Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and How to Restore Its Greatness"
What would Obama have done differently if it had not been made very clear that Moscow Mitch and the Republicans almost to a person were committed to undermining and ultimately destroying him solely because of his racial background and their overt racism and because of the near certainty that he would be assassinated, probably along with his family if he did any of the things his supporters wanted him to do. It is one thing to be bold and another thing to be suicidal. I think he was trying to buy time, expecting the zeitgeist to change and allow more progressive actions. Instead, the reactionaries increased their power and influence. We the people are as much to blame as anyone. Most of us are much too afraid of change or stuck in naive hope and mythology about how great we are.
"Instead of ending neoliberalism, though, Obama expanded it dramatically with the Affordable Care Act, putting the nation’s healthcare needs in the hands of billion-dollar insurance companies and extending the privatization of Medicare through the Medicare Advantage scam that George W. Bush had brought to being.
He refused to regulate the nation’s monopolies, instead extending George W. Bush’s Emergency Economic Stabilization Act and the Troubled Asset Relief Program that poured ever-more money into the pockets of Wall Street banksters."
With all due respect, I think you are missing something in these comments that you acknowledge further on. Obama could not pass these ACA without the insurance company buy-in, because Citizens United (actually, "Corporations United Against Citizens") had put "big money" in the driver's seat through years of Political Action Committee contributions to their electoral wins. It sounds like Obama was supporting the neoliberalism, but I do not think that was by choice; it was by necessity if he wanted to get anything done that would actually help the non-wealthy 98% of citizens, many of whom had voted for Obama because of his populist views.
And an insightful analysis. One point you made that needs amplification: deposit money is not held in trust. Bank creditors can seize it. The cause of the bank failures in '29 was not the stock market crash. It was the banks speculating in the unregulated stock market and losing the customer deposit money.
The cause of the bank failures in '08, was not the crash of the housing/mortgage market. It was that the banks speculated in the derivatives market, putting deposit money at risk using naked credit default swaps. When they lost their bet with the hedge funds, they were either insolvent or, at best, zombie banks without the means to make loans and not enough cash to meet withdrawal demands.
The Canadian banks did not fail nor need a bailout because Canada puts a tight rein on the naked credit default swamp, requiring banks to set aside sufficient capital to meet the obligations. The US does not. The premiums from the sale of the naked credit default swaps go into the outsized banker bonuses. There is no fund set aside to meet claim such as with insurance.
That is why the commercial banking executives successfully opposed any attempt to curtail their ability to use deposit money to speculate in the derivative markets. That ability keeps the US banking system fragile, and why Warren Buffett warned, after the Dodd-Frank reforms, that derivatives remained on the bank statements as ticking time bombs.
Calling policies 'neo" and "liberal" does not make them so. My take was that neoliberalism was Clinton's way to repackage Reaganism to get elected. It worked. The problem is structural, or as economist Dean Baker calls it "The Rigged System." If you do not understand how the system is rigged for wealth to flow up and trickle down you will never restore the middle class. It is a complex system, so fixing just one aspect will likely trigger offsets elsewhere to create a zero-sum gain. You have to retool the entire system, starting with taxing the heck out of the rich. That is not punnishment for being rich, but because they benefit most from a healthy, educated workforce, interstate highways and rail lines, a Navy that avoids piracy on the high seas, and a police force that protects all their personal and corporate properties - things we underlings do not have in abundance.
The #1 scheme of our rigged economy is that it is not taught in high school. Very few schools have a semester-long course that teaches personal financial management. It is not for lack of textbooks. Harold Pollack's "The Index Card" is perfect for high school. Baker's "Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer" dives deeper, but it is free at CEPR's website. What schools do is pay lip service to the topic by including a few lectures in some other class like how to balance a checkbook, how credit cards work, and explain what a mortgage is. All three are ways people indenture themselves to financial institutions for life.
Yes... And the same corporate Democrats are still trying to hold on as the anointed "opposition" to the MAGA-powered GOP grift. These Dems are fighting with all the Wall St money they can muster to stop real progressives from taking the reins. A repeat of their knee-capping Bernie to advance the dead on arrival Hillary that began the country's progressing collapse.
