Off The Grid News Better Ideas For Off The Grid Living
Apostasy is usually thought of as a renunciation of religious faith. However, apostasy can take many forms, which includes a total turning away from principles once professed. We can still claim to be people of faith but deny the inherent power of that faith. Even if we have no religious faith, we can still claim to have principles, but use every means of deception to wiggle around those principles. This is no more apparent than in the way we handle monetary policy in this country.
Today’s guest on Off the Grid Radio, Doug Tjaden of SilverSavers.com, joins Bill Heid and Jeff Harlow in discussing the accompanying moral decline of a people who embrace unsound fiscal policies and the debasement of their money. This decline affects everything in a nation’s culture—from the quality of life their citizens can expect to lead to unjust wars fought on credit out of an empty purse. As we and our government harden our hearts to just weights and measures, God will give us over to ungodly governments which will always include tyrants and dictators.
Off The Grid Radio
Ep 099
Released: April 27th, 2012
Bill: And welcome today with Bill Heid here, your host on Off the Grid Radio and my good friend and pastor, Jeff Harlow. Jeff, welcome.
Jeff: Thank you very much, Bill.
Bill: It’s great to have you here with us.
Jeff: Thank you.
Bill: And our guest today is someone we’ve had on the show before and with the metals market and the monetary situation sort of acting crazy, we thought we’d bring Doug Tjaden of www.SilverSaver.com back on. Doug, welcome.
Doug: It’s good to be here, Bill. Thanks for having me on.
Bill: You bet. Great to have you. Before we get started, I always like to kind of base things in reality a little bit and we’re anything but reality with respect to our monetary policy, where we’re floating off to sea guys. And I thought as a way to sort of put ourselves on the map someplace, I thought I’d have Pastor Jeff read a little bit of Isaiah here and just try to center us and then maybe a piece of Leviticus as well. Go ahead, Jeff.
Jeff: All right. So we’re in Isaiah 1:21-26. “How the faithful city has become a whore, she who is full of justice! Righteousness lodged in her, but now murderers. Your silver has become dross, your best wine, mixed with water. Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not bring justice to the fatherless, and the widow’s cause does not come to them. Therefore the Lord declares, the Lord of hosts, the Mighty One of Israel: ‘Ah, I will get relief from my enemies and avenge myself on my foes. I will turn my hand against you and will smelt away your dross as with lye and remove all your alloy. And I will restore your judges as at the first, and your counselors as at the beginning. Afterward you shall be called the city of righteousness, the faithful city.’”
Bill: Do you want to find the Leviticus one as well?
Jeff: I am going there quick. Okay. And then Leviticus 19:35 “You shall do no wrong in judgment, in measures of length or weight or quality.” And that, of course, is the foundation for the biblical requirement of just weights and measures.
Bill: Sure, which is one of the things we want to talk about today. Doug, Isaiah is getting a little fussy, a little cranky there, and I think you could make that same indictment. You could aim that about any of the industrialized countries—certainly our country. Last weekend we had this business of some of the secret service guys in Columbia. We’ve got monetary policy. Everything seems to be adulterated. Everything seems to be watered down and even the things that are watered down are watered down some more. I wonder if I could get you to comment on that a little bit as we get started.
Doug: Well I find something interesting. The thing that as you’re reading those scriptures, the word that popped into my mind– it’s also a very salient Biblical principle that Jesus spoke on quite a bit– and that is hypocrisy. If you remember, I think it was last summer—and time escapes me a little bit here—but you had people in the government and around the world, almost literally freaking out over this almost immeasurable change in the math of the kilo standard, worldwide. I don’t know if you heard about that or not.
Bill: Sure.
Doug: And they were just going nuts thinking, “Well what’s going on here? What’s the cause of it? Oh, this is a catastrophic kind of thing.” And yet when it comes to money, they will debase it without blinking an eye. And as Isaiah mentioned, you’ve got the widows out there who is… They are the poor—the ones who are alone. They’re the ones that are most impacted by this type of monetary debasement. So the hypocrisy just drips all over this thing where they’ll hold a standard in one area and be very, very concerned about it yet in one of the most important things that we can have, as far as we transact with one another, our monetary system—they couldn’t care less. They feel that they are the final arbiter of whatever that standard is.
Bill: Sure, and I think one of the things that always amazes me is you can go a lifetime in some churches and you’ll never hear a sermon… I mean money is a big part of our life. Money is a big part of the Bible. You’ll never hear a sermon on sound monetary policy. You almost have to go to secular sources. Jeff and I were talking about you almost have to go to www.Mises.org or someplace like that to hear anybody discuss sound policy. But sound monetary policy—It sounds to me like God found watered down money, silver to dross and so forth, symptomatic of an apostate culture and it seems to me that the world that we live in right now is evidencing the exact same thing. So we’re there. We’re doing these things but these things are actually detestable to God. He finds them just not something that He wants to have anything to do with. So we find standards. You could argue why we have these monetary units, why in the Bible for example, money is always by weight. I think, Doug, we talked about this the last time but talk to us a little bit about just these just measures that Jeff read about in the Bible. They were… A talent was a measure of weight, was it not?
Doug: Well yes. And I think the point that you made, Bill, was right on and that is the debasement of the monetary system, the debasement of currency, the debasement of money—whether it’s a paper money system or whether it’s coin clipping or mixing in base metals with silver and gold, basically mixing dross back in with the money itself—it is symptomatic of the moral decline of any nation. And whether you go back to the Roman Empire… Pick a nation who has gone through a serious monetary debasement. The French had their problems as well, during the French Revolution. And any time you see that happen, there is generally speaking, a moral decline that accompanies that. Either that and/or—and you could call this certainly a moral issue as well—that monetary debasement is used to finance a war. And often those wars are unjust wars. So that in and of itself is a moral problem.
