The United States dollar has undergone quite the distortion: let's say you attend a play at the local theatre. You check your coat and receive in return an IOU stub which grants you a claim on your coat upon your departure from the theatre. Government has essentially convinced the audience that the coats are no longer of relevance here; that rather the IOUs are the most important aspect of the transaction. In fact, they become so convicted that they distribute more of these IOU claims to convince the ever-broader audience that they too are coat owners. Of course, upon leaving the theatre you recognize that you are still coatless and the weather has become no more tolerant since the government masquerade began. Remember, the United States dollar is not beneficial in and of itself, but rather in the capacity by which it enables more extensive reach in quantity and quality of goods and services to grant people the greatest pleasure, leisure, and time. The mere expansion of the quantity of money offers no such benefit.
Virtually the entirety of South and Central America, as well as European powers Britain, Spain and France, peacefully abolished slavery — without war — in the first sixty years of the nineteenth century. Why, then, did the United States enter into a bloody war that cost over half of the nation’s wealth, at least 800,000 lives and many hundreds of thousands more in casualties? The answer: the War Between the States was not about slavery. It was a war of invasion to further empower the central government and to reject state sovereignty, nullification of unconstitutional laws, and the states’ rights to secession. It was a war that would cripple the South and witness the federal debt skyrocket from $65 million in 1860 to $2.7 billion in 1865, whose annual interest alone would prove twice as expensive as the entire federal budget from 1860. It was a war whose total cost, including pensions and the burial of veterans, was an estimated $12 billion. Likewise, it was a war that would
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