I’ve long felt that Obama undervalued and under-employed his tremendous oratorical skills throughout his presidency, and especially in the months following his inauguration. Whether with health care or the crimes of his predecessor or whatever, he unnecessarily fell short. And then he became pals with his predecessor.
My opinion is that Obama as the first, and probably only, president of African ancestry, made a concerted effort not to antagonize the real powers in this country If he had really stood up to them, he would have been slaughtered, either literally and/or figuratively.
With all of our bloviating and kvetching we never get around to addressing just who exactly are the stockholders, the real owners of USA Inc.
It is not hard to ascertain, just who is it that benefits from each administration, start by checking the heads of regulatory cabinets and commissions.
Every liberal, like me, needs to read this post. This is how politics works in a failed democracy. This is how a culture functions without a covenant. We are a country that can no longer define its values. We have failed the covenant of hard work tied to virtue. We function like a third world economy/government.
Elaborating: Our society needs to stress PRINCIPLES. The most fundamental is EMPATHY - feeling the pain of others.
And adherence to logic, evidence, and concurrence - in short, THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD. Everything good flows from these two PRINCIPLES.
Third world countries, that I know personally, do not follow these two PRINCIPLES.
The rich/powerful write off the misery of majority of their populations as: simply the way the world is.
And the rich/powerful are too lazy and self-content to bother to advance their economies or the true democratization of their societies. They would much rather hoard their wealth for the inheritance of their progeny.
One hates to burst anyone’s bubble but this cost of living crisis that Americans are currently seeing is not something that happened in the last 18m Of course WE the People would expect that POTUS would do something, anything to try to deal with this economic problem But like COVID Cheeto is completely over his incompetent head to handle the matter
The fact is this The US dollar has become worthless as a fiat currency In terms of gold the value of the dollar is 4 to 6 cents of what it was in 1971 when Nixon took the country off a gold standard Let that sink in for a moment The dollar in your wallet has the purchasing power of 4 to 6 cents while many if not most salaries have not kept up with the cost of living due to the ineptness of elected officials(https://bit.ly/4f4L9BG) Currencies are not money, just a front for credit and not money Gold/sliver is money and the US Constitution calls for a metallic standard for its money
In a historical perspective in the early 1920’s after WWI postwar Germany’s economy seemed to be humming along without a gold standard until it wasn’t and by 1922 people were burning Reichsmarks to stay warm Saliently the politicians knew the currency was in trouble but didn’t do anything about it And there are numerous examples littered throughout history of countries that have flirted with a fiat currency and all have ended in disaster Now Deutsche Bank predicts $8000/oz gold
China knows this It sits on 70K tonnes(the US has an unaudited 8Ktonnes) and many American financial commentators like Ray Dalio are warning of a financial crisis Cheeto will preside over the next Great Depression and will make GW Bush’s Great Recession look like a picnic
WE the People should demand that this issue be front and center as an election issue for now and until the country is put back on a gold standard but the major lesson is that gold is not an investment It’s a way to protect your wealth
There isnot enough gold in the world to act as a medium of exchange. The USSR went on a gold standard, where.9851 grams fine gold equaled one ruble. and the supply of rubles was limited to the gold on hand. result a perpetual shortage of money, which is a perpetual depression.
When Spain conquereed the America's, there was a sudden gold inflation, and the value of gold diminished as the supply expanded.
When the Spanish started working the mines of Potosi,Bolivia, they created a stilver inflation,and as a consquence they lost the low countries.
The discovery and working of the Comstock Lode,created a sliver inflation, so bad that Congress enacted a bill in 1873, that demonitized silver, and left us with a "gold standard"
And a 7 years impression ensued, they called it the Crime of 73, and not just that 7 years depression, but a series of depressions,
And here is what gold bug ignoramuses don't understand about money and money creation.
Banks would take in gold for safe keeping, and then make loans on the basis of a fraction of the gold that they held in storage.
