Classic economists think “fiat money”, which is produced by government decree, is a danger. Catholic Fundamentalists aren’t so sure. We wonder if the centralizing of production and the subsequent loss of jobs mandates printing presses.
We can see one extreme: the government of Zimbabwe printing billion dollar bills that are worth, maybe, a nickel. Obviously, that doesn’t help anyone, but may shrink what had been a truckload of money down to wheelbarrow size.
On the other extreme, we can see that if a country were on a strict gold standard, free trade would dictate that most of its gold would be shipped out to buy goods and services better provided by others, or the gold would end up in the hands of ever fewer people, as it has since King Midas.
Since most western governments have reached the stage of either decay or advancement where ever fewer people are involved in manufacturing, increasing numbers of jobs have to be provided that are essentially useless. We can look at the number of bureaucracies and related organizations that have sprung into being since Roosevelt, and and see that they were a natural reaction to the unemployment caused by a thousand Henry Fords and their assembly lines putting millions of individuals and small shops out of business. We also understand that few of these bureaucracies are necessary to do anything but provide jobs for those willing to spend their lives on obvious uselessness.
Each field of human endeavor now has a bureaucracy designed to make sure that it doesn’t become too efficient. Towns and factories, for instance, are not allowed to buy their own railcar-sized nuclear reactors to provide cheap energy because an Atomic Energy Commission and a Department of Energy has been put into effect to be sure they can’t.
We cannot replace expensive, complicated, hard-to-make internal combustion engines and transmissions with simple electric motors that would cut the cost of automobiles and transportation because an entire Department of Transportation is there to keep that from happening, ostensibly for various “safety” reasons. A myriad of Departments and zoning agencies keeps people from building their own inexpensive, fire-proof houses with poured concrete and inexpensive materials.
Oddly enough, one thing that keeps these bureaucracies in power is the Second Amendment. If some “true conservative” were ever to have the power to restructure government so that all useless jobs were eliminated, dozens of millions of armed and jobless former government employees who are otherwise unemployable would take to the streets and overthrow it. Similarly, if a new wave of leftists tries to replace established bureaucracies with their own supporters, as early Communists utterly eliminated all those employed by their countryies’ former regimes, those threatened with job losses would be able to put teeth in their protests.
Though most involved in useless government employment aren’t smart enough to understand that, and prove that lack of intellectual ability by trying to undermine and eliminate the very 2nd Amendment that protects their livelihoods, we understand that printing presses are better than armed revolution and the pain it causes.
