The trouble with money is that while everyone complains about it, nobody ever does anything about it. But maybe that’s because they don’t quite understand what it is—and what it is not. I won’t bore you with a long history of money, but I do hope to help some of you gain perspective on what has happened to that paper token we euphemistically refer to as the American dollar.

In 1925, exactly 100 years ago, a new Model T Ford cost $300. Owing primarily to advances in manufacturing, that was a discount of 65% from the $850 price Henry Ford got for that same vehicle in 1908. How much does a new Ford cost today?

Well, you can spend $140,000 on a Shelby F150 Super Snake. But let’s just compare to the cheapest Ford. The sticker price on a new 2025 Maverick XL is roughly $30,000, exactly 100 times as much as that old reliable Model T cost a century earlier. Sure, the Maverick has more features. After all, it’s an “XL”! But I’ll bet you it takes fewer man hours to build it. With all the advances in robotic manufacturing, the things are practically stamped out.

So, what happened? In a word, the dollar happened. Or more precisely, the Federal Reserve Note. In 1909 an American double eagle coin, containing an ounce of gold, was worth $20.67. How much is a newly minted one-ounce gold coin worth today? A one-ounce walking liberty (no irony intended) will set you back a little over $4,400, some 212 times as much as the humble double eagle of yore. In other words, every year the dollar is worth a little less, and gold is worth a little more. It took fewer than 15 double eagles to buy that Model T Ford back in 1925, and 15 walking liberties today will buy you a sixty-six-thousand-dollar vehicle.

So, what happened to the poor dollar, that it takes so many more of them to buy the same goods? How did it shrink to such a tiny sliver of its former self? Inflation of course. But how does such extreme inflation come about? In a word, government. In 1933 the double eagle was still worth $20.67, and that is what Franklin D. Roosevelt gave for it when he confiscated all the gold held by American citizens.

Roosevelt grabbed our gold under color of a World War I law called the “Trading with the Enemies Act” (you can’t make this up), and imposed a 10-year prison sentence and $10,000 fine on anyone caught possessing gold with a value in excess of $100. And then, a year later, he raised the official price of gold to $35 an ounce, a 69% increase at the expense of all those sadly duped Americans who had surrendered their wealth to him.

That allowed the Federal Reserve to print more Federal Reserve Notes (paper dollars), backed by the roughly 20 thousand tons of gold Roosevelt had purloined from us, further reducing the spending power of our crisp new paper dollars. Everyone who once had gold was now much poorer, but still none the wiser I’m afraid. Because although Americans could no longer own gold, foreign governments could. And they exchanged their US dollars and bonds for gold voraciously until about half that reserve was gone. Nixon shut them off in 1971. But was it too late? Fort Knox still holds about 10,000 tons of gold, or so the government tells us. But Fort Knox hasn’t been publicly audited since 1953. So, who knows!

Next question: Why is counterfeiting illegal? In a word, inflation. Making your own money is also unfair. But so is what Roosevelt did with our gold, and no one thought to prosecute him for that crime. Inflation is not defined by price increases, or increases in the cost of living, or a wage-price spiral, as all those economists from the land of Oz would have you believe. Those are merely its consequences. Inflation is, plain and simply stated, an increase in the amount of money in circulation relative to the value of goods available for purchase. And the cause of that increase—the only cause—is the manufacture by government of that surplus money. Or to be blunt, the only cause of inflation (etymologically, the word means an inflation or “puffing up” of the money supply) is legal counterfeiting by government.

To paraphrase that famous quote of senator Everett Dirksen, a billion dollars of inflation here and a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about monopoly money. So, let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine you are sitting at a monopoly table where the money is real and the property and assets are also real. You just passed “Go,” and with the $200 you received you were able to buy Park Place.

Another couple of runs around the board and you were able to pick up Boardwalk. Now that you own both those properties you can eventually build hotels. You will be rich! But, unbeknownst to you, the banker has a secret printing press and he is stamping out bundles of money, which he slips to his friends as they pass Go. A thousand dollars here to a donor who coincidentally funds the banker’s campaign for mayor, a thousand there to a “charitable” NGO that kicks back half of it to his personal account, and soon he and his friends are in the tall clover.