The Bank of England, was essentially the first bank that issued bank notes, on the basis of the gold that they held in their vaults.
When a person wanted to borrow money, he would go to the Bank, and bargain for a loan, the bank would issue a note (a liability on the bank),which the borrower or depositor, used as money.
The bank realized that most of the gold that they had in the vault was covered with dust, and never used, only a small amount was withdrawn by depositors.
Competitors knew that the Bank did not have enough gold on hand, to redeem all of it's outstanding notes, And would then spread the word, and the result was a run on the bank (See the classic movie, It is a wonderful world).
The Bank of England, which received its monopoly charter from Charles II, because it had loaned the wastrel money twice. He was a gamibler and a whore monger, he gave his mistress Barbara Viliers, whose cousin George has been a lover of King James, the castle Nonesuch, built by Henry VIII for Katherine Howard.
Barbara had it tore down and sold off stone by stone.
There was this run on the bank of England, the officers of the board, in a panic, hired the foremost and reknown alchemist of the realm, Isaac Newton as the first warden of the mint, that stopped the run.
Point is, that, as Arthur Kitson, the respected economist of Lodon, wrote in his book A Fraudelent Standard, that gold was precisely that.
The premise that there can be metallic inflation doesn't make sense if the consideration is a metallic standard What you write about the 1800's and the use of gold as the standard against which loans were made was the brainchild of Sir Isaac Newton for the nascent banking industry Before that time the blacksmiths held the gold and did the loans Newton stopped the run in the 1850s by making the loan only 40% of the gold reserves held Led by the Austrian School of Economics there are just as many qualified and students of the gold standard that argue the pros of a metallic standard BTW the US Constitution after the initial failure of the currency in the early 1780's a bimetallic standard was added to the document
And the final nail in the coffin, there is he Soviet Union with it's gold standard of .9851 grams fine gold, it created a perpetual depression. It was a capital crime to smuggle a ruble out of Russia, because a foreign holder of rubles could present it to the NordBank in Paris (Russia's window to the world) and demand gold, the private citiizen could not), thus that would reduce the Soviet supply of gold, and money.
sources: O.Kuschpeta's, The Banking and Credit System of the USSR and Goldman, Marshall L. Soviet Marketing, The Free Press of Clencoe Collier McMillan Ltd, London, 1963, 229 pages.
It may not make sense to you, because you are a believer, but they are facts, they actually happened.
Let's take the Comstock lode. Check out the Crime of 73 (google it). Then google a list of depressionsl. There was a dearth of specie, because Congress had demonetized silver.
This led to a demand for bimetallism. Chester A. Arthur ran on bimetallism, was elected then was asssasinated. There was and is an effort to blame it on a frustrated office seeker..
William McKinley, in his second term glipped to bimetallism and he was assassinated.
What do you think William Jennings Bryan cross of gold speech was about.?
You have a reading comprhension problem.O dodn'tsay that Isaac Newton was the brainchild of lending money, . I said he was made the 1st Warden of The Mint, to stop a runon the bank's gold. because of his reputation as an alchemist, the public beliving he could transmue base metals into gold.
Blacksmith's didn't hold the gold, bankers like the Fugger brothers of Italy, and the Knights templars held the gold, and issued receipts ornotes, which could be used as demands by the holdeers
I flirted with joining the Libertarian Party in 1984,, David Koch was their presidental candidate. We knew nothing of the Koch brothers then. Their pitch was great, but I dropped out, because there platform was the gold standard.
1094 was the uear I had finished my research and wrote a paper on Intenrational Finace and Gold.
I knew the gold standard was fraudulent. Unlike most I can think for myuself,and am not an intellectual captive to the likes of the austrian school, Van Mises and Hayek are full of shit, they are the intellectual fathers of MAGA.
Some of the comments are true true unrelated, many are outright fallacy, and just related to poor thinking Fiat currencies always fail because without a standard governments will overspend and print money leading to enormous deficits like $39T/USA with the inevitable debt trap Better minds than yours agree with this
Which ones are unrelated and downright fallacy, or just related to poor thinking
I went to the trouble to explain myself, to quote facts, history and even a source which can be checked.
