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.
There is much confusion surrounding the concept of the “separation of church and state”; much of it likely born out of the steep secular decline in religious affiliation across recent generations, with particular emphasis among atheists and anti-deists. While many have hastened to leverage this language (“separation of church and state”) in order to condemn or censure religious values — particularly those which are Christian — where they have carried influence in public life (i.e. prayer in schools, teachers covering lessons from the Bible, government representatives appealing to God, coinage bearing the words “In God We Trust”), the truth is that this “separation” was never expected to completely eliminate religious practice or religious sentiment from all matter of public life. In fact, religion was so deeply enmeshed in American life during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the French magistrate and prison reformer Gustave de Beaumont, during his nine-month tour of A...
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