Partisan Politics: The Ultimate Smokescreen?

The Left demonizes the Right. The Right demonizes the Left. The media, for the most part, only stokes this rivalry. Both sides are up in arms, believing that they have to keep the other side from winning at all costs.

Meanwhile, governments and central banks everywhere keep issuing more money, devaluing its purchasing power in the process (causing inflation). They do this to finance wars, to bail out banks, to fund massive bureaucracies and social programs and/or to stimulate the economy. They do this regardless of which party is in power.

And they do it because they can. Because our money used to be backed by gold or other scarce commodities, now it’s backed by nothing. Therefore its supply can be inflated at will (and this is what the original meaning of the word inflation alludes to).

I don’t think they do it out of malice. They likely often have the best intentions, and entire economic theories have been created and are espoused by Nobel-winning economists and academics to justify why they do it. But at the end of the day, the power to issue money out of thin air is just too great for any person or group to wield responsibly. It inevitably gets misused and abused.

And it has disastrous consequences. Most people around the world are getting poorer in real terms, regardless of how hard they work, because their purchasing power is being inexorably eroded. And most people don’t fully realize that this is what’s happening. They intuit that something’s fundamentally very wrong, but don’t really know what it is. Stress, depression, anger, frustration and despair run rampant, and are usually misdirected.

And so governments of every stripe and their central banks keep diluting everyone’s purchasing power, effectively stealing our time and energy. You work to earn money, and the money you earn buys you less and less over time. This isn’t an accident, and it isn’t because of corporate greed, or because illegal immigrants are taking what’s yours. It’s the result of deliberate governmental monetary policy, and it’s a global phenomenon.

And they get to keep doing this because almost everyone is too busy fighting the other side to even notice or understand that it’s happening.