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Abonding the gold standard to fund forever wars changed everything, according to Ferdinand Lips. At The American Thinker, J.B. Shrunk discusses Lips’s work and what that might mean for WWIII. He writes:
Mark Jeftovic wrote a wonderful essay arguing that WWIII has been in the works ever since industrialized nations jettisoned the classical gold standard at the outbreak of WWI. Drawing from Ferdinand Lips’s insightful book, Gold Wars, Jeftovik recounts how everything changed once governments abandoned sound money in order to finance long wars. From the mid-1600s all the way to 1914, the gold-linked British pound remained remarkably stable — even increasing its value relative to gold over those two and a half centuries (no doubt because of its proven resilience through myriad crises).
Quoting Lips, Jeftovic soberly notes:
In 1914, at the beginning of World War 1, the gold standard was thrown overboard within a few weekends. In order to finance wars, the world resorted to deficit spending and paper money. Had the gold standard not been given up, the war would not have lasted more than a few months. Instead, it lasted more than four years and ruined most of the major economies in the world and left millions dead in its wake.
Furthermore, had WWI “lasted only six months, currencies would not have been destroyed. There would have been no Versailles Treaty and no German hyperinflation.” Neither Hitler nor Lenin nor Stalin would have ever come to power. “There would never have been a WWII” or a half-century Cold War that left the prospect of nuclear Armageddon hanging over an anxious world like an atomic-tipped sword of Damocles.
Instead of viewing today’s chaotic global events as the depressing prologue to WWIII, Jeftovic argues that the world has been in a constant state of war since 1914 — a war over who can legally possess gold, made possible only by the intentional destruction of sound money. “[N]one of it would be possible without the ability to print value ex nihilo. Fiat currency is a monumental fiction, one that can asset strip the productive segments of the economy, hollow out the middle class, while enriching the Cantillionaire class, the military-industrial complex and the Deep State.”
By abandoning the gold standard and instituting a financial system predicated on inherently worthless fiat monies, governments have constructed the “most effective and ruthless manner of enslaving whole populations while enriching the elite. If there is a far-reaching, multi-generational global conspiracy — it is one that brainwashes the masses into trading their time, wealth and property for meaningless chits backed by nothing.”
With the last century’s monetary destruction laid bare, Jeftovic asks dryly, “Who needs global Communism?” By manipulating the value of currencies in ways that empower the “ruling class” while impoverishing the middle class, privately controlled central banks have conquered the world. Where Bolshevism failed, Marxist globalism has regrettably succeeded.
Lips’s and Jeftovic’s thesis is remarkably convincing. If correct, then today’s looming financial crisis, drumbeat for new wars, and resurgence of Western totalitarianism can all be linked to that fateful moment in history when governments and private central banks adopted policies that all but guaranteed a necessary transition from gold-backed currencies to worthless paper alternatives.
Read more here.
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