All you do is wave your hand, make exclamations, and appeal to authority. Authority which is disputed.
The Austrian school is the father of libertarianism. Andof that I say this.
Charles and David Koch, the financiers of the Libertarian party, was Fred C Koch.
Fred made his money building oil wells and refineries for Stalin, He came back to America supposedly a staunch anti communist, but he did pick up some commie ideas, like the gold standard. and if you don't work you don't eat.
The US Treasury does print money, but only in relatively small amounts, which it then sells to the Fed, for use by Mom and Pop brick and mortar, casions, the mob, street corner vendors and supermarkets. the real money is not printed by transmitted over twisted pairs or through the aether as ones and zero's.
You are mouthing Libertarian propaganda and ideology, whether you know it or not.
Setting that aside.
Explain to me the problem with the national debt. Other than kvetch about deficits and debt like you are suppose to, being that your source of info is the media, the pundits, the libertarians and Republicans.
Why is the national debt and deficit spending something to be feared.
I ask this because, even though I hear political talking points about the deficit and national debt, I never see any reasoning behind these concerns.
Although i am disappointed by the half-measures done by Obama during his first two years (after that, McConnell effectively prevented any progress) it should be noted that he had to fight against other “Democrats” also. “Centrist” Democrats are mostly oligarchs which is why the primaries are so important. Toss out the “centrists”!
History has proven that every Democratic candidate I've voted for in a Presidential election has been a glaring disappointment at best or an abject failure at worst. The Democratic Party has to draft another covenant with the "real" citizens of the nation and not the "fat cats and aristocrats" they've been so enamored with for far too long.
“I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”-Ronald Reagan
Mayor Mamdani just rebutted Reagan's stupid remark with HIS nine most terrifying words: "I worked all day and can’t feed my family."
Time to quit the neoliberal experiment and the people who keep pushing it. No justice for workers, no peace! See you in the streets.
What would Obama have done differently if it had not been made very clear that Moscow Mitch and the Republicans almost to a person were committed to undermining and ultimately destroying him solely because of his racial background and their overt racism and because of the near certainty that he would be assassinated, probably along with his family if he did any of the things his supporters wanted him to do. It is one thing to be bold and another thing to be suicidal. I think he was trying to buy time, expecting the zeitgeist to change and allow more progressive actions. Instead, the reactionaries increased their power and influence. We the people are as much to blame as anyone. Most of us are much too afraid of change or stuck in naive hope and mythology about how great we are.
"Instead of ending neoliberalism, though, Obama expanded it dramatically with the Affordable Care Act, putting the nation’s healthcare needs in the hands of billion-dollar insurance companies and extending the privatization of Medicare through the Medicare Advantage scam that George W. Bush had brought to being.
He refused to regulate the nation’s monopolies, instead extending George W. Bush’s Emergency Economic Stabilization Act and the Troubled Asset Relief Program that poured ever-more money into the pockets of Wall Street banksters."
With all due respect, I think you are missing something in these comments that you acknowledge further on. Obama could not pass these ACA without the insurance company buy-in, because Citizens United (actually, "Corporations United Against Citizens") had put "big money" in the driver's seat through years of Political Action Committee contributions to their electoral wins. It sounds like Obama was supporting the neoliberalism, but I do not think that was by choice; it was by necessity if he wanted to get anything done that would actually help the non-wealthy 98% of citizens, many of whom had voted for Obama because of his populist views.
And an insightful analysis. One point you made that needs amplification: deposit money is not held in trust. Bank creditors can seize it. The cause of the bank failures in '29 was not the stock market crash. It was the banks speculating in the unregulated stock market and losing the customer deposit money.
The cause of the bank failures in '08, was not the crash of the housing/mortgage market. It was that the banks speculated in the derivatives market, putting deposit money at risk using naked credit default swaps. When they lost their bet with the hedge funds, they were either insolvent or, at best, zombie banks without the means to make loans and not enough cash to meet withdrawal demands.
