This is how my husband talks:
"Gold’s principle value as money to everyone but bankers and politicians is that it cannot be called into existence at will to purchase votes. We are not talking about the value of gold, per se. Of course a peanut butter sandwich is more valuable to a hungry man than a gold coin. Never the less, a man with a gold coin will rarely have to go hungry.
Gold is unsurpassed as a medium of exchange, storehouse of value, and source of truth about it’s political counterpart, paper currency. For all its convenience, unbacked paper money always eventually reverts to its intrinsic value."
He’s either really smart or very confused. I can’t tell because I can hardly follow it when he starts talking about money and banking and What It All Means. I smile and nod while my eyes glaze over and I think about what’s for dinner.
Lately, after only 17 years of smiling and nodding, I experience glimmers of understanding; the pieces are starting to fit together. If he would talk about his feelings, I could follow that. But he won’t. He swears he has them. Uh huh.
You are so funny, on so many levels! I know what you mean about nodding and eyes glazing over, I do it all of the time. Felipe’s subject matter is an assortment of microbes, cows, chickens, moving dirt, sub-soil the upcoming potential, medium difficulty birthing of Brahman calves and how to make the new chicken tractor lush plush and extremely convenient for the chickens.
At some point I may still be in the room physically, but my mind has left for safer ground, like what to eat next.
I enjoy your posts.
Ginnee
This is one female quality I appreciate; the ability to politely listen and even feign interest, or actually take an interest in what we men are talking about. We men do not willingly do this enough when listening to women.
Regards the value of gold as money; no one commodity should be better than any other as a standard. It all depends upon the perceived and arbitrary value people put in that commodity…even when there is no standard, what matters is the confidence the public has in the economy.
We were using gold as a standard when the Great Depression hit us and in the end, it did not matter. What really mattered was the human attitude going into play as the business cycle took a predictable dip. It’s all relative and subjective and resides in our minds and emotions.
The attitude toward gold is as ancient as iron tool making by hand. We are living now in an incredibly complicated age of speed and computer calculated economies and lives. It is no more possible to go back to using gold as money than it is to go back to using donkeys to transport our wealth. Our paper wealth now travels at the speed of electrons in cyberspace. Either we learn to keep up with our machines, or we do not. If we fail, we won’t just be going back to the gold standard, we will be going back to the stone age.
Huh?
“Gold is unsurpassed as a medium of exchange, storehouse of value, and source of truth about it’s political counterpart, paper currency. For all its convenience, unbacked paper money always eventually reverts to its intrinsic value.” I still feel, going back to one of my other posts is that the real medium of exchange is cooperation and the willingness to work together.”
We seem to agree on a basic point, Laffingbear. The success of any economy is all about the collective attitude towards the economy in question. Markets and currencies always go up and down, each following or leading the other. How we react to that eternal dance determines whether the parameters of the cycles are extreme or mild. Our systems and our attitudes have evolved beyond concern about which commodity is used to arbitrarily measure a market’s value.
It has been said the Devil’s greatest success is in convincing people he doesn’t exist.
Intelligent people now believe it is a good idea to grant a private banking cartel (the Fed) and a gang of professional politicians (the U.S. Congress) the power to counterfeit money at will. Not only a good idea, but that everyone derives immeasurable benefit from it, and that in our modern, wired world any other monetary arrangement is as impractical as swapping strings of wampum.
Printing unbacked money or creating credit money is counterfeiting. Counterfeiting is theft no matter who does it. It works by stealing wealth stored in the existing currency. Bankers and politicians can no more be trusted with a license to steal than ordinary humans. Theft only benefits the thieves, not their victims. The modern “business cycle” consists mostly of the creation and destruction of counterfeit, credit money.
As long as we continue to trust bankers and politicians with the power to loot us at will, they will gladly do so.
The use of the term “counterfeit”, while definitely a creative attempt to back up a point, is somewhat disingenuous in this context. Counterfeit is defined as “made in imitation so as to be passed off fraudulently”.
Paper money is no more fraudulent than gold when both are used strictly as a representation of wealth. Both paper and gold can be and have been used as imitations, or representations of value. Both can be and have been counterfeited to represent more value than their respective actual worth. (We had high inflation in the 1890’s WITH a gold standard and the Great Depression in the 1930’s WITH a gold standard.)
So both paper and gold have been used as imitations. That satisfies the first part of the definition of counterfeit. But in order to satisfy the second part, the “fraudulent” aspect, the intent in the making has to be fraudulent. You have to prove that.
If your point is that governments and bankers and corporations are involved in criminal theft of wealth, I agree. They most definitely ARE. But the criminal methods they are using have little to do with whether we use a paper or gold standard. After all, they are just as susceptible to economic cycles as the working class and wildly fluctuating currencies and the resulting economic and political instability does not serve their interests. They are all about control. Paper money gives them an easier measure of control than does gold. Their power rests in economic stability, in keeping the status quo.
If you are concerned about having your money stolen by government or bankers by use of the monetary system, you should pay more attention the laws which have been made that give corporations more rights than real people have been given. You should be concerned about the myth of a free market when what is really happening is the enslavement of working people for the benefit of that 1% of super rich holding all the power.
Hi Sally
I agree with you and Ginnee I am glad to know it is just not me. Since Robert will read this I will not say much more.
Your Title says it all – the best husbands are smart and passionate about something 🙂
All this value is by agreement. Past, present and future. Just beware of what you agree to.
Why is gold any more “valuble” than paper…it’s just a soft metal that looks pretty. Hals to smart for me, hmmm what is for dinner tonight? as eyes glaze over.lol.