A friend of mine posted this question on Facebook today. Apart from the fact that I'm completely exhausted right now, I'm not sure if I could come up with the best, concise & clear response to this. How would you guys respond?

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"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." ~ Henry David Thoreau

Scarcity.

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Reduce your government footprint.

Twitter: @jwalidea YouTube: /jwalidea

Because you can weigh "shiny rocks in a vault".

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Join Us In Creating Excellence

Another question - Before the Gold Standard was abolished, the gold itself was kept in the Federal Reserve bank vaults (various Federal Reserve banks) of course when a foreign transaction was made the gold needed to be transported. Just out of curiosity how would the public be able to actually know that the Fed wasn't just manipulating the money supply regardless? Is there a check on the actual gold or can they just say "Oh we have this much so we can print this much".. I guess It's just a question about whether or not you can put your trust in government period.

I've got my reservations about the Gold Standard but it certainly tied governments hands in terms of how much they could spend. We've gotten to a point where Federal spending is over a trillion dollars more than government revenue.. Always reminds me of Milton Friedman "where do you suppose the extra 1 trillion comes from? the tooth fairy?" of course if you ask any random person that they'll just *shrug*.. then on the other hand I have Keynesian intellectuals telling me "The economy has improved tremendously under Obama!" ad nauseam; it's just a giant clusterfuck to be honest.

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Liberty: "the conceptual extension of the idea, that your rational mind grants you the exclusive right to your body & products of your labour."

I recommend you guys start reading about money in the austrian sense.

It doesn't have to be gold but it just has been for a long time. This does not mean though that it would be gold or silver that could be the next thing that is considered as money.

I'll leave a youtube video here that I recommend you all watch. If you have any questions post them here and I'll answer them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk-DZhkm ... plpp_video

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Alex and Liberty

Thanks for posting, that dude is wicked smart! I've been reading a lot about economics and economic policies but monetary policy/money seems to be a bit more confusing.

Von Mises is still a bit out of my range at the moment; something for the layman in economics is more suitable so I picked up 'Economics in One Lesson' by Henry Hazlitt and it's been a very easy but informative read so far. I'm thinking of getting a used copy of 'Basic Economics' from Thomas Sowell as well since they are like 4 bucks on Amazon (really thick book)

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Liberty: "the conceptual extension of the idea, that your rational mind grants you the exclusive right to your body & products of your labour."

Another good intro to economics is Robert Murphy's Economics for the Young Economist which can be found here for free.

http://mises.org/document/6215/Lessons- ... -Economist

I'm currently going through Mises' Human Action and it's quite the read, I would definitely recommend it.

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Alex and Liberty

A very simple reply is that libertarians are not fanatical about the gold standard. All libertarians want to do is break the money monopoly. Then we can all choose whatever currency we consider worth accepting and using. Some people will use labour notes. Some people will use unbacked currencies like bitcoin. Other people will use gold or silver as money. Others may choose to use money backed by property of other kinds.

The libertarian idea is only that we should all be free to choose. As with all libertarian solutions, there is no fanaticism or absolutism of any kind involved.

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"Here, every citizen is king; for he has plenitude of power, he reigns and governs." - P.J. Proudhon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC1zFmi ... re=related

Here's another good lecture on the subject posed in the initial topic -- from the Adam Smith institute about the present fiat monetary problem etc.

I haven't watched it all yet but I generally try to watch a good bit of lecture daily since I've decided to go back to school (only need like 18 months of part-time to finish my degree so I figured why not) and I'll be taking Macro this semester which I'm really looking forward to trying to challenging, or at least understanding more neoclassical economic views.

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Liberty: "the conceptual extension of the idea, that your rational mind grants you the exclusive right to your body & products of your labour."

I'm not an expert on this subject, but there are several untruths floating around.

