It seems they would like to implement a kinder and gentler version of feudalism. What is really going on here, and what is the end game?

Doug Casey: The middle class, the bourgeoisie, emerged with the death of feudalism, the inception of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and finally, the Industrial Revolution.

“Middle class” has been given a bad connotation in recent times. Leftists want everybody to believe that the bourgeoisie is full of consumerist faults. They’re mocked for being concerned with material well-being and improving their status. The elites feel threatened by them. Unlike the lower class plebs, grunt workers who don’t expect more from life.

Bourgeoisie simply means city dweller. Starting in the late Middle Ages, city dwellers were independent, with their own trades and businesses. Living in towns got them out from under the control of the feudal warrior elites.

Cities became intellectual centers, where the growing wealth of the bourgeoisie—the middle class—gave them the leisure needed to develop science, technology, engineering, literature, and medicine. Universities expanded the idea of education beyond the realm of theology. Commerce and personal freedom attracted the best of the peasants, who rose to the middle class. Cities ended feudalism, a system whereby everyone was born into a class and occupation, and was expected to stay there for life, obligated to pay taxes—protection money—to his “betters”. The rise of the bourgeoisie didn’t suit the ruling classes, who liked dominating society.

Capitalism developed as the bourgeoisie became wealthy. The rest is well-known history, but the point must be made that the creation of the middle class, capitalism, and bourgeois values elevated peasants from poverty and created today’s world.

But, then and now, a certain percentage of the population wants to control everyone else. The types who go to Bilderberg, the World Economic Forum, CFR, and the like see themselves as elite new aristocrats who should dominate the others. Even though most of them came from the middle class, now that they’ve “made it,” they like to pull the ladder up. And if not eliminate, at least neuter or defang the remaining bourgeoisie.

So what’s the end game?

I think it might look something like the movie Rollerball. Keep the plebs entertained while the elite, in the form of a corporate aristocracy, controls society.

International Man: Yuval Harari is a prominent World Economic Forum (WEF) member.

He suggested that the elite should use a universal basic income, drugs, and video games to keep the “useless class” docile and occupied. What is your take on these comments in the context of Feudalism 2.0?

Doug Casey: A nasty little fellow, Harari is what might be termed a court intellectual for the World Economic Forum. He’s there to provide an intellectual patina for the power members, who are basically the businessmen, politicos, and media personalities. They’re not thinkers or interested in ideas but philistines concerned with money and power. Harari gives them an intellectual framework to justify their actions and plans.

As far as his books are concerned, they amount to a lot of generic truisms, obvious observations, justifications of current trends, and a projection of how the world will evolve. As an author and thinker, he’s knowledgeable and intelligent but grossly overrated. He owes his success to promotion from the new wannabe aristocracy and their hangers on. He illustrates the advantages of being hooked up with power people.

Harari has gone from being just another college professor, living with his husband in Israel, to being an internationally famous multi-millionaire pundit.

He expects the “useless eaters” will be maintained on a subsistence basis until they die out. I’m not sure how much the Covid hysteria, followed by the vaccine, has to do with that. It’s becoming quite clear that Covid itself was an artificially constructed flu variant, mainly affecting the very old, very sick, and very overweight. The vaccine is useless in preventing Covid but has caused significant increases in morbidity and mortality among healthy recipients. Was it a trial run to cleanse the world of useless eaters?

I don’t know. But, based on what people like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot—among many others—have done in recent years, I don’t think it’s out of the question. No doubt, the new aristocracy wants to cement themselves in place. They certainly don’t like rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi when they visit Venice, Machu Pichu, and the like.

International Man: How does the WEF’s vision of “you will own nothing and be happy” compare to the previous feudal system of medieval Europe?

Doug Casey: Serfs, unlike slaves, had some rights; they owned tools and huts. But their position in society was fixed, they couldn’t easily move—rather like a medieval version of today’s 15-minute city. They had to recognize their betters, and not say anything challenging—like today’s increasingly draconian limits on free speech.

I expect that the gigantic amount of debt in society today will be the means of turning middle-class Americans into serfs. The lower classes are already welfare recipients who produce very little; they’ll soon be replaced by robots.

The better educated ones are buried under their college debts. But everybody is buried under growing credit card debt, auto debt, mortgage debt, and sometimes even tax debt.

If someone makes a lucky capital gain in the stock market or by selling his house, he might spend that money only to find that the government wants 20%, 30%, or 40% of the gain. So the gain, instead of a blessing, becomes a disaster in disguise.

Many people today are burdened by debt, living paycheck to paycheck. They’re barely getting by, under immense pressure to cover food and rent. They’d probably be quite willing to take a deal offering essentially “three hots and a cot,” a tiny apartment, internet, and some extra money to hang around Starbucks.

International Man: How do you see Feudalism 2.0 developing over the coming months and years? What can be done to resist this agenda?

Doug Casey: Trends in motion tend to stay in motion until they reach some type of a crisis—when anything can happen. Let’s look at some economic systems, as spelled out by Karl Marx.

In Communism, the Marxist ideal, the State owns both the means of production (factories, farms, and such) as well as consumer goods (houses, cars, and theoretically, even your clothes). Mao’s China is as close as anyone’s come.

Socialism is a way station to Communism. The State owns the means of production, but individuals can still own consumer goods. There are lots of countries with socialist ideals, but no real socialist countries. Cuba probably comes closest.

Fascism is an economic system where both the means of production and consumer goods are privately owned, but they’re both 100% State-controlled. Most of the world’s countries are fascist. The word was coined by Mussolini; he meant it to describe the melding of the State, corporations, and unions.

Few people know that Marx coined the word “capitalism”. It’s a system where everything is both privately owned and privately controlled. There are no purely capitalist countries.

In feudalism, a lord owns everything but grants fiefs to subordinates. An aristocracy is supported by the plebs through taxation. Feudalism is based on the plebs providing service and taxes to the lord in exchange for “protection” from other lords.

Now for some pure speculation on my part.

Most of the world’s governments, including that of the US, are terminally bankrupt. They’ll prove unable to meet their obligations. Meanwhile, the prospect of wars, secessions, and crime is growing. I suspect wealthy corporations and individuals will wind up supplanting most traditional governments.

The result could be called neo-feudalism.

The average person is looking for someone or something to save him, to kiss everything and make it better, when times get tough. With governments bankrupt and dysfunctional, solvent and powerful individuals and corporations could take their place.

Harari and his pals want to see the plebs given a guaranteed annual income, a place to live, and entertainment until the useless eaters fade away. But it won’t be as neat as Harari’s wet dreams imagine. The world will be chaotic. We may be on our way to an idiocracy as well, where the populace is dumbed down so they don’t get dangerous ideas.

No matter how things sort out, I think we’re looking at a chaotic and dangerous situation in the near term.

I don’t see voting as a solution. Notwithstanding the differences between Harris and Trump, it just amounts to choosing the lesser of two evils, which in this case would certainly be Trump. But even if you elected Mises, Hayek, Ron Paul, or Harry Browne, I’m afraid the tide of history would wash them away.

In any event, your vote doesn’t really count. Or perhaps I should say it counts about as much as a grain of sand on a beach with hundreds of millions of grains of sand. And even then, as Stalin said, it’s not who votes that counts. It’s who counts the votes.

What can you do to resist the shape of things to come?

It’s an uphill fight because if you’re liberty-oriented, you’re part of a tiny minority at odds with the views of most of your fellow citizens, who’ve been indoctrinated by years of schooling, media, and entertainment. Collectivist memes are cemented in their minds. And when they talk to their contemporaries, they tend to mutually reinforce their beliefs.

When you’re in a group, it can be dangerous to have different beliefs, in much the same way that it’s dangerous for a chicken in a flock to have a feather out of place. The other chickens will peck it to death. Reigning ideas tend to be brutally enforced.

What can you do about this?

Other than trying to maintain your personal integrity, there’s not much you can do to roll back the tsunami. There wasn’t much that a freedom-loving Russian could do in 1917, a freedom-loving German could do in 1933, or a freedom-loving Cuban could do in 1959. Or a freedom-loving Venezuelan today.

The best you can do is to try to save yourself, your family, and your like-minded friends. Changing society for the better is a long shot. Although I hope Milei in Argentina proves me wrong.

International Man: What do you suggest individuals do to ensure they don’t become modern serfs if Feudalism 2.0 emerges?

Doug Casey: There are two types of freedom: physical and financial.

From a physical point of view, it’s important not to be tied down the way a serf might be. You don’t want all your possessions to be in one place where they’re easily controlled by the powers that be. Don’t act like a plant. Staying rooted in one place is not an optimum survival strategy for a human in tough times.

The powers that be are interested in controlling other people. It’s best to be a moving target, which makes you much harder to hit.

This is a problem for those of us who think that the US is still the land of the free. It’s not. It’s been devolving for decades. My guess is that over the next few years, perhaps starting with this election, the US will evermore closely resemble the other 200 nation-states that cover the face of the globe like a skin disease.

