Aside from open borders and transgenderism, there are a few other serious plagues affecting America, chief among which are a weak dollar, China’s depredation of the American economy, and climate change madness, all three of which have had a profound effect on the American economy. These three things also all have roots dating back to the Nixon administration.
China’s the easiest target: In 1972, Nixon went to China. It was a big deal. The headlines were that “only” Nixon could have done this—that is, that only a president with staunch anti-communist bona fides could have dared to make contact with a Maoist nation. The theory was that, by welcoming China into the fold, China would abandon its evil Maoist ways and embrace liberty. That didn’t work out well.
Nixon meets with Mao Zedong. Public domain.
Nixon also presided over establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, after signing off on the National Environmental Policy Act. Environmentalism in the 1960s arose in response to a real problem, which was serious pollution from cars, factories, and the chemicals that had become part of ordinary living.
I still remember that polluted era, when the whole world seemed coated by black particles from exhaust pipes, and rivers were catching fire. We were destroying our environment in very immediate and toxic ways.
But of course, by the 1990s, being good stewards of the earth and making sure not to pollute it had morphed into climate change activism, and the EPA has happily been on board with the agenda, which has been a real economy killer, except for people drinking off the government spigot. Nixon couldn’t have foreseen that, but he presided over its beginnings.
And finally, it was Nixon who signed off on the end of the gold standard. At PowerLine, John Hinderaker has reproduced a series of charts showing how inflation exploded in 1971. They are mindboggling because they reveal a hockey stick of staggering proportions. Then, Hinderaker adds this commentary:
What happened? In August 1971, the U.S. went off the gold standard. I think it is fair to say that the inflation and exploding government debt we have seen since then are the direct results of that action. Since time immemorial, people around the world have been willing to trade goods and services for two things: gold and silver. Sometimes, but not always, bronze. China was the first country to introduce paper currency. At some point–I don’t remember what century–a European traveler to China was astonished to see people accepting paper in exchange for goods. He asked his Chinese guide why in the world anyone would do that. The answer, the guide explained, was simple: you could take those pieces of paper to a government office, and they would give you gold for them. So the paper was just a convenience.
The moment the U.S. abandoned the gold standard, the dollar’s value collapsed.
Gold is an actual measure of a nation’s wealth. Paper is just...paper. In the old days, you’d print more of it.
My Dad, born in 1919, remembered people carting wheelbarrows of bills to the grocery store to buy milk and eggs in Germany’s Weimar Republic, and it was no exaggeration that children would play with piles of worthless cash:
Nowadays, the digital economy doesn’t even require printing paper. The government just issues pixels, and suddenly, “money” floods the economy.
We live in a world that is the result of bad decisions made with the best of good intentions—or good decisions (as in the case of lessening toxic pollutants) hijacked by bad people. The problems of our modern world have deep roots and no easy answers.