Of course, corruption started seeping into government around the beginning of the 20th century when corporations started to heavily influence government. The 1913 Currency Act that created the Federal Reserve was the first nail in the coffin of usurping power from "we, the people". This was an act forwarded by Carter Glass in 1911. Prior to that the Treasury Department printed a currency redeemable in lawful money but was hampered in its ability to print currency as it was dependent upon its reserves in gold and silver. The Federal Reserve was a private corporation and its board was mostly composed of Bankers. The Fed printed a currency called a Federal Reserve Note.

Before the Fed, banks could print their own currencies, or redeemable bank notes, as records of ownership of deposits and operated on a system of fractional reserve banking which allowed them to print more notes than they had in reserves. It was a risk calculation that a run would not occur in their bank. If a run did occur it was the end of the bank. The more unscrupulous bankers could start rumors that one of their competitors were insolvent which would then create a run on that bank. Banks had to make money and the fractional reserve system provided that opportunity. Without the fractional reserve system Banks were just storage places for people to safely store their money and all the revenues for the bank were from storage fees. Hardly a get rich quick plan.

The creation of the Federal Reserve untied the governments hands because it introduced a fractional reserve system to them where they no longer had to limit their printing of the currency to their reserves. The debasement of the American currency started from that point. By the end of Bretton-Woods all individual control over personal wealth had been usurped by government and the currencies that were being printed became money.

We do not necessarily need a return to gold and silver as the money of the people. We just need a restoration of trust and confidence in the creators of money. That trust and confidence, as I mentioned, started to be eroded almost immediately after the passing of the Currency Act of 1913.
We, the people, started to wonder about what our government was doing, some of us almost from the beginning. WWl saw the destruction of European monarchies and creation of constitutional democratic republics, as well as an international organization called The League of Nations. Power was being centralized. During the twenties and thirties socialism was becoming a popular political ideology. Germany embraced it and the USSR was expanding its territory. Hitler pulled Germany out of an economic morass and there were enough supporters of socialism in the west at that time to sing the praises of socialism, universal healthcare and education were being demanded by the people. But then Hitler had gone maniacal with his superior race theory from the "science" of Eugenics. They were just "following the science", a familiar contemporary refrain we should take a lesson from. More Americans were asking questions about their government as time went on. Starting from should we have entered WWl? Should we have entered WWll? Was Pearl Harbor allowed to happen? What was the Gulf of Tonkin all about? The Bay of Pigs? The assassination of JFK? The removal of a President?
What did the end of Bretton-Woods foretell? And then the exposing of secret government operations like MK-Ultra and the Tuskagee Syphilis experiment. All of these questions piling up and undermining trust and confidence in the federal government who controlled our "money" supply and distribution.

Getting back to our main legal money these days, it exists mainly in the form of a digital currency. Cash itself is in the process of being made obsolete. It is difficult to own a digital currency, or feel like you own it in that form. The creators and distributors of it control it and it can disappear in an instant.
Bitcoin is a "cryptocurrency" and an attempt to restore ownership of "money" to the individual. It is painted by government as the domain of criminals and rascals trying to evade their oversight and ability to tax the owner.

We all report our income to the government and they take their share within the IRS code which provides the very influential with appropriate loopholes to evade authorities...er... I
mean "avoid" tax problems.

The essential point is that we, as individuals, no longer own our wealth and we only have our vote left to try and keep government honest. The past Presidential election produces more questions regarding whether or not our vote is even ours.

Government today feels it can blatantly lie to the people. What does this portend for our money? Watch for MMT, a UBI and "money" becoming even more of a valueless token. It's a future where "you will own nothing and you will be happy."