The single most important thing you can do is internationalize and make sure that all your assets aren’t in one bailiwick, under the control of one government.

From a financial point of view, it gives you the freedom to travel and move, especially with the coming FX controls and CBDCs. Use gold and Bitcoin. You should already have a good stash of both. If you don’t, it’s not too late to start accumulating and transferring assets into them.

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Politicians are implementing increasingly stringent regulations for dishwashers, washing machines, and other appliances. There have even been reports of a desire to phase out gas stoves. What’s your take on all of this?

Doug Casey: As Der Schwabenklaus of the World Economic Forum boldly said some years ago, “You’ll own nothing and be happy.”

The fact that a prominent figure could actually say that, promote the idea, and not be pilloried gives you an idea of the spirit of the current century. The lack of outrage from the average man is even more sick than the idea itself.

Not owning appliances is a practical application of the meme, but just one tentacle of the global warming octopus. Appliances are constructed from resources that have to be mined and run with electricity; that makes them evil. It’s much more important in these people’s views to “save the planet”—a ridiculous concept—than to continue raising the standard of living.

The fact is that the self-righteous authoritarians who want to limit the use of appliances basically just hate people—especially middle-class people. They’d really like to revert to pre-capitalist times, when only the upper classes, the feudal aristocrats, could benefit from conveniences. Ecowarriors, the Greens, are cut from the same cloth as socialists, communists, and fascists. Their totem fruit is the watermelon, green on the outside and red on the inside.

International Man: Many people have noticed that modern appliances are not the same quality as the ones produced decades ago. For one thing, modern appliances tend to require much more time to do the same thing an older model could do faster. For example, today, it’s common to see a standard dish-washing cycle to take more than two hours.

Modern appliances also don’t perform as well and break down more frequently. Climate regulations are largely to blame for this regression. What is really going on here?

Doug Casey: I don’t have a lot of personal experience with how appliances work, but I’ve certainly heard that modern appliances are designed to sacrifice convenience and time in order to possibly use less water or electricity.

One thing that I do recall is that several decades ago, the US government decided to regulate the amount of water that could be used to flush toilets. The devices are now less sanitary and often have to be flushed twice. The idea that politicians should mandate plumbing designs is absurd. But they do this with all products—cars, planes, houses, you name it. They destroy capital and slow technological progress, even while annoying and frustrating engineers.

But perhaps the average person doesn’t think about these things or care. The standard of living has gone up for so long that we tend to think it’s automatic and divinely ordained. I’m not so sure about that. Everything tends to wind down unless there is enough outside force to counteract it.

For instance, we live in a throwaway society. If you need something repaired, it’s generally more economic to throw the whole thing away than to hire a skilled craftsman to fix it, even though they barely exist anymore, and they’re very expensive. It’s often cheaper to replace things that break.

Is that truly economic or not? I’m not sure, but we can see it even with houses. Once upon a time, houses were built to last 100 years or longer. They were a major capital investment. But now, they seem to be the residential equivalent of IKEA furniture. They’re disposable assets. But who cares if you’re renting or have a large mortgage?

I can understand how a “throwaway” mentality might be a good thing, even though it seems wasteful, simply because technology improves. Out with the old, in with the “new and improved.” Most changes make electricity, plumbing and insulation more economic. Who wants old stuff when technology can give you new stuff that works better? The problem, however, might be that new appliances are expensive and often financed. Your standard of living might go up in the short run but further down in the long run as you deal with debt.

A case can be made for everything being bulldozed after 50 or 100 years—a cycle of life argument. You may want to keep an old car for sentimental reasons, but newer cars really do work better. Although you’ll probably have to finance the thing over seven years since they’re so expensive. Or lease it, turning a minor asset into a perpetual liability. And if it breaks, you can forget about trying to fix it yourself, if only because of its thousands of computer chips. The same is true with most devices.

There are reasons to hate appliances and devices even while you need or even love them. But I prefer to make the decision, not some government official. It’s a moral question, not a technical question.

International Man: Governments present so-called “green” solutions as a step forward to the future. However, in many ways, they represent a big step backward. What is your take?

Doug Casey: One currently fashionable indication of this is the 15-minute city, which governments are trying to impose all over the world. These would penalize you if you exit your designated 15-minute zone more than X number of times per month. The idea is green. And, like most green notions, it is very retrogressive. They want to return people to the status of medieval serfs, when few ventured more than 15 minutes from their hovels.

The most egregious green solutions, of course, involve spending trillions of dollars to build wind and solar facilities to generate electricity. There’s nothing wrong with using wind or solar power, but they only make sense for specific projects, usually in isolated locations under special conditions.

Wind and solar are totally unsuitable for running an industrial civilization. They’ve gotten much better over the years as technology has advanced, but they’re still more the product of social engineering than mechanical or electrical engineering.

Electric vehicles are another example. As a lifelong car guy, I see advantages to EVs. They have very low centers of gravity, which, everything else being equal, makes them handle much better than equivalent internal combustion engine cars. They have many fewer moving parts, which adds to reliability and efficiency. They’re quieter, emissions-free on the road, and lightning-fast. These are big pluses.

But on the downside, they’re a nightmare when it’s too cold or too hot; temperature extremes drain batteries, and it’s still quite inconvenient to charge them. That’s assuming the huge extra load they entail doesn’t cause the whole “sustainable” wind/solar grid to collapse.

Of course, battery technology will improve, so they may yet fulfill their promise. But in the meantime, when the lithium battery needs replacement, you might as well junk the car. Plus, they tend to be ultra-expensive to repair if you’re in a fender bender and potentially quite dangerous under certain conditions.

Unless I either want a high-performance plaything or was in an ideal environment where I’m just using it locally, EVs don’t currently make much sense. In fact, almost all “green” solutions are uneconomic, counterproductive, and even destructive.

International Man: The rise of carbon hysteria has coincided with rising inflation. For example, the average person might typically be expected to be upset by a drastic rise in meat or energy prices.

But his anger is muted and misdirected by the media, academia, Hollywood, and politicians telling him that his reduced standard of living is somehow helping save the planet. It seems like the carbon hysteria is a mass campaign to gaslight people into accepting a lowering of their standard of living. What is your view on the relationship between inflation and the carbon hysteria?

Doug Casey: Well, inflation is caused by money printing. The carbon hysteria will mostly be financed by money printing. So, there’s an indirect relationship. But it’s actually worse than that.

It’s long been said that war is the health of the State. We’re now looking at an insane war on carbon to supposedly save the planet. Carbon is not only the basis of all life, but CO2 levels are only marginally above what’s necessary to sustain plant life.

It’s genetically inbred in people to pull together during a war. The eco-hysterics ask: “What could be more important than a war to save the planet?” So, of course, thoughtless people will accept less and do what they’re told. In my view, this is all complete nonsense.

If they tell the plebs that inflation is somehow necessary to fight deadly CO2 and save the planet, then the average pleb will probably go along, since he’s got almost no knowledge of economics, and even less of science.

The planet will be just fine. It’s been here for 4.5 billion years and will be here for billions more, long after humanity has disappeared or gone elsewhere. Anyway, the climate hysterics don’t really care about “saving the planet”; even they aren’t quite that stupid. What’s going on is that they actually hate humanity. And themselves. The world is suffering from an episode of mass psychosis. My reaction is to push against them wherever possible.

International Man: Where is the carbon hysteria trend headed? Have we hit the high water mark?

Doug Casey: Well, we have to look at both long-term and short-term trends. The long-term trend—the ascent of man—has been in motion for at least 10,000 years. It’s been advancing exponentially with more scientific breakthroughs, leading to better technology and a higher standard of living. Will that trend stop? I’d like to think it will not only continue but accelerate.

But there have been counter trends within that very favorable long-term trend. The Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BC set civilization back for over 400 years. The fall of Roman civilization in the West led to the Dark Ages from roughly the fifth through the ninth centuries. Could we be on the cusp of something similar? There are plenty of reasons for concern. But let’s not engage in fear porn.

I hate to think something so dire is in the cards. But Dark Riders are at large, and the eye of Sauron is scanning the world. The tendency towards authoritarianism or even totalitarianism worldwide is growing—not to mention the possibility of World War III.

The negative trends go way beyond carbon hysteria and appliances that don’t work very well.

International Man’s Note: We’ve seen governments institute the strictest controls on people and businesses in history. It’s been a swift elimination of individual freedoms.

But this is just the beginning…

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The US government’s budget is the biggest in the history of the world and is growing at an uncontrollable rate. Below is a chart of the budget for the most recent fiscal year, which had a deficit of nearly $1.7 trillion.

Before we get into the specific items in the budget, what is your take on the Big Picture for the US budget?

