Once upon a time, there was a little country with only a few people in it, yet they lived in a land that was absolutely abundant in natural resourses, had thousands of miles of ocean shoreline, tens of thousand of lakes, full of wildlife, and had millions of beautiful square miles of living space in great climates. There was no shortage of things to build and things to do to take advantage of all the resourses.
Upset with their mean dictator of a king who lived far away, which by the way, there is no more powerful form of government than a dictatorship, and even though they were outnumbered, somehow won their independence from the most powerful kingdom in the world. They tried their own form of paper money, and within 11 years after declaring their independence and the ensuing war, they had destroyed its value completely. People were using the money for wallpaper, no joke.
The bureaucrats, knowing that the people were getting antsy, got together and formed a new central government with a constitution, which is the supreme law of the land. Debts were necessarily wiped out because the paper money was no good anymore, and the constitution declared that only gold and silver coins could be declared legal tender in payment of debts. Furthermore, the constitution only granted congress the authority to "coin" money, not print it.
What was the result? The government was doomed to being tiny, since its only sources of income were mostly import duties on foreigners and a few excise taxes, unless there was a war of course, in which case all rules went out the window except one, that gold and silver remained money. The government was forced to raise taxes for wars and studying the sexual habits of cockroaches, and raising taxes is not a popular thing to do, especially if you want to get reelected. Just ask George H.W. Bush if you don't believe me. And since it was cheaper to manufacture at home than to import from foreigners, only expensive items were imported and the word "imported" always implied that the item was of top notch variety.
This was true for almost 70 years until they had a civil war when some bearded man printed some paper money called "greenbacks" which were redeemable in gold after the war and the paper money was retired. But these instances were isolated. Gold and silver coins were the lifeblood of the economy. Even in spite of the civil war, the economy eventually flourished and they outproduced everyone in the world, so much so that the entire world sent them their gold and silver to purchase their far out doo-dads.
So what was the result? People from all over the world spent their life's savings for a boat ride just for the chance to live there. There was opportunity everywhere. The word "unemployment" didn't even exist. I am not saying things were perfect, but you could get a good cigar for 5 cents. The economy got so productive because there was incentive to improve their lifestyles. In other words, they got far more of the value of their labor than they did where they came from. Where they came from, there were bigger governments that sucked more of their life from them through taxes. They obviously didn't think they were getting the best end of the deal there because they came in droves because THERE WERE NO TAXES. Only foreigners had to pay to import. And they didn't pay in paper. The economy was so great there that people were willing to pay import duties in gold and silver just to be able to sell in that market.
The little country grew and prospered enormously. The country out-produced the other countries of the world, and by mostly only taxing foreigners, somehow the government eventually accumulated over 20,000 metric tonnes of gold. This was by far the biggest stack of gold in the world! They had so much fricken gold that they had to store it in a fort and guard it with an army. And I haven't even talked about silver yet. But I am getting ahead of myself.
The vast majority of people in that little country were living far better than the rest of the world. There were only two groups of people that weren't altogether thrilled about the state of affairs. These two groups were the government and the banksters.
The government people weren't happy because they were a tiny group and had very little power over the producers. They couldn't tax them and they couldn't control them. People were free to do as they pleased as long as they didn't make victims. How was the government supposed to prosper in that environment, seeing that the government is all about control and all. As the country's first president said, "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."
The banksters weren't happy for one reason...banksters make money by loaning it. Most people were so prosperous that they didn't even need loans. They had gold and silver. Oh yeah, and the banksters wanted their gold and silver, too. But that is another story. Well, I take that back. It is this story and I am getting to it. But they weren't loaning much money, that is the bottom line, and banksters want to loan money like Rick James wanted cocaine. Cocaine is a helluva drug.
