Introduction

I was reflecting on a title of a book written by Murray Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money?, and begin to wonder how we as a nation had reached the point where we make the distinction between the government and us. If anyone has read Rothbard, he too is an enemy of the State, and makes clear in his writings that what we think of as government today is indeed a tyrannical State. Our language uncovers our thinking – our beliefs – in a way that shows our nakedness regarding our subservience to the State.

Removed Far from the Founders

It is easy today to make fun of and dismiss the saying, government by, for, and of the people. But what those words signified at one time entail the legacy that the founders hoped to bequeath to future generations that would come after them. The so-called government was not to be separated from and rulers over the people. No reason to spend much time on that bit of history. We lost what it meant a long time ago. Listen to our language today. The government needs to do something about [name the problem]. The government is our security [domestic and international]. The government should provide security for people in their older age [ social security]. The government should provide affordable healthcare for its citizens [Medicare/Obamacare]. The government should educate our children [public education]. So on, so on, ad nauseam the public trough is extolled. As Rothbard points out in many of his writings, the belief system that such language uncovers had given us not a government, but an all-powerful State. In what ways have we, the people, handed our livelihoods over to the State?

The Military Industrial Complex [MIC]

George Washington, in his farewell address, warned the citizens about entanglements in the affairs of other countries, particularly regarding foreign conflicts. Yet today we have military bases in numerous countries throughout the world. We engaged in a useless conflict with Mexico in the late 18th century, and following W.W. II, we engaged in one police action after another from Korea to Afghanistan, nation building not only to our demise in terms of loss of life, but to the nonsensical goal of forming a Pax Americana over the globe. Globalism clearly raises its ugly immoral head both in progressive and neoconservative ideologies. The MIC determines our foreign policy around the globe. As Randolph Bourne put it, War is the health of the State. Critics claim that George Washington didn’t live in a time of globalism, internet, and nuclear weapons. Rather than a criticism of Washington, this is even more a rationale to remain free from political and military entanglements around the world. So-called isolationists are not calling for a return to the agrarian society of Washington’s time. It’s simply called taking care of your own backyard and minding your own business.

Health, Wellfare, and Social Security

We have likewise created the nanny State through the belief that the government should take care of all our health, medical, and retirement needs. Don’t look now, but the government is thirty-five trillion dollars in debt. To take care of all that people call on the State to do for them is unfathomable in terms of, not only dollars, but also in the ability required of a centralized Sate. Hence, the State has become the number one employer in the country. Yet with all its touted expert bureaucrats, it can do nothing but plunge the nation deeper and deeper into debt. Since there is no possible way to continue to soak the people to pay for the promises of politicians handed out to their constituents, then the State via the Federal Reserve turns on the money machine, cranking out dollar bills, flooding the economy with unearned money that drives the prices of what people really need higher and higher, creating more and more need. The government has become the people’s god.

Education

The government should provide education for our children. Given the belief system of the country as it now stands, public education has become a disaster. The so-called educational experts dictate to the parents what their children are to be taught in the neo-indoctrination camps. Unfortunately such curricula include gender identity along with other forms of wokeism. Note how intensely public educators attack private education and homeschooling, especially when those institutions are grounded in a Judeo-Christian ethic. From the perspective of the State, children do not belong to their parents; they are wards of the State. Until people truly threaten public educators with their right to remove their children from such State institutions, placing them in private educational facilities, homeschools, or homeschool co-ops, public education will continue to drift father away from its original educational goals, moving deeper and deeper into the social indoctrination camps they have set themselves up to be.

End the Fed

Ron Paul hit the bullseye. End the Fed is a worthy slogan aimed at removing the State from the regulatory role it plays in its dealings with private business, especially small, privately owned businesses. Entrepreneurs have become severely hampered, if not outright crippled, by federal, and even state, regulations. We need to heed what happened in Germany’s hyper-inflationary period in the 1920’s. With a thirty-five trillion dollar debt, inflation continuing to destroy the strength of the dollar (regardless of what politicians say), and entrepreneurial activity being obliterated, we are facing a similar situation that haunted Germany in the years following W.W.I. We may want to play ostrich, choosing not to believe that such a plight cannot happen in America, but such a plight is not external; it is internal. We have created the State, believing that it can and should meet all our needs, as if bowing before an oracle, rubbing a genie bottle, or approaching a gift dispensing machine. Such a worldview is just that, a worldview, and a false one at that.

Conclusion

So what has government done to our money? Rothbard is right. The government has become a State, not one that invaded us, but one we birthed because of the worldview we hold. As a Christian, I believe that only a Judeo-Christian ethic can be the foundation for a truly prosperous and moral civilization. I don’t hold out much hope for this nation. But that is due to my own lack of faith. I call on those of us who truly believe in the name of Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of God to pray for our nation and to do our own part in our our own settings via the local churches to counter the rise of the State that we have brought about.

John V. Jones, Jr, Ph.D./October 14th, 2024

ANALYSIS