The Fed and Quantitative Robbery

With all the hoopla over the election, Bernanke's quantitative easing announcement (a.k.a. theft of your savings) is getting insufficient attention.

Wrap it up in all the excuses you want (a weaker dollar will improve exports, we have to avoid deflation, it's really credit easing to boost business and spending....) it still comes down to the fact that whenever the government creates money out of thin air, the value of the money you have earned and saved goes down.

For every dollar you earned and saved in 1980, you only have 34 cents left. The other 66 cents has been inflated away by the Fed.

If you are old enough to have started working in 1973, when Nixon abandoned the gold standard, that dollar is now worth only 20 cents.

What happened to the value of our money 100 years ago, when we did not have the Fed and we were still on a commodity money standard?

From 1880 to 1910, a similar 30 year stretch, the value of the dollar fell 3 cents. That means you'd still have $0.97 in 1910 for every dollar you earned in 1880 instead of the $0.34 cents you have today from what you earned in 1980.

Here's a chart I have posted before which illustrates the destruction of the value of our money by the government. The dashed lines are periods in our history (including the present) when paper dollars are cut loose from a hard metal standard.

So are we better off with the Fed or with freedom? Does the government simply get to keep printing and borrowing money and then pay us back with less, all the while eroding away our ability to save and provide for our own future?

I think the answer is obvious.

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