Perhaps the most important reason to be skeptical of government inflation numbers is that the government, like a fox campaigning to guard a hen house, has many reasons to be disingenuous. As the world's largest debtor, the Federal Government is inflation's primary beneficiary.

Most governments, not all of them, but most, certainly don't want their citizens using gold. They want them in the currency that they are creating. When they are debasing money, or printing money, they are spending it and they want it to have as much value as possible when they originally spend it. Of course once they spend it, it will lose value for them and everyone else that holds it. But they need demand for their currency. They need as many people as possible holding it and transacting it. The more people that use gold, the harder it makes it.

Minimum wage laws make it illegal for a worker to accept a job that pays less, even if the worker needs that job.

Confidence by itself, unless it has a valid basis, can get us into trouble.

The president says we need to raise the debt ceiling because America pays its bills. No if we paid our bills we wouldn't have all this debt. The reason we have to raise the debt ceiling is because we can't pay our bills and we have to borrow money because we don't have any money to pay our bills.

Once the dollar begins to collapse beneath the weight of all this new deficit spending, accumulation of contingency liabilities and the socialization of our economy, commodity prices and interest rates will head skyward.

What got us out of the depression was capitalism, and we would have gotten out a lot quicker had the government not intervened.