Retirees: The State Cannot Save You

So what’s backstopping the American way of life? Is it the Government?

We live under the strongest political system the world has ever seen. It’s the world’s largest employer. It has legions of bureaucrats counting beans, measuring widgets and regulating the unregulatable.

It has the largest military force, backed by the most advanced and deadly war machines to ever exist.

It runs the world’s reserve currency, allowing it to print up the difference when the checkbooks don’t balance.

Now, exactly what about this political system do you think is intended to help the average retiree? It seems that this system for all intents and purposes is designed to prop itself up, to draw ever more power and influence to itself – to ensure its own survival.

Notice also that the State does not create its own safety-net. It does not fund the military. It does not reach into its own pockets to pay bureaucrats. It takes these funds from private citizens.

So if you’re retired, and you’re depending on the State to come in and save the day – to guarantee a pension, for instance – or to pass on a realistic cost of living increase to Social Security recipients – I’m here to tell you that you can forget it.

The Government has no intention of funding your retirement anymore than it absolutely has to – and the minute it becomes expedient to do so, you will be cut off from the "help" of the State as fast as possible.

We now know, thanks to the very straight-shooting Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, that among the first targets of this broke Federal Government are pensions. So, far from planning to provide for pensioners, the Federal Government has them in their cross-hairs.

The fact is, our Political system is not what makes us great. As charismatic as Presidents Obama, Reagan and Kennedy may be, or as dynamic as Clinton, Johnson or Eisenhower were – our politicians have always been, at best, figureheads. They don’t make the ship move.

That’s because our greatness does not flow out of the pens or the mouths of our leaders, or the guns of our military. Or the printing press of the Federal Reserve.

It comes from the honest hard work of the average citizen. It comes from the faith and trust we place in each other and in our civil social contracts.

What’s backstopping the American way of life? If you said Obama or our democracy or our guns, you’re missing the real source of our greatness.

The only thing that’s backstopping your pension, your retirement, and your way of life is the capacity of your neighbor to provide value, work and an honest civil counter-party for the goods and services that you need to live.

That’s why I’m planning to buy gold and silver on August 27th, in protest of the Federal Reserve, and I think you should do the same.

On that day, Ben Bernanke and the rest of the governors of the Fed will meet in Jackson Hole, Wyoming to discuss their plans for the dollar. I’ve had about enough of their plans, so I’m making my own. I’m buying gold and/or silver on August 27th in protest.

I know that in the event of a complete dollar collapse, I’ll be able to trust in my neighbors, and they’ll be able to trust in me – and we’ll be able to function as hard working honest people because we’ll have a common medium of exchange and store of value in our collective gold and silver holdings.

And in the event that our hapless leaders do figure out a way to solve their sovereign debt problems, I know that I’ll be able to deleverage my gold and silver position, no worse for wear.