We can’t tell you how many times in the last five years people asked us if we were Canadian, as if we’d be embarrassed to admit we were from America. Far from it! We love the idea of America, where people live and let live, where you can say what you’d like, work as hard as you’d like (and keep your money), and where all the virtues of a liberal society are brought to life.

But today’s America-largely thanks to the worst generation of political leadership in the country’s history and an inherently flawed money system that forces people into debt-is nothing like the idea of America. Not even close.

So if we’re critical of the current monetary regime and political leadership, it’s not because we’re being un-American. It’s because America doesn’t practice American ideals any longer-especially the political class, which looks out for its own interests and treats people like tax animals to be farmed and, when need be, slaughtered for some ill-conceived policy mess of their own making. And in terms of economic ideals, America’s gradual move toward socialised risks and everyone living at each other’s expense makes people both less free and less wealthy.

Keep in mind Karl Marx never expected communist revolutions in pre-industrial states. He declared that communism was the natural evolution of a capitalist industrial economy after workers grew sufficiently alienated from their production. Marx would probably look at modern day America and nod knowingly.

The U.S. dollar is the symbol of all America’s monetary and political corruption. It’s the tool used by American policy makers to steal away the purchasing power of ordinary people through inflation. We are forced to use it, even as its worth less and less each year.

Meanwhile, American policy makers rack up enormous debts to make promises they know they can’t keep. These debts must be paid by future generations either through higher taxes or more borrowing from foreign lenders, both of which will inevitably result in more money printing and further declines in American purchasing power. Lower standards of living are the inevitable result.

If you mess with value of a currency, you also mess with the durability of other values. There’s a direct link between sound money and civil society. The debasement of our money has lead, in many different, aspects, to the debasement of our culture, politics, entertainment, sport, and business ethics.

So that’s why we’re so nasty about the people who have a monopoly on money printing in the United States. They’ve abused that function to the great detriment of the American people. There should be more outrage and more contempt and a lot less respect for the institution of central banking. It will be the ruin of all of us.

Hopefully not this weekend, though. We don’t want to end the week on too dreadful a note. The upside? Throughout human history, people have tended to use one commodity more than any other as a medium of exchange: gold. It’s a lot cheaper now than it was a month ago.

Dan Denning
The Daily Reckoning Australia

Source: The Crime of Central Banking

According to a new book by Robert Auerich, Deception and Abuse at the Fed: Henry B. Gonzalez Battles Alan Greenspan’s Bank, nobody seems to be able to track down the Maestro’s dissertation, which led to Greenspan obtaining a doctorate in economics from NYU.

According to Barron’s:

For years, NYU told the public that, at Greenspan’s request, the thesis was locked away from public view in a vault at its Bobst Library. Auerbach himself was told this in January 2004 when he tried to obtain a copy.

Auerbach, who has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago (Nobel laureate Milton Friedman was his thesis adviser), kept requesting access to the papers until NYU’s provost, David McLaughlin, finally admitted in August 2005 that, “I can tell you that it was the practice of the business school, during the 1970s, not to deposit dissertations with the library. Thus, a copy of Greenspan’s dissertation is not in the Bobst Library. We suggest that you contact Greenspan directly in order to obtain a copy of his dissertation.

Barron’s did exactly that but was told by Greenspan’s spokeswoman that “his busy travel schedule precluded him from getting back to us in time for our deadline.” As for two inquires to the provost, they also went unanswered.

Such a story may not come as a surprise to those skeptical of the merits of centrally planned economics.

“We doubt that the science of as practiced by Bernanke, King and Trichet is really any more reliable than the science of modern portfolio management as practiced by the geniuses at Bear, Lehmann and all the others,” says Bill Bonner.

“We take as a given that central planners are as prone to error as a bear to honey. It also seems likely to us that it was a mistake for Alan Greenspan to cut rates so aggressively in ’02-’03 and leave them below the inflation rate for so long. The result was an orgy of spending and borrowing in the Anglo-Saxon economies…and an orgy of factory-building and capital formation in Asia. In both parts of the world, people missed their marks – overdoing it considerably.”