Freedom-Fighters Forum

The Constitutional Broadside
V2 N5 A PUBLICATION OF THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY COUNCIL
Hosea 4:6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.

THE MYSTERY OF INFLATION

Inflation is not the real war we should be fighting. It is not even a battle of that war. It is only a symptom; a symptom of a dangerous illness.

It is a sign that a war is raging around us; a warning that a terrible storm is brewing. Everybody may not yet be feeling the full force of the “hurricane” that is approaching our country but black monetary clouds hang low over the horizon. If you think that all is peaceful around you, you might remember that a hurricane rages around a calm center, moving the “eye” of the storm. In that case you may soon feel like a tornado has cut its swath right through the middle of your peaceful world.

The real danger of inflation is that most people will be upset and disturbed by the symptoms but never really diagnose the disease. They will feel the pain and scream for “somebody” to “do” something. About all they will do themselves is to yell for their political witch-doctors to feed them some more socialist aspirin.

The probability is that before the rank and file citizen of our nation discovers the real nature of our public sickness, and forces himself to apply correct remedies, our malady will have beaten our nation to its knees.

SYMPTOMS OF THE STORM

Who isn’t feeling pain from the symptoms? The farmer pours fertilizer on his soil – if he can buy it at any price. He plants seeds and hopes for rain. If his plants get a drink, they will pull energy from the sun, carbon dioxide from the air, and minerals from the earth. The life force in living things creates from natural assets of our environment the food we need for survival.

When the producer takes his goods to market today he feels the pinch and take of inflation. Too often his return is less than his costs of production. The grower, the manufacturer, and the distributor all feel the bite. The consumer pays with his blood.

Almost everybody is caught in the squeeze. True, some people get in a position where they make a quick profit from the misery of others. They get in fast and get out with their “take”. But the overwhelming majority does and will suffer one way or another before we as a people “take the cure”.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL REMEDY

The founding Fathers said in the Declaration of Independence:

“… We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them seems most likely to affect their safety and happiness.”

In their view, there had to be a CREATOR. That Creator was recognized as being real, functional, and benevolent. They expressed this concept in the glorious words, “All men are endowed with certain unalienable rights…”

The significance of these teachings at the founding councils of our Nation is impossible to over-emphasize. God is real. He is the creator who gives endowments, or gifts, to man.

It was God who gave to man the powers of thought, of liberty, of choice. Their unalienable rights are their own by endowment from God. Thus, they have not only these rights, but the obligation and responsibility of self-direction and self-care. This is the deep secret of their divinely endowed rights.

To secure these rights, the Law of our Land that is Constitutional is rooted and anchored in God. It grows out of the Councils of The Gods. That which is constitutional under our system of law is harmonious with all the laws of God. That which violates and conflicts with the laws of God is and must remain unconstitutional.

Without God’s help and approval it is impossible for men or nations to live in harmony with each other.

Inflation is an outgrowth of satanic thought and conduct. For this reason it is totally and completely “unconstitutional”.

As American citizens it is our personal obligation to see to it that our written constitution and our application of law under it, always is and forever will be harmony with the laws of God.

THE SOMETHING FOR NOTHING SYNDROME

What is that group of signs and symptoms which occur together in our culture to form the repulsive social disease known as “The Something For Nothing Syndrome“? The Holy Scriptures are full of clues to this modern mysterious ailment.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

The basic elements – the foundation principles – of the Constitution of the Laws of God are expressed to man in the Ten Commandments.

From them we get the building blocks of the Constitutional Law of the Land in the United States. By the Grace of God alone we have from Him the elements of divine truth. These are the foundation principles upon which our Constitution is based.

What do the Ten Commandments have to say about the cause of inflation – the systematic destruction of our medium of exchange today?

Ask yourself this question: What causes our monetary inflation?

Is it the Congress? Or the President? Or the Court system?