The Canadian banks did not fail nor need a bailout because Canada puts a tight rein on the naked credit default swamp, requiring banks to set aside sufficient capital to meet the obligations. The US does not. The premiums from the sale of the naked credit default swaps go into the outsized banker bonuses. There is no fund set aside to meet claim such as with insurance.
That is why the commercial banking executives successfully opposed any attempt to curtail their ability to use deposit money to speculate in the derivative markets. That ability keeps the US banking system fragile, and why Warren Buffett warned, after the Dodd-Frank reforms, that derivatives remained on the bank statements as ticking time bombs.
Here's wishing you and Louise an enjoyable Memorial Day weekend. Thanks for all you do!
Calling policies 'neo" and "liberal" does not make them so. My take was that neoliberalism was Clinton's way to repackage Reaganism to get elected. It worked. The problem is structural, or as economist Dean Baker calls it "The Rigged System." If you do not understand how the system is rigged for wealth to flow up and trickle down you will never restore the middle class. It is a complex system, so fixing just one aspect will likely trigger offsets elsewhere to create a zero-sum gain. You have to retool the entire system, starting with taxing the heck out of the rich. That is not punnishment for being rich, but because they benefit most from a healthy, educated workforce, interstate highways and rail lines, a Navy that avoids piracy on the high seas, and a police force that protects all their personal and corporate properties - things we underlings do not have in abundance.
The #1 scheme of our rigged economy is that it is not taught in high school. Very few schools have a semester-long course that teaches personal financial management. It is not for lack of textbooks. Harold Pollack's "The Index Card" is perfect for high school. Baker's "Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer" dives deeper, but it is free at CEPR's website. What schools do is pay lip service to the topic by including a few lectures in some other class like how to balance a checkbook, how credit cards work, and explain what a mortgage is. All three are ways people indenture themselves to financial institutions for life.
Outstanding, your best comment ever Tom.
Thank you, sir - blush.
Yes... And the same corporate Democrats are still trying to hold on as the anointed "opposition" to the MAGA-powered GOP grift. These Dems are fighting with all the Wall St money they can muster to stop real progressives from taking the reins. A repeat of their knee-capping Bernie to advance the dead on arrival Hillary that began the country's progressing collapse.
D.
I’ve long felt that Obama undervalued and under-employed his tremendous oratorical skills throughout his presidency, and especially in the months following his inauguration. Whether with health care or the crimes of his predecessor or whatever, he unnecessarily fell short. And then he became pals with his predecessor.
My opinion is that Obama as the first, and probably only, president of African ancestry, made a concerted effort not to antagonize the real powers in this country If he had really stood up to them, he would have been slaughtered, either literally and/or figuratively.
With all of our bloviating and kvetching we never get around to addressing just who exactly are the stockholders, the real owners of USA Inc.
It is not hard to ascertain, just who is it that benefits from each administration, start by checking the heads of regulatory cabinets and commissions.
Every liberal, like me, needs to read this post. This is how politics works in a failed democracy. This is how a culture functions without a covenant. We are a country that can no longer define its values. We have failed the covenant of hard work tied to virtue. We function like a third world economy/government.
Yes, what you say is true.
Elaborating: Our society needs to stress PRINCIPLES. The most fundamental is EMPATHY - feeling the pain of others.
And adherence to logic, evidence, and concurrence - in short, THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD. Everything good flows from these two PRINCIPLES.
Third world countries, that I know personally, do not follow these two PRINCIPLES.
The rich/powerful write off the misery of majority of their populations as: simply the way the world is.
And the rich/powerful are too lazy and self-content to bother to advance their economies or the true democratization of their societies. They would much rather hoard their wealth for the inheritance of their progeny.
