Never-Ending Economic Experiment: More Government, Less Freedom!

Financial Markets Get Way Ahead of Themselves!

We typically think of enslavement as people’s hands and feet being bound by shackles and chains, yet there’s another type that’s devastating as well. It’s insidious, gradual, often hard to detect, and it frequently happens with the populace’s permission and assistance.

It wasn’t always this way, and there’s no denying that developed nations have evolved over the centuries in certain respects. Enslavement was much more overt in the economies of previous generations and epochs as ancient civilizations were built through brute force and the forced labor of legions of slaves.

Back then, it was accepted without question that there would be few “haves” and many “have-nots.” Marx, Engels, and others would eventually propose the idea that wealth should be distributed equally among the people. It was a nice idea in theory, but in practice, communism invariably led to governments controlling all aspects of people’s lives, inhibiting healthy competition, squelching basic freedoms, and keeping as many citizens on the dole as possible.

While communism failed to produce the anticipated results, a watered-down version, socialism, continues to entice hopeful idealists of all stripes. From the so-called “Green New Deal” to Modern Monetary Theory, as well as certain aspects of the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act that actually got passed into law, shades of socialism continue to imbue the policy trends of America, Europe, and elsewhere.

As more of our youths are inducted into socialism, independently thinking patriots have to wonder whether our society has really evolved over the past several generations. Strains of globalism – a one-world government controlling the politics and economics of the developed world in its entirety – continue to pervade the top-down decisions that career politicians impose upon us year after year.

This isn’t happening, and cannot happen, without the people’s permission though. As the U.S. Constitution acknowledges, governments only have as much power as we grant them. If today’s politicians deplete America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, perpetuate debt spending ad infinitum, fund wars without the people’s consent, and destroy our quality of life by debasing government money, just remember who put those politicians into power in the first place.

In some ways, modern times aren’t “better” than the past with regards to slavery, just different. Today’s enslavement isn’t enforced with metal chains but with the U.S. dollar, which the government and Federal Reserve will protect at all costs. Remember that they’ll lose their power over the populace if people forgo government funny money and turn to inflation-resistant wealth preservers like gold, silver, and cryptocurrency.

In the 2020s, keeping people and businesses on the dole isn’t materially different from the failed economic experiments of communist nations, even if it’s not quite as overt. Nowadays, socialism takes the form of “stimulus” bailouts, outright helicopter money, and tax incentives to promote the agendas of one or more elite political entities.

Thus, the chains are invisible but practically unbreakable as we increasingly trend toward a fully government-run economy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics can tout the seemingly low unemployment rate, but your taxpayer dollars still funded $2.24 billion of unemployment benefits in December 2022.

Meanwhile, as you can see in the chart shown above, there’s been a multi-year trend toward increasing the number of federal government workers. The COVID-19 pandemic gave the government an excuse to expand rapidly, but the trajectory was already in place long before that.

It’s not difficult for the government to achieve “full employment” if it’s been on a hiring spree, and that’s just on the federal level. There are also plenty of state, city, and county workers, as well as businesses that depend on government contracts.

With Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare programs, stimulus checks, “too big to fail” bailouts, and pension funds for government workers, there are innumerable ways to keep the population dependent and beholden to their masters nowadays. High inflation only makes us more dependent because people are unable to fend for themselves when fiat currency quickly loses its purchasing power.

Tragically, the never-ending economic experiment in the U.S. and Europe is a version of socialism that many citizens will never recognize. Few people understand what the Federal Reserve is and does, nor do they realize that a decade of pumping dollars into the banking system contributed to today’s inflation crisis.

Now, the same central bank that caused the problem in the first place is trusted to solve it by inhibiting economic prosperity at every opportunity. They’ll slow the U.S. economy to a crawl and inhibit private-sector job creation until they’re satisfied that the inflation genie is back in the bottle for a while.

The upshot of all this is a disconcerting dilemma – a central bank that has painted itself and the nation’s economy into a dark corner. As Peter Schiff concisely sums it up, the Federal Reserve can either allow interest rates to go much higher causing a severe recession and forcing large cuts to government spending (including Social Security and Medicare) or the Fed and Americans can accept high inflation as the new normal.

Either way, it’s bad news for the people but a win-win scenario for the globalists seeking to retain and grow their influence. As the wealth gap expands and the grand economic experiment continues unabated, we must self-educate and identify better ways to preserve our wealth – and our freedom.