DEMOCRACY DEFEATED

This ability of governments to inject counterfeit issues into the circulation is the basis of their power to deliver wealth to pressure groups at the expense of the rest of the community. This insidious taxation underlies the whole trend toward the confiscation of wealth and the governmentalization of personal enterprise. 

It robs Peter, all unknown to him, to subsidize Paul, who is gratefully conscious of government largess. There comes now socialists, communists, fascists and sundry other schemers to confuse Peter who, regardless of which ism he chooses as a remedy is sure to blame business for his ills. Since government always poses before the people as their protector, obviously the thing to do is to give it more power to guard the public against "chislers," "profiteers," "black marketeers," and other wolves of business.

 Thus business prestige declines as political propaganda deflects upon it the blame that should fall upon government. There is no war of ideologies. 

There is but an epidemic of pressure-group larcenies perpetrated against the bewildered public by means of counterfeit money. The beneficiaries of these raids would fear to issue counterfeit by their own hands, but when government does it for them, they readily join pressure groups to tap the seemingly inexhaustible fountain. Collectivist propaganda is but a collateral force in promoting seizures and controls. 

The influence that brings it about is the enticement offered by government of getting something for nothing. As citizens are too weak to resist this enticement, so politicians are too weak not to offer it, for to refuse "benefits" is to risk loss of office. 

The corrupting power of government largess cannot be allowed to continue if the social order is to avert complete demoralization. To obscure the logical consequence of injecting into the money stream billions of counterfeit units, governments resort to suppressive price controls. With the operation of the law of supply and demand, which is cardinal to free exchange, thus impeded, industry becomes atrophied, thereby developing a public demand for government operation. 

The sin of counterfeiting leads government to one vice after another in an effort to escape the consequences of the original sin. It is this fleeing from the consequences of past errors, rather than consciously pursuing a goal, that is bringing dictatorship upon us. Government is being transformed by escapism into a tyranny of expediency. This explains the seeming paradox of the constant trend toward dictatorship in the face of official declarations espousing liberty. The first act of the ambitious politician is to grasp the "money" issuing power of government. By this means he literally buys his way to his objectives. Its value to him lies in the fact that through it he can escape public resistance to taxation. To balance the budget requires that the cost of each project be immediately revealed to the electorate through obvious taxation. 

By counterfeiting money, he not only escapes the sales resistance to his projects, but he even creates the illusion of prosperity by the temporary stimulus given to business by spending. Of course, an unbalanced budget means merely deferred taxation, through inflated prices, but it can be deferred until the objective is attained, and, even then, blame can be escaped by crying "stop thief" at private business. Examine the methods of any and every dictator or would-be dictator or blundering escapist, and we find that his essential tool is money counterfeiting. All else is propaganda and stage property. 

Without this tool, government would be compelled to be honest and frugal, because every citizen resists taxation if it does not fool him. Without the money-counterfeiting tool of government, there could be no war except by popular mandate, because the price would have to be consciously and immediately paid. The would-be war maker first of all conquers and subdues his own people by the narcotic of counterfeit money.

 If the people would hold the veto power of war, they must deny to their government the power to counterfeit money. Nor does communism necessarily come upon a people through a political coup or revolution. Its most insidious and dangerous process is evolutionary by means of counterfeit money, in spite of lip service sincerely rendered by politicians and reassuringly accepted by the people. To issue counterfeit dollars into the money stream is to reduce the power of all other dollars, and thus the frugal elements of the community are continuously drained and the communistic aim of leveling wealth is accomplished. As this process of robbing the productive proceeds, it destroys the incentive to production and thus sabotages personal enterprise.

 The resultant impoverization and demoralization is not attributed by the public to the government issue of mock money. The blame falls upon the personal enterprise system. Thus the public mind becomes conditioned to turn from personal enterprise and to look to government for salvation, and this produces the popular support for the assumption by government of the means of production and distribution. 

Under the confusing and confounding term inflation, which is caused by government counterfeit in the money circulation, communization is actually proceeding and being blindly supported by personal enterprisers who think they are operating under a free economy. Under the mock money process, our so-called free economy is but a transmission belt to communism. Monetary power is man's sovereign power. 

He must exert it and protect it if he would govern government and commerce and gain mastery of life. Without such mastery, we cannot have democracy, we cannot have prosperity, we cannot have peace.