Real History

submitted by jwithrow.History

Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
Real History

October 15, 2014
Hot Springs, VA

The S&P is checking in at $1,851 today, gold is up to $1,236, oil is down to $80.34, bitcoin is around $396, and the 10-year has plummeted to 2.01%.  The 10-year Treasury rate must have been afraid of its shadow this week.

Wife Rachel said my entry yesterday about the history of fiat currency bored her so much she fell asleep reading it.  Sorry about that.

I see history as quite fascinating.  Not the history that comes in Department of Education approved politically correct textbooks, mind you, but real history.  Real history isn’t piecemeal highlights with names, places, and dates to remember; it is so much more important than that.  Real history doesn’t show up in textbooks or in classrooms.

Real history is friend Wade’s family letters housed on his family farm in South Carolina.  The letters were written by the original owners of the farm – his ancestors – and they have been passed down from generation to generation since.  Real history is a five-bedroom brick home sitting atop “town hill” in Covington, Virginia built by my great-great-grandfather after emigrating from Lebanon in the late 19th century and opening a restaurant.  This house comes complete with a Lebanese-style tiered garden on the side of the mountain.  I can only imagine how many other pieces of real history are out there, passed down from generation to generation and discussed over Thanksgiving dinner.

But what is important with real history?  Not so much the names, dates, and places as interesting as they may be.  Instead, it is the ideas, values, and lessons that come with real history that are really important.  These intangibles, if heeded, are what truly shape the future.

The textbook history tells me Napoleon invaded Russia and his army got wiped out.  What do I learn from this?  Don’t invade Russia?  I will be sure not to make that mistake.  Real history tells me great-great-grandfather emigrated from Lebanon, opened a restaurant, and worked like crazy to create a better life for his family.  I am a part of that legacy.  What do I learn from this?  Free enterprise has the power to liberate and elevate individuals, families, and communities.  This is a real, actionable lesson that is much more valuable to me than learning not to invade Russia.

Real history is mostly ‘private’ information while textbook history is ‘public’ information.  What’s taught in the classroom and what comes on the news is also public information.  Our society places a very high value on this public information; we love to hang around the water cooler and talk about it.  It is to the point now where we seem to think that public information is all there is.  We think the school teaches us everything we need to know and we think the news reports all aspects of all events to us every day.

Our worldview, which determines how we think and act, is shaped by this public information.

The problem is public information is riddled with holes and often less than helpful.  “Don’t invade Russia” is sound advice but I was extremely unlikely to do so in the first place.  If we value public information then we waste quite a bit of time on things that aren’t very relevant to us at all.  Should Ray Rice have been banned?  Should I buy Alibaba stock post-IPO?  How will the mid-term elections go?  Who will run for President in 2016?

Who cares?!

Football is just entertainment and unless you had Ray Rice on your fantasy team his private life probably doesn’t concern you much.  Alibaba is the largest e-commerce company in the world and its IPO was welcomed with all manner of press and hoopla.  But IPOs are designed for the insiders to get rich by selling their private stock to the public at an inflated valuation.  This works best when the media pumps up the IPO story over and over again.  You don’t want to be on the public side of an IPO, you want to be on the private side.  And the mid-term elections are largely irrelevant as is the presidential election in 2016.  No matter who wins the debt will continue to spiral out of control until the U.S. dollar is supplanted from its perch as the international reserve currency… probably by the IMF’s “Special Drawing Rights” (SDR).  No amount of campaigning and voting will prepare you for the inevitable; probably best to stop wasting time and start preparing for the Great Reset now.

Public information is similar to the fiat currency we discussed yesterday.  Maybe a little bit of it won’t do too much harm but go past that line and you are going to be in a world of financial hurt.  So in this humble philosopher’s opinion: focus on real history and private information.  The rest is probably just noise.

Hopefully this one doesn’t put wife to sleep.  On second thought, maybe it’s for the best.

More to come,

Signature

 

 

 

 

 

Joe Withrow
Wayward Philosopher

For more of Joe’s thoughts on the Great Reset and regaining individual sovereignty please read “The Individual is Rising” which is available at http://www.theindividualisrising.com. The book is also available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions.

Fiat Money Undermines Society

submitted by jwithrow.Fiat Money

Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
Fiat Money Undermines Society

October 14, 2014
Hot Springs, VA

The S&P is checking in at $1,878 today, gold is up to $1,234, oil is down to $85, bitcoin is up to $403, and the 10-year is now down to 2.20%.  All in a day’s work, I suppose.

