THE FIAT MATRIX

And so you take the red pill, ascend out of cave, and your eyes begin to adjust. Have you ever wondered why all those entities which were born to help and exalt mankind now exalt debt, as student loan debt skyrockets even as less and less is taught and jobs dry up; and as medical care bankrupts so many common workers who aren’t getting the taxpayer and Fed bailouts and fresh cash hot off their printing presses, but who, instead, are doing all the work and paying the taxes that bail out the banks? Have you ever wondered why the man of the year is not Corporal Jason L. Dunham, who selflessy jumped on a grenade and gave his own life to save his fellow marines, but the man who created more debt—the very opposite of wealth—than any other bureaucrat in the history of all mankind? Have you ever wondered why over 50% of all marriages now end in divorce, and why so many children are growing up fatherless, divorced from their Natural Rights set forth by both Moses and Homer? Have you ever wondered why the words of our Founding Fathers, and greats such as Hemingway, Aristophanes, Dante, Copernicus, and Edison are no longer taught; and why Mises, Hayek, and Schumpeter were never taught to begin with? Did you ever puzzle why they had to deconstruct Homer, Shakespeare, Smith, Voltaire, Webster, and Shaw? Do you wonder why the MBA programs want to chain you to that lower form of entrepreneurship, never teaching you of that far higher and more enduring entrepreneurship of Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer?
It is because the greats spoke out against the debauched form of entrepreneurship which tries to trump all other forms of true entrepreneurship with a printing press and a police force, converting mere debt into physical wealth by the conscious, orchestrated inflation and creation of wealth-transferring fiat bubbles. Did you ever wonder who funded the deconstruction of the classical, epic, manly soul; of fatherhood and motherhood, and the notion of private property rights for artists and creators?

The directors of such companies (joint-stock corporations), however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own .... Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less in the management of the affairs of such a company? –Adam Smith, The Wealth on Nations, 1776

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. –Thoms Jefferson in 1802 in a letter to then Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin

Fair dealing leads to greater profit in the end. –Homer’s Odyssey

Thou shalt not steal. –Moses, Exodus

The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration. –Mises

The authors of the Constitution were very much aware of the dangers of inflation and the need for commodity money. Destruction of the continental dollar was vivid in their minds. The journals of the Continental Congress noted that “paper currency… is multiplied beyond the rules of good policy. No truth being more evident, than that where the quantity of money. . . exceeds what is useful as a medium of commerce, its comparative value must be proportionately reduced.” Further, inflations “tend to the depravity of morals, and decay of the public faith, injustice to individuals, and the destruction of the honor, safety, and independence of the United States.” --R. Paul, End The Fed, The Constitutional Case, p. 165

If you are in debt, you are a slave to that debt. –Benjamin Franklin

The second vice is lying, the first is running in debt. . . Lying rides upon debt’s back. –Franklin

Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value—zero. —Voltaire

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. –Ernest Hemingway

You have a choice between the natural stability of gold and the honesty and intelligence of the members of government. And with all due respect for those gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, vote for gold. –George Bernard Shaw
If ever again our nation stumbles upon unfunded paper, it shall surely be like death to our body politic. This country will crash. –George Washington

To emit an unfunded paper as the sign of value ought not to continue a formal part of the Constitution, nor even hereafter to be employed; being, in its nature, pregnant with abuses, and liable to be made the engine of imposition and fraud; holding out temptations equally pernicious to the integrity of government and to the morals of the people. –Alexander Hamilton

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a money aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. This issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of the moneyed corporations which already dare to challenge our Government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country. –Thomas Jefferson

I see in the near future a crisis approach which unnerves me and cause me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations (of banking) have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic destroyed. –Abraham Lincoln

History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance. –James Madison

All the perplexities, confusion and distresses in America arise not from defects in the constitution or confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, as much from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation. –John Adams

The gold standard has one tremendous virtue: the quantity of the money supply, under the gold standard, is independent of the policies of governments and political parties. This is its advantage. It is a form of protection against spendthrift governments. . . The gold standard did not collapse. Governments abolished it in order to pave the way for inflation. The whole grim apparatus of oppression and coercion, policemen, customs guards, penal courts, prisons, in some countries even executioners, had to be put into action in order to destroy the gold standard. –Ludwig von Mises

Of the innumerable evils which usually brings the decadence of kingdoms, principalities, and republics, the four greatest are, in my opinion: war, immorality, infertility of the land, and the debasement of money. For the first three, the evidence is obvious. But for the fourth, which concerns money, except for a few men of intellect, few people ever see it. Why? Because it is not in one fell swoop, but gradually, by a somewhat latent character, it ruins the state. –Copernicus

The themes of this paper are simple—the study of economics is incomplete and quite tragic without the classical, heroic, Austrian spirit contained in the words of the Greats. Gresham’s Law stipulates that bad money drives good money out of circulation; and I contend that a fiat currency drives soul, honor, and the classical, epic spirit out of the culture; exiling Aristophanes et al., and replacing Homer with feminist lit and Grand Theft Auto—two sides of the same coin:

