Politics & Power Quote by Garet Garrett

Garrett writes like a man watching a magician saw the assistant in half and then applauding only to realize the audience is being billed for the trick. The sentence is engineered to make policy sound not merely mistaken but theatrical, even surreal: a "spectacle" staged by a "great, solvent government" that is, crucially, not desperate. Solvency removes the usual alibi. If the state is financially capable, then the decision to pay a "fictitious price" becomes a choice, not an accident.

The target is the New Deal-era decision to raise the official price of gold and manage the dollar downward after the U.S. left the gold standard in 1933-34. Garrett’s phrasing turns monetary policy into moral psychology. "Fictitious" implies fraud, but he’s careful: the government does it "on purpose". That pivot is the subtextual dagger. He wants you to feel the scandal isn’t incompetence; it’s intent. Deliberate debasement becomes an act of self-harm dressed up as economic management.

The repetition of "did not want and did not need" is courtroom cadence, designed to pre-empt the pragmatic defense: stabilizing prices, easing debt burdens, jolting demand. Garrett’s worldview (a skeptical, Old Right suspicion of centralized power) reads those aims as euphemisms for cheating savers, rewriting contracts, and expanding state discretion under the cover of emergency.

"To astonish the world" is more than flourish. It’s an appeal to reputation: America, the modern creditor republic, behaving like an insecure regime, manipulating its own unit of account. Garrett isn’t just critiquing a policy; he’s diagnosing a loss of restraint, when government discovers it can manufacture outcomes by bending the meaning of money itself.