It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong - Andrew P. Napolitano [125]
When I Was Your Age!
Surely, any young person today can think of stories told by their parents that sound something like “when I was your age, I could buy a movie ticket for twenty-five cents, a round-trip subway ticket for ten cents, a bag of chips for five cents, and a soda for ten cents!” Now it costs over sixteen dollars to go to the movies—ten dollars for a ticket, two dollars for the chips, and four dollars for the soda, and that’s before transportation costs and the tax! This exorbitant increase in price occurred only within a time span of about fifty years; that is a 3,100 percent increase in price! For some reason, people just take price increases for granted as a normal occurrence that happens with the passage of time or blame it on the businesses that charge the higher price and call them evil and greedy.
Let us take a look at the money supply—literally the cash in circulation and in bank accounts in the United States—over this same fifty-year period.8
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The increase in the monetary base is the reason for such absurd occurrences as the 3,100 percent increase in the cost of attending a movie. The money supply really started to increase drastically in the mid-1960s, and once Nixon took America off the gold standard in 1971; money creation grew out of control. Nixon broke away from the quasi-gold standard of the Bretton Woods agreement because there was no other way to pay for the debt racked up by Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam War and Great Society, which provided “guns and butter” for all of America, according to Johnson.
“Guns and butter” is just another way of describing LBJ’s warfare agenda abroad in Vietnam—ultimately financed by the Fed—as well as his massive increase in domestic spending. He spent money the government did not have; and he spent wildly on programs such as these: The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to oversee a variety of community-based anti-poverty programs; his War on Poverty, which began with a $1 billion appropriation in 1964 and spent another $2 billion in the following two years; the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which was initially allotted more than $1 billion for inner-city schools; the Higher Education Act of 1965, which gave federal money to universities, as well as created scholarships and low-interest loans for students; and LBJ’s Great Society, which created the bottomless pits of Medicare and Medicaid. The two medical programs have been complete disasters that are not only broke, but are unfunded to the tune of $76 trillion and counting.
Moreover, the debt is not just a financial issue. Admiral Michael Mullen, at this writing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and thus America’s highest-ranking military official, proclaimed that “our national debt is our biggest national security threat.” Can you imagine that, from a military man! His greatest fear is not terrorists, but government debt! Secretary of State Hillary Clinton further explained the nature of this threat: “It undermines our capacity to act in our own interest, and it does constrain us where constraint may be undesirable. And it also sends a message of weakness internationally.” There is no chance this debt monster could have grown so out of control if the United States operated on a full gold standard.
Every day the federal budget grows, every person loses more and more freedom. The bigger the government, the smaller the amount of individual liberty; the bigger the government, the more it can regulate every aspect of our lives which strips us of our rights and liberties. Each day the Federal Reserve System exists is one more day that the government can fund its growing budget, increase its size, and deplete our savings