Government Conspiracy... or Incompetence in the White House?
June 29, 2009
– Comments (17)
Recently, the second chapter of Forty Centuries of Wages and Price Controls by Robert L. Schuetting and Eamonn Butler was released for a free read at the Mises Institute.
whereaminow recently copied this chapter to his blog:
"A History of Inflation in Rome: Are We on a Similar Course?"
He wrote:
“1. Governments rarely learn from history, as you are about to read. America - and just about every government - debases their currency for the same reason the Romans did: it concentrates power in the hands of government.”
So today as I was watching a movie I made a connection…
Today, the government continually raises taxes and prints money (devaluing the dollar by causing inflation) to support a ridiculously big government with a large payroll and a huge military.
Back in mid evil times king/dukes and what have you would force the serfs to work their fields in a similar manor to share cropping. The idea was that the serfs had to work the lords fields for over half the week for no compensation. Then the serfs had the few days remaining of the week to work their own small gardens. They had to do this to grow their own food and to raise money for the “rent” they owed to lords. The whole never ending cycle happened because the rent was outrageously large and could never be paid off, so the serfs would be in bondage forever. They had many practices to ensure the huge gap between serfs and lords suck as never allowing the serfs any form of education.
There are many forms of this, this is just one example so you can see how it works. An interesting side point is that this unfair practice still happens today in 3rd world countries.
Anyways enough of this back-story. Back to my point.
So as I was saying I was thinking. Back then they had this share cropping type thing going on to keep people always working and under control. TODAY, we have taxes and inflation keep everyone under control.
Its an interesting idea (an no I’m not trying to go all hippie on you) but its true.
You have your average head of household who spends his whole time working to make a living. Before this person is working they are going to school (college or no college, we all have to sit in school – but this is good, because education is good. My point is that people do they so they can work later). So school to work, then work to pay bills. There we go – our never ending cycle.
The reason I relate this to the whole share cropping thing is that the government makes it incredibly difficult for anyone to accumulate wealth. They have taxes on your income (just like the whole “rent” idea) and as if they is not enough they continually print out new money to find all their programs and devalue the money (the point from Forty Centuries of Wages and Price Controls about governments devaluing money to keep power in their hands).
So there we go. This has been kind of a scrambled thought… But hopefully I got my idea across. What do you guys think?
(also, as you can tell I don’t like inflation… What are some good things someone can to do help take the bite of inflation away?)
RSS Headlines
Fool UK