The Empire Has No Clothes

Mark Thornton (0:02)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues Podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. The most important component of social and political reform is for the general population to know what's actually happening and to be able to see through government propaganda and its extreme nationalistic patriotism.

Opinion polling finds an all-time low for trusting the US government, less than 20 percent compared to nerlet 80 percent during the gold standard era.

This eye-opening result could be the single greatest contribution of President Donald Trump. He entered the presidency on a campaign of draining the swamp and fighting the deep state. He talked to good game, but ultimately lost to those foes, the media, the courts, and the ballot box. Now, he reclaimed the crown, but after an encouraging flourish at the beginning, it soon became apparent that he was ruling from a pulpit. He was captured by a small sliver of American society that includes his Zionist donors, the military-industrial complex, the Israeli lobby, the deep state, and the neocon course. He failed to have the Epstein files released, and even suppressed their release. The fact that there has been no serious government investigation into the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a vocal opponent of US military involvement in Israel's affairs, confirms the corruption of our politicians in a very sinister manner, for all to see. In very recent opinion polling, American views on President Donald Trump, the Reuters Ipsos poll, for example, did a career-low approval of just 32% for President Trump, while the AP Norrick poll found his approval at a record low of just 31%.

Now, President Trump disagrees, and he will drag down the Republicans in the midterm election, and he stated that, I'm doing great. And he tells voters to just, quote, pretend I'm on the ballot, and that, quote, the 5,000-dividend check for every American adult will carry the day of the election. Now, increasingly, Americans and people around the world see the American government as a bankrupt, despotic empire headed in the wrong direction. Globally, positive perceptions of America are cratering on a long downtrend. Another recent poll finds the US near the bottom, below Russia, and only noticeably above the bottom of the list, Afghanistan and North Korea, with Israel at the very, very bottom of the poll.

Most obviously, the world sees the US government hopelessly in debt. American politicians are not even discussing the issue in public and are certainly not debating ways of addressing the problem. They are only finding new ways of spending even more money and going ever more deeply into debt. America is bankrupt in the eyes of the world. The entire world shivers when President Trump told Time Magazine recently that the national debt could simply be inflated away. Printing currency is a hidden tax, the most socially destructive and immoral of all taxes. Under the Crimes Act in the United States of 1790, counterfeiting was a capital crime and still carries penalties of 25 years in prison. But our own government now considers its own form of printing money to be normal business. The US dollar is not true money, and it hasn't been true for the last century. It's a fake legal currency by dictate or fiat that has been foisted on America and the world's economy. Almost from the beginning of human civilization, silver and eventually gold were true money. With its stable, honest value, these elements of the earth helped transform ourselves from primitive humans into an advanced global civilization of exchange and peaceful cooperation. Only recently has the scab of money been opened when the US sanctioned Russia for invading the US installed regime in Ukraine, stealing Russia's holdings of US government securities in the process. Other countries no longer trust US government bonds and have been increasing their purchases and holdings of gold. The general population, particularly in Europe and Asia, have followed suit. There is also a continuing effort on the part of many nations to liberate their gold holdings from so-called safe spots in the United Kingdom and the United States, bringing it back home to their countries out of safety concerns. Our war against Iran has been particularly enlightening and has exposed the limits of American military prowess to the extreme. It has exposed the sense of security we gave the Persian Gulf allied states, and it has ended any special status of the petrol dollar. Certainly globally, but also domestically, the perception of America has gone from a benevolent economic superpower to that of a malevolent despotic empire.

This fundamental negative change of perception of America rests on top of the fiascos in Vietnam and Afghanistan, to which is added in Iran, the lack of purpose for the current war against Iran, attacking an adversary during negotiations, killing their supreme religious leader of Iran, and targeting innocent civilians. On display are an arrogant ineptitude of strategy and tactics, and a total lack of diplomacy, the rules of engagement, and any kind of concern for our own allies, with the exception of Israel. All of this reinforces the American perception that the entire political class lacks character and morality, and are untrustworthy towards the support of our own public domain. Adding fuel to the fire has been verbal attacks against the sovereignty of Canada and Greenland, the illegal capture of Venezuelan President Maduro, and the increasingly threatening US stance against Cuba.