Autumn is truly a beautiful season.  There is a gentle, crisp breeze in the air up here in the mountains of Virginia and a myriad of red, orange, and yellow leaves dot the landscape.  As we await Maddie’s entrance, wife Rachel and I will spend the day making homemade apple cider to celebrate such a fine season!

Last week I suggested that fiat money always seems to undermine the morality and stability of society throughout history.  Let’s examine this a little bit more today.

First, we must be clear about what fiat money is.  Fiat money is any currency that derives its value from government law and regulation.  The word ‘fiat’ is Latin for “let it be done”.  Essentially, fiat money is what the government says is money.  Once decreeing something as money, governments usually force people and businesses to use whatever it is through legal tender laws.  Fiat money has taken different forms throughout history.  Today we primarily use electronic credit-based national currencies (U.S. dollars, Euros, Yen, etc.) as our fiat money.  We still use fiat paper currency also but we are gradually transitioning away from this form of money.  Here in the United States we use “Federal Reserve Notes” as our paper currency.  Take a look at what the bills in your wallet say to confirm this.

Societies, to the extent that you can pinpoint a beginning and end to them, have not started out with fiat money.  Historically, society starts out with free-market money – usually gold, silver, or some other valuable commodity – and then unwittingly moves to fiat money as its government becomes more and more corrupt.

Rome was using a pure silver “denarius” at the beginning of the 1st century, A.D.  Roman emperors then learned how to ‘print’ money by melting down their silver coins, adding cheap base metal into the mix, then re-minting the denarius with a lower silver content.  This enabled them to mint more silver coins than they had melted down, but the denarius was no longer pure silver.

The denarius was 85% silver by the year 100.  By 218, the denarius was down to only 43% silver content.  And by year 244 the denarius contained only .05% silver.  This meant that each Roman denarius coin could purchase 99.95% less than what it could originally purchase!  In other words, everyday prices were 99.95% higher for Romans in year 244 than they were in year 1.

So why in the world did the Roman emperors debase their currency so much?  Why, for great wars, great public works, and to enrich themselves, of course!  You have read all about the Roman Empire in the history textbooks.  Maintaining an empire requires soldiers and soldiers require food, water, and payment.  Oh, and weapons.  This gets more and more expensive as the empire gets bigger and bigger.  I bet you have read about the coliseum too – it was very expensive to build and maintain.  Who was going to pay for it all?

The emperor certainly wasn’t about to curtail his lavish lifestyle to chip in.  Instead he turned to dishonest fiat money: he melted down silver coins and made more of them with a lesser silver content.  Then he paid the soldiers and workers and pretended like nothing was different about the money.  As the currency was debased, Roman society got poorer and the government became more corrupt.  Eventually the Roman Empire became impoverished and collapsed.

Looking farther east, Marco Polo documented the use of fiat money in China:

“You might say that [Kublai] has the secret of alchemy in perfection… the Khan causes every year to be made such a vast quantity of this money, which costs him nothing, that it must equal in amount all the treasure of the world.”

He continues:

“Population and trade had greatly increased, but the emissions of paper notes were suffered to largely outrun both… All the beneficial effects of a currency that is allowed to expand with a growth of population and trade were now turned into those evil effects that flow from a currency emitted in excess of such growth.  These effects were not slow to develop themselves… The best families in the empire were ruined, a new set of men came into the control of public affairs, and the country became the scene of internecine warfare and confusion.”

The same thing happened in France when John Law introduced fiat paper currency in 1716: the currency was inflated into oblivion and the society was impoverished.  And in Weimar Germany in the 1920’s – it got to the point where Germans were using paper marks to heat their furnaces!  Argentina has followed suit a couple times in the late 1900’s.  Zimbabwe was one of the wealthiest countries in Africa until its government ramped up the printing presses in 2008 and implemented price controls.  It wasn’t long before civilized society was wiped out in Zimbabwe and people could no longer get enough food and water for themselves.

Do you notice a trend?

Fast forward to present day: the U.S. dollar has lost 98% of its value since the Federal Reserve was implemented in 1913.  Much of this devaluation has occurred since all ties to gold were removed in 1971.  What has happened to our cost of living?

Technology has also boomed since 1971 such that the means of production and distribution are much more efficient today than ever before.  It seems to me this scenario should have reduced the cost of living for everyone.  But has it?  It wasn’t that long ago when an average American household consisted of only one wage earner.  This one income was enough to provide a high quality of life for the family while the spouse stayed home to raise the kids.  Most households now require two incomes just to get by.

