Are you informed?

Do you want to be informed? Have you ever asked yourself, “am I informed” about a certain topic? Hopefully if you have kept reading this far I can help to give you an idea, and that would, at the very least, help you begin to be informed.
What is it you want to be informed about? For the purpose of this writing we have, obviously, stuck to the thought process of our government. It seems that most people, that I speak with anyway, say they are not sure about what they hear, and as I mentioned in the past, they definitely don’t know why a certain thing is the way it is.
Again why is the important question? Right? So if someone said so what if they are wrong? The only thing, one can do is compare what is being said to when it has worked or, of course, to when it has not worked. Keep in mind that when you compare average too average you end up with.. . . . . . .well average. So we should compare to something that was, hopefully, more that average.
Remember almost no idea on Earth has not been thought of, or tried before. This is helpful because it gives us examples of when an idea was tried and how it worked. As history has proven, history repeats itself.
Now you might be thinking, “That is not true, it can’t be, this idea couldn’t have been tried before because off”. . . . fill in the _______. But, it almost always has been tried before, yeah sure in a different setting or a different time, it is still helpful because it gives us a format. If you were tasked with writing a paper and you found one that your great grandpa wrote on a similar subject you could, at the very least, use his format. Right?
So, when thinking about any topic, healthcare, welfare, abortion, immigration, gun control, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, almost anything we can compare to what other have tried or wrote about and it gives us the format we can put it in. A perspective is important. Don’t you think?
Around the turn of the 20th century there were a lot of ideas about how to help people and what this country needed to do. Some even said, of course, that these were new ideas, that because of the times they were in, the “old” ideas, and thoughts were not relevant anymore. Sound familiar? So certain people decided to try something different. Well I can’t say for sure but perhaps no one pointed out to them that all these ideas were thought of or tried before, and that there was a reason these ideas weren’t chosen.
Some of these ideas were called “The new deal” some just hitched a ride, and still some were born before the new deal was announced. Take, for example, the Federal Reserve. Hopefully you have asked yourself why about the Federal Reserve or, at the very least what? What is the Federal Reserve? Why did it need to be created? And my personal favorite, if the country existed for 143 years before it, couldn’t we live without it? The answer is, of course, a big gigantic yes. But I don’t blame anyone for wanting to try something different, and it certainly wasn’t new.
Is the Federal Reserve federal? Is it a reserve of some kind? Important questions, right? The answers could be debated I’m sure but I can only tell you what I have learned. In the early 1900’s there were no central banks. Meaning there was not a place that was backed by the government that financed anything. In fact money as we know it was all together different back then. Today we have Federal Reserve notes, check your money all the bills have that printed on it. Before the Federal Reserve only the treasury could issue paper money, and even then it went outside of its constitutional powers. The states had the power to coin money. So the powers that be, or to use correct English, the powers that were, wanted more.
See if you have a limited amount of money coined by the states it doesn’t do what most bankers would want it to do. You want elasticity in your money don’t you? So they got together and tried to create a bank, the only problem was that the country still had a bad taste in their mouth for banks, specifically central banks. So they knew they had to be creative when coming up with this idea to get more elasticity in money. Someone came up with the idea for the name, knowing they couldn’t use a name with “bank” in it, they choose Federal Reserve. It sounds proper right? Was it legal? Was it the right thing to do? Who knows, but you can bet someone, or many would get rich off of it.
If some of you are asking why didn’t the country want a central bank, and hopefully all of you reading are asking that, some of the answers can be found during the founding of the country in the revolutionary war, and in 1835 during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. All I can say about that is they knew if you give that kind of power to people they will, almost, without fail abuse it. As the saying goes power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Well at the time it wasn’t legal for these people to create the Federal Reserve they had to change the thinking of people in the country, they had to change a few laws, and amend the constitution. How do you change people’s thinking, well the best way, as history shows, is with crisis. They had to find a way to show people that money was dangerous and that without some extremely smart people controlling it, a depression would be the result. The term depression only gets used in retrospective so at the time, in its current state, they called it a panic. See the panic of 1907. This started to shift peoples thinking about a central bank.
Fueled by the panic several rich people from around the world, they may or may not have contributed to the panic, used its power to influence the people. They conjured up this idea of the Federal Reserve and pitched it to congress. The Owen-Glass act was the first thing that got it all started and in 1913 president Wilson signed the Federal Reserve into law. This gave a place for a central bank, a place where money could gain enormous leverage, and elasticity.
How does it all work? You might ask, hopefully you are asking, its pretty great. When you think of a bank, you think of money right? Well these rich folks didn’t want to spend money they wanted to make money so there was no reserve. The Federal Reserve had a exclusive deal with the United States, it wasn’t owned by the U.S., it just had a deal with them, to be the sole provider of money to it. So if they U.S. needed money the Federal Reserve would write a check and hand it to the Treasury. Once the Treasury had it, it became money, only now it was a loan to the U.S. and had to be paid back with interest. Genius right. Today the Federal Reserve is a little different than as it began, but they still create money out of nothing. Remember all the stimulus packages they have created printing trillions.