But it’s your lucky day. You get an offer of $1,000 for Boardwalk and Park Place, essentially doubling your investment. Who wouldn’t take that? Your ship has come in! Ah, but then suddenly the board is awash with money, and your $1,000 won’t even buy a thatched hut on lowly Mediterranean Avenue. It has become an auction. Prices go up minute to minute as the newly printed cash incites a bidding war.

You continue to trudge around the board like a good worker, passing go and collecting your $200. But now, as more and more of the banker’s private slush pours into the game, everything is more expensive. Railroad rates and utilities have tripled, rents on all the properties have gone through the roof, and the banker (the government in the real world) has raised the fines (taxes) on “Chance” and “Community Chest” to unbearable levels. Even that “Get Out of Jail Free” card you were counting on now costs ten grand. So, you’re stuck in lock-up and soon to be bankrupt.

Meanwhile, the game goes on. The rich, who have accumulated assets, or have an “in” with the banker become richer while the poor dissolve into homelessness and become wards of the state. And what of the “players” who built fabulous wealth from this system of official counterfeiting, the Bernie Sanders of the world? They rush forward to protest the unfair treatment of the poor and promise “free stuff,” which they will pay for with money they extract from other losers like yourself who are still circling the drain as they struggle to pay “their fair share.” Even more tragically, each new victim of this system rushes forward to vote for the very scoundrels who rigged the game in the first place, because these hucksters promise to brush more crumbs off the table for them, their permanent constituency.

In the real world, of course, our government doesn’t actually print our monopoly money, because the Constitution will not allow that. Under Article 1, “The Congress shall have the power to ‘coin’ money” (from gold and silver, not to print it), “and regulate the value thereof….” Our founders understood the dangers of “fiat” paper money, that is, money backed by the “full faith and credit” of the government and nothing else. So, our government made an arrangement with a private bank, via the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, to borrow money which we, the taxpayers, must repay each year with interest. Hence the national debt, which now comes to $39 trillion. (The government also sells bonds promising interest, a sort of IOU, but that is for another article.)

So, how much is $39 trillion. Most people couldn’t even tell you how many zeros are in that number, let alone what it actually amounts too. $39 trillion looks like this. $39—000—000—000—000, and that is enough to make millionaires of more than 39 million Americans. That is how much our government has borrowed in your name without repayment since 1835 when Andrew Jackson was president.

But, let’s start at the bottom. A million dollars would provide one thousand families a $1,000 tax rebate to help with their grocery expenses. A billion dollars would provide a million families that same relief. A trillion dollars would provide about $12,000 dollars of relief to the family of every single American citizen. (One trillion dollars divided by 85 million equals $11,765 per family.) And $39 trillion would provide approximately $460,000 to each American family. (39 trillion dollars divided by 85 million families equals $458,824 per family.) That is enough to buy every American family a new home.

But none of us will ever see a penny of that money, because that is not how much our government has in store. It is how much the government owes, or rather how much debt our government has accumulated in our names. In fact, Americans are the poorest people on earth. Other peoples may have nothing at all, but no other people finds itself nearly half a million dollars in debt per family. And at this point our government is scarcely able to pay the interest on that debt, which has risen to $1.13 trillion this past year, 13% of the entire Federal budget and equal to our total spending on defense.

In fact, that annual $1.3 trillion, amounting to over $15,000 per family, must come out of our income taxes, or else the government will need to borrow more, which it does every single year. To be clear, that staggering amount is how much we pay each year, not for any government “services,” but just to service the ever-expanding debt with which the government’s legal counterfeiting has burdened us. That is, just to pay the interest alone as the debt continues to grow. And we are stuck with this ongoing increase, because our taxes aren’t nearly sufficient to meet that obligation.

The only way our government can continue to service that enormous debt now is to borrow more. And it will do so, trust me! Because as Milton Friedman once pointed out, “Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.” But at some point, inflation “runs-away,” as in socialist Venezuela where it is at nearly 300% this year, and a loaf of bread will cost billions as it has in places like Zimbabwe and Weimar. That is the point at which we will have officially entered the third world. That is the point at which our government will pay off the debt with worthless dollars and we will be forced to start over, an impoverished nation without credit. How many other countries, do you think, will send us foreign aid to bail us out?