The American standard of living is going in the wrong direction and this is largely due to fiat money.  Further, the fiat money is used primarily for the same things it has always been used for throughout history – war, public works, and the enrichment of the political class…

I will leave it there for today but I hope my point was made.

Until the morrow,

Signature

 

 

 

 

 

Joe Withrow
Wayward Philosopher

For more of Joe’s thoughts on the Great Reset and regaining individual sovereignty please read “The Individual is Rising” which is available at http://www.theindividualisrising.com.  The book is also available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions.

On the National Debt

submitted by jwithrow.National Debt

Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
On the National Debt

October 7, 2014
Hot Springs, VA

The S&P is down to $1,953, gold is up to $1,212, oil is up to $89, bitcoin is up to $330, and the 10-year is down to 2.38%.

Looks like the 10-year Treasury rate is still well-corralled for the moment. And gold is still on sale.

Yesterday we examined a few of the traps cleverly hidden for infants coming into the world at this time – prompted by wife Rachel and my expectations of a little girl named Madison set to begin her journey here on Earth within the next few days or weeks.  Today let’s look at the overt trap that boldly claims the right to little Madison’s future earnings: the national debt.

It is popular today for politicians to speak out against the national debt and boldly claim that ‘we’ (they love this ‘we’ business) need to balance the government’s budget and begin to pay the debt down.  This sounds great and people will vote for you for making such a statement, but there are two problems this leaves unaddressed – one based in economics and one based in morality.

First, the economic problem: the national debt is not $17.75 trillion as advertised.  The national debt is actually closer to $200 trillion if you calculate it according to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) which require you to record all future liabilities on your balance sheet.  Most of these future liabilities that are not included in the official debt figure are Social Security and Medicare commitments.  These future commitments are completely unfunded which means there exists no underlying revenue support and no asset backing.  The only way these future commitments can be met is if enough money comes into the Social Security and Medicare programs versus going out.  Demographics tell us that 10,000 Baby Boomers will retire EVERY SINGLE DAY for the next ten years, however, which suggests that a huge number of people are going to move from being contributors to these programs to recipients.

Oh, and both Social Security and Medicare already run annual deficits.

These politicians must be expecting quite a bit from my little Madison if they plan to balance the budget and pay down the debt with her future earnings.

But they don’t actually plan to balance the budget and pay down the debt.  The simple fact is it can’t honestly be done without defaulting on the existing commitments in some capacity.  There’s just too much debt and not enough production.  Which leads us to the moral problem: this system is incredibly, unbelievably immoral.

Why should anyone be taxed and forced to pay for anything against their will?  What kind of system assigns debt to infants from the moment they draw their first breath in this world?  What kind of system incentivizes debt, dishonesty, consumption, and exploitation while punishing honesty and production?

My answer: a really bad one.

So did the economic problem lead to the moral problem or vice versa?  I am not sure but history does suggest that dishonest fiat money seems to always undermine the morality and stability of society.

I will have more thoughts on that in a later entry.  In the meantime be sure to order a copy of The Individual is Rising for a more in depth look at these economic problems, some financial strategies to prepare for the Great Reset, and more.

Focusing our attention back on the debt-trap: how best to prepare Maddie for life in a society that plans to confiscate her future earnings to pay for the immorality of earlier generations?

It is a shame that I have to spend any time at all on this question here in what is supposed to be the “Land of the Free”.  The more I think about it, the more I become convinced that education is the key to preparing our children for the world that awaits them.

Not education of the public kind, however.  It looks to me like the public schools are setting children up to be victims of the immoral System.  The public school system fosters a herd mentality and requires students to subordinate themselves to “authority” at all times.  Such an environment is not going to stimulate the creativity and self-confidence necessary to thrive in a society that expects the next generation to pay the debts of the previous.  Instead, this method of education is going to condition students to happily embrace their servitude to the System as it pillages the fruits of their labor in the name of the “common good”.

Far better to create an individualized educational experience tailored to Madison’s unique skills and interests.  Instead of forcing subjects upon her, why not let her guide her own education?  Rachel and I will probably need to do most of the guiding in the early years, but I suspect Madison will be plenty capable of determining her own path as she grows and matures.  Enabling self-education in this manner will certainly do a better job of preparing her for adult-hood than the government school system that conditions students to always seek guidance and permission from “experts” instead of trusting their own abilities.

Of course this self-education will need to be blended with social activities as well.  Fortunately, one can find all manner of groups, clubs, and activities using a simple internet search these days so I don’t see this being much of a problem.  What will Madison like to do?  Dance?  Aikido?  Art?  Music?  Softball?  All of the above?

