Some musings on what I saw in the first Zeitgeist movie, and the gold bugs out there.
Last year, a movie was making the rounds of the internet, and part of it discussed the economy. The argument was that the government was secretly trying to create a regional government called the North American Union.
It also argued that inflation is caused by the printing of currency by the Federal Reserve Bank (FRB), and because Nixon took our currency off the gold standard.
There's an internal contradiction in these two arguments. If we returned to the gold standard, then, by default, we'd have a common international currency.
A common currency is one of the ways that regional governments are established. Look at Europe: they created the Euro, so that they could facilitate trade across nations. Look at the United States - we used to have different money in each state. The USA unified currency, and also eliminated interstate tariffs and trade barriers.
The only way to understand how the filmmaker and target audience can want both things at the same time, despite these contradictions, is to ignore the contradictions. They ignore them, because they're simple reactionaries: they want to return to the past, when the dollar was pegged to gold, and they think the US was isolationist. They want to return to the late 1800s.
They think that going backwards will fix things. They won't, and the reactionaries are wrong.
History is written, not for nostalgia, but for understanding.
Original: Gold Bugs and One World Government