So yes, the whole idea of monetary debasement and the moral decline of a society—they go hand in hand, always have. They have in scripture. They have throughout more recent history. And we have that as evidence there to learn from if we will. Now why that isn’t being preached from the pulpit more often, I really don’t know, other than… And there are some leaders in the whole issue of how to steward money and helping get out of debt and those kinds of things that aren’t real fans of gold and silver and so that, I think, tends to have a little bit of an influence there. But people are waking up and I think some pastors are waking up. Certainly Jeff—you’re aware of these things. And so I think the battle is one at a time. Opening eyes, putting the Word of God out there and saying, “What say you about this?” And those who are in tune and listening to the Holy Spirit, eventually that’s going to pierce their heart and they’re going to say, “You know, I can’t turn my back on this anymore. I’ve got to address this.”
Jeff: Well it does seem to me, Doug, that it’s almost an inescapable conclusion that if we start with God as our Creator, that we have to see ourselves as stewards under His purposes. And as stewards, it’s not for us to be able to determine values and such like that. Rather, we represent that which is true. Whether we’re talking about not adulterating the Gospel or not adulterating our money, it’s the same basic principle—we have to be good stewards.
Doug: Yeah, and those principles were written into our Constitution. Article 1, Section 8 talks about fixing a standard of weights and measures. And that “theory,” if you will—that principle—comes straight out of scripture. The ones that you referenced, you’ve got Proverbs 11:1 and I think it’s Proverbs 20:10—they talk about actually an unjust weight and measure being an abomination to the Lord and that’s a very, very strong word. So this is one of those where we look at it and see what’s going on around us and we better sit up and pay attention.
Jeff: Well indeed. And I would simply add to your description of history and how unjust weights and measures often go along with the decline of a city or decline of a nation, this is also judgment from God. As God hardens our hearts, God gives us over to things like ungodly governments and things like that. And so it seems to me that in addition to all the other things we have to do, repentance has to be a high thing here. We have not acted as good stewards. We have been irresponsible.
Doug: Well you’re absolutely right and that is the repentance—the idea of repentance of this—first of all, people have to be aware of it. There are people that are just walking in ignorance of the sin that they’re so deeply entangled in. And it is an entanglement. Our monetary system, at its core, isn’t just a paper money system and isn’t just one that can be debased. It is, at its core, a debt based monetary system, which simply means that all new money created is backed by a debt instrument. So as it’s created, somebody—some entity, a person, a government—goes into debt. And that is an abomination on top of an abomination; taking people into debt slavery at the same time you’re debasing the currency. It’s one of the most evil monetary systems I think mankind has ever seen and thus the ramifications of us being purged of it are going to be very significant.
Bill: Doug, here’s an interesting—and Jeff—here’s something I’m looking through. An article that I was looking at and the commentator, Sidney Ginsberg, was talking about this. He did a study of these matters, both in the Bible as well as the Talmud and here is a line from his study, his commentary. He said, “Hence they declared that the sin of illegal weights and measures is greater than that of incest and is equivalent to the sin of denying that God redeemed Israel out of Egypt. I’d say that’s right up there. Right up toward the top.
Jeff: That’s raising the bar.
Bill: Raising the bar. Exactly, Jeff. So we ought to raise the bar as well and see it for what it is. But people have been—as we talked about—coin clipping. People have been doing this for years and years. Early on in Greek history… It’s funny. The Greeks were in the news, guys, and the Greeks were coin clipping the drachma years ago and I think that I remember reading about a law—I don’t remember where I read this—but a law where you were able to clip a coin 25% and then put it back into circulation. So can you imagine? It wouldn’t take you too long for that coin to be zero, right? If four people clip 25% out of it, you don’t have anything.
And of course we have Helicopter Ben, today, saying, “Whatever happened during the Great Depression is not going to happen to us as a student of that era.” So he is busy advocating a policy, doing just that. It’s not clipping coins but it’s certainly contributing to the same thing and probably worse that clipping coins in that way because there is only so much gold and it doesn’t take you very long to go to zero. But if you look at something and you’ve got it in your hands and it’s been clipped, you look at it and say, “Well, this has been clipped. It won’t be long before all this goes to zero. I’ll take my 25%, try to get it back out into currency.” Now how do you know, right Doug? How do you know what really is going on?
Because on one hand the only gauge—like if you’re flying a plane, you’re looking at your navigational equipment—one piece of navigational equipment is gold; another is silver prices, like those you’d have on your dashboard, right? And then so if those are being manipulated… So you have all of this crazy debasement. Then on top of it, you manipulate the debasement data? And you have folks from big banks shorting silver and gold and trying to create prices that aren’t realistic so that our instrumentation’s not even functioning properly. Doug, you want to comment to that?
Doug: Well, yeah. All of the markets right now are pretty much in lockdown in some form or another and being manipulated. They can’t be totally controlled but their general directions can be boosted along or blunted a little bit, depending upon what the powers that be want to do with them. And that makes “investing” during this time very, very difficult. And so what I tell people is just, it’s a time to move out of paper assets, into hard assets—be that land, be that precious metals, be that food and energy—those kinds of things. And you’ve got to really not worry too much about measuring it against the volatility of the markets as it’s measured in US dollars.