1. John Maynard Keynes never was an advocate of large structural deficits. He advocated for public investment, but only when there was a revenue surplus, or if the deficit was very short term with some sort of plan to quickly pay it off. If you go back and read Keynes and those Keynesians who followed immediately after him, they don't sound anything like what we now define as "Keynesianism". Keynes would roll over in his grave if he saw what was being done today in his name.

2. Gold standard doesn't prevent debt. The Roman Empire was on the gold standard. They traded in gold and silver, primarily. But, they had a string of madmen as Emperors beginning with Nero. Gold started flowing out of the empire and into Persia and the hinterlands because the emperors were buying tons of luxury goods and also they had to import a lot of grain to keep the mob from completely going postal.
Why did all those European countries began to abandon the gold standard at the beginning of the 20th century? Because they were in debt and bleeding gold and going bankrupt. Why did Nixon abandon the Breton Woods agreement? Because America was bleeding gold. The only difference under the fiat system with debt is that the impact is not felt immediately.

And the fact of the matter is this; we aren't going to ever pay off our foreign debts. We've tricked the world into buying our paper. Would you rather they were holding our gold? When push comes to shove, we ain't paying up. Consequently, Uncle Sam still holds (by far, it's not even close) the most gold of any other country's central bank. My message to the rest of the world, "Try to collect". Therin lies the flaw of being an economic determinist. When push comes to shove, the ultimate outcome will be decided militarily.

1. Many also don't know that Keyne's was also a classical liberal except in the regards of public spending.

2. Anyone that has a monopoly on money will cause inflationary spending. The Roman Empire diluted the gold, which caused inflation, as well as had a lovely military industrial complex with the ever expanding empire. I recommend you read Murray Rothbard's History of Money and Banking in the United States to get a historical understanding of what happened at the hands of central banking world wide as well as here. Competing currencies stops debt from occurring.

I agree with Rothbard that we should just repudiate the debt since we've, as individuals, never entered any contracts so we have no moral obligation to be taxed and pay the debts.

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Alex and Liberty

So you seem more well versed in the subject than me, at least at this point in my self-education. What do you make of everyone claiming "the collapse of the dollar", almost cheering it on (I don't see this as being overly cynical, as it's natural human nature to want to be right)

Statistics don't really lie in that, as pertains to inflation, each peak is higher than the preceding peak, and each trough if higher the the receding trough.. so eventually this process of "stimulus" will have to have an end game, right?

The inflation rate right now, statistically is low, but it hasn't been 2 years since QE2, so my assumption would be the inflation rate should start picking up around November. Would I be correct in assuming this?

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Liberty: "the conceptual extension of the idea, that your rational mind grants you the exclusive right to your body & products of your labour."

I'm a self-learning voluntarist as well and it can seem to be overwhelming to take in so much different information than what we were fed in school. The collapse of the dollar IS inevitable as long as we continue inflationary spending. It is impossible to predict when and that's completely out of the scope of Austrian economics. Sooner or later people will start losing trust in the value of the dollar which will cause prices of goods to sky rocket.

Inflation as calculated by the government is completely different than how inflation is classically calculated, so what the federal government is much lower than what it really has proven to be.

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Alex and Liberty

The only reason why the dollar has not collapsed is because it is the world's reserve currency. Despite the state of the U.S. economy, the world still trades in dollars. It stays in demand, therefore it retains its value. Additionally, the U.S. dollar keeps its value because of American military might. So long as the U.S. retains its power and people trust in the States, the dollar will continue to be the international currency of choice. That is starting to change, though. BRICS has had multiple meetings about dropping the dollar. China is quietly getting rid of its dollars and directly trading currencies and goods with other countries as opposed to buying dollars first and then trading. There are definite strategic shifts going on around the world. It is just a matter of time, really. I mean, I don't want to see it happen, but history shows that all empires eventually fall.

