Guarding Your Money from Government Onslaughts

by Richard Daughty
Jun. 01, 2010

Grandfather-economic-report.com is famous for presenting whole constellations, in graphic form, of horrors about the mess that fiat money and government, in the hands of incompetent do-gooders, has allowed.

He writes that, in 2009, people worked, “3 times longer per year to pay all taxes more than they pay for food, housing and clothing combined.” Yikes!

This is where I learned that the combined onslaught of government (from local corruption to Congressional corruption) consumes half of all income in the USA!

And this grasping, gobbling government colossus spends half of GDP, which to this day – to this day! – makes me have nightmares full of every post-apocalyptic horror movie I ever saw, pervasive darkness and gloom, dripping in despair and suffering, where government goons and killer robots relentlessly track down “undesirable” citizens, who, you gotta admit, are always the best-looking men and the hottest hubba-hubba women of the whole bunch, which gives rise to the lesson that if you have to go down, these are the people to be with until then!

Of course, there are many lessons in these movies beyond this timeless philosophical gem, such as not trusting anybody because they are probably aliens from outer space or government killer goons. Or both.

Anyway, I thought I had made peace with myself about our system of governments consuming half of everything, but I entered a whole new land of fear and loathing (as Hunter Thompson might have termed it), when Grandfather goes on, “Increased government (at all levels) not only consumes national income by its spending, but their employees continually issue new regulations aimed at the reduced private sector, with the cost of compliance passed to the private sector as un-funded mandates to the tune of 15% of national income.”

By this time you are hardly paying attention, and are saying to yourself “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me something new” in a kind of bored, I’ve-seen-it-all, “we’re screwed” ennui, but without yawning.

I was the same way! So, like you, I was not ready for him going on to say “Adding this 15% to the 49% spending ratio increases government’s control-share of the economy to 64%,” which bring our taxpayer’s share of income down to 36%.” Wow! The government consumes two-thirds of my income!

And so we learn that in 2009, people worked, “3 times longer per year to pay all taxes, more than they pay for food, housing and clothing combined” when, in reality, the taxpayer is left with much, much, much less than that paltry estimate of 36% of gross income, and everyone is getting lesser and lesser, too, since taxes are rising and there is talk of, and the certainty of, new taxes, while inflation (which has the same effect as a tax) is rising and rising, and destined to rise some more, and then more and more until the very life is being crushed out of you by inflation in prices, which will happen because inflation in prices is caused by inflation in the money supply, which is caused by the monstrous Federal Reserve creating the extra money, which it does so that the despicable federal government can borrow and spend the extra money, which drives up the proportion of the economy that the government consumes, making it all worse and worse in a big, ugly spiral, spinning around and around, spinning, spinning, spinning until you are so dizzy that you are think you are going to throw up, and then you realize that you are not puking your guts out because of vertigo, but because the government has destroyed the country!

Of course, there is much, much more at grandfather-economic-report.com, and there are graphs of gold and gold-related things, too, making you come away both dazed and scared out of your freaking mind, but with the idea floating around in your mind that “Hey! Maybe that Horse’s Butt Mogambo (HBM) was right about that buying gold thing that he was always yammering on about! And it looks like he may be right about silver and oil, too! How could such an idiot be right about anything, much less three things?”

How? The answer is that the Austrian school of economics – found free at Mises.org – makes it easy! So easy, in fact, that it makes you squirm in delight and exclaim, “Whee! This investing stuff is easy!”

June 1, 2010

Richard Daughty (Mogambo Guru) is general partner and COO for Smith Consultant Group, serving the financial and medical communities, and the writer/publisher of the Mogambo Guru economic newsletter, an avocational exercise to better heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it. The Mogambo Guru is quoted frequently in Barron’s, The Daily Reckoning, and other fine publications.

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