called “money” supply. People are not stupid, so if they are going to lend their “money” during a period of time when prices are rising and the currency is losing its purchasing power, they are going to want to be reimbursed for such a loss, by charging higher interest rates.
OK, OK, so you know that I am enamored of the Constitution. And you’ve probably figured out by now that I’m not Joseph. I’m not even Jewish. However, if I were ever to suggest a get-fixed-quick solution to our current imbroglio, let’s think about article one, section 10, which is a prohibition on the power of the states.
First thing to consider is, the Federal government has failed miserably to do what we told them to do in A1, s8, to coin money, in alignment with A1, s10. So how about if we allow the states to coin money, as long as it is silver and gold, and all the states that would coin money would do so uniformly. For example, a state like Nevada could easily coin money (they’ve got silver and gold). I would gladly exchange my paper for a silver coin from Nevada. Can you imagine the economic windfall that this measure would have on a state? Soon, other states would join in, and we could have sound money again, as well as an opportunity for a state to divorce itself economically from the federal government. Remember, we started out as a nation of states united to do certain federal things together, and one of the things we, the people, gave to our representatives to do was to coin money of gold and silver, and we allowed them to borrow that coined money. Sorry, folks, they fail to do what we gave them the power to do.
So that’s it. You’re fired, Congress. I’m checking into getting my passport renewed, been looking at Singapore lately, hope I can get out of here before the money fails. The worst part of leaving will be getting felt up at the airport by some TSA zombie. Oh, well.
