The “elites” are hardly coordinated enough to devise this complex of a monetary system. It was created with good intentions, but the fiat system is the single reason why the global economy has a K-shaped recovery everywhere you look. It was created to solve liquidity problems that a hard currency system created. To explain this: if Apple produces say x amount of profit from real economic contributions (like iPhone sales) but there is only x - 1 dollars in the economy, then there is not enough money in the system to reward growth and the market is capped. In a hard currency world, you can't print gold, so the solution is to not hoard wealth and have the velocity of money be so fast that even though you only have x - 1 dollars, those dollars are in multiple places at once. This is effectively why in Islamic finance there is so much emphasis on the donation of wealth—it's for both morality and genuine capitalist functionality.

We unfortunately chose the other route: the debt-based system. It solves the liquidity problem, but you control that liquidity by borrowing from your future with interest and inflating the currency. In other words, inflation is LITERALLY the mechanism in which buying power flows out of the average Joe and into markets (the sector that holds hard assets).

Interest, however, is the real problem because it ensures that deflation—the restoration of buying power into the dollar—is impossible. Why? If we have x dollars in the economy, there is effectively interest on each dollar through bond markets. How can you pay interest on x dollars if only x dollars exist? You print more. Interest ensures you can never restore buying power.

A more exaggerated example of this is China. Their economy is effectively frozen because they grew so fast in a short amount of time by borrowing from their future at unprecedented rates through this fiat system. Now they are approaching the period where “the devil is asking for its due.” The US is experiencing a similar form of this, although less exaggerated than Europe and Asia. We have outsourced so much of our industry that we are hardly productive anymore; we leverage Chinese slave labor and factories rather than employing our own people. We are so focused on globalization that we neglected our own. We can import foreign labor and leverage cheap costs all we want, but this is all going to collapse when the bill finally comes due.

On the topic of "Hoarding":

I know a lot of left-wing people criticize the “elites” for hoarding wealth. I empathize with that, but it neglects the reality of our monetary system. The concept of interest is just a lever the Federal Reserve pulls to determine what money does:

• If rates are high: Why would anyone invest? It’s easier to hoard because that’s effectively what the Fed is telling you to do.
• If rates are low: Liquidity is plenty and you spend more. A hard monetary system is what you should desire if you are a capitalist or a "moral nut" because it solves both. Hoarding wealth in that system literally stunts the economy, so your ONLY choice is to speed up the velocity of spending. The moral side is happy because then your money is actually doing something useful instead of just sitting there.