bernie sanders

Um... nowhere in that meme did it say that pre-1913 was a perfect time. Far from it. But there were a few things that this country was doing right 107 years ago that it's failing on today. We weren't waging foreign wars and changing regimes, and currency was backed with ACTUAL value, instead of phony government trust, and the Federal Reserve was non existent. Schools could be funded without an income tax, as could airports and a military.

I may be romanticizing the past, because we've lost a lot of things that made society great.

 

Currency has always been based on the power of human imagination. Before the age of electronics gold had no intrinsic value. It was just a pretty rock, there wasn't a lot of it, so it seemed like an ideal physical representation of wealth. But the worlds economies have been founded on the power of human imagination since the Greeks.

We do war too much, but 1912 was a decade after the Philippine-American war, in which we killed a quarter million civilians. What do you think the most important thing we've lost is?

 

I stand corrected on the timeline on meddling of overseas wars.

The scarcity of gold is what gave it real value. It is an antimicrobial and antibacterial substance that had its uses for sanitation before antiseptics, so it had practical and utility value to it before the age of electronics as well. The great thing about gold is that neither the government or the ruling class can't make it out of thin air like they do today. Having a hard currency with actual value gives the citizens economic security for if and when the national currency collapses. People's skepticism of government and trust in true-value currency was one major important part of our culture we lost.

 

The US experienced deflation in the 1870's because we moved to the gold standard from a bi-metal standard, causing the Long Depression.

Long Depression - Wikipedia

Yuppies are skeptical enough of government that measles is making a comeback, and I bet I could find a flat earth video with 10 million views. I honestly think people are much more skeptical because of the wide availability of information now. They just get in information silos, where the only hear what they want to hear.

But again I don't completely disagree with romanticizing the past. We're a nanny state.