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“They see only their own shadows or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the Cave.”
~Plato, The Republic

Keynesianism has become synonymous with deficit spending and bailouts. But that’s not at all what Keynes was writing about. Keynes was actually an exceptionally smart dude, and if John Maynard Keynes were alive today, he would call Paul Krugman a mouth-breathing fuktard. And whatever FDR and Nixon did by ditching the gold standard was more out of necessity (from where they were sitting) than from some sort of diabolical plot. You think they had a choice? And you think with a sweeping Tea Party election this November and the stroke of a pen we could just go back to the gold standard when we have a massive trade deficit in this country? If we went back on the gold standard today we would hemorrhage like a thin-skinned hemophiliac stuffed into a wood chipper. Now, if you want to trade in gold, you already have that right. If you wanna trade in bitcoins, there’s nothing stopping you. If you wanna offer commodity barter to the JJ Bean catolog for a stylish Gore-Tex parka with fleece lining, well, they might balk at your offer.

The kind of economic game we’re playing today is nothing that Keynes would have devised, but rather could be more accurately described as Reaganomics, because it was during the 1980’s when the floodgates of the treasury were opened up like the mouth of a fat faggot lifting up a dick sandwich. And, it was during that time that our national religion was founded- I’m talking about the mythology of perpetual economic growth. And every president since Reagan has preached this philosophy that economic growth is the Savior and economic growth must be achieved by whatever means necessary. I suppose this religion pre-dates Reagan, but before the 1970’s, economic growth was a natural outpouring of demand-side forces. During the stagflation of the ‘70’s, when markets became more and more saturated, we adopted a supply-side philosophy which goes something like this, “If you build it (and mass-market the living motherfuckin fuck out of it), they will buy it.”

So, people were convinced that they needed an upstairs phone AND a downstairs phone, and then they needed a cordless phone, and then they needed a cell phone, and then everyone in the family needed a personal cell phone, and then they all needed a smartphone, and then they all needed an iPhone, and then they needed an iPhone 4, and six months later they all camped out and stood in line for the iPhone 5, and they also needed a bigger house, and they got so bored with themselves that they needed a flat screen surround sound home theater system hooked up to Netflicks and 400 channels of programming and a 4 day power vacation to Hawaii every summer and winter because they didn’t know what else to do with their anxiety. And the wives expected a shiny blood diamond encrusted present on every birthday, anniversary, Valentines Day, Mother’s Day, New Year’s Day, Sunday and fucking Groundhog Day, and all this crap was bought on credit, and the federal and state governments fell into this same kind of frenzy on a macro scale, but it would all be okay in the long run because of that saving grace of perpetual economic growth.

The world economy is like a hamster in a cage-wheel and the wheel needs to keep spinning faster every year in order to keep the kid entertained, so the hamster is fed more and more amphetamines until one day in the future it has a heart attack. JUST STOP. Stop it. Not you guys, but the rest of America, stop buying crap until your garage is overflowing with stuff that you barely even use and can’t even give away because everyone else’s garage is overflowing with crap. Stop buying stuff on Amazon and iTunes. If you’re going to buy it, buy it from your neighbor down at his independent shop. Buy it from your neighbor, dammit, and don’t ever say again that no one does that anymore. Don’t ever say that we can’t go back, or forward. Learn how to play the piano or the guitar. Grow a fucking vegetable, man. Pick a chanterelle mushroom. Shoot a deer, skin it, cook up the backstrap on a campfire and pack up the rest in waxed butcher paper. Stick it in the freezer. Catch a fish. Sit in silence once in a while and contemplate the beauty of economic shrinkage.

Now, I’m just as much of a hypocrite as the next guy. This is a dirty world, and you can’t live in it without some measure of compromise. But, there is real stuff that you can do to save humanity. You don’t like the banks? Fuck em. I haven’t had a bank account for three years. I’ve never owned a credit card. My clients pay me with cash or a check. If they scratch me out a check, I take it back to the bank that issued it and I cash it. If the bank gives me a line of bullshit, I have my client put a note on their account that says I can cash their checks without verbal authorization.

