The End Game
The State will not let it's currency die without taking your wealth to the grave first.
Hello,
Welcome to another post from Serfdom Road.
“What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (b. 1770, d. 1831)
The Empire Strikes Back
The collapse of empires takes time, and then all of a sudden, it accelerates.
Those ignorant, or unprepared, are caught in the destruction and mayhem.
Observing the US as an empire, or even the “West” as a whole, we likely reached the end of the Age of Decadence in the early 1980s, with the Age of Decline marked by the Iran-Contra affair of the mid-80s, the “Black Monday” stock market crash of 1987, the Japanese asset bubble collapse of 1990, the Monica Lewinsky affair of 1998, and the “Dotcom” stock market crash of 2000.
It’s worth noting, the peak in US interest rates was also during the dawn of the Age of Decline - they headed to zero ever since.
The terrorist attacks on 9/11 brought the dawn of the Age of Collapse - marked by the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the illegal war in Iraq in 2003, the 2008 financial crisis, the European sovereign debt crisis of 2010, the first brick of the EU being pulled with Brexit in 2016, the COVID mania of 2020, and recently the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Again, it is worth noting, Russia now only accepts payment for natural gas in roubles, not dollars - a massive attack on the last “soft” weapon the US can deploy: the petrodollar.
Great empires cannot sustain themselves, as the Age of Decadence breeds a lack of morality, courage, and competency, it cannot continue to rely on age-old means of exploration, discovery, investment, and saving, to reignite the empire.
It must further it’s use of plunder and violence to enslave it’s subjects, and crush it’s enemies, until it runs out of steam, and the inevitable happens: collapse.
Weapon of Choice
Recently, Germany reported it’s highest rate of inflation for 40 years, at 7.4% - and that’s the massaged number the politicians in The Bundestag want you to know.
The last reading for the US was 8.5%, for the UK it was 7.0%, and for Canada it was 6.7% - a higher cost of living all round for everyone!
In fact, looking past the “Putin’s Price Hike” nonsense, inflation has been increasing since the start of the COVID mania.
Below is a chart showing the US inflation rate for the past 5 years.
To be clear, inflation is not prices increasing, this is a consequence of inflation.
What is being inflated, is the currency supply - more currency chasing fewer goods and services, causes prices to increase.
In other words: the value of the currency diminishes as the supply of the currency increases.
Look at the chart below for M2 Money (Currency) Supply in the US, over the same time period - the x-axis is in billions!
If supply increases (inflation), then value diminishes, and prices increase - more accurately, prices are not actually increasing, it is the value of the currency declining.
You need more and more currency units to pay for the same good or service as before.
It is almost tragic, with the lack of financial education in public schools, most people believe anything from the State is truly “free” - including stimulus checks.
Nothing from the State is free.
Everything has to be paid for eventually, either through taxation, or the hidden tax: inflation.
Every time the government needs financing, it either steals through taxation, or it prints the currency it needs, and with each newly printed currency unit, the purchasing power of your bank account erodes.
This counterfeiting exercise cannot happen when the State is forced to use real money to 100% back it’s currency - historically, this was gold.
Gold is money.
Gold has value as money because of it’s properties that were forged in the furnace of a dying star.
Gold has value because it maintains it’s properties over millennia (store of value), each ounce of gold is the same as any other ounce of gold (fungible and a unit of account), and it is not someone else’s liability - your gold won’t disappear if someone else becomes bankrupt.
Currency is a money substitute.
Currency (receipts or banknotes) was introduced to represent money, so you did not need to carry all your gold coins with you.
However, throughout history, particularly 1913 (creation of the US Federal Reserve Banking System), 1933 (Executive Order 6102), and 1971 (End of the Bretton Woods System), in the US, the connection between money and currency has now been severed.
Today, we have fiat currency - currency not backed by money, with value only derived from the power of the State.
Further reading: Why Gold?
Fiat currency, including those banknotes and coins in your pocket, have no intrinsic value - because they have no freely-chosen use.
They can be used as a medium of exchange, but this is only because the State decrees it (by fiat) to be legal tender - or rather, you can only pay your taxes with their fiat currency.
If you don’t pay your taxes, you risk going to prison.
Fiat currency only has value because of the coercive power of the State.
The State acts much like any other criminal syndicate, it has it’s own product to sell (fiat currency), and it will use any means necessary (monopoly on violence) to maintain it’s value.
For the State, fiat currency is used to bribe the public with promises of “free” medical care, “free” education, and “free” wars.
