These guys really know their stuff. They'll be able to find that much next season. Easily.
Posted on 08/23/2012 3:42:23 PM PDT by barmag25
The gold standard has returned to mainstream U.S. politics for the first time in 30 years, with a “gold commission” set to become part of official Republican party policy.
Drafts of the party platform, which it will adopt at a convention in Tampa Bay, Florida, next week, call for an audit of Federal Reserve monetary policy and a commission to look at restoring the link between the dollar and gold.
The move shows how five years of easy monetary policy — and the efforts of congressman Ron Paul — have made the once-fringe idea of returning to gold-as-money a legitimate part of Republican debate.
Marsha Blackburn, a Republican congresswoman from Tennessee and co-chair of the platform committee, said the issues were not adopted merely to placate Paul and the delegates that he picked up during his campaign for the party’s nomination.
“These were adopted because they are things that Republicans agree on,”
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
I never knew that. Thank you for telling me.
Will they keep their word? My first thought is to say something smart alecky but am not going to bash my own side.
So the answer is well, maybe if the issue stays in the platform for a few rounds - and by rounds I mean years - maybe something will happen. I think auditing the fed is a terrific idea.
Agree. Its only talking points and will never happen. Sadly, flat out lying to the American voter is par for the course regardless of party.
Going off the gold standard was a huge mistake, but it’s too late to go back on it. If we did, the economy would have great difficulty adjusting.
Spain is actually a superb illustration of this. To start with, Spain was the big producer of silver in Europe until the Muslim invasion, which forced silver mining to develop in other nations.
Its empire was not just preserved, but strongly advanced with silver discoveries in the New World, both in South America and then the immensely rich mines in northern Mexico.
While the Indians mined a little, Spanish mining there was both completely innovative and technologically lucky, as a new chemical process had been developed to make extraction of silver easier. For example, one mine in a mountain had a giant diagonal square shaft leading down from it, large enough for a locomotive, but just for their *tailings*.
And this region is still seen as one of the wealthiest silver deposits in the world.
But the Spanish empire had a problem we are all too familiar with: they spent money faster than they made it, mostly on poorly thought out wars. And when they lost their fleet at Trafalgar, they couldn’t get the silver from the new world back to Spain. That and the Napoleonic wars finished them off.
The last time anything a “Commission” studied actually got executed was in the 80s.
GOP is not courageous enough at this point.
It will happen, however, if/when the fiat system collapses on itself and non-Marxists happen to be in power.
I take umbrage over the comment that “the price of gold has fluctuated wildly”.
My college American History professor lead one of his classes through a guided discussion on American monetary polices. One of his exhibits was the price of a hand made suit from a tailor in the Californian Gold Fields circa 1850. Due to the lack of money the price was expressed in ounces of gold. He then tasked his students to prove or disprove the theory of inflation.
I was one of the stupid ones that said inflation had occurred. He then showed me, and the rest of the class, that the actual price of a hand made suit in 1966 was extremely close to the same suit 115 years earlier when expressed in ounces of gold.
What we call money, the paper dollar, isn't a real item with a real worth. In fact it costs the government around 6 cents to produce but is “worth 100 cents”. It is worth exactly what we, the government and its citizens agree its worth.
Personal case in point. In 1974 I bought a gold bracelet in Thailand made of 83+ grams (3 ounces) of 24 cart gold. It ran me around $ 400. To replace that bracelet today I would be spending around $ 5,000. Did the bracelet change in size in the intervening 38 years? No. The “buying” power of the dollar when compared to gold went down.
These guys really know their stuff. They'll be able to find that much next season. Easily.
No, actually there is not. Even with the immense gold supplies of the New World the growth rate for gold and silver is less than 2%. This means that there is a deflationary bias built in with the GS and a higher unemployment rate results than is acceptable to the modern electorate.
And can you imagine how idiotic it would be to actually have to use the metal in monetary transactions? How much fraud and inefficiency would result.
Fiat currency use is never going away as long as civilization does not collapse. It has been instrumental in the massive growth rate in the US economy since the creation of the Fed and the incredible improvement in the standard of living for even the poorest American.
Has management of the dollar been perfect? No, but overall it has been pretty good.
How do you believe a massive increase in the demand for gold would affect the price of gold? With little increase in supply.
The Gold Standard is a terrible idea for many reasons not the least of which is its actual operation.
Basically the superstitious love affair with gold money is based on ignorance of the actual history and operation of the gold standard. It is preferred because it is not elastic (its advocates are more concerned about it as a store of value not a medium of exchange) and that is also the reason it will never be returned to outside of some kind of dictatorship. As a money supply gold cannot expand quickly enough to accommodate economic growth and is not a guarantee against inflation in any case.
New strikes and discoveries expand the money supply often enough to produce inflation. When the metals from the New World were imported into Europe they set off a multi-century wave of inflation which ruined Spain’s economy and raised the price level throughout Europe.
Gold was initially selected for metaphysical reasons as much as any practicality. Its beauty makes it always valuable. There were also silver standards (Athens). The other metals you mentioned were not available.
However, who would want to make our money supply subject to the whims of suitors across the world or women’s love of fine jewelry? Ideally the Medium of Exchange has no intrinsic value and is useful only as a MoE. Gold is far from that with multitudinous uses. It is supremely durable and divisible but that is not enough.
“I’ll go out on a limb and say that there will also be some discussion about auditing the fed.”
Good thinking, but not much of a limb since reports that Romney said he would support an audit of the Fed appeared last week.
Looks like Romney’s the one one out on a limb — People want that audit done, but will he fight for it and insist it be done?
Marijuana standard? How about butt-crack standard, anyone who’s voting for obama this time has got have his head up his A double S.
The tax and spend, borrow and spend, seize and spend liberals will not be happy.
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