Yes, it is all of these, plus the Legislatures, the Governors, and the whole coterie of administrators, federal, state and local. It is the mayors, the councilmen, and the law enforcers.

It is the farmers, the merchants, and the manufacturers. It is the transporters, the salesmen and the installers. It is the labor union officials and the members. It is the non-unioners and the corps of independents. It is the housewives, the butchers, the bakers, and the candlestick makers.

It is Tom, Dick and Harry. It is Mary, and Jane, and Little Ann. It is Grandpa and Grandma and Junior, himself. It includes the Board of Education, the School Superintendents, the Principals and the staff of teachers. It is John Q. Public and all his many off-spring.

When you look for the enemy to fight in the battle of inflation, you will find, on careful thought, that it is us. We are the enemy.

WHO? ME? THE ENEMY?

“… We hold these truths to be self-evident, that… governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed…?

Aren’t you and I two of the governed? Aren’t we the governors? Does not congress get its just powers from you and me? Are not we the ultimate source of power of government? Is it not our personal responsibility to find and cure the causes of our current disastrous inflation? What are the evil symptoms or causes we should find and correct?

To help us grasp some insight into the grave problems we face in dealing with inflation in America today, we excerpt and quote from pages 168 to 174 of the book The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian Nobel Prize winner who was recently exiled from Russia for publishing history of horrible Soviet tyranny as follows (emphasis added)

“So let the reader who expects this [paper] to be a political expose slam it shut right now.”

“If it were only so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

“During the life of any heart, this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various stages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. Thus his name doesn’t change, but to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.”

“… from good to evil in one quaver, says the proverb. Or from evil to good in another.”

“We would prefer to say that [evil] people cannot exist that there aren’t any. It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story for children, so as to keep the picture simple. But when the great world literature of the past – Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens – inflates and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it seems somewhat farcical and clumsy to our contemporary perception. The trouble lies in the way there classic evildoers are pictured. They are made to recognize themselves as evildoers and they know their souls are black. And they reason, ‘I cannot live unless I do evil so I’ll set my father against my brother! I’ll drink the victim’s suffering until I’m drunk with them!’”

“Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born of hate.” But no; that’s not the way it is! To do evil [of the kind and magnitude committed under communist tyranny] a person must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else it’s well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately it is the nature of a human being to seek justification for his actions.”

“McBeth’s self-justification was feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoer stopped short of a dozen corpses – because they had no ideology.”

“Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.”

“[It is ideology, social theory] which [the evildoer] relies upon to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own eyes and other’s eyes so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors That is how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking “Christianity”; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of the motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobin (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.”

“Thanks to ideology [such as socialism in all its forms] the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in millions [of murders]. This cannot be denied nor passed over nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist: And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.”

And from page 147 Solzhenitsyn says, “[The Blue Caps – the Russian aids of the police state who tortured confessions and accusations from accused prisoners] were possessed and directed by two of the strongest instincts of the lower sphere, other than hunger and sex: Greed for power and greed for gain. (Particularly, for power. In recent decades it, greed for power, has turned out to be more important than money.)”

“Power is a poison well known for thousands of years. If no one were ever to acquire material power over others! But to the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion over all of us, and who is therefore conscious of his own limitations, power is not necessarily fatal. For those, however, who are unaware of any higher sphere, it is a deadly poison. For them, there is no antidote.”

THE CAUSE, THEN, OF INFLATION?

It is not just a cause. It is a mixture of evils, both of thought and deed, buried deeply in the hearts and conduct of the people, including their leaders.

It is the result, the cumulative results, of a false ideology; an ideology made up of many kinds of good and evil thoughts; of good and despicable actions perpetrated for ends that are thought to be noble; an ideology that is the very antithesis of everything that the law of God teaches.

The real war that we must fight against inflation is an ideological war against a syndrome; a war of ideas; a war of thought; an active war of production and of self-restraint. The battle-ground is not “The Middle East”, nor “The Far East”. It is neither Europe, nor Asia, nor the so-called “Third World”.

