Grunch of Giants and the U.S. Government Take Our Money Through Inflation
Buckminster Fuller further argues that in addition to the Grunch stealing our money through inflation, the U.S. government also participates in this cash heist. One way the U.S. government does this is by requiring all life insurance companies, all savings banks, and all trust funds to invest only in notes and bonds of the tax supported federal, state, municipal, and multi-state authorities. The insurance companies could only invest in bonds of this nature and they had to be officially approved for investment by federally supervised authorities.
Grunch of Giants & inflation
In 1971, President Nixon detached the dollar from the gold standard. When he did this, U.S. citizen’s dollar equity declined precipitously. The stock market is simply a reflection of this inflation that has been unleashed when the dollar was detached from the gold standard. Fuller points out that a big scam that the government engages in is not allowing individuals to invest their own Social Security dollars. Instead, these funds are controlled by the U.S. government and result in the ordinary citizen losing equity in their Social Security fund through inflation. Fuller explains:
The last third of a century of overall stock-market price-advances, in direct correspondence to the role of inflation in business pricings in general, has produced ever widening but false gaps between people’s government fund equity values and the portfolio of world-around stockmarket values of the securities of the private-enterprise system. (Grunch of Giants, 70)
Grunch of Giants & inflation
Buckminster Fuller further illustrates that had the U.S. government invested these Social Security funds in the stock market, the value of them would be so large that it “would permit the U.S.A> to extend all manner of social benefits to all its people.” (Grunch of Giants, 70).
While the “advertising industry, the brokers, the banks, the conglomerates, the shipping business, and labor unions”–in essence the Grunch of Giants–have all increased prices, the actual price of producing the products has not increased one bit. To the contrary, the price of producing has decreased as inventors have “greatly reduced the manufacturing costs” through the use of machinery (Grunch of Giants 71).
The danger in this all, argues R. Buckminster Fuller, is that what all this means is that “ever larger sums of other’s money is being commanded by the money-makers–all at the expense of the individual human beings who do not command such sizable funds, discouraging their enterprise and initiative.” (Grunch of Giants 71)
Stock markets reflect the price increases that corporations, or the Grunch of Giants, make. This occurs as the corporations raise prices and become more profitable and thus post greater profits and their stock values go up. The irony is that inflation only benefits those holding stocks of these companies. Those without stocks lose money and are robbed of their wages and savings through inflation. Inflation is a game that only benefits the rich.