The world will be her oyster…

More to come,

Signature

 

 

 

 

 

Joe Withrow
Wayward Philosopher

 

For more of Joe’s thoughts on the Great Reset and regaining individual sovereignty please read “The Individual is Rising” which is available at http://www.theindividualisrising.com.  The book is also available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions.

Maddie Coming Soon

submitted by jwithrow.Maddie

Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
Maddie Coming Soon

October 6, 2014
Hot Springs, VA

The S&P opened at $1,975, gold is down to $1,190, oil is hanging around $88, bitcoin back up slightly to $327, and the 10-year is checking in at 2.44%.  While this wouldn’t be a bad time to pick up an ounce or two of the yellow metal, the 10-year Treasury rate is what’s really worth keeping an eye on.  How long can the Fed keep rates suppressed?  Some say forever; some say until December.  I say “I don’t know”.  Assuming the folks who say forever are wrong, what then happens when rates go up? Some say the Fed can manage the increase in a gradual fashion; some say the poor 10-year Treasury has been cooped up for so long that it will blow through the roof once free of its chains.  I say “I don’t know” again but I tend to think the latter is probably more likely.  And then…

Shifting gears from economic future to family future, wife Rachel is 39.5 weeks pregnant as of today!  Coming soon: a little girl. How exciting!  We shall call her “Maddie”.  With Rachel busy working on her nesting list, I close my eyes and try to catch a glimpse of the future that awaits little Madison.

Look at all those traps.

Heavy metal toxins in infant vaccines? Round-up ready GMO fruits and vegetables?  Ouch.

Government-run public school system designed to feed the administrators and instill collectivist ideals in the children?  Probably best to steer clear.

Skyrocketing college tuition?  Will there even be jobs left in this economy in twenty-some years?

Opening my eyes, I am confident that we have a pretty good plan to help Maddie tackle the college problem: an infinite banking insurance policy paired with a “hands-off” approach.  We can fund a life insurance policy for Madison as soon as she turns two weeks old.  With an annual premium of $3,000 per year, the policy will have a cash value of at least $60,000 by the time Madison reaches adult-hood.  Then we sign the policy over to her and say follow your passion.  Want to travel the world?  Go for it.  Want to start a business?  Here’s your working capital.  Want to go to college?  No need for student loans.

Of course that $60,000 cash value figure is based on today’s purchasing power.  I am confident the insurance company will be able to keep up with inflation via long-term investments and sound actuarial pricing on new policies such that Madison’s policy dividends will keep up with inflation also.  Or maybe the dollar crashes and the insurance industry has to denominate their policies in gold in order to survive.  Wouldn’t that be something!  Then we wouldn’t need to worry about inflation because we would be using REAL money again!

Or maybe this strategy blows up in our face… who knows.  We examine the Infinite Banking Concept (IBC) in more detail in our book “The Individual is Rising” – you can get it here.

So what is college for anyway?  As best I can tell, people go to college to receive a degree that says they went to college.  Then they try to get a job where they can sit behind a desk all day.  That’s pretty much it.  I suspect there was a little more to it years ago (early-to-mid 20th century?) and of course there are some exceptions – especially in the specialized fields like engineering.

Think about it.  What is the first thing people say when they go to a job interview?  “I have a degree in such and such”.  This is supposed to be a strong selling point for the potential employee… but is it really?  What does having a degree actually tell you about someone?  You can probably safely assume that this person has spent a fair amount of time drinking cheap beer.  I don’t know that you can really deduce much else.  Doesn’t everybody have a degree these days?  Doesn’t the government finance ninety-some percent of those degrees?

Doesn’t sound like much of a selling point to me.

We live in a ‘have’ oriented society – we place a premium on ‘having’ things.  A degree, a nice car, a big house, a fancy wardrobe, you name it.  We tend to link our own self-worth to what we ‘have’.  We shouldn’t do that.  Much more important than ‘having’ is ‘doing’.  What are you doing to make your life better?  What are you doing to make your family’s life better?  But wait, there’s something even more important: ‘being’.  What is the nature of your character?  Are you a kind and strong-willed person?  Can others count on you to be honest?  Do you understand that your self-worth is derived from what’s within?  Do you recognize how powerful and wise you truly are?

Having is nice.  Doing is great.  Being is essential.  Focus on the being and everything else will fall into place.  This is the one lesson I hope my daughter learns from me; any other lessons imparted from me to her will be of lesser importance.  I also firmly believe it is a two-way street… I can’t wait to find out what she has to teach me also!

