Notwithstanding the fact that the Federal Reserve System (the US Government’s unconstitutional central bank) destroys wealth through the inflation tax, it is the enabler of empire and the warmongering aspirations of the imperial government.
Consider this: Without the ability to create money out of thin air, a government must finance a war via taxation. The cost of the Iraq adventure is now at about $20,000 per US household. If George W. Bush and the lapdog congress had to appeal to the American people to pony up $20K each for this war, how many do you think would have willingly opened their pocketbook?
Of course, government regularly forces taxation on the people without their approval, but there is a practical limit to how much they will take. It brings about revolution when it goes too far – a scenario government would prefer to avoid.
The Federal Reserve is the engine that runs the Military Industrial Complex. Billions of “off budget” dollars are funneled to the favored manufacturers of the war machine, and their powerful lobby that pushes our government toward intervention.
A nation should be at peace by default. War should be conducted only when necessary and just to respond to an attack, or to prepare for an eminent attack. And when you fight a war, as we did in the American Revolution, it should break the bank. It should drain all the nations resources, and everyone should feel the pain. War should be painful and taxing.
Instead, war with fiat money, courtesy of the Federal Reserve, seems painless to the masses who willingly follow government propaganda. We don’t feel its effects until years later, and when we do the government can blame it on everything but government. Market failures, greedy capitalists, “irrational exuberance,” and (currently) speculators are blamed for all our woes.
War is funded with inflation. Inflation must always be paid for with recession. It is inevitable that we should experience financial crisis as a result of our current military adventurism in Iraq.
Without the ability to fund wars with printed money, government would be “chained down” by the constraints that Thomas Jefferson envisioned.