Dear Readers,
The entirety of humanity’s history has been spent in a quest to improve lives and livelihoods through hard work and technological advancement. The vast majority of people over the millennia worked for years on end to provide for themselves and to build a better foundation for their children and subsequent descendants. Generation after generation built upon those foundations, and particularly resourceful individuals discovered new technologies and methodologies for completing their daily work. This continuous improvement, century after century, has brought us to the present day, in which hundreds of millions of people around the globe have obtained living conditions that our ancient ancestors could only dream about.
For the bulk of the last several thousand years, humanity was able to store excess productivity of prior work and prior generations using types of money that retained their value over long periods of time (aka, “hard” money), such as gold and silver. Since the supply of those preferred types of money tended to increase at a slower pace than almost all goods and services, the purchasing power of one’s money tended to increase when valued against those same goods and services. In other words, saving in and of itself was quite often sufficient to not only maintain wealth from year to year, but also build it outright.
In an unfortunate turn of events for humanity at large, money that excelled at storing value was replaced almost entirely by fiat currencies that are created and altered at will according to the desires of the political leaders of the day. Not one fiat currency in history has successfully maintained a lower inflation rate than store of value monies like gold over extended periods of time; in fact, the majority of fiat currencies throughout history have already failed as a result of their inflationary march towards worthlessness.