They
Inflation: The Need For A Gold Standard
One hates to burst anyone’s bubble but this cost of living crisis that Americans are currently seeing is not something that happened in the last 18m Of course WE the People would expect that POTUS would do something, anything to try to deal with this economic problem But like COVID Cheeto is completely over his incompetent head to handle the matter
The fact is this The US dollar has become worthless as a fiat currency In terms of gold the value of the dollar is 4 to 6 cents of what it was in 1971 when Nixon took the country off a gold standard Let that sink in for a moment The dollar in your wallet has the purchasing power of 4 to 6 cents while many if not most salaries have not kept up with the cost of living due to the ineptness of elected officials(https://bit.ly/4f4L9BG) Currencies are not money, just a front for credit and not money Gold/sliver is money and the US Constitution calls for a metallic standard for its money
In a historical perspective in the early 1920’s after WWI postwar Germany’s economy seemed to be humming along without a gold standard until it wasn’t and by 1922 people were burning Reichsmarks to stay warm Saliently the politicians knew the currency was in trouble but didn’t do anything about it And there are numerous examples littered throughout history of countries that have flirted with a fiat currency and all have ended in disaster Now Deutsche Bank predicts $8000/oz gold
China knows this It sits on 70K tonnes(the US has an unaudited 8Ktonnes) and many American financial commentators like Ray Dalio are warning of a financial crisis Cheeto will preside over the next Great Depression and will make GW Bush’s Great Recession look like a picnic
WE the People should demand that this issue be front and center as an election issue for now and until the country is put back on a gold standard but the major lesson is that gold is not an investment It’s a way to protect your wealth
There isnot enough gold in the world to act as a medium of exchange. The USSR went on a gold standard, where.9851 grams fine gold equaled one ruble. and the supply of rubles was limited to the gold on hand. result a perpetual shortage of money, which is a perpetual depression.
When Spain conquereed the America's, there was a sudden gold inflation, and the value of gold diminished as the supply expanded.
When the Spanish started working the mines of Potosi,Bolivia, they created a stilver inflation,and as a consquence they lost the low countries.
The discovery and working of the Comstock Lode,created a sliver inflation, so bad that Congress enacted a bill in 1873, that demonitized silver, and left us with a "gold standard"
And a 7 years impression ensued, they called it the Crime of 73, and not just that 7 years depression, but a series of depressions,
And here is what gold bug ignoramuses don't understand about money and money creation.
Banks would take in gold for safe keeping, and then make loans on the basis of a fraction of the gold that they held in storage.
The Bank of England, was essentially the first bank that issued bank notes, on the basis of the gold that they held in their vaults.
When a person wanted to borrow money, he would go to the Bank, and bargain for a loan, the bank would issue a note (a liability on the bank),which the borrower or depositor, used as money.
The bank realized that most of the gold that they had in the vault was covered with dust, and never used, only a small amount was withdrawn by depositors.
Competitors knew that the Bank did not have enough gold on hand, to redeem all of it's outstanding notes, And would then spread the word, and the result was a run on the bank (See the classic movie, It is a wonderful world).
The Bank of England, which received its monopoly charter from Charles II, because it had loaned the wastrel money twice. He was a gamibler and a whore monger, he gave his mistress Barbara Viliers, whose cousin George has been a lover of King James, the castle Nonesuch, built by Henry VIII for Katherine Howard.
Barbara had it tore down and sold off stone by stone.
There was this run on the bank of England, the officers of the board, in a panic, hired the foremost and reknown alchemist of the realm, Isaac Newton as the first warden of the mint, that stopped the run.
Point is, that, as Arthur Kitson, the respected economist of Lodon, wrote in his book A Fraudelent Standard, that gold was precisely that.
