Geeze what has happened to me? Here is it a historical event, the nation’s first black president, and a man that appears to be an intellectual, taking over from that dreadful idiot cowboy GW (good riddance by the way). I should be stoked but I’m feeling apathetic instead.

My wife and I at least both agree on the point that Obama’s job is not enviable. I would not want to be the one inheriting this dreadful mess.

I sit in my favorite cafe and look over at other laptop users sucking the cafe’s Internet wireless bandwidth and watching the live feed of the coronation. There is a feeling of excitement, for sure, and conversations are buzzing around me about our new Commander-In-Chief. But I fear it may be as Shakespear wrote, “…like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury yet signifying nothing.”

I am afraid that not much will change with our country. Obama promises yet more spending and tax cuts. He will not address the elephant in the room, the national debt. Not one nod to the free market economists that are decrying our trade deficit. Not one mention of the Federal Reserve’s poor monetary policy. He won’t speak out against our empire overseas. He promises change but I don’t see much that will be different.

I’ve heard him compared to Franklin Delano Roosevelt when the deceased president took office in a time when the economy looked at lot like it looks today. I shuddered when I heard Nancy Pelosi boast, “they say the Democrats have run out of ideas, but I have three words for them, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

We are told in school that the free market cannot run itself and the crash of 1929 followed by the Great Depression was a natural consequence of an unmanaged economy. The Federal Reserve, put into power just a decade before, claims it helped take the edge off of the crash. Roosevelt did everything he could to get people back to work, creating jobs and stimulating the economy. He protected people from losing their savings (FDIC) and gave us that great safety net Social Security.

Yet, what they don’t tell you is that the Federal Reserve, or any central bank that coins and prints U.S. dollars is not provided for by our own constitution. Money, it says, must be backed by gold and silver. But that’s not what we have today. Our dollar has lost 95% of its value since the 1920s. What they are not saying is that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression and that Hoover and Roosevelt both prolonged it.

In fact, the entire history of our country up until that time, we never had anything like a Great Depression.  Sure there were booms and busts. The Federal Reserve is not the first central bank or even the second, but the third in this nation’s history. When President Jackson moved to shut down the second national bank, its chairman threatened to plunge this country into a depression. This demonstrates the great power a central bank has over its monetary system. I have heard people say, “well times are different. The rules that worked then don’t work now.” President Wilson himself indicated that he felt the constitution of the U.S. was out of date and anachronistic. During the Dotcom boom, people bragged that we were in a “new economy.” The old rules no longer apply. But like with any bubble, it eventually pops and we realized that yes, the old rules do still matter after all.

Don’t you find it interesting that we suddenly find ourselves with a history riddled with a Great Depression, runaway inflation, and now a credit/housing/financial implosion on our hands, all in this modern age? And we also have something else–a complete abandonment of our constitutional principles. We have central management of our money supply. We have huge intervention on the part of the federal government into our personal lives as well as business. Massive entitlements and a national debt that we should be ashamed of. And the problem is not just on the federal level–state governments all over the union are overloaded with debt, huge public sector salaries and benefits, programs, etc..  Now we are seeing state and local municipalities going bankrupt.

F.D.R. helped usher in a new era of socialism into this country, and we have been moving in that direction for a long time. And Obama is taking up the mantle and continuing his “great” work. All the promises of creating jobs sound good, but in reality, the government cannot create wealth out of thin air. All it can do is move wealth around. When you create a public works job, you take away a job in the private sector. When you print new money, you cause people with savings to lose value and prices to go up, punishing those on fixed incomes. When you borrow, you still have to pay back. Or if you raise taxes, you make it harder for people to make ends meet and contribute to potential unemployment.

Obama is promising a tax cut. What is needed is a cut in spending. A big cut. But the phrase “spending cuts” doesn’t seem to issue forth from his lips. That is what is needed most, because the only way you can get out of debt is to pay it down and that usually takes great sacrifice, in the form of drastically reduced spending habits.

So all this talk of change is really just the “doublespeak” George Orwell wrote about in 1984. It will most decidedly not be change, but more of the same. When I hear the phrases “drastic spending cuts,” “raise the interest rates,” and “return to honest money” issue forth from our new president, then I’ll believe it.

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