Great article from mises.org

The government and the clueless pundits on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox won't explain to you why the dollar is now worth only four cents. In fact, they don't even want you to know that. In a step-by-step process, the government destroyed the value of our dollar since they created the Federal Reserve in 1913. Now nothing backs our fiat currency.

This great article explains a lot of what the government did to us. Thanks to the Mises Institute for another great article on economics.

Why you should read "Meltdown"

Iceland went under, Austria's banks are about to collapse, and England is teetering. The news from China is just as bleak: 70,000 factories have closed in the last few years, and the unemployed from those closings has hit 20 million. Why?

The root cause is that every country now, following our foolish lead, has an inflating central bank. The favorite tool of these banks: fiat currency. Fiat means "of nothing." So all of this supposed "money" is simply paper backed by nothing.

Thomas Woods, one of the best historian/economists in the country, has come out with a great, relatively short book that explains it all. Meltdown: A Free Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse.

If you read it, you will know more than over 95% of the people in the U.S., and then you can figure out and implement a plan to save your investments and yourself. A small price to pay in these turbulent and scary financial times.

Greenspan exposed

Another great article from the Mises Institute, this one exposing the former Fed boss Alan Greenspan. Unfortunately for America, Greenspan tried to nullify the fundamental laws of economics. Once of his worst sins was printing money, and printing money, and printing money. The "Great Printer" printed so much in the 90's that the NASDAQ went up ten times in ten years! That's not really supposed to happen, and it all began to unravel in 2000.

So when your friends tell you it was the "free market" that caused all of our problems, just have them go to mises.org or here to find out the truth.

More government help - please no!

Governments around the world are trying to figure out how to "save" their economies. They all vow to do something, and usually use the term "stimulus." So, they want to stimulate their economies. Unfortunately for them, that is impossible. Only entrepreneurs, who invest capital to start businesses and employ millions while providing the goods and services we want and need, can "stimulate" the economy. Since governments don't make bicycles, candles, pizza slices, pens, shirts, cars, and the billions of other items we desire, they cannot "stimulate" their economies. They can only get out of the way, and leave businesses alone.

The loons who created this mess (by allowing their central banks to inflate) are meeting to discuss the problem. The problem is, they are prescribing the same medicine - the wrong medicine. Get out of the way, stop taxing and regulating, eliminate your central bank, and stop printing fiat currency. Then, and only then, will economies flourish. They won't do this, of course, so we're in for a decades-long global recession. Mark my words.

Mises knew it a long time ago

The greatest economist of the 20th century, Ludwig von Mises, wrote one of his many great works back in 1934. The title: The Theory of Money and Credit. This book is especially important now because of the devastation of American wealth caused by the inflating central bank, the Federal Reserve. An excerpt:

"Native inflationism demands an increase in the quantity of money without suspecting that this will diminish the purchasing power of money. It wants more money because in its eyes the mere abundance of money is wealth. Fiat money! Let the state "create" money, and make the poor rich, and free them from the bonds of the capitalists! How wrong to forgo it simply because this would run counter to the interests of the rich! How wicked of the economists to assert that it is not within the power of the state to create wealth by means of the printing press! - You statesmen want to build railways and complain about the low state of the exchequer? Well, then, do not beg loans from the capitalists and anxiously calculate whether your railways will bring in enough to enable you to pay interest and amortization on your debt. Create money, and help yourselves."

Mises knew back then that the creation of money backed by nothing leads to disaster. As we watch the economy collapse this year and next, we can only hope that Mises' works catch on so we can finally abandon Keynesianism, that economic crap they teach in public schools.

What happened?

The root cause of the current crisis is central banking (the Federal Reserve) and its fiat money system. Whenever any central bank prints money out of thin air, the chickens ultimately come home to roost. Only a few of the "experts" you see on CNN, Fox, etc. actually understand this. So all the meaningless talk is just that, meaningless, unless they discuss the Fed and its policies.

Only the Austrians knew what was coming, and they predicted it years ago. By studying Austrian economics, you'll not only know more economics than almost the entire U.S. population, but you'll also be better able to invest your money and avoid catastrophe.

Simply invest $6.00 and buy The Case Against the Fed by Murray Rothbard. Then you'll also realize that neither Obama nor McCain knows what's going on or how to fix it.