Mark Jeftovic wrote a wonderful essay arguing that WWIII has been in the works ever since industrialized nations jettisoned the classical gold standard at the outbreak of WWI.  Drawing from Ferdinand Lips’s insightful book, Gold Wars, Jeftovik recounts how everything changed once governments abandoned sound money in order to finance long wars.  From the mid-1600s all the way to 1914, the gold-linked British pound remained remarkably stable — even increasing its value relative to gold over those two and a half centuries (no doubt because of its proven resilience through myriad crises).  

Quoting Lips, Jeftovic soberly notes:

In 1914, at the beginning of World War 1, the gold standard was thrown overboard within a few weekends.  In order to finance wars, the world resorted to deficit spending and paper money.  Had the gold standard not been given up, the war would not have lasted more than a few months.  Instead, it lasted more than four years and ruined most of the major economies in the world and left millions dead in its wake.

Furthermore, had WWI “lasted only six months, currencies would not have been destroyed.  There would have been no Versailles Treaty and no German hyperinflation.”  Neither Hitler nor Lenin nor Stalin would have ever come to power.  “There would never have been a WWII” or a half-century Cold War that left the prospect of nuclear Armageddon hanging over an anxious world like an atomic-tipped sword of Damocles.

Instead of viewing today’s chaotic global events as the depressing prologue to WWIII, Jeftovic argues that the world has been in a constant state of war since 1914 — a war over who can legally possess gold, made possible only by the intentional destruction of sound money.  “[N]one of it would be possible without the ability to print value ex nihilo.  Fiat currency is a monumental fiction, one that can asset strip the productive segments of the economy, hollow out the middle class, while enriching the Cantillionaire class, the military-industrial complex and the Deep State.”

By abandoning the gold standard and instituting a financial system predicated on inherently worthless fiat monies, governments have constructed the “most effective and ruthless manner of enslaving whole populations while enriching the elite.  If there is a far-reaching, multi-generational global conspiracy — it is one that brainwashes the masses into trading their time, wealth and property for meaningless chits backed by nothing.”

With the last century’s monetary destruction laid bare, Jeftovic asks dryly, “Who needs global Communism?”  By manipulating the value of currencies in ways that empower the “ruling class” while impoverishing the middle class, privately controlled central banks have conquered the world.  Where Bolshevism failed, Marxist globalism has regrettably succeeded.

Lips’s and Jeftovic’s thesis is remarkably convincing.  If correct, then today’s looming financial crisis, drumbeat for new wars, and resurgence of Western totalitarianism can all be linked to that fateful moment in history when governments and private central banks adopted policies that all but guaranteed a necessary transition from gold-backed currencies to worthless paper alternatives.

Oh, those inherently worthless fiat currencies might have the full-faith backing of powerful nation states and their militaries, but when has a politician’s (or government’s) word stood for much of anything?  After all, when basic accounting meant that governments did not have the money to finance last century’s wars, pork barrel largesse, and expanded welfare State, they simply decoupled from the gold standard and started madly printing paper bills!  A century of IOUs now sit atop bank vaults filled with next to nothing.  At some point, the cost of funny money becomes deadly serious.

The lesson of the last century is simple: end fiat money and end forever wars.  End fiat money and end central bank oligarchy.  End fiat money and end the ever-growing bureaucratic Leviathan that rules over the people against their will.  End fiat money and end Western totalitarianism.  Big Government cannot stay big for long if it loses its power to print money and pay for its sins by stealing from every person’s pockets.

That’s impossible, you say?  Only powerful governments and their central bank masters can create reliable money?  We common serfs must do what our financial feudal lords command?  Not so!

Before the “ruling class” destroyed sound money, it was the common people who erected gold-backed currency for use in trade.  They did so because it made intuitive sense.  As Lips notes in Gold Wars:

By 1900, approximately fifty countries were on a gold standard, including all industrialized nations.  The interesting fact is that the modern gold standard was not planned at an international conference, nor was it invented by some genius.  It came by itself, naturally and based on experience.  The United Kingdom went on a gold standard against the intention of its government.  Only much later did laws turn an operative gold standard into an officially sanctioned gold standard.

Keep this historical fact in mind when the financial system goes belly-up and Western governments’ pathological need to “never let a crisis go to waste” leads them to implement freedom-killing central bank digital currencies.  You may not have any interest in gold, bitcoin, or commodity-backed cryptocurrencies today.  When the SHTF, though, communities will have every incentive to disregard federal authorities (and international regulations) and consider trading at a municipal or regional level with local scrip based on local resources and needs.

Normal people developed a system of gold-backed trade because it naturally stored value over distance and time better than any alternative.  Once the Federal Reserve gangsters and their money-laundering congressional co-conspirators finally pop the dollar’s inflated bubble, normal people will again have a choice: should they remain financial slaves to a monetary system that has stolen their savings through government-created inflation and funny money, or should they learn from their ancestors and take charge of their lives and fortunes by eliminating the central banks’ predatory program of Marxist globalism?  

That stark choice is coming whether you like it or not.  As Matthew Pipenburg wrote in an essay entitled “Debt, Currency Debasement, & War — The Timeless Pillars of Failure”: 

Debt, once it passes the Rubicon from extreme to just plain madness, destroys nations.  Just ask the former Spanish, British or Dutch empires.  Or ask the inter-war Germans.  Ask the Yugoslavians of the 1990’s or ask a historian of Ancient Rome or a merchant in modern Argentina.  It’s all pretty much the same story, just a different stage or curtain call.

The dollar’s “curtain call” is rapidly approaching.  Its unique status as a global reserve currency maintained by the most powerful nation the world has ever known will allow it to limp along like a wounded animal — angry and violent toward anything that gets in its way.  In the end, though, it will croak.  No currency can survive the poison of its own debasement.  

Pipenburg warns that government malfeasance has become so catastrophic that those with power today will be forced to distract the public with wars, pandemics, and other manufactured “emergencies” that might hide their culpability for the coming economic meltdown.  Quoting Ernest Hemingway, he concludes: “The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war.  Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin.  But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”

Yet we know exactly what to do.  We ordinary human beings, as powerless as we might feel, are equipped with the knowledge and strength to take back control of our financial freedom.  We the People are capable of building a future without the tyranny of central bank despots or the censorship-happy governments that do their bidding.  

“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for,” Hemingway also wrote.  We need only the grit and determination to defend it.

Furthermore, I consider that Marxist globalism must be destroyed.

Image via Picryl.