(C) BoingBoing
Author Name: BoingBoing
This story was originally published on Boingboing.net. [1]
License: CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0.[2]


1971: The year they broke money

2021-12-25 15:17:16+00:00

Inflation was insane in the early 1940s when the government took over the economy to win World War II. Inflation was considered a serious problem in the 1960s. Getting off the gold standard in 1971 was a good thing. It was high time to stop worshiping a fetish metal. It wasn’t the first time the US went off the gold standard either. That was the whole point of FDR’s manipulation of the gold price that made it possible to ameliorate the Great Depression.

The gap between the haves and the have-nots widened in the 1970s when the federal government stopped intervening in union busting and started cutting taxes. The Confederate right-to-starve-amid-plenty states took over manufacturing with help from the interstate highways. In the 1980s, union busting was the rule starting with Reagan breaking the first union to support his election. Then came the massive tax cuts and the shareholder value ideology that freed government chartered collectives to prey on Americans.

The gold standard had little to do with it. People don’t understand that with fractional reserve banking an ounce of gold can create any amount of money. Under 1930s rules, an ounce of gold could create $500K, but once the FDIC was in, the sky was the limit.
[END]

[1] URL: https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/1971-the-year-they-broke-money/211388
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/deed.en_US

BoingBoing via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/rferl/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.