25A005 Vox Pop by Jim Davies, 2/4/2025

It's a wonderful thing, that with a few keystrokes we can see the opinons of a whole variety of people, not just those of Editors of a handful of newspapers or TV Anchorpersons. True, the Biden Gang savagely twisted the arms of social media hosts to censor out of sight all heterdox views, but with the demise of that Gang and the confessions of Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps that unhappy era is over.

The flip side of it is that readers have to discriminate carefully, between reason and ill-informed bigotry and ignorance - with both of which the Net is packed.

The "ignorance" part of that is astounding, and provides vivid commentary on how terribly the "education" system has deprived people of knowldge. Here's a recent interchange, to illustrate.

On Russia Today (which has an open reader forum) there was an article about Mr Trump's recent remarks favorable to President McKinley. I chipped in with a comment:

One of McKinley’s aims was to strengthen America’s commitment to a gold standard. That would be a good one for President Trump to emulate.

That drew a response from one GeorgeBMac:

McKinley plunged the US deeper into the Great Depression with that kind of nonsense.

To which I replied:

Check your sources. The Great Depression didn’t even begin until 30 years after McKinley died.

The towering ignorance of GeorgBMac is just astonishing. McKinley was shot dead in 1902, and the Great Depression was triggered in 1929 and prolonged until 1945. Yet this product of the government school system was so pig-ignorant that his time scale was out by three decades and his notion of cause-and-effect altogether upside-down.

So here follow a few thoughts on the Depression.

It brought enormous suffering to America and most of the world. Worse, it brought a rash of government interventions during the 1930s under Franklin Roosevelt, IMO the worst President ever, and culminated in WW2, into which he manipulated America against the expressed popular wish.

Its trigger was a severe stock market crash in October 1929, caused by a then-unprecedented increase in fiat "money", which had been unknown in this country before the Fed was created by Congress in 1913. The bogus money trickled down into investors, who used it to speculate on margin, so driving stock prices much higher than profit returns would justify. In October, the bubble burst and the party of the 1920s came to an end.

There had been market crashes before, but all of them corrected themselves in about 18 months without government intervention. This time, it intervened - first under Hoover (R) and then for 12 miserable years, under FDR (D). It would have cured itself quickly like those others had it been left alone (laissez faire) but those two, especially FDR, were not about to leave anything alone.

One of the interventions was the deeply wicked confiscation of gold in 1933. More than a few ignored the Order, but those who obeyed it were swindled by an almost immediate devaluation of the fiat money, the paper dollars; they were forced to "sell" their coins at $20 an ounce but then FDR hiked the exchange rate to $40. So if anyone wished to take his government money and buy back his gold (which he couldn't, for that was illegal) he'd have to pay for it twice as much. Half their gold savings were stolen, in broad daylight, by FDR's Executive Order.

That prohibition has been lifted since. Today, an ounce costs $2,741. Such is government honesty.

If the FedGov had obeyed the limits set by the Constitution and not used fiat money, it could not have intervened further into the economy and so prevented an earlier recovery; nor could it possibly have afforded to enter WW2. Hence, the Depression was greatly prolonged (as well as being triggered) not by a retention of a gold standard as GeorgeBMac alleged above, but by its abandonment.

What we read on social media is indeed the Voice of the People, but it's a voice deeply distorted by gross falsehoods purposely implanted by government schools - so it's an echo, of sorts, of what those indoctrinators are doing. Such echoes will continue until those schools are de-funded, in the ZGS.