Fiat Currency Debasement: A Path to National Collapse

An essay published this week argues that the sure way to destroy a prosperous nation is to debase its currency. The piece traces the pattern from ancient Rome to the French Republic to Weimar Germany, and contends that the United States and the broader West, all fiat currency regimes, are bound for the same end.

The author singles out two categories as the primary recipients of newly printed money: war and welfare. Neither, the essay says, can be sustained for long under a sound money standard, let alone both at once. Wars consume a nation's output and its young men. Welfare, once started, becomes irreversible short of total monetary collapse.

In the United States, the process began in the 1960s under President Lyndon Johnson, who pursued both the Vietnam War and his "Great Society" welfare programs. The author cites Johnson's own admission that he did not know how to end the war "honorably." Later administrations, the essay says, shifted away from hot wars toward the Cold War, but then refused to disband NATO after the Berlin Wall fell. Defense spending kept expanding, and new enemies appeared.