So the banksters and the government put their heads together, as they always do, behind closed doors, and said, "Hey, if we banksters use the age old scam of printing paper money, we could loan out all kinds of moola to you, and you could grow as big as you want. Look how easily you could get reelected if you had all the money you needed. We both make out like bandits. We get people to deposit their gold and silver in our banks, make the paper redeemable in gold, then one day we pull the rug out from under them and say, sorry, the gold is gone. Too bad for you." Like John Belushi said in Animal House, hey, you fucked up, you trusted us. The gold would still be there of course, but as always they would print so much paper money that there would never be enough gold for the flood of paper that would come.
So they created a private banking cartel and called it the Federal Reserve, which wasn't federal nor was there any reserve of anything, unless you consider all the paper they had out back as a reserve of some sort. The Federal Reserve could now magically create money out of thin air, no mining needed. Why hadn't they thought of this before? Oh yeah, they tried that during the Revolution, but everything was so good now and that was over 100 years ago, and what did Benjamin Franklin know anyway? This time, we have learned from the past and we now know how to overrule the laws of physics as well as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. And they would only put pictures of dead presidents and bureaucrats on the money because everybody knows that the current president is a dumb ass but the previous ones were mostly geniuses and war heroes.
Oh yeah, and the same year they created the Income Tax, which is part of the story, but I don't have another 5 hours to write about it so you will just have to take my word for it that it is one of the ideas in the Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx, or you can google it and read it for yourself. You can't make this shit up.
This worked even better for awhile, until it didn't, and then there was a Great Depression only 16 years later, followed by a world war. I'm sure paper money had nothing to do with those events. Being able to print a bunch of money would have nothing to do with a massive debt problem followed by a Great Depression, nor could all of that money have anything to do with funding a war to end all wars.
The Great Depression was So Great and the leader of the free world got So Powerful that by executive order he made it illegal to own more than 5 ounces of gold, punishable by 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. That's a pretty big fine, especially considering there was a Great Depression and nobody had any money, and especially considering the gold that was declared legal by the constitution that the leader of the free world held up his hand and swore a vow to protect with his life, then made it a crime to own, was nowhere to be found anymore. Government grew and the bankster's profits grew, and they were starting to get pretty happy now.
This brings us to the Bretton Woods agreement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Monetary_and_Financial_Conference
You see, the not so little government didn't just want their own citizen's gold, they wanted all the gold in the rest of the world, too. Everybody knows that gold is intrinsically worthless. That is why the government wanted all of it, seeing as how the government only does retarded things by accident all the time, and who needs all that shiny worthless metal anyway when all they have to do is print more Monopoly money and everything will be like Christmas again, at least for a little while. That is also why everyone in the world wanted to move to the country in the first place, to get some of that gold and pay no taxes, and why the foreigners didn't mind giving up their gold to pay import duties, seeing as how it was all so worthless and everything. These dummies even had a gold rush and moved across the country trying to find little flakes of this worthless stuff. Some genius from England, John Maynard Keynes, even said that now gold was a "barbarous relic," and everybody started to agree with him. Well, not the banksters and the government, they still wanted the gold.
The banksters and the government figured that if they could soak their own people like this in only 20 years, imagine what they could do to the rest of the world? So with the biggest stack of gold, the strongest economy, and the strongest military, the country made their case to 730 dignitaries from 44 countries in the world, during the war to end all wars, and they decided that, since the country now had the biggest stack of gold in the world, especially by sucking it out of their own people, that the rest of the countries could use the dollar to settle trade agreements, because the dollar would always be redeemable in gold, right? We might pull the rug out from under our own people, but we would never pull out the rug from under the entire world, right?
So the Federal Reserve got busy and started printing money. Of course, now they knew better than Ben Franklin, but they honored him anyway by putting his picture on one of their more expensive bills. They even called that note a Franklin. Well, it used to be pretty expensive until they printed a whole lot of them.
But really, they knew better, and this time everything worked out well. With all the gold and silver safely removed from the people, there was no poverty, no wars, government grew by leaps and bounds, the banksters loaned money day and night, and especially the little guy now had it better than ever in his life, seeing as how there were no jobs, and foreigners didn't pay anything to import anymore while all the locals now paid for the enormous monster of a government with an income tax. And the food stamps flowed like honey in a bee hive.
It was now Paradise.
The End