You’re going to have to start to measure God’s provision that He’s given you and the storehouse that He’s allowing you to build in terms of bushels and ounces and acres and those kinds of things and then understand that on the other side of this monetary reset that’s going to be pushed at some time in the future—we don’t know if that’s months or years yet—that you’ll still have that then to begin to use as capital to rebuild. And those are the kinds of things I’m trying to help people understand is don’t freak out when you see your portfolio in this wild gyration as measured in US dollars if it’s in reasonably balanced and hard assets. If you’re in paper assets, those will get very wild and they could end up looking very good in a hyper-inflationary environment in nominal terms but in purchasing power, they’ll be zip. So we’re entering a very, very… Unprecedented has been the word that has been abused, I think, a little bit in this but it’s the only thing that really describes what we’re in right now.
Jeff: Well Doug, maybe for some of us who are less well versed in this you could kind of talk to us how silver itself is being manipulated because as I read at the historic ratio of silver to gold is about 16:1 and we’re way away from that right now.
Doug: Yeah, it is. And silver, being an industrial metal and having moving from a monetary metal into an industrial metal over the last say 30 years as new uses for it have come about, there is a pretty powerful group out there called… I think it’s The Silver Users Association. They got in cahoots a little bit with the CFTC, who regulates the precious metals and commodities markets and they set up an environment where the silver price could be kept very, very low. We’re talking $4 or $5 an ounce for a long, long time. And that allowed them to keep their input costs low. Well the interesting thing is I don’t know their motivation totally behind that because the amount of silver used in most of these industrial applications, in terms of the final cost of the product, is really not that great. So it isn’t like it was going to make their products prohibitively expensive. But there is some of that that did happen. It’s well documented.
JP Morgan is involved in that and it’s very, very interesting that JP Morgan has never said anything about their accusations, which have been going on for years, about their silver manipulation. They’ve never said boo about it for years. But last week they came out and one of their spokesmen came out and denied that they are involved in silver manipulation. So there is a bit of a preemptive strike. They are trying to come out and set the narrative because I think that whole… Their involvement in this is coming to an end. And there are some things happening in the CFTC that the rules position’s changes on the amount of short positions you can have that are getting ready to come into effect. So they’re framing the argument. They’re starting to come out and trying to set the public’s opinion on what’s going on there.
But the reasons that it’s been going on are many. It has been going on for many, many years and historically, yes—Will that ratio hit 16:1? It could overshoot and go to 10:1. There are some people that look at the structure of the markets and say that the available amount of above ground silver and the available amount of above ground gold are actually pretty close to equal. So there are some folks who say silver could rise to close to the price of gold at some point in time. I don’t know if I’ll go that far but I certainly look for it to rise significantly in the years to come and as this whole perception and manipulation and obfuscation of the truth of what undergirds its price comes to an end.
Bill: So Doug—and then you’ve got the ETFs on all the paper forms of holding silver. So I don’t know if you know anything about this. I don’t know very much but what’s the ratio of paper silver to physical silver? If everybody called in their paper silver right now from all of the silver ETFs in existence, what would happen?
Doug: Well, that’s a very interesting point. Now I don’t know exactly what would happen but Jeff Christian with the CPM group—and I can’t remember what those initials stand for but they are a gold and silver group of some kind and I’m sorry I can’t pull that off the top of my head—but he came out a year ago in a debate that he was having with, I think it was Bill Murphy with GATA. And he said, “Well everybody knows that there is 100 times more paper silver trading out there than there is physical silver.” And it was to him like, “It’s no big deal.” But if you think about that, that’s just absurd and on its face because you have 100 times a commodity that is being pushed back and forth to set the paper price when the actual, physical availability of that underlying commodity is 1% of what the overall paper market is.
And so that’s… Those kinds of things are what people are beginning to realize and they know that this whole game that these people play within the hedge funds, in moving these prices around—it’s coming to an end because people are… They’re just fed up with it and saying, “We’re not going to have these games played anymore.” And you see very spectacular things happening like the Madoff scandal, you have MF Global—those are going to become more and more frequent over the years as all of this deceit and lies and just distortion of the markets finally settles itself out. It’s going to be very interesting.
Bill: It is going to be interesting and I think that holding something that has lasting value is probably the only way. I’m sure there are ways to beat the market. I certainly don’t know those ways and haven’t been very successful at it. But at least having a standard… The founders of our country—there was still enough Christianity left during that period that when they did the $20 gold piece, the double eagle, that was an ounce of gold, right? And then a half ounce, the $10 coin. We really—the founders—got this right because of their worldview, because they understood just weights and measures. They were products of the Reformation.
Certainly this was something that Luther had brought up over and over and over. Luther was very worried about… Interestingly… Luther was pretty crazy in a lot of things but where he nailed it down… He was worried about… Guess who’s going to get hit in inflation? The poor. He was always worried about the poor being whacked by the inflation of his time and man, he wrote about during his period in his commentary on Romans, even addressing the Civil Magistrate in the early part of Roman saying, “Look, it’s your responsibility, King, to make sure that we don’t flood this with poor purchasing power.” So you’ve got that. You’ve got Calvin commenting and going out of his way to make sure there were just weights and measures or at least trying to get them in the Geneva area. And then of course our founders being very influenced by this, brought that. The Pilgrims that came here, the Separatists early on—they certainly had those beliefs.