“Free at the point of use” is not “free” either.
The State must leverage it’s own central bank to keep the currency supply expanding exponentially - this is inflation.
Inflation increases the number of currency units faster than the number of goods and services in the economy - prices increase.
Inflation, in effect, devalues the State’s own product against the coercive force trying to maintain it’s value.
For the State to keep growing, it must expand the currency supply, and to support it’s own currency, it must increase it’s coercive nature.
Fiat currency is trapped between two opposing forces: inflation and coercion.
Eventually, inflation wins out, but not before the State has used every last drop of it’s monopoly on violence.
In fact, the State constantly needs an enemy to fight, or if the enemy is not well-equipped, it will equip them, and if there is no enemy, it will create one.
This not only helps the State to use an excuse to keep expanding the currency supply (without triggering a sovereign debt crisis), it also allows the State to advance it’s control over the population.
It is known that Wall Street funded both sides of World War II, and that the US gave weapons to the Taliban in the 1980s to fight the Soviets - over the past 40 years you could tell who would be the enemy of tomorrow for the US, the one being financed today.
The Final Assault
As the inflation beast demolishes everyone’s purchasing power, the State must use it’s monopoly on violence to retain any semblance of value in the currency.
These efforts start out on the surface as quite benign, and for the “good of the people”.
These measures are largely grouped under either capital controls or price controls.
However, once they have been flouted, or derided by the public, the State is left with it’s last weapon: physical controls.
In 1933, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed signed Executive Order 6102, ordering the public to deposit all their gold bullion at a Federal Reserve Bank.
This was shortly after the Great Depression, and the Federal Reserve was low on gold and could not print more currency units - it needed more gold.
Many citizens wilfully handed over their gold due to their mis-guided patriotism, in return for fiat currency.
Executive Order 6102 was not repealed until 1974.
In 1931, two years prior to Executive Order 6102, the Bank of England ended the convertibility of pound sterling to gold.
In both cases, it was a response to the Great Depression, but also allowed the State to print more currency to help “stimulate” the economy.
It’s truly astounding how the general public could not see the State openly devaluing their purchasing power, and yet, here we are nearly 100 years later.
Then, in 1966, in the UK, under the Labour government, restrictions on the possession of gold bullion were enacted - it was illegal to own more than four gold coins without a special licence from the Bank of England.
In order to finance World War II, British citizens voluntarily exchanged their gold sovereigns for war bonds - it was their patriotic duty of course.
The post-war Labour government brought in the Exchange Control Act, in 1947, placing convertibility restrictions on pound sterling.
British citizens were no longer free to invest in foreign assets, including gold from overseas.
In 1966, the government amended the 1947 Exchange Control Act to include the importation of gold coins.
Individuals were also only allowed to possess up to 4 gold coins dated after 1837. If you had more, you needed a collector’s licence from the Bank of England.
While these controls were often flouted by the public, they were not officially abolished until 1979, by the government of UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
In 1944, representatives from the Allied nations met in Bretton Woods, US, to develop a new monetary system - one in which the US dollar would be tied to gold, and every other currency tied to the US dollar.
By 1971, after printing more currency then the US had in gold reserves, to fund the Vietnam War, many nations, including France, started dumping their US dollars in return for gold.
As the US was being depleted of it’s gold reserves, US President Nixon decided to effectively end the Bretton Woods system, by taking the US off the gold standard.
This act formed part of the “Nixon Shock” - a series of economic measures, including wage and price controls, to tame the inflation beast.
As with any government intervention, any concern for “unintended consequences” is lost to the wind.
Inflation gave way to stagflation (high unemployment and high inflation) and the US dollar plummeted in value.
To remedy the situation, Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State, worked with the Saudis to get them to agree to sell oil only in US dollars, and to recycle any profits back to the US - either by buying US bonds, stocks, or even weapons.
The petrodollar system was born.
Moving forward to today, we still live under some form of capital controls.
For example, do you believe the currency in your bank account is yours? Not quite.
On your personal balance sheet, your bank deposit would be listed as an asset, for you. However, on the bank’s balance sheet, it would be listed as a liability - the bank owes you that amount but does not keep it safely hidden in a draw with your name on it.
In other words, as soon as you deposit currency at the bank, it is immediately added to other bank deposits as one liability.
All bank deposits are then used to either pay interest, or to create new loans “out of thin air” that only need to be backed by a certain amount of bank deposits - for example, for every $1,000 bank loan, the bank may only hold $100 in bank deposits.
