Next - An American Revolution?

Wish I could print money. Wouldn't that be great! But if I did, I would be a criminal - a counterfeiter.

Ditto for coins. If I made brass coins plated with gold and passed them around - that would be criminal: counterfeiting would be the charge. Yet, emperors and monarchs have been doing precisely this for millennia - and it is called "debasement." It has caused ruinous inflations, and brought flourishing empires crashing down.

Nothing much has changed, huh?

What would I do if I could print money and exchange it for goods and services? What would I buy? Well, a few kilos of ganja to begin with. Beer. And so on.

But what does Uncle Sam spend his paper US dollars on?

Some ideas emerge from this column by Lew Rockwell, titled "The Other Captive Nations," in which he lists out a long list of tyrannies in the Middle East and elsewhere that are being propped up with this funny Uncle Sam money. He writes:

One of the great shocks that has greeted Americans this year has been to discover, perhaps for the first time, that the US has long been running its own bloc of satellite dictatorships in many parts of the world. Just as the Soviet Union had its "captive nations," so too the US has its own collection of valiant allies who are as wicked and oppressive toward their own peoples as the communist dictators of old. 

Americans discovered this only recently due to the massive wave of protests all over the Arab world. Libya is one example. But there is also Egypt and Tunisia, plus Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, and Morocco, Djibouti, and other states, perhaps Saudi Arabia and the UAE too. In each case, a government in the pay and control of the US is facing a population sick of the human rights violations, the oppression, the economic backwardness, the injustice and the attacks on free speech and freedom of movement.

He adds that this "exposes the gross hypocrisy of US foreign policy."

And he concludes on a revolutionary note - calling for another American Revolution:

As such, these revolutions can mean more than the overthrow of despots; they can end in overthrowing the despotic policy and empire headquartered in Washington, DC. Want to join me in the streets?

LewRockwell.com supports Ron Paul, the Republican Congressman from Texas, a medical doctor, an Austrian economist, author of many books on Liberty including the recent End The Fed, advocating shutting down the US Federal Reserve that prints these dollars. He is pretty big in the "Tea Party Movement" - though there are many who ridicule him for his views, including especially his strong stand on a "non-interventionist foreign policy." He currently chairs a committe set up by the House to inquire into Fed matters. But if The American People wake up to his ideas, who knows, it is there that the next big Revolution could occur.

I found some quotes from Cato's Letters that ought to make Americans closely study the ideas Ron Paul is advocating. Written in th 1720s in England, these papers were widely read in the America of the old Revolution:

I have often seen honest Tories foolishly defending knavish Tories; and untainted Whigs protecting corrupt Whigs, even in instances where they acted against the Principles of all Whigs; and by that means depreciated Whiggism itself, and gave the stupid Herd Occasion to believe that they had no Principles at all, but were only a factious Combination for Preferment and Power....

Let us not therefore, for the Time to come, suffer ourselves to be engaged in empty and pernicious Contentions; which can only tend to make us the Property and Harvest of Pickpockets: Let us learn to value an honest Man of another Party, more than a Knave of our own: Let the only Contention be, who shall be most ready to spew out their own Rogues; and I will be answerable that all other Differences will soon be at an end. Indeed, there had been no such Thing as Party now in England, if we had not been betrayed by those whom we trusted.

The Republican-Democrat "party politics" of the USSA is not going to set America right. It needs The People to get involved - and the men leading the way - that is, the correct way - are Ron Paul and, of course, Rockwell, himself the founder and president of the Mises Institute. This means that some very serious Principles are involved - and will be resolutely upheld.

I conclude with another paragraph from the same issue of Cato's Letters. The authors state their creed as journalists:

This Letter of Advice is not intended for those who share already in the publick Spoils, or who, like Jackalls, hunt down the Lion's Prey, that they may have the picking of the Bones, when their Masters are glutted. But I would persuade the poor, the injured, the distressed People, to be no longer the Dupes and Property of Hypocrites and Traytors. But very few can share in the wages of Iniquity, and all the rest must suffer; the People's Interest is the publick Interest; it signifies the same Thing: Whatever these Betrayers of their Country get, the People must lose; and, what is worse, must lose a great deal more than the others can get; for such Conspiracies and Extortions cannot be successfully carried on, corrupting the Guardians of the publick Liberty, and the almost total Dissolution of the Principles of Government.

The essay is titled The Leaders of Parties, their usual Views - Advice to all Parties to be no longer misled. The authors begin thus:

A very great Authority has told us, that 'Tis worth no Man's Time to serve a Party, unless he can now and then get good jobbs by it. This, I can safely say, has been the constant Principle and Practice of every leading Patriot, ever since I have been capable of observing publick Transactions; the Alpha and Omega of all their actions.

Recommended reading: My previous post on Constitutionalism - and its Failure.