From Brandon Smith of The Bob Livingston Personal Liberty Alerts
I think one of the great misconceptions about the economic crisis is that solutions are always dependent on centralized government action. In truth, most financial disasters are actually caused by too much government action and involvement. This is not to overlook the fact that central banks like the Federal Reserve are also primer culprits; their machinations which are independent of government oversight fall into the category of deliberate sabotage, as I outlined in last week's article. Basically, the Fed bankrolls the corruption through fiat money creation while government officials and corporations utilize the money to wreak havoc on our living standards.
Ending the Fed would solve the fiat money problem, but there's still a host of agenda-driven politicians and bureaucrats to deal with before our nation can right the ship.
Really, the best way to fix our system would be to first force the government to interfere less. As a point of reference, consider the common media narratives surrounding the COVID pandemic. Along with the White House, the media has been the premier driver of irrational fear over the spread of COVID, which ended up being a minor threat compared to the hype as the median Infection Fatality Rate was no more than 0.27 percent. Yet, in response to this nothing-burger bureaucrats declared a national emergency requiring insane and unconstitutional lockdowns.
The lockdowns damaged the economy in ways people are only now beginning to comprehend, with hundreds of thousands of small businesses lost across the country. Not only that, but in response to the economic implosion the elites created, they then created over $6 trillion in new money through the Fed in a single year. This helicopter money or UBI (Universal Basic Income) has expedited a stagflationary disaster and helped to push prices on necessities to 40-year highs.
The media claims it was "COVID that caused the crash," but this is a lie. It was the response to COVID that caused the crash. The virus was merely incidental to the economic sabotage by governments and central banks. As we saw in conservative red states that defied the lockdowns and the vax mandates, economic activity thrived while leftists blue states suffered. And what did these blue states get in return for their economic sacrifices? Nothing. COVID infections continued to rage in blue states and deaths often outpaced red states with similar-sized populations.
In other words, the lockdowns, the mask mandates and the attempts to force vaccinations through medical tyranny saved zero lives and possibly made things worse. This is the legacy of government micro-management (And yes, let's not forget that Trump went along with these lockdowns at the beginning of the pandemic also. Biden is just the dirt-bag that continued the measures despite the massive amount of evidence that they don't work).
While the COVID event illustrates my point in a big way, there are a lot of more subtle problems that government intervention has caused that add up to one big fiscal calamity. Many of these threats require relatively simple solutions that government elites will rarely address and will try to stop at all costs. Here are just a few examples...
Inflation and stagflation? Back the dollar with hard commodities
The Federal Reserve and their minions have spent the better part of a century trying to convince the public that a gold standard for our currency is what caused the Great Depression and what could cause future depressions. They claim that limitations on money printing strangle liquidity and disrupt velocity. This is a lie.
Former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke openly admitted in 2002 in a speech in honor of Milton Friedman that it was the central bank that actually caused the deflationary collapse of the 1930s, not the existence of the gold standard. This rare moment of truth from a fed official was perhaps due to the sheer amount of evidence that Friedman often cited that contradicted the original anti-gold propaganda. Or maybe it happened because the banking elites did not see Friedman as a particular threat and figured no one among the public would read Bernanke's speech anyway.
In fact, a commodities foundation held the U.S. economy together for centuries until the Fed came along and the government slowly began removing gold from the picture. All subsequent economic crisis events have been exponentially worse ever since. When a commodities standard is employed, stability always follows. Just look at what has happened in Russia recently; their currency was on a downward spiral due to international sanctions, yet, when they reopened markets this past week the Ruble skyrocketed back to normal. Why? Because Putin had the currency coupled with gold. It's really that simple.
The U.S. and parts of Europe are facing their own inflationary disasters, and this is largely due to the unchecked avarice of central bank stimulus and government spending. The only way to secure the dollar's existence as a stable store of wealth would be to back it with hard commodities like precious metals (among others). This might kill the dollar's world reserve status because fiat printing would be impossible from that point on, but I got a news flash for those that hate the idea of grounding the dollar in commodities: We're going to lose world reserve status anyway, and it's going to happen soon.
One third of the world's population including Russia, China and India are already breaking from the dollar in bilateral trade. The U.S. might as well accept this as the reality and prepare to mitigate the coming currency collapse by supporting the dollar with commodities.