You don’t like Obamacare? Don’t participate. The last time I went to the doctor was in 1986, after a mosh pit incident, but anybody with 20/20 vision, good hand-eye coordination, a sterile needle and a few strands of cat gut could have taken care of my stitches. I didn’t need a doctor of medicine.
My daughter was born in our living room. We hired three midwives who educated us up over a 6 month period. I paid them partly with cash and partly via work-trade. We rented a 75 gallon Rubbermade cattle tub and put an aquarium heater in it so that my wife could labor in a deep tub of warm water. My wife woke me up from a dream at 7am and I timed her contractions with a wristwatch and determined that the shit was imminent so I got up and out of bed and set up the tub with the heater and it was just the two of us for the next six hours, husband and wife, until the midwives showed up 20 minutes before the birth, but we basically did it all on our own. I boiled the water, I prepared the druidic herbal poultices, I timed the contractions, I caught all the vomits in a big stainless steel bowl, I made the final catch and I cut the umbilical cord with some sterilized pruning shears. My wife deserves some of the credit. We never had a one of those ultrasound scans that expecting parents try to show you on a video and you’re thinking that their fetus looks like an alien skeleton mutant and you’re trying to concoct an excuse to leave the room in order to wash out your eyeballs. We never saw a doctor. It was a surprise to us that we had a girl. We had a girl. And there she was. So beautiful. I got to name her because my wife was too wiped out to weigh in. Afterword, we went back to bed with the baby and took a long nap (no pills, no bright lights, no paperwork, no vaccinations, no hospital gowns, no searching for the car in the parking lot). I don’t need any clinical healthcare, man. I’ve been living in this body for 43 years and I’m the expert about what’s going on up in here. One of these days I’ll have a problem that won’t heal, and one of these days it’ll all spiral downhill, but the last time I checked the score, the Grim Reaper was still undefeated.

You don’t like big government? Goddamit, then stop feeding it and grifting off of it. Stop paying taxes. Stop collecting benefits, man. I’m not talking about you guys, I’m talking about Middle Class brainwashed America. Don’t pay income taxes ever again. I don’t pay income tax. I’ve never collected a benefit. I never have. If the IRS ever sends me something in the mail, I’ll throw it in the wood stove. If they knock on the door, I won’t answer. If they break down the door, they won’t find what little bit of money I have stashed away. If they send me to jail, I’ve been there a few times before. It ain’t no thing.

Anarchy is not a philosophy. It’s not a debate between Austrian and Keynsian economics or any of this other stuff that we have no control over in a country which has a single political party lobby-ridden RepubliCrat monopoly on politics. Liberty ain’t liberal and it ain’t conservative. It has nothing to do with some video about libertarianism on U-Tube that teaches you the proper way to formulate an argument. Anarchy is not a theory. Anarchy is not an idea. Anarchy cannot be demonstrated in a lecture. Anarchy is a practice. Anarchy is an individual action within a communal action. And whatever anarchy I have ever practiced cannot even be remotely compared to the anarchy of a Patrick Henry who told the British Empire to “Give me Liberty or give me Death!” and then promptly took a lead slug to the torso. Naw, we have it easy, my brethren and sistren. And we have simple methods to grind this hamster wheel to a screeching halt. But, it doesn’t start with Ayn Rand or Ron Paul or some demonstration where you hold up a cleverly worded placard while taking a video of yourself to be uploaded to Twitter, or any of that kind of edifying narcissistic bullshit. It starts with the face to face connections that you make with your neighbors, and the day-to-day business that you carry out, and the useless shit that you leave behind, and the trust that you anchor in Providence. In the face of danger and the possibility of the loss of life, it makes no logical sense, but deep down all human beings yearn for liberty. All livings things do. The center of the revolution is everywhere, and it has no circumference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F2aIDxadIk

I'm probably in the vast minority here but I love Milton Friedman. A wonderful historian and late in life became much much less trusting of government run monetary systems and seemingly a much bigger advocate of commodity money. Never mentions anything specifically for or against competing currencies.

