North: Fiat Currency Money Printing Leading to Decentralization and Operational Secession

Dr. Gary North gives us his take on the Fed, gold, and the revolution that may take place. A snippet:

... The classic situation that precedes a political revolution is when a government has promised benefits to large numbers of people, and then it reneges on the benefits.

For years, things seem to be getting better. The government takes credit for things getting better. Then things then get unprecedentedly worse. This happened immediately before the French Revolution. It happened immediately before the Russian Revolution. It happened a decade before the American Revolution. We forget about this.

The American Revolution began in response to relatively mild increases of taxation that were required to pay for British troops in the United States. The French and Indian War (1757–63) had eliminated the threat of the French, so the Americans assumed that they would be the beneficiaries. The British government decided that Americans should pay for the quartering of troops in the colonies, in order to defend the new western borders against any future incursions by the French. The Americans had thought it was going to be no taxes and lots of new land. The British imposed new taxes and restrictions on the westward movement of the population. Then came the Stamp Act of 1765. That was all it took for the beginning of the end of the British Empire in North America. It began to erode the legitimacy of the British Empire in the eyes of North American British citizens. As the legitimacy of the regime declined, the opportunity for Sam Adams, Patrick Henry, and other anti-imperialists made possible the American Revolution.

Revolutions in the past have been through the centralization of power. The one exception to this was the American Revolution, but that exception only lasted for five years: 1783–1788. The Constitution centralized power enormously in comparison to the Articles of Confederation. After 1788, the process of centralization increased relentlessly. There is not a single period in American history from 1789 until this year in which there was any serious reduction of Federal power.

The French Revolution and the Russian Revolution centralized existing hierarchical systems that were already more centralized than other countries in the West.

A political revolution aimed at capturing power in Washington is inherently self-defeating. It will simply add to the existing process of centralization that has gone on since 1789.

A political revolution has to involve the transformation of the legal order. Without a transformation of the legal order, there is no revolution. There is only a coup. It does not pay to run a coup. A revolution favoring freedom must involve something like a return to what existed in the days of the Articles of Confederation. If this is not the direction of the revolution, then it will simply be business as usual.

It is not good enough to reform the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve System must be abolished. This is the proper approach of thinking about the revolution. Ron Paul has written a book called The Revolution. He has also written a book called End the Fed. This is the correct approach. We must not try to strengthen the system, or reform the system, or make the system more efficient. We must abolish the system, agency by agency.

Ultimately, this could mean secession. ...

Read it here.