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Show Vol. 4 No. 23 Salt Lake City, Utah 84115 June 7, 1973 Reprinted from the Gold 9 took place in December 1971. jbunk. If the currency doesn't The official price of gold work, the country cannot work. increased from $35 per ounce to The destiny of the currency is, $38. Then on February 1 2th of and will be, the desting of the Silver Newsletter, Pacific Coast this year, the dollar was devalued for the third time. The official price of gold increased to $42.22 per ounce. r Coin Exchange We opened our interview with Dr. Pick by asking about the The recent dollar devaluation. "The 2 most 2 recent devaluations alone amount to about 18. The gross total public and private debt in the United States is about $5V2 trillion. So these devaluations wiped out more than a trillion dollars of savings. Investors who bought bonds, life insurance, annuities or similar things were recent most devaluations.. .wiped out more than a trillion dollars of savings." PCCE: On February 12th, the dollar was devalued for thesecond time in 14 months. What is the significance of this? PICK: IT was the third fraudulent simply cheated without state bankruptcy in the history of compensation. If we continue to the United States. The first was do this, we are going to ruin the in 1 934. The official price of gold United States and we may from drift into dictatorship. $20.67 per ounce jumped to $35. The second dollar To talk about the industrial devaluation, a comic book event, power of the United States is just . I., ' ..s ? r PICK: Very bad. For example, you could buy a good pair of shoes before World War II for about $6. The same pair today is about $35 nation. or $40. In 1 940, bought a suit PCCE: How many more devalumade to order for $75. Today the ations of the dollar do you expect same tailor to whom I still go in this decade? charges $450 for the same suit. I PICK::. Endless. We may have bought my first car in 1 948, and another devaluation next week it cost $900. The same kind of or maybe only in eight months! car today costs about $4,000. I The dollar will be wiped out. go shopping every 2 weeks, and PCCE:: indicator is Many Congressmen my inflation have been proposing new import . Pepperidge Farm Bread. Twelve quotas and years ago, I paid 1 60 a loaf. Last PICK: about week, I paid 490. You see, the Forget Congressmen. They government expropriates don't know anything. We will everybody who obeys the law. lose from these trade barriers. PCCE: Just how many billions of PCCE: Do you see a danger of paper dollars .are there in in circulation? trade wars? PICK: Yes and we will suffer. PICK: We have now 55 billion The dollar will decline much paper dollars in circulation. But faster. we also have over 450 billion PCCE: How bad is inflation in dollars of government debt in the America? form of bonds. . u I- - . L ft, 7 r V & tjr 1 si to PICK: I believe this year we are going to have a 15 to 25 increase in the cost of living. If that happens, we will come close to bankrupting all pension funds. How will they pay? We will bankrupt all institutions of higher learning they are in trouble already. "Soon we will go through the wringer." PCCE: Would you please review for our readers what happened America's during previous runaway inflations? PICK: Runaway inflation during the Revolutionary War lasted 4 years. At the end of that time, the Continental dollar was worth nothing. It expropriated the money of people who believed Continued On Page 12 OSHA ON TARGET pi VH.3 V.f The Oshacrats Under Fire By HENRY HAZLITT amendment is in doubt. If it becomes law, an outrageous By some sort of miracle, the infringement of the rights and Senate on April 4 passed by a liberties of American citizens an will at last be ended. . vote of 68 to 23 amendment to the dollar We have only to recall a little devaluation bill that would history to remind ourselves how restore the right of private t outrageous that infringement American citizens to hold gold. really is. The bill has gone to the House, Prior to 1933 all Federal where the future of the Reserve Notes, not to speak of gold certificates, assured the bearer in print that his note was UTAH INDEPENDENT redeemable on demand in gold 2459 Major Street at a rate of $20.67 per fine Salt Lake City, Utah 841 1 5 ounce. Outstanding bonds of the United States government also Second Class Postage bore the solemn promise that Paid at they were redeemable at Salt Lake City, Utah maturity in gold at the same rate. President Roosevelt disdainfully repudiated these solemn contracts and pledges, remarking that anybody