Doug Casey: The biggest expenditure for the US government are so-called entitlements. It’s strange how the word “entitlements” has been legitimized. Are people really entitled to the government paying for their health, retirement, and welfare? In a moral society, the answer is: No. Entitlements destroy personal responsibility, legitimize theft, destroy wealth, and create antagonisms.

The fact is that once people have an “entitlement,” they come to rely on it, and you can’t easily take it away. The Chinese call that breaking somebody’s rice bowl. In the case of the American welfare state, it’s more a question of breaking a whipped dog’s doggy bowl. It’s a shame because many have come to rely on their mother, the State, not entirely through their own fault. The US has become pervasively corrupt.

The World Economic Forum (WEF)—a pox upon them—isn’t entirely incorrect when it arrogantly calls most people “useless mouths.” An increasing number produce absolutely nothing but only consume at the expense of others. Courtesy of the State.

There’s little doubt in my mind that the government’s expenses are going way up as people demand more. While receipts go down as the Greater Depression deepens. Which it will, as the economy is burdened by evermore taxes, regulations, and currency debasement. That’s on top of the gigantic debt the government and country are buried under.

The government reminds me of a poker player on tilt, betting more and more crazily in hope of magic or luck to bail him out. It always ends badly.

We’ve watched this progression accelerate since at least the 1960’s—a slow motion train wreck. But the inevitable has finally turned into the imminent.

International Man: What are your thoughts on Social Security, Health, and Medicare?

With an aging population, it seems politically impossible to make any meaningful cuts here. On the contrary, spending in these areas is likely to explode.

Doug Casey: They should be abolished. I’ve said this many times before, but it bears repeating as often as possible because everybody forgets the most basic of the basics. Namely, the government, as an instrument of force, should be limited to protecting people from physical force. And nothing else.

That implies a police system to defend people from force within, a military to defend against foreign aggressors, and a court system to allow people to adjudicate disputes without resorting to force. I’d further argue that those three things are so important to the conduct of a civil society that they shouldn’t be left to the kind of people who inevitably gravitate towards government. But that’s a different subject.

Looking at these three things you mentioned in particular, they’re complete disasters. They’re fiscally unsound, will bankrupt the US government, and, therefore, bankrupt the country itself, especially with an aging population.

Social Security seemed like a good idea at the time so that poor people wouldn’t be left totally without an income in old age. But the fact is that Social Security is a classic Ponzi scheme. Its taxes have gone from a trivial percentage to 12.4%.

It’s so high that people are on the bottom end of society, who it’s meant to help, are precluded from saving on their own. Social Security is both a practical and moral disaster.

As for Medicare, how is it your problem if another has failed to take care of his body? Your body is your primary possession. Should it also be your problem if somebody fails to take care of his car? Should the State fix all your property?

Should the government have anything to do with health? No. It’s strictly a matter of personal responsibility. Of course, if the State believes it owns you, like a milk cow, the cattle can expect food to show up, as will medicine if they get sick.

Government entitlement schemes encourage everyone to try to live at the expense of his neighbors. They’re intrinsically dehumanizing, corrupting, and degrading. They’re a bad deal all around.

International Man: With the most precarious geopolitical situation since World War 2, “National Defense” seems unlikely to be cut.

Instead, so-called defense spending is all but certain to increase.

What is your take?

Doug Casey: The United States’ “defense” spending exceeds that of the next 10 nations combined, including Russia and China. Most of that spending goes into the maw of five major defense companies. A decade or two ago, there used to be 30 or 40 defense companies. But they’ve now consolidated, the better to deal with Big Government.

They increasingly make only expensive high-tech weapons, which may prove totally useless in today’s environment. For instance, the US is currently suffering an invasion of feet people across the southern border—millions and millions of young males, of alien race, language, religion, and culture, in the last two years alone. We may yet wind up with a civil war in the US, on top of several insane foreign wars.

These high-tech weapons, in the process of bankrupting the US and enriching the defense establishment, will prove largely useless. Meanwhile, military personnel are being gutted. It’s no secret that the services can’t recruit enough people to keep their numbers where they want them. That’s in good measure because ESG and DEI have been insinuated throughout the military like slow-acting poisons. The military is no longer a meritocracy. Now, it’s critical to be the right color and gender. George Patton would quit in disgust.

On top of all that, defense spending is a provocation to other countries. It’s like waving around a giant golden hammer. They’re correctly afraid that everything has started to look like a nail to the US.

International Man: The net interest expense on the national debt was $659 billion in FY 2023, which is sure to rise.

The US government needs to roll over a significant portion of its existing debt issued when interest rates were 0% in an environment of much higher and rising rates.

What are your thoughts on this item?

Doug Casey: Interest on the debt is the next big thing, in addition to entitlements and out-of-control “defense” spending.

They used to say, “Don’t worry about the national debt; we owe it to ourselves,” which was always ridiculous because some specific people always owed it to other specific people.

But the US can no longer generate adequate capital to fund the government’s debt. And I hasten to point out that the government is not “We the People.” The government is a separate entity, with its own interests, as distinct as General Motors.

In the recent past, the national debt has been financed not by Americans, but by foreigners. At this point, however, foreigners no longer want to own the debt of a bankrupt entity whose currency is nothing but a floating abstraction. The government can only finance its debt by selling it to its central bank, the Fed, which creates new dollars to buy the debt.

As the dollar inevitably loses value, interest rates will rise. That’s regardless of what the Fed does or doesn’t want. The market will demand higher interest rates to finance the debt. You don’t want to own bonds.

International Man: US government expenses seem to have nowhere to go but up.

Is there any chance the US government can reform and return to a sustainable basis?

If not, what are the implications?

Doug Casey: The US government is bankrupt. It’s not just the official $34 trillion. The real number is several times higher, considering contingent liabilities. It’s probably more like $100 trillion. This debt will never be repaid. The US government is like Wiley Coyote after he runs off a cliff.

In addition, the average American is deeply in debt—student loans, mortgage debt, credit card debt, auto debt, and much more. The country is in big trouble. Frankly, there’s no practical way out at this point except to officially declare bankruptcy.

I realize serious change is impossible since the situation is so out of control. But here are six things to imagine—for a start:

1. Allow the collapse of all bankrupt entities. No bailouts, subsidies, or guarantees for banks, insurers, corporations, or anything. 

There will be plenty in the coming years. Bailout money is always wasted. Most of the real wealth now owned by the bankrupt entities will still exist.

It will simply change ownership. But that’s not nearly enough. At this point, it would be a half-measure, a 3-foot rope over a 12-foot gap. If you allow the collapse of unprofitable enterprises without changing the conditions that created the problem, recovery is going to be even harder. So…

2. Deregulate. Contrary to what almost everyone thinks, the main purpose of regulation is not to protect consumers but to entrench the current order. Regulation prevents new institutions from arising quickly and cheaply.

Does the Department of Agriculture really need 100,000 employees to regulate fewer than two million farms in the US? Abolish it.

Has the Department of Energy, created in 1977 to somehow solve a temporary crisis, done anything of value with its 110,000 employees and contractors and $32 billion annual budget? Abolish it.

How about the terminally corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs, which has outlived whatever usefulness it might have had by 100 years. Abolish it.

The FTC, SEC, FCC, FAA, DOT, HHS, HUD, Labor, Commerce, and many more, serve little or no useful public purpose. Eliminate them, and the entire economy would blossom – except for the parasitical lobbying and legal trades. There are hundreds of agencies like these. Most aren’t just useless. They’re actively destructive.

3. Abolish the Fed. This is the actual engine of inflation. Money is just a medium of exchange and a store of value; you don’t need a central bank to have money. In fact, central banks are always destructive. They benefit only the cronies who get their money first.

What would we use as money? It doesn’t matter as long as it’s a commodity that can’t be created out of thin air. Gold is the obvious choice. Bitcoin may turn out to be excellent.

The whole idea of a central bank is a swindle. Massive bailouts and optional wars can’t be done without it.

4. Cut taxes by 50%… to start. The economy would boom. The money won’t be needed with all the agencies gone. Certainly not if the next two points are followed.

5. Default on the national debt. I realize this is a shocker unless you recall that the debt will never be paid anyway. Why should the next several generations have to pay for the stupidity of their parents?

A default sounds dishonorable—and it is in civil society. But government is different. It hasn’t been “We the People” for a long time; it’s now a self-dealing behemoth run by cronies. It’s like a building with a rotten foundation—better to bring it down with a controlled demolition than wait for it fall unpredictably.

Governments default all the time, though most defaults are subtle, through inflation. In an outright default, however, the only people who get hurt are those who lent money to an institution that can only repay them by stealing money from others. They should be punished.

6. Disentangle and disengage. The entanglements the US needs to escape prominently include the UN and NATO. Spending could easily be cut 50%. The US combat troops now in over 100 foreign countries can come home. They’re not “defending” anything but local collaborators while picking up bad habits and antagonizing the locals. Spending on the military and its sport wars significantly adds to the economy’s problems.

Editor’s Note: The economic trajectory is troubling. Unfortunately, there’s little any individual can practically do to change the course of these trends in motion.

