The Illusionary Economy

By Simon Black

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If you close your left eye, the U.S. dollar is strong. The labor market has recovered to its pre-crisis levels. The U.S. is affluent and free.

 

But if you close your right eye, the dollar is astonishingly overvalued based on nearly every objective metric that exists, and the Federal Reserve is nearly insolvent on a mark-to-market basis.

 

The labor market has been completely hollowed out as the U.S. work force now constitutes the lowest percentage of the American population since Jimmy Carter was President.

 

The U.S. government itself is flat broke, based on its own financial statements.

 

Nearly every major program and institution, from Social Security to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, to the FDIC, is either insolvent or precariously underfunded.

 

The government cranks out 75,000+ pages of new laws, rules, regulations each year, many of which carry severe criminal penalties and govern the most private details of our lives, including how we are allowed to raise our own children and what we can/cannot put in our own bodies.

 

Police forces have turned into federally-funded paramilitary units, and a grand surveillance state now dominates over the citizens.

 

Civil Asset Forfeiture, the deliberate theft of citizens’ private property by the government with absolutely zero due process, is on an alarming rise.

 

And many of the basic freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution have become watered-down aphorisms rather than inalienable rights.