In the last World War, the United States of America beat the fascists, drew a line between freedom and the communists, and then spent the next 70 years turning into what it claimed to abhor.
There were notable milestones on that road. There was 1971 when government had swelled so large that it had to publicly announce that it could not pay for itself absent a monetary game of Three-card Monte. On August 15 of that year, gold was decoupled from the dollar. Then in 2001, the US went full police state, a framework that it had long been marching toward in small and big ways. In 2020, it shut down all churches, schools, and most businesses, seizing total control over life in the period known as corona communism.
Like the Reichstag Fire of February 27, 1933, a minor, non-event — a seasonal illness — was turned into an excuse to seize power more completely. Each year, about 1% of Americans died from all causes. That was the normal baseline rate. In 2020, there was not a bubonic plague level event of one-third of the population dying. There was not a decimation-under-seize level event of one-tenth of the population dying. About 1% died that year, just like many other years. Americans had long marched toward communism, and by some mystery, that seasonal illness became the pivotal event that society widely consented to as the moment a defining transition into corona communism would take place.
Through this all, from the time of its fight against the unfree nations all the way to its shift into an unfree nation, America consistently pushed its chief export in the post-World War Two era. Some may debate that America’s chief export is material. Others may debate that America’s chief export is debt. Both of these claims misunderstand the significance of the American economy in the world.
Its most significant export in the post-WW2 era was the regulatory framework that America pushed into virtually every corner of the globe — its abolition of financial freedom.
Washington, D.C., Langley, and New York City alike collaborated in a powerful system of “modernizing” banking and financial record keeping globally, to the extent that merely desiring to have privacy in one’s financial affairs was enough to cause one to be declared a criminal and an enemy of the state.
This took place through rules on taxation, through money transfers, through accounting standards, through anti-financial privacy laws, through innocent sounding “know your customer” policies, through righteous sounding sanctions, and many other methods as financial privacy was effectively renamed “money laundering.” It was presumed that if one were to seek financial privacy that one was a terrorist seeking to harm innocent civilians, a narcotics trafficker seeking to ravage homes and communities, or a human trafficker seeking to drive that which is good and pure from the face of the earth.
While this system captured many troublemakers, an untold number of innocents were harmed in this attack on financial freedom, a detail that was seldom mentioned by the opponents of financial freedom. Eventually, the biggest troublemaker of them all was hardest to ignore. In time, it became known that the US government, to a virtually incomparable level, engaged in acts of terror on civilians, engaged in trafficking of narcotics, and engaged in trafficking of humans. Just as that government spoke freedom loudly while instituting tyranny, it also became all manner of evil it claimed to oppose.
Eventually, this war on financial freedom became so total that some non-American banks would not even open an account for an American citizen because of the compliance headaches it caused. Once the calling card of freedom in the world, the American passport even turned into a business liability. Far from being seen as a warning sign that such anti-financial freedom regulation had gone too far, this was an indication that some places were too free if there was competition among passports. The regulatory regime increased in both velocity and mass.
On February 24, 2022, a minor border skirmish between virtually indistinguishable neighbors — one of dozens taking place around the globe at the time — turned into an opportunity for the United States to seize upon a new level of financial control. Never before, not even against Nazi Germany, had such a level of economic sanctions been rolled out against a country. Russia, declared an aggressor nation by the United States in a conflict with the Ukraine, suffered crippling economic sanctions.
The United States had gone about the world using the financial regulatory framework to de-bank individuals and removing them from the global economy. This brutal de-banking of people had come to be seen as a normal and legitimate role for the US Government to play. This was a new extreme, though. The entire country of Russia was in many ways de-banked, isolated from the world economy, and massive economic ramifications occurred. The currency, the Ruble, plunged in value. It was widely argued by American media experts that the Russia economy and Russian people would crumble in days, perhaps even resulting in a coup d’etat.
In a desperate effort to prop up its currency, the Russian government responded by requiring payment in its own currency for its exported commodities. Russians, after all, had no access to international banking, so the US Dollar had suddenly become largely worthless to this 2% of the world’s population who occupied about one-tenth of the world’s land mass. The Russian government did an additional, uncommon thing for a post-1971 country. It tied its currency to gold, a move that was considered by leading economists to be a barbarous relic.
Crippling sanctions continued, proxy war with other nations on Ukrainian soil raged, Russia was soon to be defeated, and its leader deposed by the Russian people, American media experts announced.
By April 7 of that year, the Russian currency found itself trading even higher than it had on February 24. For the first time ever, the post-World War Two economic order — and its promises of economic destruction for all who disobeyed — had failed.
No matter how much bluster you have, no matter how much talk, no matter how tough your words are, those things just can not beat gold. Those things can not beat the no nonsense real life call to action appeal of gold. Everywhere in the American sphere of influence, talk of the evilness of those who would stand against American financial regulatory hegemony filled the airwaves. The numbers did not lie, though. Talk lost.
Gold had taken its proper seat again as money. Paper had taken its proper seat again as gold certificates. A glimmer of freedom sparkled through the world in those darkest days of 2022, the evil empire and its crippling sanctions, sanctions felt even by its own people, that evil empire had finally been shown to have a limit to its evil at home and in the world, and that evil empire had an expiration date on its evil.
If its most powerful export — the eradication of financial privacy and the elimination of financial freedom — could be combatted with something as powerfully simple and disarming as the truth contained in a room full of gold, then it was clear that there were other simple, disarming truths that could return the world to its proper order as a place of free men.