The best you can and should do is to stay informed so that you can protect yourself in the best way possible, and even profit from the situation.

That’s precisely why bestselling author Doug Casey and his colleagues just released an urgent new PDF report that explains what could come next and what you can do about it. Click here to download it now.

What are holidays, and why are they important to a culture or country?

Doug Casey: The word “holiday” actually comes from “holy day”; it has a religious derivation. Once upon a time, I’d say as recently as the 1950’s, religion played a very important role in Western culture. It no longer does. Christianity is a dead duck in Europe, and fading rapidly in North America. Much as it replaced classical religions starting in the late Roman Empire, Christianity is being replaced by Wokism/Greenism.

Our holidays, until recently, were still about shared values and shared traditions. They were an acknowledgment of common beliefs, a celebration of what was important among the people of a country or a culture. But that’s no longer the case. The meaning of holidays, as with so many things, has degraded.

International Man: Marketing agencies are responsible for most consumer-themed holidays, which aim to get people to buy stuff they don’t need.

It started with Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, but now there seems to be a holiday for everything. There is National Tequila Day, National Donut Day, Amazon Prime Day, and countless others. What’s your take on this?

Doug Casey: Previously, people limited work during holidays. They were celebrations. Sure, there were sales of food, drink, and things necessary for the celebration. But in the past selling was just a consequence, a necessary adjunct of the holiday.

Today, selling has become the essence of the holiday. Christmas used to have a real religious essence, but it’s devolved into little more than a time for intensive marketing and competitive gift giving.

One of the very few good things about the giant amount of debt in society, and the unfolding Greater Depression, is that the promiscuous consumption centering around holidays will drop. People are likely to reorient towards more basic values as times get tough.

The fact that so many holidays have gotten a seal of approval and made “official” by the government is another sign that fascist values have overcome the West. Fascism, you’ll recall, doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with violence and black uniforms. It’s simply the melding of big business and government. They support each other, and prosperous big business means more tax revenue for the State. It’s exactly what Mussolini, who coined the word “fascism”, intended.

International Man: Identity politics has been a big factor in the surge of new holidays as politicians seek to cater to certain groups.

Juneteenth is a newly declared federal holiday. Columbus Day has been re-branded as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. President Clinton gave the first presidential declaration marking Kwanzaa.

We now have Pride month for those with sexual deviations, February is dedicated to black history, and November is dedicated to Native Americans, and so forth. It seems there is now a day, a week, or a month for every group. What is going on here?

Doug Casey: Holidays have become politicized. Many years ago holidays were times when people would acknowledge common beliefs and traditions; they united people. The newly minted ones see individuals as parts of a group, in effect arraying them against other groups. Of course, I question the value of artificially uniting people in the first place, because it typically emphasizes the lowest common denominator, like race.

The deletion of Columbus Day is shameful in itself. Columbus, for all his faults, was a heroic character who initiated a new era in world history. But replacing it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day is even more shameful.

As is the use of the term “Native Americans”. It emphasizes the fact that they were here first, which implies, and even emphasizes the fact that the Europeans took over their property. But more advanced civilizations have been doing that to primitive ones since Day One. It’s purposely antagonistic to emphasize it. In fact, Russel Means, with whom I was friendly if not an actual friend, preferred the term “Indian” for a number of reasons. I agreed with him on that. Self-hating white wokesters have a long history of subtlely corrupting words.

But that aside, today, holidays have become so politicized that they’re no longer mellow and joyous, but have become a source of resentment for everyone. They don’t create cheer and camaraderie, but antagonize groups that feel left out.

This is a natural consequence of no longer being a country which shares traditions, beliefs and attitudes. The US has become a multicultural domestic empire with numerous groups striving for power over each other.

Even things that seem as relatively benign as Martin Luther King Day—and he seems like a basically thoughtful and decent human being—was only made a holiday as a sop to blacks who rioted after he was killed. The State was, in effect, just throwing a racial group a bone. The same is true of the totally phony holiday called Kwanzaa, fabricated and promoted by Ron Karenga, a rabid race baiter.

It would’ve been equally legitimate—and I personally would’ve preferred—a holiday for Malcolm X. Why? Because towards the end of his life, he was becoming a rather overt libertarian, something that most people are completely unaware of because of his black Muslim name. But it’s a bad idea for the State to create holidays for anyone or anything out of thin air. If you want to promote something, do so. But don’t use public funds to impose it on everyone else.

The worst of these phony constructs may be Juneteenth, which is now a national holiday. Wikipedia says it was the day, June 19, 1865, two months after the end of the war, when Federal troops marched into Galveston and informed blacks that they were no longer slaves.

But perhaps even the 1619 Project will someday be turned into a holiday of some type. It’s the year when the first black slaves were brought to Virginia. Its promoters say that this was the country’s real founding. The whole concept is based on a fraud, the overt lie that the US was built on slavery. The 1619 Project is clearly intended to promote race hatred.

The widespread acceptance of these things is further proof that the government has been captured by actual Jacobins. The Democrats are a reincarnation of the group who tore France apart in the 18th century. They’re the most important “cadre” leading ongoing cultural revolution in the United States.

International Man: Do all these newly created celebrations cheapen traditional holidays? How does it factor into the bigger trend of the degradation of Western Civilization?

Doug Casey: I suspect the change started in earnest back in the ’50s, when people started writing ‘Xmas’ instead of ‘Christmas.’

I’m not a religious person, but I am a cultural traditionalist in many ways. Many of our hallowed traditions seem to have religious roots; they have nothing to do with religion, but they’re quite benign. Lovable old Santa Claus has absolutely nothing to do with the original idea of Christmas. He was popularized by the famous cartoonist Thomas Nash in the mid-19^th century, and then adopted by the Coca-Cola company in the 1930’s.

This type of thing is true to an even greater extent with Easter, which, unbeknownst to most, is much more important than Christmas in the Christian liturgy. The original concept of Easter (the death and resurrection of Jesus) has been replaced with things like the Easter bunny and chocolate eggs. These are very nice traditions, but we have to recognize that the original meaning of Easter has gone away.

Halloween is another example. It used to be All Saints and All Souls’ Days, and now it’s all about spooks, goblins, and costumes. Its religious significance has totally disappeared.

Once again, not being a religious person, these things don’t bother me. Santa and the Easter Bunny are benign, and they take the hard edge off dogmatic religious holidays. Who wants black-clad puritans dictating holidays or holy days? But they’re indicative of certain trends.

For instance, take Christmas itself. You rarely wish people Merry Christmas anymore. In recent years you wish them a Happy Holidays—which means absolutely nothing.

Of course, if we go back further, the early church designated Christmas as a time to subvert and replace Saturnalia, a raucous Roman religious holiday that took place at the same time. Easter is a later appropriation of the ancient celebration of the spring equinox, a fertility festival.

The Christians captured pagan holidays and now neo-pagans are capturing Christian holidays. You can like it or not, but society evolves. In some ways, it’s benign; in other ways, not so much.

International Man: Many governments throughout history have invented new holidays to distract the plebs from bigger issuers. Do you see this happening today? What does the rise of fake holidays say about the big picture?

Doug Casey: Perhaps it goes back to the French Revolution. The Jacobins totally renamed and reformed the calendar and all holidays. They attempted to overtly overturn society.

That’s what’s going on today. Holidays are no longer organic or traditional. They no longer rotate around nature and well-worn traditions. They’re created by fiat out of Washington, and marketers in New York and Hollywood. Ill-intentioned groups that masquerade as benevolent or righteous reformers. These people are identical in character and intention to the Jacobins in France, the Bolsheviks in Russia, or the Nazis in Germany. They try to capture the culture along with the politics and economics of society. Reinventing holidays is just one of many fronts in the culture war. An overture to a real revolution is taking place.

We’ll see where it goes, but trends in motion tend to stay in motion. My guess is that before things get better, they’re going to get pretty scary.

Article cross-posted from International Man.

The US and the Netherlands are two of the largest agricultural producers in the world. It seems certain Western countries are waging war against farmers in the name of climate change. What is really going on here?

Doug Casey: I hate to say that things like COVID or a rabid belief in anthropogenic climate change are parts of a conspiracy—although it often seems that way. I tend to discount conspiracies for a number of reasons. It seems more likely they’re mass hysterias—the type of thing that happened in Salem at the end of the 17th century, except on a gigantic scale. Versions of the kind of “group think” that captured a number of countries in the 20th century, as well.

In any event, what appears to be a war against agriculture on the part of “the elite” is both real and serious. People in power are anxious to control every aspect of the plebs’ lives, usually either for the supposed good of humanity or the planet itself. They believe there should be rules governing where the plebs live, what they can say and think, and even what they eat. The “elite” like to say farm animals are partly responsible for global warming by emitting methane.

