REMINDER: I will be speaking at the Ron Paul Institute’s annual conference, which this year is being held at the The Westin Washington Dulles Airport. The theme of the conference is “Anatomy of a Police State.” See my blog post of yesterday. If you can make it, I am sure you’ll be happy you did. If you do attend, please come up and say hello. Register here. — Jacob
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Just about everyone, including the most ardent proponents of public (i.e., government) schools, would say that America’s educational system is a chaotic disaster. But as Sheldon Richman observes in FFF’s award-winning book Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families, America’s public-school system is actually a tremendous success. That’s because the system achieves precisely what it is set up to achieve — public-school graduates with deferential mindsets that will automatically mold themselves to accept whatever federal officials tell them, no matter how patently ludicrous it might be.
It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a better example of this phenomenon than the recently enacted “Inflation Reduction Act,” which authorizes the federal government to spend the money to hire 87,000 well-armed IRS agents who have been trained to shoot people.
How does the hiring of 87,000 well-armed and well-trained IRS agents reduce inflation? Exactly! But Boobus Americanus accepts it as gospel. That’s because of the deferential mindset that was inculcated into Boobus for 12 long years. For Boobus, hiring 87,000 well-armed and well-trained IRS agents to harass, audit, terrorize, and criminally charge people with income-tax violations is how America wins its fight against inflation.
The Inflation Reduction Act is a classic example of where the federal government creates a problem and then adopts tyrannical measures to address the problem. Inflation is caused by the Federal Reserve. The Fed is the federal entity that inflates the money supply. When the Federal Reserve floods the money supply with newly printed money, that reduces the value of the money that is already in circulation. That reduction in the value of money is reflected by the rising prices of things that money buys. When you see prices rising across the board, that’s because the Fed has inflated the money supply.
That’s what the Fed has been doing since its inception in 1913. It’s been inflating the money supply and, in the process, debasing the value of money already in circulation. That’s why, for example, silver coins no longer circulate as money. The Fed has printed so much money that people would be dumb to use silver quarters to buy a soft drink. Interestingly, even Boobus seems to get that.
Why has the Fed inflated the money supply, thereby debasing the value of people’s money, decade after decade? Ever since the adoption of the welfare-warfare state way of life, federal officials have been spending money like it was going out of style. They get that money primarily through income taxation. That’s where the vicious IRS comes into play. Its job is the terrorize the American people into paying their income taxes so that federal officials will have the money they need to fund their welfare-warfare state operations, including, for example, invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq and then sending gobs of money and weaponry to Ukraine.
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The problem, however, is that federal officials spend even more than the vast amounts that the IRS collects through income taxes. That inevitably means federal debt because federal officials are afraid to raise income taxes too highly on the American people, especially in election years.
What happens when the federal debt gets too high? Enter the Federal Reserve. Its job is to print the money to pay off the debt. It inflates the money supply to pay down the debt and, in the process, debases the value of people’s money. That’s what the Fed has been doing since its inception, decade after decade.
But the beauty of this racket is that it’s hidden and it’s complicated — so hidden and complicated that Boobus Americanus is unable to comprehend it. Boobus becomes convinced that inflation is caused by the people who are raising their prices. He has no idea that the Federal Reserve and other federal officials are engaged in a vicious racket that is designed to plunder and loot the American people, both directly through income taxation and indirectly through inflation.
One option, of course, would be to slash federal spending to such an extent that no new debt would be incurred. But federal officials are loathe to do that. If they did that, how would they continue making their vast welfare payments, including Social Security and Medicare? How would they continue funding the vast “defense” industry? How would they continue funding Ukraine? How would they continue funding the drug war? The war on immigrants? Their countless federal regulators? All the thousands of federal departments and agencies and the army of bureaucrats that come with them?
That’s where those 87,000 new well-armed and well-trained IRS agents come into play. Their job is to go out and extract more money from the American people, primarily through terror. If anyone resists violently, well, that’s where the “well-armed” and “well-trained” come into play.
In other words, hiring those 87,000 IRS agents will not reduce inflation. Those agents will simply extract more money out of the pockets of the American people. But make no mistake about it: Federal officials are not about to reduce federal spending. Instead, federal spending will continue to soar. That means the federal debt will continue to rise, which means the Federal Reserve will continue to inflate. The result will be the same as it has been for decades — a continuous debasement of people’s money, which will be reflected by rising prices across the board.
Meanwhile, people will continue graduating from public (i.e., government) schools with deferential mindsets and, therefore, will continue to accept and believe federal nonsense. Every year, a new crop of Boobus Americanuses will continue to believe such nonsense as the hiring of 87,000 well-armed and well-trained IRS agents — to terrorize the American people into paying more income taxes — will reduce inflation.