was foolish, who believed these promises in the first place, . because he ought to have known that there was not enough gold around to keep them. And then, almost exactly 40 years ago, on April 5, 1 933, he issued an Executive Order forbidding the "hoarding" of gold and requiring Americans to surrender all privately held gold to the Federal Reserve System. They were to do this before the in exchange end of the month for paper money or suffer a penalty of a fine of $10,000, or imprisonment of not more than 10 years, or both. So this was what passed for government for outlook your w 'j? Henry Hazlitt is one of the nation's foremost economic journalists. What's inflation? integrity and government morality. The legal criminal was not the government that had repudiated its most solemn pledges, but those private citizens who had taken the government at its word, and when they feared for the future value of their paper dollars, and sought to protect themselves against their depreciation, had turned them in for gold. Then the Supreme Court, the putative defender of American private rights and liberties, connived in this swindle by ruling in favor of the government and contending that those who had been mulcted of their gold had not proved any loss. And so the matter stands to this day. The purchasing power of paper dollars has been falling and the price of gold in terms of those dollars has been soaring in the markets of the world. Foreigners can take advantage of this. But it is still a crime for American citizens to try to protect themselves by buying gold against the further erosion in the purchasing power of their dollars. The irony is that even the original prohibition holding excuse for the of has private gold completely The wonderful world of O.S.H.A. was displayed at a editors' conference in Washington on May third. The announced purpose of the conference, sponsored by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, was to brief editors and reporters about the, record, status, and future plans of the burgeoning O.S.H.A. bureaucracy. It wasn't that simple. Because of the agency's persistent and arbitrary harassment of private businesses, O.S.H.A. has become the object of intense day-lon- g public criticism since it began operations two years ago. The conference was a n effort to hel p counter the adverse exposure which O.S.H.A. has been receiving. of There were two-table- s documents and near the handouts publicity B of of the Room entrance Auditorium Departmental where the conference was O.S.H.A. held. Included was a pile of reprints (from the March 21, 1973, Congressional Record) of an attack error-fille- d William Congressman Steiger (R.-Wisc- .) by A. on disappeared. This excusq was "Oshacrats: Mr. Businessman that the government had to The Buck Stops With You," the conserve its gold holdings as .widely circulated critique of "backing" against its domestic O.S.H.A. by Alan Stang which dollars and as a reserve to meet appeared in American Opinion future gold demands from for December of 1972. foreigners. But the removal in Congressman Steiger was co1967 of any legal gold reserve sponsor of the bill which whatever against requirements created O.S.H.A., so his near Federal Reserve Notes, and the panic at havfng this monster abandonment on Aug. 15,1 97 1 , exposed is understandable. Continued On Page 6 available from the were press kits containing such items as a copy of Public Law (the Williams-Steige- r Act which Also Oshacrats 91-5- 96 created OSHA) and booklets describing OSHA recordkeeping requirements. More interesting was a large, singlesheet flyer that consisted of a montage of newspaper headlines, accompanied by two letters to the editor of a publication called Ad World. One of the letters on the flyer presented a concise and factual summary of OSHA's concluded with a pledge by its author to supply a copy of Alan Stang's "Oshacrats" to anyone requesting a copy. The second letter was apparently intended to rebut the first, but fell far short of that goal. Instead of challenging the factual charges made against OSHA? It attacked The John Birch Society, described OSHA as "the workingman's protection against sighted companies best short- which practice safety first so long as it cost money," and lamented that OSHA is not strong enough because it is still hampered by legal roadblocks "written into law at the behest of powerful business interests." Though it was labelled a doesn't publication of the U.S. Department of Labor, this flyer looked for all the world like something hatched in the basement office of some Continued On Page 4 . |