But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it’s a general belief, even among the plebs themselves, that the world’s population, composed mostly of useless eaters, is too high. The powers that be have said on any number of occasions that eight billion people is “too many” and that an optimal level would be less than a billion.

Here’s an outlandish thought: They can’t put people in gas chambers anymore and hope to get away with it. But perhaps reducing the quantity and quality of their food consumption, among other measures, can have the same effect. A crazy thought? Don’t forget that governments have sponsored wars, famines, and persecutions that have killed hundreds of millions. There’s no reason to think that today’s “elite” are any less nefarious than their antecedents. Rather the contrary…

There’s plenty of evidence that the kind of people who control the world and run governments have evil intentions toward their fellow humans. Even while they masquerade as philanthropists and humanitarians, they typically treat them either as a means to their ends or a nuisance.

International Man: Government central planning of agriculture can be catastrophic. For example, millions of people perished in famines in the Soviet Union due to disastrous policies forced upon farmers. Do you see any parallels today?

Doug Casey: Government, as an institution, is congenitally incapable of creating anything.

It can only control what others create, and it’s mainly destructive. There are lots of examples. The perpetual famine that the USSR experienced while it still existed, including Stalin’s Holodomor in the Ukraine. Mao was famous for creating perpetual famine in China during his Great Leap Forward and again during the Cultural Revolution.

Farmers always fare poorly when “the elite” capture the apparatus of the State. One reason is that, as a group, farmers are basically entrepreneurs. They don’t work a 9:00 to 5:00 day. They don’t take orders from supervisors working in cubicles. They’re necessarily independent.

Farmers have to buy and sell like merchants. They have to be practical field-level biologists, botanists, and zoologists. They have to be businessmen, mechanics, meteorologists, and a dozen other things.

A successful farmer is naturally multi-faceted and multi-talented—not the type of person prone to taking orders from high up. He’s a person that owns property and values it.

As a class, farmers are natural enemies of socialist governments. It’s true that they can be corrupted, much as many farmers have been in the US with subsidies since the 1930s. But farmers tend to be independent freethinkers.

Governments, therefore, hold them in suspicion and are inclined to pay special attention to farmers.

International Man: With inflation making meat unaffordable for many, the elite want to keep the plebs happy by gaslighting them into thinking that meat is bad for the environment.

That’s a big reason why there’s been a flurry of articles in the mainstream media condemning meat consumption and promoting cheap alternatives.

Bill Gates recently said: “I think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef. You can’t have cows anymore,” and governments can “use regulation to totally shift the demand.” What is your take on this?

Doug Casey: The US Department of Agriculture has about 100,000 employees. It’s one of the many US government departments that should be abolished. If any of those 100,000 employees actually know anything about agriculture or farming—most of them don’t—they should go out and do it, as opposed to making the lives of farmers miserable.

Interestingly, the #1 mission of the USDA, stated on its website, is to combat climate change. Not to improve food production.

The USDA, the EPA, and many others create regulations on everything and anything that farmers do today. I’d point out that according to USDA rules, a “farm” is any piece of land that produces over or can produce over $1000 worth of product. That’s an unbelievably low amount. A garden in your backyard can be deemed a farm if it suits the authorities.

No matter what a farmer produces, he can rely on lots of oversight from a regulator who is intent on justifying his existence.

All production has to go through a bureaucratized, centralized, and highly regulated process. It’s almost like anything that’s produced might as well be sent to a central processing facility in Kansas before it’s shipped back to the very place that it came from after being homogenized, pasteurized, sterilized, packaged, and denatured.

This is a bad thing because it leads to less independence on the part of both producers and consumers and more dependence on bureaucracies that bring nothing to the party but taxes and regulations.

International Man: As part of this trend we’ve been discussing, the media, the World Economic Forum, and certain politicians promote eating bugs as a solution. An article in The Economist notes: “We’re not going to convince Europeans and Americans to go out in big numbers and start eating insects… The trick might be to slip them into the food chain on the quiet.”

What do you make of the push to feed people bugs?

Doug Casey: Especially in the Orient, certain types of insects and grubs are sold in grocery stores. I’ve sampled some, and after overcoming a cultural reluctance, they can be quite tasty snacks.

In fact, for decades, there have been things like chocolate-covered ants sold in the US in specialty stores as edible novelties. Having some insects or grubs as an occasional diversion to amuse your friends at a cocktail party is one thing, but changing the entire nature of people’s diets because you think it’s a moral imperative to eat bugs? The idea is insane. Manipulating the food supply, and the eating habits of the plebs, is worse than unnecessary; it’s degrading.

The movement to radically change the nature of agriculture, and feed the masses, goes way beyond insects, though. A Finnish company called Solar Foods has developed an obscure bacteria that can be vat-grown, lives largely on hydrogen and sunlight, is very high in protein, and, they say, very eco-friendly. It can be dried into a powder and manipulated into edible form. I’m all for innovation. And suppose Wokesters and the starving masses might go for it. But my view is that it should be promoted as cattle fodder, not a Soylent Green substitute. But that won’t work when cattle are eliminated.

Speaking of cattle, the Irish parliament has mandated a severe reduction in the Irish cattle herd. About 65,000 cows will be culled over each of the next three years to reduce the herd by about 10% in order to meet the EU’s carbon dictates. This is the shape of things to come everywhere, I suspect.

The problem is that the people on top, who see themselves as a distinct class and have huge amounts of both power and money, figure that they have the right to give orders to the plebs. They’re only marginally affected by the laws they pass. Meanwhile, the plebs have been inculcated with notions making them think it’s morally wrong to eat animals, the way animals have always eaten other animals.

I understand an esthetic inclination to be a vegetarian. And I appreciate the moral sentiment not to slaughter other beings. But this is a choice that—like all choices—that should be left to individuals, not imposed on them by those who fancy themselves as their betters.

International Man: What can the average person do as the war on farmers and meat accelerates?

Doug Casey: What you may be asking is: Is it possible to fight the State?

If you don’t follow the law and do what you’re told, you run a risk of being jailed or having your property confiscated. It’s dangerous to run counter to the law, especially when the average person thinks he’s in a “democracy” and shares control over what’s happening. That’s an illusion. Our nomenklatura have control of the apparatus of the State.

Can you take any kind of political action to change the people that are in control? I think the election of 2020 showed that that’s probably pointless this far down the road. Can you reason with these people? Probably not.

We’re dealing with a psychological problem, not an intellectual problem. Therefore, the situation is not really open to solution from reason and factual arguments. Recognize that the only reason to try to change things is not because you will succeed—that’s unlikely—but because it’s right.

The direction of society has a life of its own. You should work to reverse bad trends simply because it’s good karma and, personally, psychologically gratifying.

Recognize, however, that the downtrend has been in motion for decades. It’s still accelerating and likely to keep accelerating until it reaches a real crisis, which will be very unpleasant. We don’t know what’s going to happen after we go through the crisis. What’s happening with farmers and the food supply is just one aspect of it.

Article cross-posted from International Man.

Whenever the chattering classes talk about cuts, it’s only about cuts over the course of 10 years. Which is a dodge, a fraud. Partly because most of the supposed cuts will be scheduled for the end of the period, but also because new programs, new emergencies and hidden contingencies are guaranteed to creep in, offsetting any announced cuts. The anticipated $2 trillion deficit for 2024 isn’t a temporary worst case; it’s the rosiest possible scenario.

People thought I was joking when, asked how bad the Greater Depression was going to be, I answered that it would be worse than even I thought it would be. But I haven’t been joking.

To sum up the situation, given its financial condition and the political forces working to worsen it, the US government is facing a completely impossible and irremediable situation.

The problems we face are one hundred percent caused by the US government– not by bankers or brokers, although they have been complicit.

Recall what government is: an organization with a monopoly of force within a certain geographical area. Its purpose is, ostensibly, to protect the inhabitants of its bailiwick from the initiation of force. That implies three functions: an army to protect against aggressors coming from outside of its borders, police to protect citizens from aggressors inside its borders and a court system to allow citizens to adjudicate disputes without resorting to force.

Assuming you’re going to have a government, it’s important to limit it strictly, lest it get completely out of control – it’s got a monopoly of force, after all – and overwhelm the society it’s supposed to protect.

Here I want you to distinguish government from society. They are not only two totally different things, but are potentially antithetical to each other. This is because the essence of government is force, not voluntary cooperation. Everything that people think the government provides (beyond some forms of protection) is really provided by society, or with resources the government has taken from society. It’s critical to understand this, or you won’t see the slippery slope the US is now sliding on.

Is there any chance that the US government can reform and go back to a sustainable basis at this point?

I’d say no.

Past is Prologue

Its descent started in earnest with the Spanish-American War in 1898, when it acquired its first foreign possessions (Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, etc).

It accelerated with the advent of the income tax and the Federal Reserve in 1913. It accelerated further with World War I, when the government took over the economy for 18 months.

The New Deal and World War II made the state into a permanent major feature in the average American’s life.

