this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2025
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https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
For those that don't know, 1971 is when President Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of U.S. dollars into gold for foreign governments. The final abandonment in 1971 moved the U.S. to a pure fiat money system, where the currency's value is based on government decree rather than a physical commodity like gold.
Reagan slashed taxes for the wealthy and introduced the whole idea of trickle down economics.
These fuckers have been stealing from us for half a century.
Rebranded the idea of trickle down.
The concept has existed since the late 19th century; it was formerly called "Horse and Sparrow Economics," as the horses eat the whole grains, and sparrows peck their meals from the horseshit.
Dems have always had a messaging issue, but undoing that rebranding would be a step in the right direction.
That’s a striking mental image. And it’s becoming increasingly obvious that’s exactly what’s happening—we get to pick the scraps out of the billionaires’ shit.
I despise this website. It is so wildly misleading, especially since most of the graphs don’t actually radically change until the 80s. There is no one thing that caused everything/could fix everything, it was a lot of policy changes and deregulation through the 70s and 80s.
Because policies and actions are always instantly felt and measurable.
So the graph is wrong then, should be Nixon.
No, all those graphs tell very different stories and even if they did, it wouldn't inherently mean the transition to fiat was the problem.
people who don't understand currency crack me up. it's like pretending the value of specie was tied to the value of precious metal by fiat makes it special.
I get why it's so hard to understand, economics (even when studied) isn't really a science and a lot is based in vibes.
Bitcoin is a fascinating example of a modern day commodity based system. Theoretically there is a finite amount of bitcoin that can exist, meaning there is a limited supply that controls the "market". And as we can see in the bitcoin market, commodity has its own problems (most notably people don't really want to spend it).
There are even some research done in the space, I'm not familiar with the Cato institute, but there write up here seems like a decent explanation of gold vs bitcoin - https://www.cato.org/blog/how-bitcoin-system-unlike-gold-standard
IMHO economics has been gradually becoming more of a science since the 1970s. We just haven't changed monetary policy since then, so crypto is the most isolated petri dish we've got.
i am familiar with the cato institute and they're a propaganda outlet
Good to know, most of what they were saying didn't sound too far off, but only skimmed it. I'm not a huge crypto person to begin with though, so I may just shrug off some of their bias.
the best lies have a lot of truth sprinkled in them