Posted on 03/07/2013 6:34:19 AM PST by SeekAndFind
President Nixon gave us our fiat dollar on August 15, 1971, when he suspended convertibility of the U.S. dollar into gold. Shortly before then, I had become the proud owner of a shiny new Fiat 124 sedan.
Unfortunately for the nation and the world, Nixon’s fiat proved to be as unreliable as my Fiat. Worse, while my Fiat 124 quickly returned to the iron oxide from whence it came, Nixon’s fiat dollar is still with us.
Forty-one years later, Fiats have become reasonably reliable (Consumer Reports rates the 2012 Fiat 500 as “Average”), but America’s fiat dollar is still breaking down and leaving us stranded on the side of the road to prosperity. Why is this?
There is no evidence that John Maynard Keynes ever owned a Fiat. However, he did a good job of defining fiat money when he wrote, “Fiat Money is…created and issued by the State, but is not convertible by law into anything other than itself, and has no fixed value in terms of an objective standard.”
Here is the problem with a fiat dollar. One of the laws of the universe is, “Without integrity, nothing works.” “The dollar” is our unit of market value, and a unit of measure, by its very nature, needs to be constant and unchanging, like “the foot.”
A fiat dollar has no integrity, so it cannot work. Worse, because of the essential role that money plays in commerce, a fiat dollar drives our entire economy out of integrity, rendering it dysfunctional. In the process, an undefined, unstable dollar makes cheats and liars out of honest people.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
PING
I had a 75 Fiat X1/9......I spent more time UNDER it than I did IN it!........
FMCDH(BITS)
“so it cannot work”
But has since 1971.
Had he not untied the US$ from the $35 rate, the gold supply would have been sold out within days. The price of gold at the time in London was $40-43. Taking $35 to the gold window and buying and then selling in London for $40 was a piece of cake.
Nixon had no choice but to sever the relationship. Congress lacked the guts to engage in a debate and reset the rate as they had many times before. The decision was made that gold was irrelevant to the modern economies
I had an ‘80 Fiat Spider and had electrical problems with it. Was a fun car to drive but rusted like crazy when I had to use it in winter.
Funny story: I left a six pack of club soda in it overnight. When it froze the bottles exploded sending one jagged glass top through the rag top. Opened the door in the morning and the interior was coated with frozen foam.
The X1/9 had horrendous electrical problems. The wipers would sometimes go on by themselves, and since it had flip-up headlights, one day as we were driving down the road, one headlight would just pop up and go down continuously..........
It was a beautiful car and it was really fun to drive!.......when you could drive it...........
Thanks for that pic. Even if it was a Fiat, it was at least attractive. Contrast that with our present crop of excellent, but mostly visually meh cars of today.
One of the few break into a laugh headlines on FR.
I really wanted the Spyder in the 1970s but stayed away due to the reliability rep.
Ended up with a Mercury Capri converible years later when they had the Mazda driveline. Eight years of fun driving in California for $5K.
The owner of a sports car garage in Iowa City had a count of the number of Fiats in the university town in 1972. I think there were 22 or 25 at the time.
He kept a dozen starters on hand for winter business and sold every one of them...
Ever since 1971 1933 when FDR stole the citizens gold those who have been the issuers and first-users of fiat currency have done very well indeed out of it.
They have been able to purchase your labor with pieces of printed paper which devalue every year.
I can still buy beer with it.
So......there.
I never had a starter problem, maybe because we’re in Florida, but the X1/9 had it’s engine in the rear, and the battery was in the front trunk. Which meant that you had a really long battery cable to the starter. It ran the length of the car thru the tunnel in the center. It had a compass on the dash, and every time the starter was engaged the compass would automatically align with the magnetic lines of the current flowing in the cable!...........
I recall a pal from 1977 owned one of these. He put two starters in the thing between ‘77 and ‘80.
:0)
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