The battle ground is inside our own minds.

The cause of inflation is a national sickness; a moral and social malady that afflicts millions; a syndrome made up of many kinds of false concepts and criminal, self-service actions.

To quote Solzhenitsyn, page 163, to introduce some symptoms:

“Pride grows in the human heart like lard in a pig”

And to paraphrase a part of the message of the Ten Commandments and of other sections of the Law of the Lord:

“Thou shalt not covet anything that is thy neighbor’s nor bear him any false witness. Thou shalt have no other Gods to love before me. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself but thou shalt not steal anything for him by means of government plunder.”

“Six days out of seven shalt thou labor, eating thy bread produced by thine own sweat.”

EVILS OF THE SOCIALIST IDEOLOGY

The word ideology, is not a bad word. In one sense, the word means the science of ideas. In another, it refers to some sets of ideas.

The set of ideas that comprise the doctrine of socialism can be referred to as an ideology, the socialist ideology.

The construction of that ideology comes about by unique combination of thoughts and ideals.

Clearly the laws of God provide for each person to have a proper, wholesome and well-balanced concern for other people; a concern equal to one’s concern for self.

Normal people want to be “good”. Loving one’s neighbor is said by the Lord to be excellent; ergo, people want to do good things for themselves and for others.

Power to do good is desirable; ergo, people want to have the power of service.

In the United States, the source of the power of government force is in the people; erego, many people, thinking of themselves as “good”, want to use their power to help themselves and their neighbors.

Society is made up of “the people”, ourselves; erego, the things which “we, the people” do by means of government and action, is thought by many to be “good”.

Most people have allowed the fat lard of self-interest to grow within them. They want to have the pleasure of thinking they have done good things for others; erego, being also lazy, but without admitting it to themselves, they resort to doing their alms to the needy by means of government service.

Since it is normal human self-interest for a person to think of himself first, it becomes very easy to decide that the best government action is the action that will in the end benefit me. Of course, what is good for “me” should also be good for others; ergo, the privileges I get from government are mine by “right”. I need them; ergo, they are good.

Few people, if any at all, want to think of themselves, or to be thought of, as “bad”. They must see themselves as “good”. Being thus reflected in the mirror of their own self-interest, their image seems good and their intentions noble.

Thinking along such lines, they formulate their philosophy of government service into an ideology, a socialist ideology – without realizing they are doing it.

GOVERNMENT SERVICE BY PLUNDER

With the concept of Government Responsibility; firmly established, somebody sets up a hue and cry for some special interest government aid. It may be the War Veterans of the 1920’s. Or the farmers of the early 30’s. It could be the airlines that “needed” a government subsidy. Or some companies needed a tariff for “protection”.

Soon the “liberals” start to cry great big crocodile tears about the “old folks” who “need” social security. Then there is “welfare” for the poor and food stamps for the indigent. Or great private and public corporations cry out for the assistance of the government to help them over some terrible emergency.

All kinds of things happen. In the name of some weird ideology, in 1934 the Government, via the President, the Congress and the Courts, plundered and stole the total supply of the nation’s gold that was then owned by the citizens. By Executive Order they gave control of our total supply of gold to the Federal Reserve Banks and forbade any citizen to own or possess gold coin or bullion.

The notion was fostered that gold was of no value for money. Instead, the manufacture, control, and destruction of money was given into the hands of banking interests. Certificates of debt, whether of government bonds or of other private paper, were labeled as “Legal Tender” and offered to the nation in lieu of sound money.

Once this philosophy of government social service has been accepted as noble, the majority who hold it will vote for it. They will move heaven and earth as it were, to put it into effect. To them, what they vote for is good; thus, it is moral and desirable. They now have an ideology that is firmly entrenched and fueled by high ideals.

The moment the citizens put total government power behind such an ideology, the nation is doomed to eventual destruction – unless a majority repent and withdraw power from such a government force.