And then I suppose it was a little watered down by the time that Tommy Jefferson and Adams were around but they still believed those things. Even the Deists and Atheists, even they believed in hard money. So it’s interesting that if we could get the back the Constitution and sort of stress this, Doug and Jeff. Do you guys want to comment any on really what…? The fact that we’re not trying to override the government… We’re trying to say, “Look, if you’re going to go back to a Constitutional form of government…” This isn’t radicalism or revolutionary talk. This is… I guess on some levels you could call it pro-government talk because we’re talking about a righteous government the same way that the founders talked about a righteous government when they were mad at George III for being crazy.
Doug: Well yeah, people who talk about… Folks who dare talk about the Constitution being anti-government… It’s actually… It’s the rhetoric. It’s the spin of the…
Bill: Yeah, we’re the pro-government people.
Doug: Exactly. We’re pro- what the Constitution said because that’s a pro-liberty and freedom government and when you talk about that standard weights of measures in the Constitution—you read the writings of what these guys meant and they said, “In the fixed value of coin”—what they were talking about was specifically what you mentioned a little earlier, Bill, and that is one ounce of gold contained an ounce of gold. A quarter of an ounce contained one quarter of an ounce of gold. The same with silver—a silver dollar was the Spanish mill dollar. It contained 371.25 grains of silver. One dime contained one tenth of that. It was fixing the standard of the precious metal’s content and the value in those contents—not that they could arbitrarily go out and say, “X is a dollar and it has Y value.” That’s just a bunch of historical revisionism bologna that they have today. And they felt so strongly about this. Even Alexander Hamilton, who wasn’t the most conservative in his fiscal views, he wrote the Coinage Act of 1792, which said any of the people working at the mints, who debased the coins—you know what their punishment was?
Bill: What’s that?
Doug: Death.
Bill: Well…
Doug: They can be killed for debasing the coins.
Bill: So that was a capital crime.
Doug: It was a capital crime…
Bill: The same way incest was a capital crime, as I was reading before. So tampering with this… And I think this… Is this because, guys, God considers a just and righteous society in need of something stable, right?
Doug: Well absolutely it is. Because money is one of the most insidious and deceitful ways—debasing of it—is one of the most insidious and deceitful ways that A—you can cheat people out of their hard earned labor and then B—use that for evil purposes. The Bible says, “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” for a reason. As I look around the world and see all this evil going on, I go back to the root of it and I’m… If you go dig, dig, dig down into the root of it, it gets to be money just about every time.
Bill: Yeah, it’s…
Jeff: Well, and I think that… The Apostle Paul– I think it’s in Colossians—equates covetousness with idolatry and I think there is—with money—there is that attempt to control, almost in a godlike way one’s future, one’s… And especially if you take the restraints of just weights and measures off, then those in power, those who can control the value of things, really do almost have godlike power and you can see…
Doug: Yeah, Mayor Rothschild said himself, “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes her laws.” So what you’re saying, Jeff is spot on. People who control the money can control the laws and thus control the people and then, in and of themselves, set themselves up as God. And that’s what you see in this pagan culture, unfortunately that we’ve kind of turned into, is we’ve gone away from Biblical principles and we’ve adopted this idea of secular humanism and evolution and the fact that there should be people who are elite and who are smarter than we are and who should be in control. And it’s perverting itself in a way that unless we were on our knees in repentance—and that’s where it’s got to begin—we’re going to hand over a world to our children, a nation to our children, that’s going to be very, very different and very difficult to recover from in literally generations to come.
Bill: I think too, guys, that what we’re talking about with people now is—a familiar theme here on Off the Grid News—is what are we farming out? And we always say, “Gee, you’ve got to be careful farming out all of your food, your kids, your health in general.” You’re going to farm this out to the Division of Labor somehow and put somebody else in charge. A little bit of that could be good but then we’ve done something weirder yet that’s something that would make certainly the Puritans and early Colonial Americans roll over in their graves. We’ve farmed out government. So instead of, as you said Doug, everybody participating in government, you’ve got people just saying, “I’m not even going to vote because it doesn’t matter” or “I’m going to farm this out to the extreme, to a bureaucrat.” Right now bureaucrats run 90% of our country. Our legislative activity, our judicial activity is farmed out basically to bureaucrats that aren’t really a function of either Democrats or Republicans. They just are who we are as a nation and here is the thing—if we weren’t, as a populous, clamoring for bread and circuses—if we weren’t clamoring for easy money…
Just think if President Obama and Mitt Romney had to go and do a debate and everyone in the populous wanted sound money. Well, what would their speeches look like then? So to me, guys, yet I do want to lay some of the blame on our leaders. It is their fault. But without a populous that begs for that… If everyone begged for sound money, then whichever candidate had the best policy toward sound money would win. So we as a people—it’s us—we’re driving these poor policies. And I think that’s not something that people want to hear. I don’t even want to hear myself say that but we have to. If we’re going to get out of this mess, we have to identify where the problem is and sin is located not only in government officials, in politicians, but it’s also right in us—me.
Jeff: Well, and one of the things that our founders understood is there needed to be limits on government but there are limits on the monetary system and I think both of them, from a Christian perspective, flow from our understanding of original sin. Both individuals and gathered individuals making up a government are prone to evil and are bent in that direction and so God has placed limits—limits on the amount of authority that an individual can exercise. That’s the foundation for our limits on the various different houses of government and such. But then also limits placed on our monetary system. We are stewards. We are not in a position of being able to set value. We only represent it. And that, all because we don’t trust ourselves at some level if we properly understand things. We have fallen. We are bent. We need limits.