Banks are so levered-up with debt, that if too many of their assets (interest-bearing loans) are defaulted, or they cannot create more assets from more bank deposits, they risk bankruptcy.
For example, Barclays plc, in their 2021 financial statements reported:
Total Assets: £1,384bn
Total Liabilities: £1,314bn
Total Equity: £70bn
So 95% of Barclays’ assets are funded by debt - not exactly a safe and secure company.
The story is the same for Deutsche Bank AG, from their 2021 financial statements:
Total Assets: €1,020bn
Total Liabilities: €985bn
Total Equity: €35bn
So 97% of Deutsche Bank’s assets are funded by debt - still surprising for many how this bank has not yet failed.
This is why they cannot allow you to withdraw too much of your bank deposit too soon - effectively they have controls to avoid a bank-run.
Most British banks have a cash withdrawal limit of £300 per day. Of course, they will say this is for your benefit, in case of identity theft or your bank card being stolen.
This is purely to avoid a bank-run, and to allow the bank to keep creating loans “out of thin air”.
Now the situation in the US is probably worse. In fact, to some degree, there is more capitalism in China than there is in the US today.
For example, The Internal Revenue Service (IRS), in the US, is authorised to certify any delinquent tax debt to the State Department for action.
Seriously delinquent tax debt is “an individual's unpaid, legally enforceable federal tax debt (including interest and penalties) totalling more than $55,000.”
The State Department has the power to revoke a US citizen’s passport, for having greater than $55,000 in delinquent tax debt.
What’s worse is that this decision can be reversed if the “tax debt…becomes legally unenforceable…or the certification is erroneous”.
Basically, the US government has the power to declare you have a significant enough tax debt, whether you legally do or not, and then confiscate your passport.
Then there is the recent news that US President Joe Biden has proposed selling the seized assets of Russian oligarchs.
These assets include a $90million yacht belonging to Viktor Vekselberg, and cash in US bank accounts - all totalling in the region of hundreds of billions of dollars.
If you think the US government is going only wield this power against Russian oligarchs, think again.
US President Joe Biden recently stated that the so-called MAGA crowd are “the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history.”
In fact, the Canadian truckers, protesting against more COVID mania, have experienced asset seizure themselves from the authoritarian Trudeau regime.
In other news, The International Monetary Fund (IMF), in March this year, published a policy paper on capital controls - of course, they call them capital flow management measures.
The End Game
Every empire eventually collapses.
The Roman Empire collapsed under it’s own weight but not before it destroyed it’s own monetary system, fought endless wars, and captivated the masses with “bread and circuses”.
The Ancien Régime, or Kingdom of France, collapsed after 800 years of rule, with the final century featuring the introduction of a corrupt central bank, and the final few years featuring the bloody French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, and the execution of King Louis XVI.
Even though the British Empire, was once described as “the empire on which the sun never sets”, it too mostly collapsed after the end of World War II, while still holding on to a few territories decades after, including Hong Kong, which was finally relinquished in 1997.
The “Western” Empire, under the dominance of the United States, is now in a state of collapse.
After decades of allowing the State to take more and more responsibility over our lives, it has had to control more and more of every aspect of our lives.
It has needed to separate the child from the family, the church from the religious, the culture from the people, and the value from the currency, in order to control the masses.
Here on in, expect the State to employ stricter restrictions on your private property, and by extension, your freedom.
The world is already moving rapidly towards a cashless society, and ultimately a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
Privacy will be dead.
COVID lockdowns are going to give way to climate lockdowns, which like any lockdown before, has more to do with flooding the economy with billions more currency units, to keep the State in power.
However, recent TV performances from Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ardern, Elizabeth Warren, and Dan Andrews, suggest that cracks are already appearing in the last stronghold of the State.
For you to see it through to the other side, it is important to be involved in a community of like-minded people with a diverse set of valuable skills.
Learn to become more self-sufficient, and be comfortable taking more responsibility for your own life.
Fundamentally, take better care of your physical and mental health.
Healthy mind, healthy body.
Last of all… buy gold!
Bonus Feature
If you want a podcast to remind you of what it takes to keep a society going, what has caused our recent decline, and how we can all be more brave, this recent one from James Delingpole is fantastic!
https://rumble.com/v13nal5-andrew-tate.html
I hope you have found this article insightful and helpful!
Please feel free to comment below.
Kind regards,
Le Libérateur
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