Bitcoin Is Peace After 9/11

On Mar 25, 2022

For full context, make sure you read Part One of this two-part series before continuing. In it, we discussed how the United States’ irresponsible spending stems from the fiat money system, which allows them to engage in continual abstract wars (such as “the war on drugs”) and how a return to a sound monetary standard through bitcoin would stop the endless conflict we’ve experienced over the last century.

War On Poverty

The War on Poverty — the granddaddy of the United States’ poor spending habits.

58 years ago, former President Lyndon B. Johnson launched a war which would eat into people’s wealth all while trying to cure wealth inequality — a contradiction for the ages.

Nevertheless, good intentions birthed this series of legislative actions. At the time, more than 20% of Americans were considered poor and Johnson was convinced that state intervention was the most viable way to bring the country back to its feet. While it was supposed to be “a hand up, not a handout,” Johnson’s legislation couldn’t be further from that ideal.

Over $800 million has been spent to eliminate poverty since his series of initiatives came to pass.

What do we have to show for it? Welfare rolls have expanded, as the horrifying truth of government dependence has come to fruition for many. The notion of equal opportunity is phenomenal, but rather than cutting red tape and encouraging job creation, wealth was taken from those with more and given to those with less. Some of those on the program leveraged the government assistance to build a life for themselves but given the increase in welfare dependency over the last half cntury, more people have structured their lives around the system instead of using it as it was intended, as a “hand up.”

It’s safe to conclude that the “handouts” which Johnson was so adamant about excluding have become the hallmark of modern welfare programs. The War on Poverty is a stain on the American track record of raising those with nothing to prosperity – providing equal opportunity for all who reside “from sea to shining sea” to work or to innovate their way to prosperity.

Funding for such programs would have to become almost entirely voluntary under a bitcoin standard, as taxes could never be high enough to replace the U.S.’s decades-long penchant for money printing. Any functional and accepted state program would be funded by those philanthropists who want to contribute to the cause, and due to this limited available funding, decision-making would be more precise by necessity. When scarcity is a factor in any decision, capital allocation is naturally done in such a way that leads to the optimum outcome. Under fiat, money can be created and seized at any given moment, so the concept of scarcity never plays a hand in decisions — hence why government programs often resemble inefficient money vacuums more than they do functional value-adds.

While the War on Poverty was the first case study in the inefficiency of government capital allocation, it wouldn’t be the last. Once they discovered their universal solution, the money printer, the necessity for sound money would become even more apparent to the American people.

War On Drugs

The string of government initiatives beginning in the 1970s to end drug usage was the second of four periods of “war on the abstract” that the U.S. has engaged in over the last century.

Starting as far back as 1914, the regulation of opiates and cocaine began passing in the halls of Congress, followed by Prohibition, followed by the introduction of a heavy marijuana tax in 1937, as well as imprisonment and fines for possession. This was just the beginning of something far more concerted and targeted in the United States — the war on drugs.

In 1970, the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) was signed into law by President Richard Nixon, introducing an arbitrary “schedule” to classify drugs and ascribe criminal punishment to them. And in June of the following year, Nixon declared a war on drugs, citing drugs as “public enemy number one.”

Ironically enough, Nixon suspended the convertibility of dollars to gold in August just two months later; his money-sucking initiative was followed by the nail in the coffin for the dollar as a sound representation of gold. Ultimately, this was necessary: To pursue these lofty public initiatives while continuing to finance the war in Vietnam, something had to give.

Was the United States going to levy a higher tax burden on its citizens? No. As we discussed earlier, this would be a death sentence for any sitting president. The easy solution would be to quietly disconnect the currency from the value it was supposed to represent, despite meaning that this made the dollar a promissory note which promised nothing.

That is how you finance government expenditure, they learned. And boy, oh boy, did it feel good.

In 1973, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was created, still receiving an annual budget of $2.03 billion in 2022. The 1980s saw then-President Ronald Reagan introduce many “Just Say No To Drugs” campaigns – such as the elementary-school-targeted D.A.R.E. programs? The crackdown on even the phrase “drugs” was now underway.

The cost of this endeavor has been an estimated $1 trillion as of 2015. That’s a hefty tag to pay for an arguably failed attempt at eradicating drugs from the American paradigm (remember this theme for later). Fiscal irresponsibility was sparked by the legally-recognized ability to magically create dollars out of thin air. And this was just the beginning.

War On Terrorism

Now we arrive at the main subject matter of this article, the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) much more popularly known as “the war on terror,” a term coined by then-President George W. Bush. It was meant to be a catch-all term for war against all terrorist groups (not just Al-Qaeda who claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attacks) which should have been the first signal that perhaps the United States was biting off more than it could reasonably chew.

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