Our already unstable government is hanging in the balance of a worthless currency (we'll call it fiat currency) that has consistently been proven not to not only collapses the currency itself. – but the economy that sheltered it. So the question is: why? Why are we not able to simply learn from our predecessors of this “fiat” currency? Besides, why haven't we already learned the lessons from our own past? That's right; As a country, we have already had several failed attempts to implement this idea. First of all, what is fiat currency? A fiat currency is a monetary system in which the money itself has no intrinsic value, or whose intrinsic value is significantly less than face value, and is declared legal tender by a government. This is where we get the “fiat” part, fiat means: arbitrary order. Additionally, the law does not allow it to be converted into anything else, such as gold or silver. This seems like a vague concept at best, so why would a government issue something like this? Why were we taken off the gold standard? Well, this happened in 1971 on the orders of President Richard Nixon. During this period, the unemployment rate was 6.1% and the inflation rate was 5.84%. So, to combat this, Nixon made it so that the US dollar was no longer convertible into gold. All of a sudden the government is paying its bills while increasing its wealth and the potential rise in inflation has stopped, right? This sounds good on paper…until you realize that the paper is worth more than the paper it was purchased with. So why does fiat currency fail every time? Here's why: Taxpayers are fed up with the amount of taxes they already pay and if they were asked to pay more than that, they would only get angrier and nothing good could come of this middle of paper . ……that’s over $680 billion. Yet...the stock market is at an all-time high...how can the stock market of an indebted and bankrupt country be at an all-time high? Well, what do you expect when billions of dollars are injected into an economy? Overall, our excess printing and spending on paper money will contribute greatly to the irreversible destruction of a once-strong economy by a poorly designed government. This shows that history repeats itself and that, unfortunately, we are at a place where it would be almost impossible to stop. Works Cited “Gold and silver are the emissions of nature: paper is the emission of art. . The value of gold and silver is determined by the amount nature has created in the earth. We cannot make this quantity greater or less than it is, and therefore value, being dependent on quantity, is not dependent on man.…”