Stimulus money buys hot meals for seniors ... A month ago, Almeta Whitsett was on the waiting list for Mobile Meals. With two hip replacements and a husband with Alzheimer's, the 84-year-old Greensboro woman was finding it harder to cook. She already had someone who came in to clean her house every two weeks. Now, she has help in the kitchen, too. Senior Resources of Guilford learned over the summer that it would receive $80,000 in stimulus money from the state Department of Health and Human Services. The money officially arrives today for Senior Resources. But since the agency knew that the funds were coming, Whitsett started receiving two hot meals a day, five days a week, in late September for her and her 85-year-old husband, James. "I don't have to worry about preparing dinner each day," Whitsett said. "I prepare a little breakfast for us, and maybe in the evening get us a little sandwich or something. We've enjoyed the meals tremendously." Oscar Lowe, Mobile Meals program director for Senior Resources, said the list was needed because the economy had turned bad for many. "I guess that we had 30 or 40 on the waiting list," he said "It was pretty sizeable." Senior Resources is funded through the United Way, federal Title III grants and private donations ... Lowe said it feels good to be able to call people such as the Whitsetts to say, "I believe I can get your meals started." – News & Record
Dominant Social Theme: Government hot meals to the rescue ...
Free-Market Analysis: We are never, really pessimistic. This is surely an exciting time to live. The Internet, like the Gutenberg press before it, has galvanized an intellectual insurrection. The result over time, we believe, will be the reshaping of Western cultures and perhaps a restructuring of civil society in a way that brings the West closer to an equitable economic model, one less prone to manipulation by the monetary elite.
In the meantime, however, we can't help but remember the great pioneering tribes of Western Europeans (mostly) that took off in rickety stagecoaches to colonize the American West. Sure, the land they were colonizing had already been colonized by Native Americans (who'd probably colonized them from some other group in a previous era). Nonetheless, the courage and self-sufficiency exhibited by such adventures is worth recalling.
These were families, actually, and included Mom, Pa, the kids and even the grandparents. There was no stashing of the old folks in retirement homes and no worrying about hot meals, so far as we know. A rifle and a rabbit provide the rudiments of dinner and kids learned to shoot and skin animals about the same time they were learning their ABCs.
There were no central banks in the early days of the West, by the way, Andrew Jackson having stood against them. And gold and silver specie provided the basics of exchange. The current canards about wildcat banking had yet to be written and there was no inflation to speak of because there was no fiat money and thus no overprinting.
In fact, the economy was entirely undistorted by fiat money. It is fiat money of course, which provides the rocket fuel that sends economies into orbit, tempting youngsters off the farm and beckoning those with modest incomes to give them up in search of the unfortunately ephemeral surer thing. Fiat money in the 20th and now 21st century has not merely pilfered people's retirements. Fiat money has virtually restructured society, shattering family units, providing people with the faux certainty that large incomes can be had for "careers" in white collar fads, er ... fields.
It is not popular, nor even considered sensible, to write such things of course. Tell most people that their lives and livelihood are the result of fiat-money banking policies and they will likely look at you as if you are crazy. But we are convinced that it is true. The results are all around us.
Sure, there was poverty and difficult economic surges in a pre-fiat money world, especially the American one. But these episodes tended to be relatively mild and regional. If there was a problem somewhere, you could go somewhere else. No different than the Italian city-states, or other participatory democracies before it. And people knew what to expect, mostly. They knew that the family unit was important and that one ought to seek self-sufficiency – or if not, that the jobs and businesses to which they migrated were built on firm foundations, not the sandy loam of fiat-generated false expectations.
Like a mirage, the prosperity promised by fiat fades away, leaving shores awash with the detritus of false hopes and ruined lives. We read a statistic recently that a majority of American children will be on food stamps at one point or another in their lives. And American seniors are said to await their hot government meals with the breathless anticipation that wild-catters used to await the results of a potential gusher.
Where is the prosperity that America once promised? Where is the sturdy self-sufficiency? There were no meals on wheels in the Wild West. And probably no thought that government programs, especially, should help provide them. It is in America, therefore, that we can most markedly chart the decline and ruin that is visited on a population ravaged by fiat money. Drive through the America of today and gaze upon a trail of destruction wrought by debt and inflation.
Conclusion: It is not regulation, nor any other governmental activity that has brought this great country low (though taxes and regulation certainly hurt). It is mostly – and most certainly – the debasement of currency. Thomas Jefferson had it absolutely right. And it is the Internet that has reignited his perspective and brought Austrian, free-market economic literacy to the fore once more. Millions understand what has happened, and millions more will understand over time. Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come (or come again). Not even a government hot meal.
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