The Great Society made free food, housing and medical care a feature.

The final elimination of any link of the dollar to gold in 1971 ensured ever-increasing levels of currency inflation.

The Cold War and a series of undeclared wars (Korea, Viet Nam, Afghanistan and Iraq, among others) cemented the military in place as a permanent focus of the government. And since 9/11, the curve has gone hyperbolic with the War on Terror.

It’s been said that war is the health of the state. We have lots more war on the way, and that will expand the state’s spending. But the Greater Depression will be an even bigger drain, and it will likely destroy the middle class, as an unwelcome bonus.

In all that time, from 1898 to today, there have been no substantial retrenchments of the US government, and the situation is getting worse, on a hyperbolic curve. Trends in motion tend to stay in motion until a genuine crisis changes them, and this trend has been gaining momentum for over a century.

The Death of the Middle Class

Let’s divide people into three classes – rich, poor and middle class.

Rich people are going to be okay. They can bribe the politicians to change the laws, hire the lawyers to interpret the laws, the accountants to limit their liabilities, advisors to help them profit from distortions and travel agents to get them out of Dodge. They may get eaten later, but for the moment, don’t worry about them.

The poor don’t have much to lose, and the government is going to keep throwing benefits at them to keep them happy. That’s a shame because it cements them to the bottom as poor people – but that’s a topic for another day.

The real danger is to the middle class, and it’s a serious matter because the US is a middle-class society. These are people who try to produce more than they consume and save the difference, in order to grow wealthier. That formula has worked well up to now – but almost everybody saves dollars. What happens, however, if the dollars are destroyed? It means that most of what they saved disappears, and most of the middle class will disappear with it, at least for that generation. They’ll be very unhappy, and they’ll be up for some serious changes.

What Happens Next

My point is that there really is no conventional solution to the US government’s financial crisis. It’s reached a stage where it will either have to start defaulting on some of its obligations, or vastly increase its rate of money printing. You decide which. The only questions are political; the economics are quite clear. Money printing it is. Especially since the Jacobins who now control Washington are believers in Modern Monetary Theory.

It won’t be the end of the world when the US government goes bust, although it will certainly have plenty of inconveniences and unpleasantness. Lots of governments have gone bankrupt before, some of them numerous times – like all of them here in South America, where I am at the moment.

In fact, there’s a temptation to look forward to it, since the state is the enemy of any decent human. One might hope that when they bankrupt themselves, we might get to live in a libertarian paradise. But that’s not likely the way things will come down; rather, just the opposite. Not all State bankruptcies are just temporary upsets. Most of the great revolutions in history have financial roots.

Great revolutions are more than just unpleasant and inconvenient; they’re extremely dangerous.

The French Revolution of 1789 was brought on by the financial collapse of the French government. It was a good thing to depose Louis XVI, but things didn’t get better – they got much, much worse with Robespierre and then Napoleon.

The collapse of the Czar’s regime in Russia in 1917, bankrupted by WW1, seemed to be good news at first – but then things got worse under Lenin, and stayed worse for a long time. In Germany, the destruction of the German mark in 1923 set the stage for the Nazis – and then the depression ushered them in.

The fact is that when a government collapses, especially when the government is providing all the things the US government does today, people want somebody to fix it; they want their goodies back.

It’s well known that over 50% of the US population are net recipients of state largesse. And the degree of state support and involvement in the US today is far, far greater than it was in France, Russia or Germany. After a period of chaos, it’s always the people who are most political, who have the most rabid statist ideas, who get the public’s attention and rise to the top.

It seems highly likely that the US will get a savior, someone full of bravado, who assures the booboisie that he can straighten things out – if he is given sufficient power. Perhaps it will be an arrogant windbag, perhaps some narcissistic general. The government won’t wither away; it will reassert itself. I don’t see any way around it, actually.

We are already moving into a police state. But, on the bright side, it’s a police state with a fairly high standard of living, one with Walmarts, McDonalds, and SUVs – at least for the time being.

But rest assured that if the situation evolves the way I expect, the standard of living will drop steeply, financial markets will become chaotic, and the US will become quite repressive. I’ll bet you money on this. In fact, I am betting money on it.

But what can you do about it? Well, actually, there is nothing you can do about it. At least as far as changing the course of history is concerned. The best you can do is to speculate intelligently on new distortions that will be cranked into the system, as well as others that will be liquidated.

It seems to me that this trend can no longer be reversed. The US government’s budget is, in fact, the biggest thing in the world. It won’t be turned around, because it is like a gigantic snowball rolling down a hill. It will only stop when it smashes into the village at the bottom of the valley.

The best thing you can do is capitalize on it as best you can. And get out of its way while you do.

Article cross-posted from International Man.

One of the best things about money is that it allows an individual to set aside capital, the product of his labor, in a form that retains value. A farmer, for instance, can’t save fruit from year to year, nor can a baker save bread. Sound money is critical for lasting gains in wealth and economic progress. Sound money is why wealthy societies become dominant, and a reason other societies are poor and ripe for conquest and domination.

Rome provides a meaningful long-term template. The Roman government, in search of revenue, started debasing the denarius under Nero in the 1^st century, taking it from 90% silver to 75%. As late as the reign of Marcus Aurelius, which ended in 180, the denarius was still about 75% silver. By the end of the 3^rd century, it was pot metal that was simply plated with silver. The 3^rd century was notable for numerous coups, civil wars, assassinations, and secessions. There are plenty of reasons political chaos goes hand in hand with economic chaos; they reinforce each other.

Roman coins weren’t worth saving by the middle of the 3^rd century, and the collapse of the currency was a major cause of the collapse of the empire. In some ways, sound money was even more important in ancient times than it is today because they didn’t have sophisticated banking, financial markets, credit, accounting, or ways of measuring the rate of currency depreciation. Physical cash was king.

Currency inflation creates chaos, even in a relatively primitive economy like that of the Romans—where there was still a lot of barter. Once the rulers found they couldn’t depreciate the currency anymore, direct taxes went up substantially, but it became hard to collect them simply because the currency had no value. The soldiers didn’t like being paid with worthless tokens. This is why after the reign of Aurelius, the next century was a time of civil wars and general chaos. There was no new construction of roads or public buildings. Those who were able holed up at their country estates, which were internally self-sustaining. It was the beginning of feudalism, a foreshadowing of the coming Dark Ages. By the accession of Diocletian in 295, Rome had lost all touch with its republican roots and had become an oriental-style despotism.

Is Rome a distant mirror to today’s West? It’s entirely possible, even likely.

International Man: What parallels can be made today with the US in terms of monetary debasement and overall degradation?

Doug Casey: The parallels are very direct. We can just look at the pictures on the coins.

During the Roman Republic, the consuls didn’t put their images on the currency. The coins bore images of the gods, heroes, or personifications of various virtues. Julius Caesar was the first ruler who dared put his own image on a coin. It amounted to free advertising.

Caesar signed the death warrant for the Roman republic, followed by Augustus, his adopted son, who was the first actual Roman emperor. From that point until the end, all Roman coins featured the image of the current ruler.

In the US, we didn’t have a picture of a president on a coin until 1909, when Lincoln was deified and put on the penny; before that, pennies featured an Indian. All the other coins had allegorical images, as did Roman coins during its republic. After Roosevelt was elected in 1932, however, things changed. The coins all featured past presidents. Washington replaced a walking Liberty on the quarter in 1932. Jefferson replaced the Indian on the nickel in 1938. Roosevelt himself replaced the image of Mercury on the dime in 1946—that was a big step since he was so recently dead. Benjamin Franklin replaced Liberty on the half dollar in 1947.

Since Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson were basically mythical-level presidents, I suppose an argument can be made for their images on money—but it was unwise since they were really just politicians. And Lincoln had the nerve to have his picture placed on a $1 bill in 1861.

Kennedy replaced Franklin on the half-dollar in 1964. Replacing allegorical symbols, or long-dead founding fathers, with recently deceased politicians is a sign of degradation. We haven’t yet put a current ruler on the coinage, but we’re getting close.

Of course, gold was the first to go, in 1933, with the accession of Roosevelt. Then in 1964, all silver was removed from coins. Current coins look like silver, but they aren’t. It’s a subtle fraud, symptomatic of the entire US—and world for that matter—monetary system. Technically since, then, the discs you may have in your pocket are tokens, not coins. Coins have value in themselves; tokens have no intrinsic value. Then in 1982, the penny—which had been 95% copper and 5% zinc—was changed to zinc with a copper wash on it.

The trend of money has been negative since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, followed by World War I. Currency debasement and war underlie the ongoing moral and economic bankruptcy of the West.

The next step will be the removal of coins from circulation. Few are still worth enough to bother picking up from the ground. They’re no longer even useful in parking meters or video games. It costs three cents in metal to create a zinc penny and eight cents for a nickel. Both are entirely useless. But all coins are on their way out, to be replaced by digital currency.

