 Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues Podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. In last week's podcast, I talked about the importance of the silver dollar, where it came from, the rise of modern society, the middle class, and an ever-expanding standard of living. In this week's podcast, I want to draw your attention to another speech that was given at the Mises Institute supporter summit by Dr. Guido Holstman, the cultural impact of the dollar, where he looks at the modern paper dollar rather than the older silver dollar. I think this is very important because he shows that the cultural impact is at least as significant in a negative sense than the economic impact of the paper dollar run by the government. And it really helps to bring together a lot of the problems that you and I notice in the world and associates it with the strong force of inflation that our government is causing. Now, the impact of government intervention into money and credit are not limited to the economic consequences, such as higher prices and recession. And this is what Dr. Holstman is really addressing. These problems of cultural impacts are especially so when the government has wholesale complete control over money. What is the money unit? Its supply and interest rates and the influence that has over our economic and cultural actions. The justification for government control is economic benefit. But Dr. Holstman raises the question, is that even true? Everybody agrees it has an impact, but he shows that the benefits are only in the short run. The Fed saves us. But in the long run, there really is no benefit. The basic costs of the current system were once thought to be very low because paper is paper, you can print it up with any numbers that you want on it. But what we found and what his students have found is that the real cost of, for example, employing 20,000 people at the Federal Reserve is very high and significantly greater in some sense than the old system of silver coins and gold coins. He begins his talk describing some of the theories that Austrian economists are well aware of. And I think you can follow along fairly easy. It's pretty much common sense. For example, monetary intervention causes a redistribution of money and wealth in the economy. The people who get the money first, such as the government itself, the government bureaucrats, government contractors and big Wall Street banks are the real winners here. And the losers are the people who get to see the money last after prices have risen significantly. In other words, just about everybody else. This also unleashes the government not only to print, but also to borrow money to run up a huge national debt and money to regulate everything in our lives. Monetary intervention also causes price inflation that we're all experiencing now. The more money you print, the higher prices go, the higher the price level, money units depreciate in value. And this is really what Dr. Holtzman calls an historical anomaly that we could have gone through decades and decades of depreciating money. He shows that the owners of physical assets, such as the old and the wealthy, tend to benefit from this system, whereas younger people without physical assets, especially labor, tend to lose. And then, of course, everybody is encouraged to get into debt financing of things like homes where the government has intervened and created a market for 30-year mortgages. So instead of saving for the things we want, we simply finance them in order to take advantage of the ever-depreciating dollar. Professor Holtzman describes in great detail some of the effects, the cultural effects that this system has, where money is continuously depreciated. For example, one category of effects is that it makes us all very short-sighted. We're here. We want to service our debt. We don't want to engage in savings for the future. We want to act in the here and now, and that causes a lot of cultural problems. The second effect is that it makes us more servile, more debt makes us trapped, it makes us obligated with this debt spiral that many of us have gotten into. We tend to do what we are told in order to keep up our credit scores. He gives examples in the talk that are very interesting, very pertinent, and very timely. For example, during COVID, doctors pretty much were forced to go along with everything because they were so in debt, they couldn't say no, face the loss of their license and their businesses. A third category is the moral degradation that occurs with an ever-inflating money supply and depreciating currency. A fourth category is that it reduces our charity and our generosity towards others because we're so caught up in this debt-financing spiral. His main point here is to show that the government's depreciating inflationary monetary system leads to moral decay. But I think you'll be able to see in here pretty clearly the implications for the government building up a huge national debt, being able to afford a huge welfare system, an empire, and a warfare state around the world, as well as driving the divisiveness inside the American population, separating us, making us want to combat one another rather than glory in what we all could share in a free market economy. Again, I highly recommend this. I think it will tie together a lot of your thoughts about what's wrong in American society today, and I'll link to this talk in the show notes.