Anyway, if the original poster is still around it's another video on the subject.

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Liberty: "the conceptual extension of the idea, that your rational mind grants you the exclusive right to your body & products of your labour."

another video? AAAAAAaaaaaaagghhhhhh!, *sigh*

ahem

Voodoo Economics

Voodoo economics,
Slaves to electronics,
Adults reading comics,
Batmen and Robbins,
Harry Potter, Susan Collins,
Twightlight vampaholics,
FULLSTOP

Are you listening to my phonics?

[…2 3 4……………[ kick it ]

Wanderin ‘round like zombies,
Starin at iPhone screens,
Walkin into I-beams,
Your coffee tastes like ice cream,
Cocky like a pre-teen,
Roided like Giambis,
Over-medicated commies,
Zuckered pom pommers,
Puckered Steve Job dorks,
Corned like hot pastramis,
Dressed up in pajamas,
Voting for Obamas,
Smiling for the cameras,
Living like a clam does,
Drooling like you damaged,
Tooling like a damn bitch,
Doing what the Man says,
Eating a food stamp sandwich,
Performing cunalingus,
On Kathleen Sebilius,
On Janet Napolitano,
But something that they don’t know,
There’s something that they can’t take
Away,
From the shores of the Great Lakes,
From the prairies and the plains,
From the swamps of the Everglades,
From the deserts and the woods,
From the alleys and the streets,
From the shores of the Atlantic,
To the bluffs of the Pacific,
There be souls undertow,
There be blood down in that soil,
From American hands that toiled,
From men that never wavered,
From women in their labor,
And never needed favors,
From Capitol Dome slavers.

Goose-steppers need a word,
Need to be un-herded,
Need to be un-plugged,
Need to be un-drugged,
Need to be de-bugged,
Need to be un-learned,
Need to be un-lamed,
Need to be un-trained,
Need to be un-tamed,
Need some un-hobbling,
Voodoo economics speed-wobbling,
The weather vane be spinning,
Creaks be a creaking,
Cracks be a cracking,
The din be a rising,
Light bulbs be a breaking,
Thunder be a peeling,
Lightening be a blinding,
Surprises be surprising,
Foundations be un-piling,
Roofs be a leaking,
Dams be a toppling,
Mosquito gonna straw ya,
Rattlesnake gnaw on ya,
Beaver gonna saw ya,
Black bear gonna maul ya,
Grey Wolf gonna paw ya,
Cougar gonna claw ya,
Raven caw-caw-caw ya,
Bald eagle swoop down on ya,
Great White gonna jaw ya,
Redwood fall upon ya,
Spiders crawled all on ya,
When you wake up at dawn.

And you’ll be full of sores,
And filled all up with pain,
You’ll probably need a cane,
Probably need a band-aid,
But,
I’ll smoke you out with homegrown,
Pour homebrew made from whole grain,
Elk steaks cooked over flame,
The sound of many waters,
The breath of many winds,
Sparks a sparkling,
Stars a spiraling,
Trees a dancing,
Truth unveiling,
Ghosts a rising,
Gods descending,
It won’t need no explaining,
Just a little tasting,
It really ain’t no thaing.
I’ll just drop an E.M.P. in the sky of your brain.
I said I’ll drop an E.M.P. in the sky of your brain.

I don't really know what to say to this, but it deserves responses. You have a level of dedication I have yet to commit to myself. On one hand I commend you greatly for that. On the other hand, it seems a bit risky, especially with a family. Nonetheless, fuck Ronald Reagan.




Shameless P.S. I was at that show. Here's my vid of it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0dgHg2egVE

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Reduce your government footprint.