Back to the present: looks like I have some tasks assigned to me on wife’s nesting list.  It is best not to keep her waiting.

Until the morrow,

Signature

 

 

 

 

 

Joe Withrow
Wayward Philosopher

 

For more of Joe’s thoughts on the Great Reset and regaining individual sovereignty please read “The Individual is Rising” which is available at http://www.theindividualisrising.com.  The book is also available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions.

Saving

submitted by jwithrow.Fishing Boat

We have been hearing all about how most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and not saving any money as justification for the brilliant (*cough*) myRA government savings plans so we felt that it would be prudent to take a deeper look at what ‘saving’ is.

You see, we don’t think that saving is about money. Money is involved, but it is not the focus. Saving is really about storing our productive efforts.

It goes back to the days of barter…

Back then the fisherman would catch extra fish in the morning and take them to the market in the afternoon to trade his extra fish with the farmer for vegetables. His wife liked to have vegetables with her fish for supper so he had to trade for vegetables instead of the painted rock that he really liked.

The fisherman had learned that fish would start to smell bad the day after being caught so he had no choice but to trade all of his extra fish every afternoon and go fishing for more again every morning.

Until the fisherman discovered gold. Then the fisherman could trade his extra fish for gold and take the next day off. The fisherman didn’t really care about amassing gold; he just figured out that gold would let him store his production so he didn’t have to go fishing every single day to feed his family. And it turned out that three day old gold smelled much better than three day old fish – this was a bonus.

So saving was born!

Somewhere along the line we forgot this and started to think that saving was about amassing money. And on top of that we started to think that money was paper and not gold. We are so forgetful!

So when saving became about money and not about production we opened the door to debt. We started to think that instead of saving we could just borrow whatever money we needed. After all, the credit money still bought stuff just like the saved money except we didn’t have to wait to use it!

But then when we had to start using our entire paycheck to pay back all of the credit money we found out that we had to be even more productive now than before we went into debt. Our plan backfired.

We didn’t learn from our smart fisherman ancestor and now we had to go fishing both in the morning and in the afternoon to have enough fish for our supper and also enough to trade for vegetables so our wife won’t get mad and also enough to give to the banker to pay him back for the credit money that bought us the really neat painted rock.

Darn painted rocks.

The Middle-Class is Fading

submitted by jwithrow.Fire Dollar

The middle-class is fading. Fast.

The jobs that have been lost since the financial system teetered on implosion in 2008 have not come back. Those jobs are not coming back. More education won’t bring them back. More laws won’t bring them back.

The government’s job report says that more and more jobs are being created, but guess what? They are mostly low paid part-time or temporary jobs; they are not the middle management jobs in the high rise buildings.

As for why the middle-class is being wiped out, it’s no mystery. This very same scenario has occurred all throughout history. One can look back as far as the time of the Roman Empire and see that there is nothing new under the sun. History rhymes and those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.

You see, every time the currency of the land has been inflated and debased, the middle-class has been destroyed. Inflation transfers value from those who must work to earn currency to those who control the currency supply.

They don’t tell you this in school. They don’t tell you this in college. They don’t even tell you this if you major in finance or economics. They probably don’t know themselves. So most people never understand what is happening. Their paycheck gets bigger and bigger so they can’t figure out why they can never get ahead. They don’t realize that their bigger paycheck is buying less and less. They don’t understand the difference between nominal income and real income.

In Roman times it was the government that controlled the currency supply. The Romans would collect taxes and tributes from citizens and conquered peoples and they would then melt the precious metal coins and add in cheaper metals such as copper to re-mint more coins of lower value. They would then pay the Roman army with these cheaper coins and pretend that they had the same value as before. The general market caught on to this process and began to charge higher prices for food and goods in response. The middle-class was destroyed over time and eventually the economy collapsed. Then the Empire fell.

In modern times it is the Federal Reserve and the other central banks of the world that control the currency supply. They do this by simply creating currency units from nothing and using the new currency as they see fit. They inject some of this new currency into the banking system, they use some of the new currency to buy government debt, and they inject some of the new currency into the IMF and foreign central banks. This directly leads to more and more debt and an increase in consumer prices across the board.

They are printing currency at will so why is the middle-class working so hard for 2% annual raises?

The rules of the game have changed and those unable to recognize this and adjust accordingly will be wiped out with the middle-class – just as has happened throughout history.

