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All across America, housewives are gripped with fear when the clerk rings up their cart of groceries. Breadwinners cut back on lunch in order to fill the tank to get to work. Senior citizens struggle to pay their utility bills out of their small fixed income. Nearly every day, you hear one person or another complain that prices have gone up'.

Indeed, prices HAVE gone up: the price of oil impacts nearly everything we buy, either directly or indirectly. One hundred-dollar-a-barrel oil has threatened the competitiveness of many small and medium-size businesses and has crippled the low and middle-income consumer. Daily, the news and financial shows offer speculation and reasonable-sounding explanations for the rising price of oil. There are several reasons for the rising cost of oil-and it has little to do with shortages, hurricanes or wars in distant places. In reality, the rising cost of oil has far more to do with the ability of global speculators to bid up the price of oil futures to an unprecedented level in the name of profits. As the price of oil is pegged to the US dollar, it naturally takes more of those dollars to buy both oil and the products that rely on oil to be produced.

If the price of oil were the only thing impacting the US dollar, however, the value of the dollar wouldn't be going down. Given a natural state of affairs, the VALUE would remain constant, even though oil and food, utilities, retail goods, etc would cost more. The dollar, as we view it is basically a commodity just like oil, with one important difference: we cant make more oil, but we sure do print more dollars! To understand how this devalues the dollar, we have to understand the history of money, both in the US and other countries. A few thousand or so years ago, paper money didn't exist. In it's place, primitive cultures used items of value to them to buy and sell. Some primitive cultures used shells or beads-items which the people agreed held value and could be trusted to be worth a certain amount. So, three purple shells would buy a basket of fruit today and the same basket of fruit next week. In a poor harvest season, the price might go up to four shells or even five, but the following abundant harvest would see the price drop.

More advanced cultures soon began to use precious metals as their standard of exchange. Recognized everywhere as valuable, gold and silver soon became the standard-or money-of trade. As one became richer, carrying all that heavy gold and silver around started

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