Twitter: @jwalidea YouTube: /jwalidea

I was talking to a friend tonight after the debates. He doesn't believe in the whole "governments are controlled by and elite social class" so it's a little difficult talking to him. I began complaining how both candidates supported bail outs and quantitative easing. How it just causing inflation and going to run us into a whole. He says that it isn't causing that much inflation and pulled up this site http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ According to this site the dollar in the lat 10 years at least has only went up about 2 percent per year. Especially over the last few years with pumping money into the economy it's only jumped up 2 percent. If the fed is doing such a bad thing why aren't we seeing more inflation as far as that calculator is concerned?

I used that calculator on that website. $1 in 2000 is worth $1.30 in 2012, an increase of 30% or 3% per year. Sure a 3% per year increase is "better" than a 10% per year increase, but both are far from ideal. Inflation generally means a weak economy.

Tell your friend he's paying more now for the same goods/services than he did 10 years ago. This means the buying power of his dollar is 3% less than it was last year, and 30% less than it was 10 years ago. In other words, his money was able to stretch further last year and the year before than it does today.

This might not be a big deal if his salary has increased concomitantly with the inflation rate, but it's a big deal to the people whose salary didn't or who don't have a salary anymore.

Tuesday, I walked into my local independently owned convenience market and the cowgirl owner was in tears, mascara running down her face. She said that once her gas tank ran dry, she wasn't going to be able to sell gasoline anymore. So, I bought $40 of gas at $4.32 and a quart of Coors for well over $2.00 (recently used to cost me $1.39). I looked into this gas thing and sure enough: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-1 ... pot-prices

I've always had this theory that gas prices plummet on the approach of an election. But, I saw gas listed today for $4.89. I guess that's what can happen when your state electorate is sold out for President Xanax, the empty chair. If Romney had a chance of winning California, we wouldn't be having this "refinery outage" crisis right now.

Now, the reason that we don't have widespread inflation is that people and businesses are suffering. During a depression, you get deflation, because demand is so weak. So, we have the forces of depressionary deflation working against the forces of monetary inflation. When these two forces are balanced, you see a stability in prices.

But, herein lies the rub. If the economy were to recover mightily, and the engines of capitalism were to roar back to life, you would see runaway inflation, and you would see interest rates go up. We're caught in a Catch-22 where an economic recovery could be worse than continued recession and high unemployment.

I prefer the idea of simply trading with gold and silver and NOT using a currency backed by gold or silver. Why ask for a Gold Standard when we can trade with gold itself? I don't mean to say trades cannot be performed electronically; as long as the transfer of ownership is correlated directly and the accounts are 1:1 allocated, like with James Turk's GoldMoney banking, then you're trading directly with physical holdings without having to physically carry or ship your metal for every transaction.

Remember that the US was on a gold standard after the creation of the federal reserve, during The Great Depression, during times of deficit spending, up until Nixon "temporarily" closed the window. We were using dollars backed by gold based on fraudulent accounting that was easier to hide when not directly trading with real assets.

If we stopped thinking in terms of abstract money and instead thought about real things, we could use things like gold and silver as real assets/resources for barter/trade. There is no need for creating an abstract asset disassociated from actual production.

Also, gold and silver have always been real stuff of value that can be traded just about anywhere in the world, regardless of what was or wasn't considered money, even during the height of the petro-dollar, as well as right now while we're debating it.

My thoughts are that problems in the past with using gold and silver were problems with alloys and purity. That can't really happen, today, with global trade and everyone being able to check purity, nor with no single government or dynasty controlling the supply, can it? The other problem would be with storage and dishonest accounting, which can never be perfectly solved and will always require due diligence and taking personal responsibility on who you do business with. For example, I do business with James Turk, not because I have faith in third party auditors or gov regulators, but because I've come to trust his business.

Gold and silver are also just really kewl resources for building stuff from art and jewelry to high tech gadgets and on to future stuff we've yet to think of!