Blogito ergo sum.

I have noticed on my drive to work that the vast, vast majority of people on the road early in the morning are men.

I wonder why.

In addition to the frontal attacks on our wealth represented by income taxes, Social Security taxes, etc., etc., there’s another tax that is much more subtle, and therefore more sinister, because it goes unnoticed.

John Maynard Keynes, the intellectual forefather of liberal economics from FDR to Barack Obama, let us in on a dirty little political secret:

“By a continuous process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.  The process engages all of the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner that not one man in a million can diagnose.”

The government doesn’t create wealth; it merely prints money without any corresponding real wealth.  By pumping this new money (currency) into the economy faster than the private sector creates actual wealth (goods and services), the government automatically makes all of our current (and future) possessions worth less.  Why?  There’s more money to buy essentially the same amount of wealth.  The law of supply-and-demand kicks in.  (This is one of the “hidden forces of economic law” that Keynes mentioned.)  Since there’s more of a supply of money demanding the same amount of wealth, it takes more money to buy the wealth.

Look at it this way.  A new dollar, fresh off the government printing press, buys some of the wealth (goods or services) that we, the private sector, have produced.  The government gets a dollar’s worth of wealth for it.  That dollar starts circulating, moving from one business to another, but since it is constantly being followed by more new dollars all vying for the same amount of wealth, it becomes worth less (remember the law of supply-and-demand!), and it takes this dollar – plus change – to buy the same amount of wealth that the government got for it.  The longer this dollar is in the system, the less it is worth.  By the time it gets to you, and you take it to McDonald’s or Ace Hardware, you buy less wealth for it than the government did.

Here’s the revelation: if you follow the chain backwards, who got the best deal for the dollar?  The government!  Who got the worst deal?  The last guy in line: you and me!  Our wealth is moving inexorably but undeniably in the direction of the government.  How else could they afford to hire more and more people, buy up more and more land, and send more and more benefits to the “poor”?

I’ll bet Henry Paulson, George Bush, John McCain, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi all know this – but they’re not telling.

Most of us just consider inflation a fact of life.  Yet inflation is a hidden tax by which our government is confiscating, slowly and inexorably, “secretly and unobserved,” our wealth, and “in a manner that not one man in a million can diagnose.” 

Welcome to a very elite group.

In Genesis 41 and 47, Joseph predicted 7 years of prosperity, then 7 years of scarcity.  During the 7 years of scarcity, the people turned to the government to bail them out.  Pharaoh took care of them all right, but in the process collected the people’s assets, and enslaved them.

Last week, with the impending meltdown of the U.S. economy, the people turned to the government to bail us out.  Congress took care of us all right, but in the process collected many of our assets, and…

Thomas Sowell’s solution: Translate some of our far-left publications into Spanish and give everybody in Mexico a subscription.  After they read how terrible this country is, they’ll want to stay away!