"I sincerely believe that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity,
under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale. "
 -- Thomas Jefferson


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"Government is the only agency that can take a useful commodity like paper,
slap some ink on it, and make it totally worthless."
-- Ludwig Von Mises


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"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning
the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.
The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction,
and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."
--John Maynard Keynes - The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)


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"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.
It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess
(large gifts) out of the public treasury and then they will continue to elect the politicians
  promising the most.  And the end result will be a fall of that democracy
  due to economic ruin and chaos."
-- Alexander Fraser Tyler


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"A democracy is a temporary and transitional form of government on the way
  to total government."

- - Alfred Fraser Tyler


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"The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare
statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of
credit. They have created paper reserves in the form of government bonds
which- through a complex series of steps- the banks accept in place of tangible
assets and treat as if they were an actual deposit, i.e., as the equivalent of what
was formerly a deposit of gold. The holder of a government bond or of a bank
deposit created by paper reserves believes that he has a valid claim on a real
asset. But the fact is that there are now more claims
outstanding than real assets."
 
"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings
from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were,
the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case
of gold.  If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver
or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as
payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and
government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods.
The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the
owners of wealth to protect themselves."
 
"This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold.
Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the 'hidden' confiscation of wealth.
Gold stands in the way of this insidious process.  It stands as a protector
of property rights.  If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in
understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard."
- - Alan Greenspan

 
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 "If the American people ever allow private banks to

  control the issue of their currency, first by inflation and then by

deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them, will

deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless

on the continent their fathers conquered."

- - Thomas Jefferson


 

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  "Give me control of a nation's monetary system and I
  care not who writes their laws."
- - Meyer Rothschild:

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  "The aggressive mindset of the world's economic powerhouse may need to be replaced
with the humility appropriate for the world's biggest debtor nation.."
- - Berry Riley, Financial Times, April, 2001:

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  "Today's economy was probably experiencing a once-in-a-century acceleration in 
innovation, but people may well conclude that a good deal of what we are currently
 experiencing was just one of the many euphoric speculative bubbles 
that have dotted human history." 
- Alan Greenspan, January 2000

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"For 5 years at least, American business has been in
   the grip of an apocalyptic holy-rolling exaltation over the
   unparalleled prosperity of the 'new era' upon which we have entered."
   - Business Week, 1929

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"There can be few fields of human endeavor in which
   history counts for so little as in the world of finance.
   Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is
   dimissed as the primative refuge of those who do not have the insight to
    appreciate the incredible wonders of the present."
   - John Kenneth Galbreith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria

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"Below the favourable surface [of the economy],
 there are as dangerous and intractable circumstances as I can remember....
. . . Nothing in our experience is comparable…
But no one is willing to understand [this] and do anything about it…
 We are consuming… about six per cent more than we are producing.
 What holds the world together is a massive flow of capital from abroad…
 it’s what feeds our consumption binge...
 the United States economy is growing on the savings of the poor…
 A big adjustment will inevitably become necessary,
 long before the social security surpluses disappear and the deficit explodes…
We are skating on increasingly thin ice."
   - Former Federal Reserve Chairman, Paul Volcker

 

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