Daily Bell: Thanks for sitting down with us. Let's get right to it. In your view, what are the most critical domestic problems facing America?

Edwin Vieira Jr.: Two stand out. The foremost problem-because it is the source of, or contributes significantly to, almost every economic difficulty now plaguing this country-is the inherent and ineradicable instability of the present monetary and banking systems centered around the Federal Reserve System.

The second problem derives from the first. It is the ever-accelerating development of a first-class para-militarized police-state apparatus centered around the United States Department of Homeland Security, with its tentacles reaching down into every police force throughout the States and localities. Fundamentally, this apparatus is not, and never was, designed to deal with international "terrorism". If that were its goal, its first task would be absolutely to secure the southern border of the United States, which it has never seriously attempted to do. Rather, it is being set up to deal with what the political-cum-financial Establishment anticipates (and I believe rightly so) will be massive social and political unrest bordering on chaos throughout America when the monetary and banking systems finally implode in the not-so-distant future-surely in hyperinflation, and probably in hyperinflation coupled with a gut-wrenching depression.

Of these two problems, the second is actually the more dangerous. For if (on whatever pretext) this police-state apparatus does succeed in clamping down on America, the likelihood of effecting basic reforms in money, banking, or anything else favorable to the American people will be reduced to something approaching nil, absent a veritable political uprising in this country.

Daily Bell: How can these two problems be solved?

Edwin Vieira Jr.: The problem of money and banking breaks down into two interrelated parts: one economic, the other political.

Economically, the problem lies in the commonly accepted fallacy that debt-whether the private debt of banks or the public debt of governmental treasuries-can function as sound currency over the long term. "Money" is supposed to be the most liquid of all assets-which is why the best moneys have always proven to be the precious metals, silver and gold. "Debt", conversely, is not an asset at all, but is someone's liability, the value of which is contingent upon the debtor's ability and willingness to pay, and often the creditor's ability to force the debtor to pay. The attempt to put into practice the self-contradictory notion that a liability payable in money can be an asset that functions as money-and that the ultimate debtor or surety in this scheme can be a governmental treasury, which usually cannot be compelled to pay in any event-has been tried again and again, in country after country, and failed again and again. For Heaven's sake, it was tried in this country with the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and only about twenty years later utterly failed with the banking collapse of 1932, Franklin Roosevelt's seizure of the American people's gold, and the ensuing Great Depression that lasted throughout the 1930s! Right now, we are witnessing what will soon prove to be a more catastrophic failure of that same false idea embodied in that same pernicious institution. Apparently, as the old saw has it, "No one ever learns anything from history except that no one ever learns anything from history." Obviously, massive efforts in public education will be necessary to overcome this deplorable level of ignorance.

In our particular case, the problem also appears in a political form, actually dating from well before 1913: namely, the coupling of bank and state, whereby the government empowers private special-interests groups by statute to "manage" the monetary and banking systems-primarily for the economic benefit of those groups, but as well to the political advantage of the public officials, politicians, and political parties that support the system and receive support from it. The Federal Reserve System is such a coupling: the hermaphroditic creature of private enterprise and statute, at once both quasi-private and quasi-public in source, form, and functions.