Oil shortages and energy inflation? Stop interfering with oil exploration
In early February of this year, the Biden administration made legal filings that halted new oil and gas leases including exploration due to conflicts over "climate costs." This interference with America's oil independence is only one of many instances starting with Biden's sabotage of the Keystone Pipeline in 2021. Interestingly, with gas prices doubling ever since Biden entered office, the White House now claims that they have nothing to do with energy inflation and are not preventing drilling in the U.S.
During the same period, Russia was establishing a 30-year oil and gas contract with China and laying the groundwork for a major pipeline to be finished by 2025. Russia was planning ahead while the U.S. was shifting from energy independence and a net exporter of oil, to once again becoming dependent on authoritarian regimes in the Arab world. Why?
Biden's excuse is usually climate alarmism. The Earth's temperature has only risen by 1 DEGREE CELCIUS in the past 100 years according to the NOAA, so the main argument against oil production in the U.S. is based on the fallacy that man-made carbon has any bearing whatsoever on climate changes. But maybe the carbon fraud is just a distraction from something else?
To fix any supply and demand issues in the U.S., we only need to start producing once again at levels that were easily obtainable in 2020. But what if the issue of supply contraction is not the main cause of oil inflation? I would note that the dollar is not only the world reserve currency but also the global petro-currency. Until recently, almost all oil was traded internationally using dollars. The decline or collapse of the dollar's buying power due to money printing and runaway inflation is more likely the direct cause of rising oil prices, and supply issues are secondary.
If the dollar was to collapse due to inflation, oil would be one of the first early indicators. With the establishment blocking new oil production and hindering the most cost-effective method for oil transport (pipelines), an engineered decline in supply becomes a very effective smokescreen for the death of the dollar. The crisis caused by the government and the Federal Reserve's currency destruction could then be blamed on supply chain issues and climate "peril." This is the reason why the establishment will not allow any future growth in U.S. oil production. They cannot allow the public to realize the precarious position our currency is in.
Debt and liquidity crisis? Let states establish their own banks and currencies
The state of North Dakota has an interesting model for economic independence, which utilizes a state-sponsored bank designed specifically to help businesses in North Dakota. I would say it's bizarre that this idea has not become popular across the nation, but I understand that if it did, the federal government and the central bankers would be very unhappy.
Here's the thing, while it is true that the Constitution explicitly states that the U.S. Treasury becomes the only issuer of U.S. currency, this was done at a time when our currency was backed by gold and silver and there was no corrupt middleman in the form of a central bank. In truth, the Treasury is now second fiddle to the Federal Reserve, and the constitutional regulations on money have already been broken. It's time for a new currency model and banking model.
An official bank in each state could decentralize power away from the Federal Reserve in terms of how debt and interest rates are handled, creating something closer to free-market discovery of interest rates rather than a rate dictatorship controlled by the Fed. By extension, each state could also issue currency scrip legal for use only within the borders of those states. This would create a secondary safety net against inflation in the dollar.
In other words, we decentralize the banking system, and we offer state alternatives that function not so much as competing currencies but as parallel or complementary currencies backed by and exchangeable in certain commodities. I believe very strongly that this model (along with a couple of dozen other measures I don't have space to cover here) could save our country from decades of economic mismanagement and bring us back from the brink of catastrophe.
States could do this without the permission of the federal government or the Federal Reserve, but I have little doubt that the elites would be in an uproar. Make no mistake, states will have to move to decouple from the national financial system and build alternatives as soon as they realize that the dollar is tanking, and stagflation is here to stay. And when they do, the establishment will declare such actions on par with "insurrection."
In the meantime, there are numerous preparations, and each individual can make in their local communities to insulate themselves from economic dangers. There are those that will say that local measures are only a stopgap and more national action needs to be taken. They are partially correct; in the long run, there needs to be wider organization toward free markets once again, along with redundancies in state economies. In the short term, we must do what we can.
Ultimately, the clearest solutions to our fiscal fate are not pursued because the elites do not want to save the economy, at least not in a way that ends up with them having less power. They want even more power and centralization that extends beyond national boundaries into the realm of a single global currency and a single globally managed market. Fixing the system can't happen because they won't let it happen.
This means that the only fix that truly matters will be the one that allows all other others to progress, and that fix is to remove these people from positions of influence and authority. You can't really repair the body in the wake of an illness until the offending disease is first eliminated.
To truth and knowledge,
Brandon Smith
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