Theft By Deficit

By Al Duncan
August 2, 2013
NewsWithViews.com

By the Author of The Master Plan

In 1966, before Alan Greenspan became the Federal Reserve Chairman, he wrote an essay, which I highly recommend, called Gold and Economic Freedom. Herein lays the crux of what he presented, emphasis are mine: “The welfare state [the self-destructive system we operate under today] is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society [the working middle class] to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. Thus, the earnings saved by the productive members of the society lose value in terms of goods.

“The welfare statists [government officials] were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale. When the economy’s books are finally balanced, one finds that this loss in value represents the goods purchased by the government for welfare or other purposes [pork barrel, waste and fraud] with the money proceeds of the government bonds financed by bank credit expansion.

“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process.”

As Greenspan explains, the gold standard limited government spending to the amount of gold held in reserve. The gold standard was unprofitable to the international bankers and moreover, interfered with their plans for a New World Order. So the central bankers, in collusion with devious government officials, embarked on a stringent campaign to repeal the gold standard. Stopping at nothing, they attacked and crucified anyone who opposed them. Eventually, the gold standard was repealed.

Knowing that government officials will always spend more than they have, the bankers had now provided a means for them to do so. Repealing of the gold standard provided an open door for deficit spending.

The central bank of the United States is the Federal Reserve (Fed), a private bank owned by private international bankers and businessmen. Congress authorizes the Fed to purchase U.S. notes, which the U.S. Treasury prints. The Fed then issues an equal amount of Federal Reserve Notes, which are used to buy U.S. Treasury Bonds. They literally create money out of thin air by placing a figure on a ledger in the form of a debit, and then demand that the American people repay that debt, with interest.

Debt, transfers accumulated wealth from someone, in this case, the American people, to someone else, bankers and businessmen. It’s an insidious scheme to “confiscate the wealth of the productive members of society.”

Inflation is caused by government deficit spending and printing money to repay it; inflation raises the cost of goods, while purchasing power is reduced, i.e., yesterday an item cost one dollar, today it cost two dollars, and tomorrow it cost three dollars. In addition, you are paying three times the original cost in tax. Massive money printing always ends in hyperinflation.

Government officials are parasites, they don’t produce anything; they only feed off of those who do. As one person said, the fatter the government, the skinner the people. And when government officials cannot meet their obligations or fulfill the promises they made to the public, they’ll figure out ways to appropriate the public’s money to fund their projects. Government officials don’t produce wealth; they only redistribute your wealth. Desperate government officials will always resort to expropriation, which is outright confiscation.

In the case of Portugal, the government nationalized three of Portugal’s telecom pension funds and placed the assets on the government’s balance sheet so that it would look good when it came time negotiated with the European Union. Those pension funds were expropriated.

The Cyprus government outright appropriated depositors’ funds from their bank accounts and then called it a tax. What the Portugal government did was subtle, what the Cyprus government did was blatant; both scenarios violate the rule of law and are theft; whether secretly or openly, bankrupt governments will do whatever necessary to survive.

Ten thousand Baby Boomers well turn 65 years old every day until 2030. There are approximately $15 trillion in private retirement funds, while the government has an annual deficit of $1.5 trillion. And so, there are now plans to nationalize private 401K and IRA retirement accounts. This ploy is being deceptively publicized as the government protecting the public against business failings or state bankruptcies. When governments are broke, everything is fair game. Your cash, your retirement funds, your bank deposits and your investments are at risk of being confiscated by the government through some contrived reason or another.

On May 6, 2012 Lauren Schmitz, a research analyst at the Bernard L Schwartz Center for Economic Analyst (SCEPA), introduced HB5337. This 401(k)/IRA de-privatization is the brainchild of Teresa Ghilarducci, whom through funding from the White House and the Ford & Rockefeller Foundations engineered a new “Regulatory & Tax Incentive”. The purpose is to force Americans to convert their Retirement Accounts into Government Managed accounts.

Thanks to inflation, the purchasing power of your retirement plan is being eroded daily. In ten years, a $100,000 retirement fund will only provide $25,000 of purchasing power. A jump from two percent inflation to four percent inflation is devastating to a pension fund. Appropriately, many have cashed in their pension funds, paid the penalties and have taken charge of their own retirement funds rather than chancing it to value-eroding inflation or government seizure.

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