Investing in Gold and Silver Bullion

submitted by jwithrow.Sound Money

Investing in gold and silver bullion is, believe it or not, much easier than investing in stocks, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, or bonds.

If the concept of investing in gold and silver seems strange to you, it is only because the financial media has marginalized the precious metals in order to sell more paper equities and the mainstream media has associated the precious metals with paranoid dooms-dayers. And apparently you haven’t been reading our little blog here.

You see, gold is money. It has been for all of recorded history.

You can’t pay your taxes with gold because your government knows that no one would want government currency if you could. And then your government would be in big trouble.

We talk about the ‘why’ in more detail here and here so now let’s look at the ‘how’.

Gold and silver bullion is available in the form of coins and bars of varying weights and measures and purchases can be made either in person at a reputable coin dealer or online through an internet dealer.

The advantage of buying from a local coin dealer is that you can pay in cash anonymously and you can potentially develop a working relationship with the dealer. The downside is that you will have to pay your state sales tax on all bullion purchases made at a local dealer.

The advantage of buying online is that you don’t have to leave your home and you can avoid the state sales tax (for the time being, anyway). The downside is that you cannot purchase anonymously and there is a delay between purchase and delivery.

Gold and silver bullion can also be sold back to the same dealers – be sure to research their individual policy.

The IRS currently classifies precious metal bullion as a collectible and thus taxes the gain on sale at the collectible rate which is 28%. Keep this in mind if you choose to invest in gold and silver bullion, especially if you sacrifice anonymity and purchase online. Also, be sure to stay updated on the current tax laws regarding gold and silver bullion as they could change at any given time.

There are many strategies when it comes to investing in gold and silver but a general rule of thumb is to stay away from unique collectibles (numismatics) unless you are very knowledgeable in the field. The reason being is that numismatics carry a much higher premium than standard bullion from well-known mints but there is a much smaller market for these rare coins and thus they are much less liquid.

Our favorite strategy is to dollar-cost-average into both gold and silver periodically at the ratio of one American Gold Eagle to twenty American Silver Eagles.

Buy Gold Online

Sound Money

submitted by jwithrow.CurrenciesinGold100years

The most important facet of free market capitalism is sound money. If you don’t have sound money then you don’t have free market capitalism – you have something else.

Sound money is simply money that serves as a reliable store of value. Put another way, sound money is money that does not constantly lose its purchasing power. Sound money affords one a reasonable expectation that one unit of money today will buy the same amount of goods and services as one unit of money tomorrow. And next month. And ten years from now.

What a novel concept!

Anyone who has taken a finance course is familiar with the time value of money principle. In finance class, we learn to discount our money over time based on the inflation rate. We are taught, correctly, that present dollars are worth more than future dollars.

What we are not taught is that this is a deformation of free market capitalism!

The general market has chosen gold and silver to serve as money throughout most of history because the precious metals are particularly well suited for this purpose: they are limited in supply, they have functional utility outside of the monetary system, and, unlike our money today, they cannot be created from nothing.

Make no mistake about it, that’s where our money comes from today: nothing. It is created from nothing and then loaned into existence at interest. See the Hidden Secrets of Money video series for a more thorough examination of our money.

You see, money should not be a function of government nor should it be a function of a central bank behind closed doors. And it certainly shouldn’t be created from nothing. This is why the U.S. Constitution only authorizes gold and silver as legal tender; the Founders knew well the virtues of sound money and the dangers of fiat currency.

Did you know that the U.S. dollar was defined by the Coinage Act of 1792 to be 371.25 grains of fine silver? This act set the standard weight and measure of the dollar in terms of silver and individuals in the market were still free to accept or reject coins of differing weights and measures as they saw fit.

But we digress.

Here is why sound money is important to you:Thomas Jefferson Money Quote

Every dollar to your name is constantly losing value and there is no way for you to predict how much value your savings will lose over time.

This is a direct result of the monetary system that is in place whereby central banks create money from nothing and then lend that money to governments and to commercial banks at interest. That money then enters the economy when governments spend it and when commercial banks lend it out to customers. This is done constantly and it is why your money constantly loses value. Such a system has a profound impact on people from every walk of life.

How can we accurately plan for anything long-term if our money is constantly losing value? We can only guess.

What we do know from history is that sound money leads to a stable economy while fiat money leads to booms and busts.

The general market prefers the former while big government prefers the latter.

For more information on the sound money principle see the article links below. For a lot more information on sound money and monetary history see the book links below.

The Principle of Sound Money

The Simplicity of Sound Money

An Introduction to Sound Money