This has interesting societal implications because kids won’t be able to collect coins anymore. It’s hard to save money digitally. Digits aren’t tangible, and kids like real stuff if they’re trying to save. Taking the physical reality out of money devalues the concept of money itself.

International Man: Much of the spectacular art, music, and architecture in recent history was created in times when the average person used gold and silver coins as money.

Do you see a relationship between the use of hard money and culture?

Doug Casey: There is a relationship. It’s perhaps not directly provable as cause and effect, but there’s a high correlation between junk money and junk culture. And it’s not just a question of arbitrarily changing taste.

During the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, older generations would sometimes decry rock and roll music. But the fact is, rock and roll music has stood the test of time. Why? It has melody, rhythm, and, in many cases, very poetic lyrics. Rock may be a step down from Bach, Beethoven, or Wagner, but it doesn’t make my dog leave the vicinity. But today’s popular music—metal, rap, hip-hop, and the rest—doesn’t even have a melody. It’s actively dissonant. The lyrics are almost all coarse and gross. There’s rarely any poetry or nobility of emotion.

The same is true of art. Much modern art is something that a chimpanzee can paint. In fact, a lot of it is just a scam, a private joke among galleries and critics who compete in bilking the public. The only good thing about most “performance art” is that it’s gone when the performance is over. I’m not a religious person, but it’s clearly a sign of decline when things like Serrano’s “Piss Christ” are considered art—and things have become even more degraded since. A lot of art is totally lacking not only elegance and nobility but has even less technical skill than Hunter Biden’s paintings. Of course, they don’t really count as art—that was just about overt bribery.

These things would have been met with ridicule and disgust before the 20^th century. There is a correlation between the way a civilization expresses itself in art and the money that finances that art. I think it’s more than just correlation. This is even true of how people dress. It used to be that when people went out, they wore coats and a tie. Of course, styles change—but some modes of dress show respect for oneself and other people. Some don’t. Now all you see are t-shirts and torn jeans.

These are all symptoms of bad money. Crappy art, crappy music, and crappy clothes go along with a crappy culture and crappy money.

International Man: Today, countries around the world are inflating and destroying their fiat currencies at breathtaking speed with no end in sight. In countries with rampant currency debasement, we often see more lying, cheating, and stealing as people struggle to make ends meet.

Aside from the obvious financial consequences of the ongoing currency debasement, what social and cultural consequences do you see coming?

Doug Casey: As bad as debased currency was for the Roman Empire, it’s going to be even worse in our advanced industrial society, with its complex and often international supply chains.

If you don’t know what the real value of the money is that you’re selling something for, things start falling apart. The State is impinging on every area of society. Inflation may be the worst product of government, but taxes and regulations are almost as destructive.

In addition, the rewards for not working—in the form of welfare and soon guaranteed annual income—are so high that it’s going to discourage people that would otherwise be entrepreneurs or workers. It’s going to encourage them not to set up businesses and simply not to work. Frankly, it’s just one thing after another. Could the Covid and vaccine hysterias be the straws that break the camel’s back? If not, maybe the Global Warming hysteria will do the trick.

Western Civilization is being destroyed right before our very eyes, and I don’t think that trend is going to change until we reach a crisis—when things get so bad that there’s a revolution.

International Man: Let’s consider historical examples and the US today. Once currency debasement and the degradation of culture have established themselves as long-term trends, what are the chances they reverse?

Doug Casey: Trends in motion tend to stay in motion until they reach a crisis. Once they reach a crisis, it can go either way. But things usually get worse again, for at least a while.

Things might degenerate slowly into something like the Soviet Union or Mao’s China. Or maybe what’s left of capitalism and personal freedoms will be overthrown quickly. We can certainly expect no good to come out of Washington now that Americans seem to have elected genuine Bolsheviks to run their government. The old order was overthrown in France in 1789, and it got worse with Robespierre and then Napoleon. Things were terrible in Russia in 1917, but they got worse under Lenin and worse again under Stalin.

I think no matter what happens, we’re in for some really grim times

International Man: What are the investment implications?

Doug Casey: People should buy gold and silver and store them in the safest place they can think of—including in a stable political jurisdiction outside of your own. And learn to speculate because prudent investing is becoming impossible in the kind of environment that we have today.

We’re very much like Rome in the third and fourth centuries. But the decline is moving at an accelerated pace. Prudent long-term investment is no longer possible the way it was before. You have to think of everything in terms of speculation.

It’s unfortunate, but over the next 10 years, everybody is going to be forced to become a speculator just in order to survive.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

Things have obviously changed since the cataclysmic stolen 2020 election. I quickly took on one, then two, then three precious metals sponsors out of nearly 30 that I had vetted because they were the only three that were demonstrably “America First,” not working with the CCP and not donating to Democrats..

The reason that I preface the article below from International Man is because I want readers to know that I do not share these articles for the sake of fearmongering. There are massive and completely legitimate concerns about our financial future as a nation. I was not a “Chicken Little” telling people to get out of the stock market and into physical precious metals until recently. Now, I’m a full-blown believer in “smart money,” and while I’m not a financial advisor, as a journalist I can appreciate the need for Americans to move their retirement accounts to self-directed IRAs backed by physical precious metals.

We are in for a very bumpy ride. Buckle up. Here’s International Man and Doug Casey explaining what to expect…

From Goldsmiths to Central Banks: Doug Casey on the Degradation of the Banking System

International Man: Historically, classical banking functioned as a way to safeguard people’s money—banks charged a fee to depositors for holding money and administering transfers.

Today, banks generate enormous profits from making loans to borrowers—by lending out far more than they hold on reserve. How has the relationship between the depositor and the bank changed over time?

Doug Casey: The banking industry has become totally fraudulent. It has totally left its roots. As I explained a couple of weeks ago, the banking business is really two separate and unrelated businesses.

One is savings accounts (a.k.a. time deposits), where you deposit your money, gold, with the bank for a fixed period of time. You’re paid a fixed amount of interest. The bank lends it out for the same amount of time for a higher rate of interest. Historically, sound bankers only made short-term, self-liquidating loans backed by assets exceeding the amount of the loan—but there’s still a degree of risk.

The other function of the bank is to store your capital securely. For that, you use a checking account (a.k.a. a demand deposit). The bank doesn’t pay you but charges you a fee for keeping your money safe in a guarded and insured vault and giving you the right to transfer or withdraw it instantly.

These are actually two completely different businesses. But today, accounts of all types have been completely merged. The public—and almost all bankers—don’t know and really don’t care about any of this.

Banking has totally transformed—in 1913 with the founding of the Federal Reserve, then in the 30’s with the devaluation of the dollar and a slew of new regulations, then in 1971 when the dollar was turned into a complete fiat currency—from a relatively small business, where in effect a merchant was providing a service to safeguard and deploy money, to a dominant institution that controls the economy. It’s part of the financialization of everything. The Federal Reserve is now essential to financing government deficits today, much more than taxes or the borrowing of savings.

The Federal Reserve buys government debt with dollars it creates and deposits them in government accounts at commercial banks. The commercial banks then lend the new dollars out many times over through the fractional reserve system. It seems to work until too many borrowers become too indebted. Or too many depositors lose confidence in the system as they did recently with Silicon Valley Bank.

Unfortunately, most people don’t have a clue how this works or what the mechanics of it are, but it’s the main reason why we live in a world which is head over heels in debt.

“Saving” means producing more than you consume and setting aside the difference. It allows a higher standard of living in the future.

“Debt” facilitates an artificially high standard of living now and a lower standard of living in the future. That’s because you’re either consuming capital that others have saved or you’re mortgaging your future.

The bottom line is that the whole financial system—based upon the way currency is created today by the government and the way the banks work, is totally and irredeemably corrupt. I don’t believe it can be reformed. It’s inevitably going to collapse in some way.

International Man: A fractional reserve banking system could only work if there is a so-called “lender of last resort” to create new currency units out of thin air to bail everyone out when things go south.

This is what the Federal Reserve and other central banks do. It resembles a Ponzi Scheme backstopped by a massive counterfeiting operation. What’s your take?

Doug Casey: The Fed has become part of the cosmic financial firmament. People react to any who question its legitimacy as they might to a Flat Earther. Regardless of that, I think it’s important to say that fractional reserve banking is a fraud. It’s a criminal activity.

The solution is not to have a lender of last resort to hold everything together, hoping to keep the system intact. The solution is to recognize that anything short of a 100% reserve banking system is a fraud and should be treated accordingly. When a banker mixes savings accounts and checking accounts or creates loans without corresponding deposits, he should be prosecuted as a common law fraudster. But now, these things are integral parts of the financial system. It’s going to be very, very hard to unwind.

Of course, the Federal Reserve itself should be abolished because it’s the actual engine of inflation, but that’s not going to happen either because the government relies upon the Federal Reserve to finance most of its spending today.