Bill: And the founders, Jeff… Doug, do you want to chime in here? The founders didn’t trust themselves. Here is a key point. This is why we have a tripartite governmental system is they believe that absolute power corrupted. They didn’t even trust each other. They didn’t trust… They’d look in the mirror and John Adams would say, “I don’t trust that guy I see in the mirror.” Now we don’t hear that kind of talk today, not in any kind of political debate, Doug.
Doug: Well, we’ve got… One burr I have under my saddle is this whole use of the word democracy versus representative republic and those kinds of things. We’ve lost our representative republic over the last probably 30 years, as the people’s minds have been conditioned to think of ourselves in terms of a democracy, which is nothing more than mob rule and our founding fathers absolutely abhorred the thought of a democracy.
And the only remnant I think we have of our representative form of republican government is that we have a government that kind of reflects our culture and that is a—as you said earlier Bill—a people who have just given over their control, their influence to a group of elites and they’ve just set it and forget it and as long as the good times were rolling, through the ‘90s especially, and as long as the Federal Reserve could keep the monetary system somewhat afloat, these whole “idealistic” views of limited government and sound money—those were passé and we don’t need to worry about those. And the problem is once you give up that power, power is not restored or brought back to the local level easily. It has to be fought for. At the ballot box here, we can still do that. I am still thankful that we have the form of government that we can do this. It’s going to take a very, very long time but people who think that we can solve this problem in one or two election cycles by getting in some kind of a “Conservative” in Washington—they’re fooling themselves.
Bill: Yeah, it’s got to come from the hearts and minds of the populous first, which as we’ve been saying should drive policy then and it will never come… Even a watching of the movie Gladiator, where the Emperor walks out and he kind of has to look around, right? If you watch Gladiator, notice how he looks at the crowd and tempers his behavior as a result of the crowd. And so I think even where a guy ostensibly has absolute power with respect to being an Emperor or a tyrant of Rome—he even sort of… And I think that the producer did a nice job of— director rather—of sort of having that actor look around and say, “Well, which way is the wind blowing? I’ve got to be careful here.” And we can make a difference by changing and educating. And this is why I’m kind of calling pastors out again saying, “Look, this is a subject matter for a sermon. This is something we need to talk about.” The Bible is a very practical book. It’s not all about church things. It’s not all about spiritual things, though it does cover those things and cover those things quite well. It covers all aspects of our lives and including political issues and monetary issues and the formula is not that complex. The formula is pretty simple. It’s just a little painful if we have to go back because all of us have to eat it a little bit and we can’t continue to live the life that we’ve been living. But I’m not sure, guys that’s all such a bad thing in a way.
Doug: Well, I think you’re right in saying that it has to be… Judgment begins in the house of the Lord. We have to, as Christians, begin our own process of repenting of this, reeducating the flock and the body of Christ first on this issue, before we can ever hope to begin to educate those who do not understand nor subscribe to the principles found in the Bible and then hope to influence the leaders. That’s why it’s going to be a long process. But yes, it begins in the Church. It begins with church leaders and that’s why in the book that I wrote, Fool’s Gold, I talk about not just the problem and looking at it from a Biblical perspective but we have to understand and pastors need to understand and Christians need to understand the thing that the founding fathers understood—and Jeff, I think you mentioned it earlier—was the human cost of these inflations.
The human cost and suffering and the impact that it has on the destruction of the family unit is enormous and that is where God’s heart is. It’s like, “You know what guys? We’re going to judge this monetary system and bring it back under control and get it out in the open because we can’t let this go on forever.” The human impact of the failure of these systems is tremendous. And that’s what we’re looking square in the face at, globally and certainly in this nation. So for pastors to begin to understand that aspect of it, I think that’s where a pastor can have a heart connection with this issue and go, “Oh my goodness. This is going to impact my flock very significantly so maybe I ought to study it. Maybe I ought to step up and preach about it and then help them to be good stewards and prepare for a time of transition as we go through what appears to be a head that we’re all looking at here.”
Jeff: Well and I could perhaps speak a word to my fellow pastors, my brothers, because I understand this takes a lot of courage because often the powerful people in your church are the ones with a lot of money and they are going to be threatened by this kind of thing. But it does take courage and of course we stand before… We will all stand before and give an account and those of us who are teachers are going to face a stricter judgment and so it’s no good being safe now and threatened then. You have to be willing to be threatened now in order to be safe then.
Bill: That’s a good point. How would a pastor or just any of our listeners get a hold of your book, Doug, before we move on? How do they get a hold of Fool’s Gold?
Doug: Well, I would say it would probably be best to contact me directly at this point and you can send me an email at [email protected] and just let me know that you’re interested in the book. I’ll make sure that you get one.
Bill: Nice. Nice. You mentioned globally. Let’s kind of segue a little bit. Meanwhile, over in Asia… Let’s look at some global issues because I think what’s happening too is that you have Asia, who has a sort of neo-Christian, crypto-Christian perspective in the sense that you have the old Puritan work ethic very much operative in the Asian tigers in China and you have those countries developing balances and those balances, interestingly enough, as we manipulate the price of gold and silver down, those balances are going to purchase the world’s gold and silver. So you’re seeing a shift of assets. In the old Spanish world, when the Spanish and the French and the English were all tangling, it was who could have the most gold, right? And that was a store of wealth. They certainly knew that. Now it’s kind of the same thing too. Quietly central banks are purchasing gold and right now you’ve got Asia with net cash, buying gold instead of treasuries. That’s going to affect us at some point too. So they’re using this manipulation, temporarily, to buy gold. Is that not right?
