Think about it.. Without money, you can't really do much in today's day and age. Transportation costs money, food costs money, kids cost money, school costs money, everything costs money. With enough money, you are free to choose whatever you want to choose. Without enough, you are stuck doing what you can. You are bound to what you can afford, and the less you have, the less you can afford.
So what, exactly, is money? It has changed from generation to generation, country to country, and from time to time, but it always represents the same thing: some arbitrary value made up by someone other than yourself. You can't just print some money and be cool, because if you try, you will have federal agents at your door in no time. They don't like it when people mess with their money.. No gang does.
"Well, we could always go back to the gold standard. That would solve all of our money problems!" While this is great in theory, in reality, it won't change a thing. It will slow their ability to print more money, and prevent the economic problems that come along with an ever-expanding money supply, but in the end, you'll still have problems. Not even gold is safe from the breaking of the promise of money. True, it isn't fiat money, so it has intrinsic value beyond that of an empty promise, but there is only so much of it. And it is difficult to store securely. It's heavy, so it isn't transported easily. And most importantly, there are SO many other important uses for gold that it seems silly to keep it all hoarded up as money.
You see, we have trillions upon trillions of little pieces of paper here in the U.S. Each and every one of them represents a promise made by the full faith and power of our government. Just let that sink in.. Our money is a government promise. What does history tell us about government promises? Don't have time to read your history? Well, no worries! Spoiler alert: They break them. Damn near every time..
So, what do we have so far? Money is a promise made by our government that basically assures us that we will be free if we collect enough of it. So you can safely view the poor, working or otherwise, as slaves. I would include the middle class as well, although at the rate this group is shrinking, it won't be relevant much longer. But since most middle class families are one disaster away from financial Armageddon, they aren't free. Freedom is being able to pay the 15% capital gains tax rate because your money is working hard for you, giving you time to pursue the things you want to do. Most people don't have the starting capital, financial knowledge or acuity to become wealthy. Instead, they work hard to become rich, always paying the 50% plus tax rate the the working poor are hit with when it's all said and done. They kicker is, they never get there. They never get rich. One or two squeak by, but most just work their lives away, trying to build castles out of sand.
Here's the biggest problem: They keep printing more promises. Promises that were already damn-near empty are now losing value by the second as more and more sheets of green paper bills fly off the printing presses. Each dollar that gets printed robs value from the dollars already in circulation. True, many of those dollars will get damaged or destroyed, so there is a need to keep new bills coming, but not at the rate that they are. For example, in 2014, roughly 6.6 billion notes were printed at the rate of 24.8 million per day, with a total face value of $560 million. Yet, only 5.95 million notes were destroyed. That's nearly 100 times more money created than was destroyed!!! Yikes! And if every dollar printed and added to the circulation is robbing value from the ones that exist, then we are in for big problems ahead. Freedom will be at the center of the issue, because we are selling our freedom in exchange for empty promises. Check out the U.S Treasury website for more recent facts and figures, if you dare..
I hate to say this, but we are in the middle of a global sovereign debt crisis, with our own government debt accounting for a tiny fraction of the overall outstanding global debt. So does it surprise anyone that a war cycle is building up right now? Does it surprise anyone that civil unrest is at an all-time high globally? Does it surprise anyone that the number one generator of money around the world is criminal enterprise? Drugs, human trafficking, slavery and other by-products of organized crime are earning one out of every $10 dollars earned. This is what government promises buy us..
