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"Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism."
--Ludwig von Mises
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Highlights from Populist Party Commentary
Potential Future Hyperinflation
by Stephen Lendman
We're nearly or already bankrupt; are creating money to cover our obligations - the more we print, the more we need - it's fiat currency unbacked by gold, and every new dollar created dilutes the value of all others in circulation. Double the money supply, and presto - every dollar is worth 50 cents. Double it again, and you get the point. We've been doing it for decades, especially since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971.
At some point, the music stops, the dollar collapses, it becomes worthless paper, and related dollar-demoninated paper assets go down with it. Williams quotes a law professor who experienced Weimar Germany's hyperinflation first hand. It was the worst by far ever recorded. "It was horrible. Horrible! Like lightening it struck. No one was prepared." Shelves in grocery stores emptied. "You could buy nothing with your paper money." At the trough in 1923, the mark plunged to an astonishing 4,200,000,000,000 to the dollar.
Can it happen here? It might, and rising world inflation is worrisome.
(read more here)
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Rising Energy Prices and the Falling Dollar
by Ron Paul
Oil prices are on the minds of many Americans as gas hits $4 a gallon, and continues to surge. How high can prices go? How can we solve these problems? What, or who, is to blame?
Part of the answer lies in understanding bubbles and monetary inflation, but especially the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve is charged with controlling inflation through interest rate manipulation, however, many fail to realize that creating money, and therefore inflation, is really its only tool.
(read more here)
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The Presidency and the Economy
by Evans Munyemesha
The theory of 'Survival of the fittest' is apparently inapplicable to the presidency for this institution seems to thrive on the theory of 'Survival of the basest character.' This is deducible from the fact that while a reasonable person in any society ought in all his actions to aim primarily at his own interests, yet the presidency overturns this well-established principle, promising to meet the infinite interests of several million people -- even at the oddest hours of the night by staying close to the phone waiting for that fabled call.
The presidency, being the single most important institution in a democracy and whose sole object is ostensibly to help people achieve their just interests mostly by restraining others who might be an hindrance or a threat to doing so, seems to attract persons who are morally bankrupt...
Far from contenting themselves with the fictions associated with the presidency and what its agents purport they could do; far from entertaining the capricious and arbitrary decisions of the presidency, which perpetuates itself by pretending to be founded on firm and higher principle, their initial question surely should be: "How could we know that the presidency is competent to direct the economy (assuming that the economy needs directing by some single institution)?
(read more here)
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Why the Oil Price Is High
by Paul Craig Roberts
By pumping out money in an effort to forestall recession and paper over balance-sheet problems, the Federal Reserve is driving up commodity and food prices in general. Yet American real incomes are not growing. Even without jobs offshoring, U.S. economic policy has put the bulk of the population on a path to lower living standards.
The crisis that looms for the United States is the loss of its world currency role. Once the dollar loses that role, the U.S. government will not be able to finance its operations by borrowing abroad, and foreigners will cease to finance the massive U.S. trade deficit.
This crisis will eliminate the United States as a world power.
(read more here)
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The High Cost of a Single War-Like Remark
by Dave Lindorff
Most analysts say an actual attack on Iran would send oil almost immediately to past $300 per barrel - a level that would strangle economies worldwide and send the world into an economic collapse not since the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs kicked off the Great Depression.
The repercussions of that would be staggering.
America, which runs on oil, would grind to a halt. Gasoline and home heating oil would double or triple in price, leading to desperation in the coming winter for those living north of the Mason-Dixon line, and to a mass exodus of the elderly from Florida and Arizona, where air-conditioning would no longer be affordable.
In China, an economy almost wholly dependent upon the manufacture of goods for sale to American consumers, hundreds of millions of workers would suddenly find themselves unemployed. With their remittances to their peasant relatives halted, half the country would be kicked back to the pre-capitalist era, only without guaranteed wages, homes, food and healthcare. It is likely that unrest unprecedented since the Cultural Revolution would erupt.
The Middle East would explode.
(read more here)
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Published 5 days a week, Populist Party Commentary and the Populist Party blog both strive to provide an alternative point of view to current events and political theory.
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In the spirit of liberty,
From All of Us on the Populist Party team
Copyright 2008, The Populist Party of America
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