Doug: Well it’s absolutely fascinating that the nation who is strongest economically and supposedly the most free is debasing their currency and trying to scare people away from obtaining one of the few monetary assets that will see them through the coming global currency shock. Meanwhile you have China, a pseudo-Communist country that is employing more capitalistic ideas and encouraging their people to buy gold and silver.
Bill: Exactly. They are doing that. I’ve been there. I can witness to that, Doug.
Doug: It is. It’s amazing to see this because they know the power shift that’s coming. They know the economic shift that’s coming. And they’re preparing their people for it. And they’re doing it on a number of levels. You’ve got this whole issue going on with Iran right now and the sanctions that are being posed and the proposal to use the swift system to bring sanctions against Iran and basically cut off their supply of being able to transact in US dollars. And here’s China and India taking steps to bypass that and use gold to purchase Iran’s oil. And some of the other things they’re doing that I just found out here a few weeks ago is China is bartering with Iran to rebuild some of their aging oil and refinery infrastructure in exchange for the oil. So it’s almost as if the US dollar, in their minds in some ways, is collapsed and nonexistent anyway and they’re putting in procedures and processes to get around it. So it’s just fascinating that each of these actions that we take as the United States undermines the need and the credibility of the dollar as a world reserve currency. And at the same time, it strengthens our greatest rival for economic dominance and that’s China. It’s just amazing what’s going on these days.
Bill: It is amazing. And that SWIFT system… That’s the system—just so that everybody understands—that’s the system—am I right Doug?—that just allows for the transfer of wires and for banks to do business back and forth. So they’re basically—the western world—is basically cutting Iran off from the flow of dollars or the flow of deposits in general or…? Is it just US dollars?
Doug: Yeah, my understanding is the SWIFT system is what is used to exchange to trade internationally in US dollars. So they chop Iran off of that and that impacts them from being able to trade with other nations. And that’s why China and India and other nations are taking steps to get around it. Like “Fine, shut off US dollars. We’re kind of seeing them as being increasingly worthless anyhow. We’ll find another way to do business with them.”
Bill: Interesting. I wonder if that sort of behavior is a precursor to… Though at some point, if other nations can’t find ways to do business, if that’s not a precursor for those nations to become a little crazy and maybe do something that they wouldn’t do ordinarily. In other words, is that something that could create a war in and of itself?
Doug: Oh, currency wars can absolutely precede the actual tossing of lead around
Bill: Sure.
Doug: I mean there’s no question that that could be a precursor to that. But what’s interesting is it’s allowing these nations to feel their way around and put in processes and understand how business may be done post-US dollar dominance. And so you’re basically feeding your enemies a playbook on how to survive what’s probably coming anyway and that’s the replacement of the US dollar as a world currency. So the undermining of what it does for us… At the same time, it’s making oil cheaper for China and India because Iran—they’re cut off. Obviously they’re going to say, “Well, we’ll sell it to you cheaper because we need to sell it anyway. At the same time, what’s going on with the gas prices here in the United States? It’s going up. I mean our foreign policy right now couldn’t be the most backward, in terms of trying to help the American people and secure our economic liberties and future than… It’s just crazy. I don’t even have the words to describe it. It’s nuts.
Bill: Yeah, it’s… It will be interesting to see—we’ll be long gone—but how history gets written for this period because it is an age where you can’t get good data because not only do you have the information being manipulated—the gold and silver—but the media seems to be just hard pressed to do anything but to tell the truth. They seem like… Like pastors, it seems like the media have kind of a vested interest in the grid and all of its control systems and nobody wants—as Jeff was saying about courage—nobody wants to step out and say, “Hey, here’s what’s really going on.” I think the fact that we lost a feedback loop is one of the most dangerous things that could happen because if you don’t have accurate information, you can’t plan accurately.
I heard Gerald Celente talk the other day about someone that he knew whose mother was in France and she said, “Well, the last reports that we got…” This was at night, “…was that the French forces repelled the Nazis.” Well they woke up in the morning with goose stepping in the streets and because the media had reported to them that… Right down to the last night—12 hours apart. “Good news, everybody. French forces have repelled those crazy Nazis.” And it wasn’t true. So the world that we live in really, I think, we’ve got a problem because getting good information is probably something else, I think, that Isaiah would advocate—good information. It’s becoming harder and harder and harder, yet we’ve got the internet with so much… I mean thank the Lord that there is the internet but you’ve got so much information at your fingertips but most of it’s poisoned or muted or something.
Doug: Yeah, it’s difficult to… You’re absolutely right. It’s very difficult to get good information. The good news that I do see however is people on a broadening scale are understanding that in order for them to take back some sense of influence over their lives, they need to begin at the local level. And so they’re getting more involved in their local governments. They’re getting more involved in their state governments. An on the whole monetary issue side of things… A year ago—we’ve talked about before on this program—Utah passed a sound money act. First in the nation in 80 years. They are now going through an implementation phase of that to determine exactly how to put gold and silver coin back into circulation in that state. They’ve got a nice model going forward. And there are two other states right now where it has passed out of committee and is now moving to the House for debates and that is in South Carolina and here in my home state of Missouri. So the states are starting to realize that there is a problem and there are…
It may not be the most elegant solution and it may be a little bit tardy in its implementation because things could begin to unravel pretty quickly here before they get it fully implemented. But there can be some kind of a foundation laid to return to some kind of a sound money system. And it’s not going to happen… It’s coming from Washington in time. Period. It’s not going to happen. But if enough states begin to move in that direction, it can put some influence on the Federal Reserve and cause Ben Bernanke, like the [inaudible 0:43:37.7] coming out of the Gladiator analogy gave, to look around a little bit and maybe modify their behavior some and in the meantime the states are just going to stand up and say, “This is what we’re doing for our citizens.” As I see things, I don’t think there’s enough time for all the states to get onboard and do this and have a good, sound system before we hit our capitulation point and run into some difficult times with the US dollar.
