I read yesterday that the inflation adjusted wages for the average American man have returned to the level of 1968. As I am an old fart I was around in 1968. Being ten years old at the time the world was pretty good for me at a personal level. In retrospect there were a good many bad things going on at the time but my dad, an average working Joe, could easily provide for our family on his salary alone (and still take us on a cross-country vaction for a couple of weeks every summer, while saving to send five kids to college and putting aside money for retirement). If I was deprived of anything I wasn't aware of it. Life was good.
Looking around the world today that 1968 pay rate doesn't cut it, most wives (significant others) have to work to help support the family, putting something away for the future is an absurdity as inflation eats away at the return on investment. The Cold War may have ended but the Monetary Wars are heading straight into Trade Wars, and those (almost inevitably) end up in a Shooting War. People across the world find themselves living in countries where the government does not serve them well, if it functions at all. Starvation, corruption, violence and decline stalk the world at the same time that we find ever more frivolous uses for the brilliant technology that we have developed.
Sure, I can buy a 70" television at a really cheap price, but there is nothing I wish to watch on it. People wander around in a state of eternally interrupted conciousness as their $200 a month cellphones distract them from the world around them. The President of the United States Tweets to his followers that he needs their money to get re-elected. I am left to wonder at what happened all those years ago that ended the upswing in middle-class wealth and brought us to this ruinous state.
1968 saw the Great Society in full swing, and LBJ (after inflicting that monster in the US) decided to not to run for re-election, the Cold War was in full swing with the Norks capturing the Pueblo and the the Russkies invaded Czechsolovokia, the Viet Nam war saw the Tet Offensive (which we won handily despite the media's protestations otherwise) and one of it's sorriest episodes with the My Lai Massacre, the US began printing money in earnest to cover the costs of the Viet Nam War and the Great Society and Richard Nixon was elected President of the USA., and human beings felt the pull of another planet's gravity (ever so slightly) for the first time as Apollo Eight orbited the moon.
Out of that, admittedly thin, reveiw of events two things stand out; the attempt to print our way into Guns and Butter (for Heaven's sake, even Goering knew it was Guns or Butter) and the election of Nixon, the man that took the U.S. off of it's last ties to a gold standard. Both of these were disasterous events. The refusal of the US Government to tell it's people that they would have to make a sacrifice (aside from the draft of poor people's children) to defeat Communism, and the election of the man who broke the connection between the dollar and gold and thus set loose the monster of uncontrolled fiat money.
Communism may have died (socialist experiments always fail) but the beast of fiat still stalks the land. It will certainly fail as well, and may cause more casualites in the long run than the Cold War did.
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