06-07-2017, 10:59 AM
(06-03-2017, 11:42 PM)Note the correction: Wrote:(06-03-2017, 10:08 PM)Galen Wrote:(06-03-2017, 08:37 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(06-03-2017, 12:40 AM)Galen Wrote:(06-02-2017, 10:38 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Gold is simply scarce and desirable.
This is one of the reasons it is a good medium of exchange. Gold does have many industrial uses but not as many as silver does. Both have been used as money for thousands of years and without legal tender laws and government force they probably will be again.
As usual the two of you completely miss the point. Empires that are on the decline tend to have huge debt loads and they deliberately debase their currency in order to help cover the bills. It looks like the US is going the way of every other empire and you, like most of the citizens of those prior empires, are completely clueless about what his happening around you.
A gold standard would require a hyper-deflation that would result in a depression as severe as that of the Great Depression. But gold is so expensive ($1276 per ounce) that it would be unsuitable for many transactions. Gold has been as expensive as $1889 an ounce in 2011 and as inexpensive as $252 in 2000.
You are missing the point as usual. I was using the price of gold as a way to show that the purchasing power of currencies issued by declining empires tend to go down. Apparently you can not grasp the possibility that you are living in such an empire. That is what I have come to expect from Boomers, an unfailing ability to ignore the obvious.
The fact that gold prices only tend to increase in terms of dollars over the long term should be a huge clue that the dollar is intentionally being debased which is what declining empires do without fail.
Did commodity prices increase in price as severely as the nearly 7.5-fold increase in the value of gold between 2000 and 2011? I didn't think so. Besides, the Roman economy was greatly different from ours in level of technological development and social realities.
If America is an 'empire in decline', then such is due to the increasing concentration of wealth and political power in fewer hands and the deterioration of democracy (as in lobbyists wielding the real power in Congress and most state legislatures. The solution will be more equality and more democracy, and not greater reliance upon some economic elites to make everything right. Yes, I prefer small business (limitations as they are) to bureaucratic behemoths with rigid ceilings for opportunity for anyone not born into the Right Family. The demise of such an entity as Sears implies that there will be plenty of opportunities for small businesses to find niches.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.