Stanford University Professor Milton Friedman stated: "The Federal Reserve definitely caused the Great Depression."
Yes the Gold Standard failed, but it was by design of those who controlled the gold, the central bankers who gained a private monopoly on the control of our money supply.
The gold standard appeared to be highly successful from about 1870 to the beginning of World War I in 1913-14. During the so-called "classical" gold standard period, international trade and capital flows expanded markedly, and central banks experienced relatively few problems ensuring that their currencies retained their legal value.
On Sunday, December 23, 1913, two days before Christmas, while most of Congress was on vacation, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law. Wilson would later express profound regret over his tragic decision, stating:
"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world - no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."
Less than one year later Congress declared the 16th Amendment as having been ratified, although it wasn't, creating the Internal Revenue Service which became the de-facto collection agency for the Federal Reserve System. Its only duty was to tax the income of citizens to make the interest payments for the U.S. Government loans that would soon follow.
Under orders of the FED, on April 5, 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Presidential order 6102, which required all Americans to deliver all gold to their local Federal Reserve Bank on or before April 28, 1933.
Any violators would be fined up to $10,000, imprisoned up to ten years, or both for knowingly violating this order. This gold was then offered by the Fed owners to any foreign, non-U.S. citizen, at $35.00 per ounce. Over the entire previous 100 years, gold had remained at a stable value, increasing only from $18.93 per ounce to $20.69 per ounce.
In return the Fed loaned an endless money supply to our govt based on a usury system. This system was designed to keep the govt paying interest without paying the principal, all the while loaning the govt more money,
Since then, every U.S. citizen has become an asset of the government, pledged at a specific dollar amount to pay debt through future taxation. Thus, every American citizen is in debt from birth (via future taxation), and is, for all practical purposes, property of the creditors, slaves to the privately owned Federal Reserve System.