But any time there’s a foundation laid, as you know, it can be built upon and built upon pretty quickly. So I do have some hope that those things are in place and they’re in motion and I’m working my tail off to try and help that as much as I can because I see it as being very foundational and necessary going forward. The alternative is to let some kind of a regional or global currency come in that’s imposed to us by the IMF or the Bank for International Settlements and if that happens, we’re going to lose sovereignty in this nation at a rate that we’ve never experienced before. So the choices are pretty stark, as far as the economy and monetary systems are. The choices in front of us are pretty stark and they’re pretty imminent, in terms of what we need to be making progress on.
Bill: Yeah, they’re big, Doug. I was thinking as you were saying that that the original vision that the founders had, of course, was pull back, let the states have their own policies and then people would gravitate. There would be a natural competiveness between the states. So if Pennsylvania taxes got too high and you live there, you might move to Massachusetts or someplace, pray tell. But the same thing could happen in the way that you’re prognosticating there, that maybe if things got crazy enough in Illinois—let’s say the taxes got so high here where we live—they’re already pretty high—but people would then move out. I had a guy come in here with a Republican candidate stop and visit us. And his business, Doug, was moving other businesses out. And he’s very busy moving people out of the state and businesses—moving them out of the state of Illinois because the taxes are so high. So you might end up with a lot of—you probably wouldn’t like this—but what if a whole bunch of people from Chicago came down to Missouri? What do you think about that?
Doug: Well, you know, if the people are leaving, then they must be somewhat likeminded. There are folks who are staying who would be the ones who I wouldn’t want…
Bill: Show me the gold. You could… Instead of the “show me” state, the “show me the gold” state.
Doug: Yeah, that’s right.
Bill: It could be on your bumper stickers or something that you could have.
Doug: Well it’s interesting you mention leaving, Bill, because I just read this… I mean the headline on Drudge was the most people renounced their US citizenship last year—or maybe this year it is already—than combined over the last four or five years and since they began keeping statistics in that. People are saying, “Listen, I’ve had enough of this. I don’t like where we’re going and I’m not so sure that we have an opportunity to right the ship.” So they’re taking off. They’re voting with their feet.
Bill: Yeah, life’s on the margin. There are always a percentage of people. I’m not ready to make that move yet. I still like the United States. And I want to live there. I think the battle is here but it’s fun to look around and see what it would be like to live in another country. This is still the land of the weird, home of the brave, whatever. On a lot of levels it’s still a great country. There are still a lot of people trying to get into this country. But as you say, at the same time there are people trying to… Oh, here’s another headline—this one on Drudge. This is funny, Doug. “Blackhawk choppers with heavily armed men swoop over Chicago.” At the same time—simultaneously—that’s the little head up on top at the same time that the headline right now says, “Record number of American citizens are renouncing.”
Doug: Gee, you think there is a correlation there?
Bill: And they just got done with armed raids on pig farmers in Michigan. Did you read that, guys?
Doug: No, I didn’t see that.
Bill: Oh, no, no. Here’s what’s going on because I’m an old… I used to help hog farmers when I was young. So now, in Michigan, here’s another reason why you might want to move out of Michigan and move to Illinois, where we love hog farmers. Here’s what they’ve done. If you have a hog that’s a heritage variety, it’s against the law to own that hog now. So heavily armed men from the Department of Natural Resources of Michigan are coming and either telling you, “You’re going to shoot those pigs or we’re going to do it for you.” And if they show up and your pigs aren’t all shot, you’re a felon. This is a felony to have a heritage variety pig in… Now you would say, “What’s a heritage variety pig?” Well when I was young, I used to show Berkshires at the fair and Berks are now a Heritage variety. I think most of what you would see in pig setups today is sort of hybrid pigs but Berkshire’s like a standard pig. People… Chefs want this pig because it has a kind of a marbled fat that some of the other pigs don’t have.
But if you have a heritage variety pig in Michigan or Tennessee, watch out. There are jackbooted thugs coming with machine guns, coming to visit your farm. Isn’t that amazing that we’ve come to this point, where… Now there’s another side of it I think, that there is probably some legislation that was aimed to get rid of wild pigs and because these guys don’t read the bills, they threw a big old net and it didn’t just get the game farms that were irresponsibly turning hogs loose on their property and letting people hunt. They threw a net that got everybody. And once you tell these bureaucrats—these agencies—that they can attack, I think… Go Google this and see what you can find in Michigan. “Pig farms raided” or something like that. You’ll find all kinds of articles popping up on pig farms being raided. So the world… As my friend used to always say, “It’s not the country that I grew up in.”
Doug: No. And the thing that comes into my mind—and I don’t know if it’s a correlation here—I am just saying you know what’s going on in Dearborn Michigan right now and just the takeover by the Muslim faith and the Muslim brotherhood of that area. And so I’m looking at their aversion to pigs and what it means to their culture and I’m just saying is there a correlation?
