Want some fun? Look out for the new "liberty dollar." Yes, there are curmudgeons who want to move away from federal reserve notes back to coinage backed by gold and silver. They claim it is not inflationary. Not quite. The value of gold and silver notes fluctuates with the value of... wait for it... gold and silver. The 1849 California gold strike was inflationary, by creating money out of the ground. With population growth, however, it is deflationary. People multiply faster than gold. In fact, the crazy thing about the gold standard is that, if you try to explain it to college students today, their eyes bug out. I have often asked people to consider why gold is valuable. Answer: it is pretty and doesn't oxidize. That's it. Otherwise, it was, historically, the softest, most useless metal on earth. It has some uses now for electrical conductivity, but these only came into widespread use relatively recently. The US government is finally cracking down.
The amazing thing is that there are now millions of dollars being spent on this idiotic venture. It is, of course, even if "successful," still fraught with all the problems that free silver would have faced in the 1890s.
I personally think it's a marketing scam based on the very high prices for gold right now ($570/oz). Sell a bunch of gold to roobs, then leave them holding the bag when the market tumbles.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Free Silver is Back
Posted by The Law Talking Guy at 3:03 PM
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4 comments:
These people are nuts. We'll never go back to the gold standard. We were on it until the 1970s and got off it because it wasn't reasonable to continue.
What's next? Horses and buggies?
// posted by Raised By Republicans
Thnk of the poverty we'd face if we went back to gold!
So much better to use credit and print more money.
// posted by UNWest
FYI: Here is the deconstruction of the Wizard of Oz as an appeal for free silver .
// posted by RBR
Screw gold. Let's have a currency based entirely on lead. It's heavy, sturdy, malleable and, best of all, will slowly poison people who get too attached to it.
// posted by LTG
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