Paper currency has value only of people have faith in it.

"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. … This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard." — Alan Greenspan

He should know.

I tend to not hold on to fiat currency very long. I prefer to convert it to real things of value as fast as possible. Things like shelter, real property and gold. What good is saving it if someday it’s not worth the paper its printed on.

"If the American people ever allow private banks (like the Federal Reserve) to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." Thomas Jefferson

Free market capitalism would have no desire to devalue profit as represented in dollars or any other currency. No connection possible or feasible.

Another for corrupt politicians to steal from people that loaned us money. They borrow a dollar and pay it back with a dollar that has half the buying power.

Another is to STEAL from the citizens. If you were hard all your life and retire they can devalue the dollar stealing your retirement from you.

The government is corrupt and therefor evil. They need to be put out of office and replaced until they understand their role and obey the Constitution. We are not anti-government. We are anti-corrupt government.

Declaration of Independence.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–

******That to secure these rights,*******

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security"

Interestingly enough, the two governments seemed to use these practices for similar reasons. Caracalla needed to increase war spending, and thus debased the currency to do so. The United States has done exactly the same thing throughout its history and especially the last 100 years, and today is attempting to fund an empire that consists of soldiers in over 140 countries worldwide and dozens of nations that are essentially economic dependents.

Governments prefer this method of raising revenue to direct taxation. If the American tax collectors actually walked up to the average worker and said that they would be taking a huge portion of this worker’s wages and giving it to bankers on Wall Street, such a worker would be furious. However, government-controlled central banks do exactly this via economic stimulus packages that create new money and then give it to these banks, directly debasing the currency and thus lowering the worker’s real wages, which are the actual value of what he takes home rather than the numerical value of how many dollars and cents he has.

Considering the expenditures that have been taken on by the federal government, such a massively inflationary monetary policy is not surprising. It is such a policy that has caused a 96 percent drop in the value of the dollar since the founding of the Federal Reserve System in 1913. State monopolies on anything present problems.

This is not because the people in government are naturally more evil than the rest of us. This is because all human beings act to substitute their current state for what they perceive to be a better state.

The people in government are no different, and the means at their disposal via central banking gives them the power to act with little to no regard for other individuals, regardless of whether their intent is malicious. A state monopoly on credit expansion and currency manipulation gives our government a license to essentially unlimited taxation via currency debasement.

Thus, it should be no surprise that governments, which are made of up human beings who perceive their judgments as better than those of others, will attempt to attain whatever power they can to implement their proposed policies. It is time to end government-run central banking, and in our country this means ending the Federal Reserve.