You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the God is giving you. God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.

Why is this important?

Well, let’s say you needed to buy some paint and went into a hardware store and ordered 3 gallons of paint, got it tinted to the right color, and then told them you’d be back later to pick it up. A couple of days later you go back to the store to pick up your paint and the clerk hands you three cans of paint that are about half the size that you originally ordered. You, of course, complain – “I can’t paint my room with this much paint. I ordered 3 gallons of paint because I needed three gallons of paint!” The store owner says to you “Well, it is 3 gallons of paint. The size changed.”

That could create some problems.

So, what does this have to do with government? Well, one of the major roles of government is to create standards for weights and measurements. Money happens to be one of those (it’s actually a measurement of worth, value, or wealth), and so our government has the ability to create money. The problem happens when government starts changing the size (value) of money by creating more of it (that’s called inflation).

This is exactly what our government is doing. This first started happening back in 1913 when the Federal Reserve was founded. At the time, the Fed promised that they wouldn’t change anything, that they were just a clearinghouse for banks to lend money to each other. But in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt and the Fed actually changed the value of the dollar (which is a measurement, remember) from $20/ounce of gold to $35/ounce. They effectively cut the value (weight or measurement) of the dollar by half. And then, in 1972, Nixon said that the dollar wasn’t worth any gold at all.

They changed the measurement, by cutting the value in half. And then they removed any sort of control over making more of it, by making sure there was no measurement standard at all.

A government can do this for a little while. But eventually people in positions of power realize that they aren’t held accountable for anything they actually do with money. They get into a situation where they need more of it, but collecting more taxes on people would ruin their political career. So, what they do instead is print more money. Then they do it again. And then again. And pretty soon they end up addicted to the free money they can print, so they just leave the printing presses turned on and print as much as they want.

The fallout from this is that the money supply becomes massively large, and suddenly they can’t get rid of it so easily. The demand (or desire) for the money starts going down, and in response prices rise (it costs more money to buy something because the individual dollars are worth less). Eventually it gets to the point where no one will accept the money that the government has printed, and the money becomes completely worthless.

This has happened in the past on numerous occasions. One of the major examples of this happening is in Argentina. In 1913 it was the world’s 10th wealthiest country, and it is now 36th. Their story started with huge national debt during the Great Depression (starting there in 1936). The government decided it would just print enough money to pay off their national debt. In 2002, Argentina had 25% unemployment, and the peso had lost 70% of it’s value (in other words, the money is now 30% of the measurement it was previously).

What makes the whole situation so much worse is that the people who suffered most were the poor. The very rich could absorb the currency losing its value and the prices going up as a result, but the poor couldn’t. The government mucking around with the value (measurement) of their money destroyed the country.

The scary thing is that the same sort of thing is happening in our country right now. We have crazy huge amounts of debt, and the way we’re planning to get out of it is by printing more money (changing the value – measurement – of it at the same time).