By Vasko Kohlmayer ——Bio and Archives--August 10, 2010
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Government eventually ruins that which it controls and manages. Government controls and manages our currency. Therefore, government will eventually ruin our currency.If the initial premise is true, sooner or later the dollar will be destroyed. The conclusion follows logically from the first premise. A number of writers have written about the dollar's long term decline, since the federal government began its takeover in 1913 with the establishment of the Federal Reserve System. (I previously touched on the subject here.) Thirty-nine years ago the federal government finally succeeded in gaining complete control over our money by severing its last link to gold. The results of all this government interference have been both dire and predictable: The dollar is worth less than one tenth today of what it was worth in 1913. The downward slide has been especially pronounced since the closing of the gold window in 1971. Having been in steady decline for decades, the dollar is now entering the end game. Weighted with colossal debts that cannot be paid, a sharp devaluation awaits at some point in the not-too-distant future. The dollar will suddenly lose much of its already diminished value. It will be a mess and there will be a lot of pain. Our currency's fate has been sealed the moment it came under governmental control. Most conservatives are blind to this and assign blame wrongly. They assume that irresponsible politicians are responsible for the dollar's travails. We tend to think that once we vote the good guys in everything will be all right. But this is the same as to say that the Soviet Union and the Eastern Block did so poorly, because the wrong people were in charge. The problem lay obviously much deeper. Its root was state control of everything, and everything that the state controls will eventually come to grief. That's why those countries collapsed. The American state controls the dollar. Hence its decline and impending doom. Conservatives almost invariably fail to make that connection. Rothbard's observation about free-marketers being unconcerned about state control of money lays bare a glaring inconsistency – if not an outright contradiction – in the prevailing conservative worldview. We would do well to ponder this point carefully.
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Born and raised under communism, Vasko Kohlmayer is a naturalized American citizen. His work has appeared in various newspapers, magazines and internet journals.