Another day, another bailout, another set of financiers saved from consequences at our expense

So the government (which of course means you and I) has bailed out AIG. The moral of this story is that if you or I make stupid, bonehead investments because of the potentially high yeild, we can be fucked by the market, but if you are a bank/mortgage lender/insurer/other fianancial institution, you can make all the money you want on high risk/yeild investments and never face the consequences of your risks if they go sour.

If is NOT in the public's best interest to prop up insolvent institutions, like the Fed says it is. This will just lead to another round of malinvestment in the future, more bubbles and busts, more transfer of wealth from us to the already wealthy elite. We need to move toward a monetary policy and system that is stable and protects against John Maynard Keynes' favored system of credit expansion through levereged borrowing that leads nowhere other than inflation. The elite have been manipulating the system for far too long to get the wealth out of our hands, and it's working beautifully. The sad thing is, no one seems to notice or care.

What did the government do to our money...?

"The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit....

The Law of supply and demand is not to be conned. As the supply of money (of claims) increases relative to the supply of tangible assets in the economy, prices must eventually rise. Thus the earnings saved by the productive members of the society lose value in terms of goods. When the economy's books are finally balanced, one finds that this loss in value represents the goods purchased by the government for welfare or other purposes....

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold.... The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the "hidden" confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights."
- Alan Greenspan, "Gold and Economic Freedom", in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, ed. Ayn Rand (New York: Signet Books, 1967), p. 101