I'll tell you what I think about the way
This city treats her soundest men today;
By a coincidence more sad than funny,
It's very like the way we treat our money.
The noble silver drachma that of old we were
So proud of, and the recent gold coins that
Rang true, clean-stamped and worth their weight
Throughout the world, have ceased to circulate.
Instead the purses of Athenian shoppers
Are full of shoddy silver-plated coppers
Just so, when men are needed by the nation,
The best have been withdrawn from circulation.
—Aristophanes, The Frogs, 400 BC

Dante recognized that in order to prop up the false value of their fiat regime, the MBA must naturally commit violence against art—one can see the financial motivations for the deconstruction and dumbing down of the academy—for the removal of Zeus’ lightning and Moses’s thundering justice—for the concerted attack on the exalted, masculine soul which passes judgment on FRAUD:

The monstrous shape lands on the brink and Virgil salutes it ironically. It is GERYON, the MONSTER OF FRAUD. Virgil announces that they must fly down from the cliff on the back of this monster. While Virgil negotiates for their passage, Dante is sent to examine the USURERS (The Violent against Art). . . These sinners sit in a crouch along the edge of the burning plain that approaches the cliff. Each of them has a leather purse around his neck, and each purse is blazoned with a coat of arms. Their eyes, gushing with tears, are forever fixed on these purses. Dante recognizes none of these sinners, but their coats of arms are unmistakably those of well-known Florentine families. . . Having understood who they are and the reason for their present condition, Dante cuts short his excursion and returns to find Virgil mounted on the back of Geryon. Dante joins his Master and they fly down from the great cliff. . . Their flight carries them from the Hell of the VIOLENT AND THE BESTIAL (The Sins of the Lion) into the Hell of the FRAUDULENT AND MALICIOUS (The Sins of the Leopard). –p. 133, The Divine Comedy (The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso) by Dante Alighieri and John Ciardi

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Juvenal asks. “Who will watch the watchmen?” “We will!” the fiat MBA is taught to respond, as every crises they create is used as reason to expand their power, as the words of Thomas alva Edison—the hodler of 1,000 patents and founder of General Electric is exiled from the academy.

Tom Paine has almost no influence on present-day thinking in the United States because he is unknown to the average citizen. Perhaps I might say right here that this is a national loss and a deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, 'the United States of America.' But it is hardly strange. Paine's teachings have been debarred from schools everywhere and his views of life misrepresented until his memory is hidden in shadows, or he is looked upon as of unsound mind. We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. He was the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed Paine devised and wrote. The deeds of one in the Weld were matched by the deeds of the other with his pen. Thomas Edison in The Philosophy Paine, 1925

People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money from the United States than will the People who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest ...But here is the point: If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution pays nobody but those who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People. If the currency issued by the People were no good, then the bonds would be no good, either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to insure the National Wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious value of gold. Interest is the invention of Satan. — Thomas A. Edison

If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves. –Thomas Edison

For there are vast profits to be made in catching the common man in the crossfire—in both creating messes and cleaning them up—in inflation and deflation—in the bait and switch—in the marriage and divorce—taking the common man’s pensions, savings, and homes on the way there via mere lawyerly decree, and his taxes and freedoms on the way back, as the Constitution, culture, country, and currency are all debauched so as to serve the counterfeit regime and the artificial business cycles it imposes to 1) convert mere fiat into physical wealth, and 2) transfer wealth toward the printing press and its well-paid architects at the top of the vast pyramid scheme, built upon groupthink fiatocracies all united in dismissing truth and honor; and which, tragically, must share the fate of all pyramid schemes, hollowing out the home, family, church, and very soul of a nation along the fiat descent. Indeed, the final chapter of Moby Dick comes to mind:

A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago. –Moby Dick

But one does survive to tell the tale, and my class so oft opposed by those who know not what they do, I shall now shout these words to the eternities, so that thousands of years from now, scholars will remark upon the enduring vitality Bogle’s Battle and Socrates’ soul, which will soon trump the fiat administrators, who have no power to debauch these words, but only their own private souls, culture, and currency, as they “tauntingly follow the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars.”
And I only am escaped alone to tell thee. –Job
The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?— Because one did survive the wreck. –Epilogue Moby Dick
Pride goeth before the fall, and on the way down, there are also vast profits to be made in expanding the problems one purportedly seeks to solve—all that is required is a lack of honor, soul, and character, which the undergraduate education conveniently does away with, and which the MBA recruiter hires and promotes. The temptations are just too great, and even Alan Greenspan, who fueled the most epic bubbles ever known to mankind—bubbles which transferred trillions of dollars to the honor-free doublespeakers, wrote in his younger, more idealistic years (before he put on the One Ring and was transformed into Gollum):

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard. --Gold and Economic Freedom by Alan Greenspan, 1966