Credit crunch. Mortgage crisis. Recession. Inflation. These words have been spoken countless times in recent months. The only consensus among the nation’s economists is that there’s something strange in the air, though nobody can agree on what it is. The current situation has left regular people somewhere in the middle, with more questions in their minds than purchasing power in their wallets.
The reason for all the confusion, according to Pahrump-based economist Ron Wayne, is a long-standing myth surrounding money.
“‘If all the economists in the world were laid end-to-end, they’d still all point in different directions,’” he says, quoting an old joke. “The core of the joke is that economics is whatever you think it is, meaning that it’s so complicated that there are no underlying rules. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
According to Wayne, who spoke April 5 at the Pahrump Community Library, economics is an exact science with laws, which, if broken, lead to dire consequences.
“Take a look at the current decline of the U.S. dollar against all of the world’s currencies, a decline that can now only be described as geometric, and you will see the formula for an economic tsunami, a skyrocketing inflation, an inflation due entirely to monstrous government debt,” he said.
A lifelong engineer who currently works as a coin and bullion dealer, Wayne attributes the current financial crisis to the unconstitutional elimination of precious metals from the nation’s currency. Before paper money, he maintains, the costly ambitions of politicians had to be realized through real and limited money, which had to be taxed from the public. In turn, the nation’s leaders were more accountable to their constituents.
“To political authority ... gold was an intolerable shackle,” Wayne told the audience, later adding that “paper money enables the most politically desirable form of taxation ever conceived: inflation as a secret tax. It never shows up on the books and nobody ever votes for it.”
Wayne’s lecture, titled, “The Economy Under the Influence of Corrupted Money,” used historical markers to explain the basics of the American economy. For instance, Abraham Lincoln’s use of fiat money during the Civil War stands as an example of monetary manipulation as a means to political gains. Had Lincoln opted to legitimately tax the Union, he likely would have had to fight two rebellions at once.
The lecture also touched on the 1913 creation of the Federal Reserve System and how World War I was used as a trial run for the fed’s new notes. But it was Wayne’s mapping out of the linkage between Franklin Roosevelt’s depression-era criminalizing of private gold ownership and the country’s present-day, seemingly insurmountable national debt, which drew the most gasps from the audience.
Wayne, who recently finished his magnum opus, Insolence of Office — for which he currently seeks a publisher — wants to spread his message of sound money farther than Pahrump. He hopes people will take note and prepare themselves for what he sees as an inevitable return to gold and silver currency.
When the fiat money system finally is seen as the fraud it is, Wayne says, the 90 percent silver coinage system, driven out of circulation in the mid-’60s by its copper-nickel imitator, will return.
“That silver coinage slipped into private holdings, under the influence of something called Gresham’s Law — simply defined as ‘bad money drives out good money,’” he said. “When this parallel money system actually comes to pass, people will be doing common street business in silver, making yesterday’s money tomorrow’s money once again.”
