Now that I think of it, where does the constitution that we have to stay on a gold based currency?  It simply states the government has the right to "coin money," does it not? No State shall ... make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts ... (Excerpted from Article 1, Sect...

Look, I don't care what is morally right or wrong at this point and what logic you use to justify your position. What I care about is the effects that low socio-economic mobility and wide wealth disparity have on civil society and our democracy. What remedies are you proposing for unequal income di...

doodle wrote: Look, I don't care what is morally right or wrong at this point and what logic you use to justify your position.

That gives us everything we need to evaluate your statements.

The sale of hundreds of tons of paper gold in a short interval on April 12th, followed by margin calls against leveraged longs on April 15th.

My mom is ex-NSA and is completely unrepentant about the recent Verizon news. We've had some interesting conversations.  ;) That reminds me of the great line about never trying to explain something to a person whose livelihood (or retirement) depends on not understanding it. I am sure that some ver...

I suggest to Mr. Brooks that the best way for people to stop seeing the state as gigantic and menacing is for it to cease being gigantic and menacing.

Otherwise all they have is standard "blame the victim" psy-ops.

That would make sense. Most of your arguments are heavily utilitarian. The main problem I have with utilitarianism is that because "the greatest good" or even "the greater good" are inherently subjective terms, attempting to maximize them can be used to justify anything at all--up to and including ...

I am a US citizen and resident, but that doesn't mean I have to have FRNs in my portfolio. In fact, I am net short quite a few of them, via a fixed-rate non-recourse mortgage. Do you hold treasury bonds in your portfolio? What will you ultimately be provided with when those bonds mature?  I assume ...

We dont disagree about government at all actually. We disagree about the degree to which our society comprised of egocentric individuals can self organize and regulate in a manner that approximates somewhere that we would want to raise our children in. Not everyone lives in the kind of neighborhood...

I use HB's measuring stick on this stuff... if I can pretty easily meander and "pretend" to recognize authority that I don't, I can live a remarkably free life.  I'm not going to take a page from the book of technovelist and attempt to hold myself out as some sort of slave.  Especially when I have ...

The Fed is enabling the government to spend as much as they feel like without having to worry about increasing taxes. And where do they get the money that they buy the Treasurys with? They created it. They created all the dollars. Exactly, so the notion that they aren't printing money is pretty sil...

1. The Fed isn't "printing money", it is engaging in asset swaps (giving reserves, getting treasuries, etc.).  The amount of $$$ in the private sector is essentially unchanged as a result of QE. The hope of Bernankadank was that the lower treasury rates would induce people to buy stocks, causing st...