Bill: Oh, I never thought about that.
Doug: I’m just saying think about it. These are the ways these folks operate. So does it surprise me that Michigan is one of the states that’s trying to drive pigs out? No, not at all.
Bill: Yeah, I never would have thought about that.
Doug: It’s an hour from Wonderland World, guys.
Bill: Yeah, there’s no telling what… I’m wondering… Do you know anything about—as we get ready to close—this is a little bit wacky but is there a place for gold in Sharia law?
Doug: You know, I haven’t studied that out. I do know that they—interestingly enough, kind of like China and their Communists—they do value gold and weights and measures and they have more of an acceptance of it in their culture than we see. So that’s one thing you have to kind of watch a little bit but they talk about the gold dinar being put in place at some point in time and I don’t know if that’s going to happen or not. But there is definitely more of an acceptance of it in their culture than there is, certainly, in ours where we’re beholden to the Federal Reserve and think that…
Bill: But guys, think about this. In the name of being politically correct, couldn’t our Muslim friends be the tip of the spear for us and sort of get legal tender? In other words, if they want to have tender laws that are politically correct for Muslims and they have gold in their culture, couldn’t we let the political correctness of that play itself off, then come right in behind them and say– as the standard that Jeff read earlier in Leviticus—couldn’t we say, “Hey, we play by those rules too and we want this standard as well”? Because you’d have precedent law.
Doug: Yeah, I think that’s a possibility. I’d be very careful about that. What comes with that is going to be a large amount of control about how it’s used and under what circumstances and all kinds of Sharia law probably wrapped around that that would be pretty difficult to…
Bill: I don’t think my wife would want me to advocate that policy, Doug.
Doug: Yeah.
Bill: She doesn’t want to wear all the headgear when she goes to go shopping. Anyway, final points? We had a lot of stuff that we were going to cover that we really didn’t get a chance to cover but, Jeff, do you want to make any points before we start to close and I’ll ask Doug to do the same?
Jeff: Well, I’m a good news kind of guy and so I do see—back to our passage in Isaiah 1, even though the Lord threatens to put His hand against us and that clearly is happening, there is a promise at the end, that once again we can be and will be called the city of righteousness, the faithful city. So as we face these difficulties, we can do so with hope in Christ, that He’s going to win in the end and a lot of these policies that we’ve been talking about are going to get driven away from us. That’s my hope. It’s going to be tough in the middle but we have hope in the end.
Bill: Stand fast, right?
Jeff: That’s right.
Bill: All right, Doug. What are your concluding thoughts? And also, why don’t you—as you conclude—also tell folks a little bit about how they can accumulate gold and silver through your program?
Doug: Sure. Yeah, no Jeff, I agree with you 100%. What we’re trying to do is alert people and educate them on the reality of history and how we go through these difficult times. This is a cycle that has been repeated since time began. As a nation turns its back on God, He gives His attention through a myriad of ways. We finally come to the point where there is repentance and we begin to rebuild again. There is no reason whatsoever that cycle cannot, in this nation, repeat itself and we can have that foundation once again, where we’re building on God’s law and His principles and His ways and are receiving His blessing again. I have that exact same hope and expectation. So in the meantime, yes—we’re looking at how do we help people walk through the next X-number of years, whatever that is, to get to the point where we are on that rebuilding phase and we’ve repented? And that’s part of it.
One of the things I’ve done, Bill, is I’ve written this book called Fool’s Gold: how the traditions of men have replaced God’s honest money. And you can just send me an email at [email protected] and I’ll be sure you get a copy of it. It talks about this whole system from a Biblical perspective. It looks at the history of how we went from our honest weights and measures to where we’re at today, through the United Stated and the Federal Reserve system and all those kind of things and then what the real impact of this transition is as we come to this point of capitulation and our debt based system finally meets its end. What does that look like and then how do you move through that? So that will help hopefully some readers—maybe some pastors—to gain a foothold and understanding where they can be able to bring this to their people and say, “There are ways to prepare.”
On the practical side of it I do work for a company called Mass Metal out of Lawrence Kansas. They have an accumulation program for silver and gold bullion– Very easy. It’s called Silver Saver and you can go there and look at that at www.SilverSaver.com and it simply allows you to set up a schedule where, “Hey, I want to save in gold and silver.” So it takes X-number of dollars on a regular basis out of your savings or checking account and changes it from fiat money into physical precious metals that are either stored in a depository in Delaware or you can have it delivered. So it’s a pretty simple program. We’re trying to make it so that anybody can begin to accumulate some of what I call “God’s money” and that He created it to help move through this time ahead.
So those are a couple of practical things that I’m working on to help people in this transition phase. And again Bill, I appreciate all the work you’re doing in helping people to be aware of all these different issues and all the guest that you have because precious metals is one area, the monetary system is one but there are a whole—as you know—there is a lot more to getting ready to move through these times. As long as we all do it standing on our hope in Christ, we can do it without fear and we can be good witnesses and a help to those around us and I think as Christians, that is what our main focus should be.
Jeff: Absolutely.
Bill: Absolutely, Doug. I couldn’t have said it any better and with that, I think we’ll close. You know, it’s been great having you on, Doug, and we look forward to having you on next time as well.
Doug: All right. I appreciate the opportunity.
Bill: God bless. We know an hour of your time is very valuable. Thanks for spending it with us. We’ll look forward to talking to you next time.