To create such a government evil, they put into power people who promise to use government force to do good things for the people. This promise is colored and motivated by the expression of high ideals and great expectations.

With this done, government agents and politicians, with the help of deceived and lying professors, led an unsuspecting people, (ideologists of the first rank), to accept the evil notion that government is responsible for the financial welfare of the people.

Soon the nation began to covet ease and to shun self-effort and sacrifice. As the notion of government responsibility increased, production per individual began to fall off in quality and quantity. Thus, the people turned more and more to the central powers of government for food, clothing and shelter. The result?

MOBOCRACY!

There you have it: A government that is dedicated to plunder in support of an ideology.

The ideology says that it is good to have “full employment.” Everybody is entitled to a full lunch pail if he “needs” it. It is the government’s duty to see to it that prosperity abounds. Law and order is good. Government is good. Prosperity is essential. The government’s power to tax and spend must be used in ever widening circles.

If more money is needed to “balance the budget”, borrow it. Increase the debt of the country.

Tax the “haves” to support the “have-nots.”

Listen to “the voice of the people.” What they want, the people take. Share the revenue and make need the standard by which ownership is determined.

By creating such an “ideology” the many symptoms rooted deeply in widespread personal greed have combined into a nationwide, a worldwide “something for nothing syndrome,” a terrible social sickness.

So you have inflation stealing your bread!

HALT INFLATION?

We will never do it until the great majority of the people realize and are willing to face up to the fact that to be prosperous and free of debt, we must produce more than we consume.

We must have an honest money system; a system that will allow people to exchange their goods and services freely because it is universally acceptable; a money system that will aid them to store their surplus goods and services in the form of capital without loss of value for future use.

We must stop government, and ourselves personally, from mortgaging the future of our grand-children to pay for today’s luxuries.

The alternative?

Personal and national chaos. Take your choice.

But make your will know to your Congressmen. They alone can write your decision into the law of the land.

COMPLEXITY vs OVER-SIMPLIFICATION

The world is far too complex to be managed by anyone but free and righteous men who can own and use what they produce in a free and open market.

A GOOD SUGGESTION

Offered by Henry Hazlett in THE FREEMAN for July 1974, pg 392:

“If private citizens had the right to make contracts in gold, gold would then become a de facto money, in both domestic and international trade, whether legally “monetized” or not.

It would not necessarily follow that gold itself would be used in every transaction. Contracts might merely provide that a due payment could be made in paper dollars, or in any other currency, or by check, but in terms of the market price for gold on the day of settlement.

Such a private currency would be enormously better protection against inflation than any set of “indexes” or “escalator clauses.” it would be a step toward freedom instead of still more government coercion.

It would have still another advantage: As inflation continued, the various paper currencies would go to the greater and greater discount against the new private gold currency. This would daily emphasize that continually rising PAPER MONEY prices were not [alone] the result of greater and greater greed on the part of producers and sellers, but merely the increasing worthlessness of [fiat] government money.

That alone would be the real beginning of reform.”

FIAT UNCONSTITUTIONAL MONEY

A Federal Reserve Note which bears the statement, “This note is legal tender for all debts public and private,” is not legal constitutional money. It is fiat money that is legally outlawed by the Constitution of The United States.

CONSTITUTIONAL MONEY

The Constitution of the United States, Article I Section 8 says:

“Congress shall coin Money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;”

And in Article I Section 10, it says:

“No State shall . . . coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in payment of Debts, . . . (or) pass any Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts. . . .”

OUTLAWS AND INLAWS

All the “jokes” about mothers-in-law notwithstanding, . . .

A person who lives outside the law is an outlaw.

Does it not therefore follow that:

“A person who lives inside the law is an in-law?”

Whether you like it or not, be he a Congressman, a President or a Justice of the Supreme Court, a person who does not hold himself bound in his actions by the Constitution of the United States is an OUTLAW.

Fiat money is the “money” of outlaws.