With the world as deeply indebted as it is today, pulling the plug would cause widespread bankruptcies and unemployment as embedded distortions in the system are liquidated. But the plug should be pulled because it’s important that the world returns to a sound basis, which is about producing real goods and services as opposed to shuffling money around to the benefit of the paper economy.

Put it this way: If a 100-story skyscraper is poorly built and resting on quicksand, it’s better to have a controlled demolition than wait for it to fall unexpectedly at a random time. This is going to end extremely badly, likely during the current financial crisis.

International Man: The recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank was the 2nd largest bank failure in US history.

The US government and media bent over backward to try to convince the public there wasn’t a bailout—but there was. All depositors are supposed to be made whole—despite most being above the FDIC’s $250,000 limit. What kind of precedent does this set, and what are the implications?

Doug Casey: Banks have become creatures of the State. They’re no longer businesses, among many others, that just facilitate commerce.

The only way to solve this problem is to get the government out of the money system, which is something most people can’t comprehend—and go back to actual specie money, which is to say gold.

The whole system has to be revamped and refurbished. This is going to wind up with either a deflationary collapse or a runaway inflation of the currency if the government creates more dollars in order to keep the Ponzi scheme going.

The SVB bailout was particularly shameful because it was about protecting the ultrarich around the tech industry—over 90% of SVB’s deposits were over the $250,000 limit. Of course, if the Fed hadn’t bailed out SVB, it would have caused a deflationary collapse. But that would be better than what’s likely coming…

We’ve been on the razor’s edge of a disaster for many years. The massive creation of currency to paper over problems has created bubbles everywhere. In 2000 with stocks; in 2008, with real estate, and a hyperbubble in the bond market. Now the crisis is in the banking system itself. There’s actually no easy way out of this. There’s no soft landing.

What we’re looking at is a gigantic depression, defined as a significant drop in most people’s standard of living. That’s the way it’s going to end, and it’s likely to end soon.

Of course, the government’s going to try to do to paper this over—they’ve tried “quantitative easing,” which they continue by creating huge amounts of digital currency. They’ve tried reducing interest rates to keep things going, which made things much, much worse. Now they’re going to try Central Bank Digital Currencies, which will be the ultimate disaster. My suggestion is to prepare for a class 5 hurricane in the financial markets, not just this year but over the rest of this decade.

International Man: Are there any practical alternatives to the unstable banking system today?

Doug Casey: I urge people to buy lots of gold and silver, especially in smaller coins. If possible, keep a fair portion of it outside of your native country because your main risks today—as serious as the financial and economic risks are— are political.

You have to insulate yourself politically. Diversify not just into gold and silver but into foreign jurisdictions— where the local government doesn’t see you as its personal possession but rather the possession of some other government.

International Man: The banking system is one giant government-caused distortion in the market. Do you see any smart speculations as these distortions inevitably unwind?

Doug Casey: It’s regrettable that, as the government passes more laws and regulations, creates more currency, and juggles interest rates, the markets will become more chaotic.

People will be forced to second guess the markets just to keep what they have. Most people won’t succeed at this. So it’s important that, even at this late date, you improve your understanding of economics and intelligent speculation, to insulate yourself from these things to some degree.

Most of the real wealth in the world is still going to be here after the current financial system collapses. It’s just going to change ownership. You’re more likely to survive and to prosper by gaining as much knowledge as you can and building as much real capital as you can.

Editor’s Note: Most people have no idea what really happens when the banking system collapses, let alone how to prepare…

As we get closer to a widespread banking collapse, choosing where to put your money is crucial to ensuring it doesn’t get caught in the crosshairs.

Owning gold is essential. Gold has held its value for thousands of years. It has preserved wealth through every kind of crisis imaginable. Gold will preserve wealth during the next crisis, too.

That’s precisely why legendary speculator Doug Casey and his team just released a new video on this topic, including what the mainstream media won’t tell you about gold. Click here to watch it now.

The idea is for bureaucrats to restrict—and eventually prohibit—car use because everything is within walking or biking distance. Phasing out hydrocarbons, in general, and cars with internal combustion engines, in particular, is a primary goal of the carbon hysterics.

Critics also argue that 15-minute cities will eventually allow for total surveillance and control of people’s lives, as governments will inevitably pair them with an ESG social credit system and central bank digital currencies.

What is your take on the 15-minute city concept?

Doug Casey: It’s social engineering taken to a new level—trying to reform the way humans act and live. In fact, it’s social engineering that’s expressed in the form of civil engineering, putting people in the kind of houses, environments, and locales that the elites—strike that, I mean parasites—prefer.

It’s as if the whole human race is taking a role in the Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show. But that’s way too benign. The way they’re trying to reform the cities and force people to stay in place in certain areas, it’s more like the panopticon, which was a type of prison where all people could be observed easily by the guards at all times.

Of course, keeping everybody within a 15-minute radius of their home sounds convenient, homey, and small town-like. But it just makes things much more convenient for artificial intelligence to monitor where everybody is. Not just in their vehicles, either, because the next step along this path will be to make it desirable for everybody to have a chip implanted so individual bodies can be monitored. The 15-minute city concept is just a step on the way to something much more dystopian.

International Man: 15-minute cities received a big boost from the Covid hysteria as many city councils and mayors sought to redesign city spaces amid the lockdowns.

The concept has spread to many areas in North America and Europe, with plans to transform parts of the biggest cities into numerous 15-minute city zones. We have already seen this happen in Ottawa, Oxford, and other large cities.

What is really going on here?

Doug Casey: It’s all about control, but it won’t be sold as a military “you must do this” type of control. It will be a soft, “do it for your own good” type of control. And, of course, it’s part of the general climate insanity for the supposed good of Mother Earth. The idea is to get people to stay out of their cars and, for that matter, stay off of planes and even public transportation.

It’ll be sold as a great way to get to know your neighbors, walk, and maybe bicycle. They’re trying to return the world to medieval times where nobody went more than 15 minutes from their house. Because not only weren’t they supposed to but there might be dragons over the next hill.

International Man: The global elite don’t want the plebs to be as mobile as they used to be.

In recent years, we’ve seen more and more travel restrictions. The Covid hysteria set a precedent for using lockdowns as official policy and introduced many confusing travel restrictions. The carbon hysteria also serves as a pretext for all sorts of proposals to limit and restrict travel. The trend now in motion is gaining momentum.

How do you see 15-minute cities within the context of this trend?

Doug Casey: People are far easier to control if you know where they are at all times. And the elite—again, they’re parasites that don’t produce anything or serve a useful purpose—want the plebs to stay in place, not just physically, but psychologically, economically, and politically.

They’d prefer to live in a world where places like St. Mark’s Square in Venice, Machu Picchu, and the Grand Canyon aren’t overwhelmed with the hoi polloi because they’re back observing their 15-minute travel zones and adhering to requirements that allow them to expend only so many pounds of carbon.

It’ll be much more convenient for the parasites from a personal living point of view, in addition to affording them vastly more control.

International Man: The World Economic Forum (WEF) has promoted 15-minute cities.

Why are they interested in this topic?

Doug Casey: In the past, the United Nations provided the premier forum for governments to get together and palaver about how to restructure the world. But the UN—fortunately—is fading into obscurity. It’s now really no more than an expensive club for mid-level government officials to vacation in New York while playing big shot and connecting with other ambitious bureaucrats.

The World Economic Forum is for the real power people.

The WEF, however, needs a reason for existing. These people are into power and money. They naturally like to socialize with each other, scratching each other’s backs and seeing themselves as masters of the universe. Now that they’ve gotten to know each other at the WEF and have clearly taken the reigns over at least the Western world, they’re no longer there just to socialize. They have lots of big plans for the plebs.

The concept of the 15-minute city is one of the many prongs of attack that they’ve launched to essentially take over the world, as outrageous as that sounds.

International Man: Given everything we have discussed, what can the average person do to safeguard his sovereignty in general and his freedom to travel in particular?

Doug Casey: First of all, try to relocate to a rural area where you’re much more in control of your own life, and you’re not surrounded by thousands of people who might rat you out as a non-conformist and could easily turn hysterical.

The second thing is to get as rich as you can because having assets helps insulate you from both the parasitic elites and the capite censi.

And third thing you can do is to resist any way you can. Speaking out and letting other people know that they aren’t alone in thinking what’s going on is actually evil. But recognize the risks of doing so.

We can’t change the trends of history. The atmosphere in today’s world is like that of the early days of the US Civil War or the early days of World War I or World War II. The boobs become stupidly hysterical, enthusiastic to ” join up” to fight some real or imagined foe, and marching together in lockstep. A giant mind virus is well on its way to capturing most people.

We live in really dangerous times.

Editor’s Note: The months and years ahead will be politically, economically, and socially volatile. What you do to prepare could mean the difference between suffering crippling losses and coming out ahead.

That’s precisely why, legendary investor and NY Times best-selling author Doug Casey just released this urgent report on how to survive and thrive.

Article cross-posted from International Man.