The premise that there can be metallic inflation doesn't make sense if the consideration is a metallic standard What you write about the 1800's and the use of gold as the standard against which loans were made was the brainchild of Sir Isaac Newton for the nascent banking industry Before that time the blacksmiths held the gold and did the loans Newton stopped the run in the 1850s by making the loan only 40% of the gold reserves held Led by the Austrian School of Economics there are just as many qualified and students of the gold standard that argue the pros of a metallic standard BTW the US Constitution after the initial failure of the currency in the early 1780's a bimetallic standard was added to the document
And the final nail in the coffin, there is he Soviet Union with it's gold standard of .9851 grams fine gold, it created a perpetual depression. It was a capital crime to smuggle a ruble out of Russia, because a foreign holder of rubles could present it to the NordBank in Paris (Russia's window to the world) and demand gold, the private citiizen could not), thus that would reduce the Soviet supply of gold, and money.
sources: O.Kuschpeta's, The Banking and Credit System of the USSR and Goldman, Marshall L. Soviet Marketing, The Free Press of Clencoe Collier McMillan Ltd, London, 1963, 229 pages.
It may not make sense to you, because you are a believer, but they are facts, they actually happened.
Let's take the Comstock lode. Check out the Crime of 73 (google it). Then google a list of depressionsl. There was a dearth of specie, because Congress had demonetized silver.
This led to a demand for bimetallism. Chester A. Arthur ran on bimetallism, was elected then was asssasinated. There was and is an effort to blame it on a frustrated office seeker..
William McKinley, in his second term glipped to bimetallism and he was assassinated.
What do you think William Jennings Bryan cross of gold speech was about.?
You have a reading comprhension problem.O dodn'tsay that Isaac Newton was the brainchild of lending money, . I said he was made the 1st Warden of The Mint, to stop a runon the bank's gold. because of his reputation as an alchemist, the public beliving he could transmue base metals into gold.
Blacksmith's didn't hold the gold, bankers like the Fugger brothers of Italy, and the Knights templars held the gold, and issued receipts ornotes, which could be used as demands by the holdeers
I flirted with joining the Libertarian Party in 1984,, David Koch was their presidental candidate. We knew nothing of the Koch brothers then. Their pitch was great, but I dropped out, because there platform was the gold standard.
1094 was the uear I had finished my research and wrote a paper on Intenrational Finace and Gold.
I knew the gold standard was fraudulent. Unlike most I can think for myuself,and am not an intellectual captive to the likes of the austrian school, Van Mises and Hayek are full of shit, they are the intellectual fathers of MAGA.
Some of the comments are true true unrelated, many are outright fallacy, and just related to poor thinking Fiat currencies always fail because without a standard governments will overspend and print money leading to enormous deficits like $39T/USA with the inevitable debt trap Better minds than yours agree with this
Which ones are unrelated and downright fallacy, or just related to poor thinking
I went to the trouble to explain myself, to quote facts, history and even a source which can be checked.
All you do is wave your hand, make exclamations, and appeal to authority. Authority which is disputed.
The Austrian school is the father of libertarianism. Andof that I say this.
Charles and David Koch, the financiers of the Libertarian party, was Fred C Koch.
Fred made his money building oil wells and refineries for Stalin, He came back to America supposedly a staunch anti communist, but he did pick up some commie ideas, like the gold standard. and if you don't work you don't eat.
(Article 12 of the 1936 Soviet Constitution?
As regards government printing money.. You show your ignorance of Modern Money Mecainics a confessional printed by the FRBNY, you can download and read https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Modern_Money_Mechanics.pdf
The US Treasury does print money, but only in relatively small amounts, which it then sells to the Fed, for use by Mom and Pop brick and mortar, casions, the mob, street corner vendors and supermarkets. the real money is not printed by transmitted over twisted pairs or through the aether as ones and zero's.
You are mouthing Libertarian propaganda and ideology, whether you know it or not.
Setting that aside.
Explain to me the problem with the national debt. Other than kvetch about deficits and debt like you are suppose to, being that your source of info is the media, the pundits, the libertarians and Republicans.
Why is the national debt and deficit spending something to be feared.
I ask this because, even though I hear political talking points about the deficit and national debt, I never see any reasoning behind these concerns.
Although i am disappointed by the half-measures done by Obama during his first two years (after that, McConnell effectively prevented any progress) it should be noted that he had to fight against other “Democrats” also. “Centrist” Democrats are mostly oligarchs which is why the primaries are so important. Toss out the “centrists”!
History has proven that every Democratic candidate I've voted for in a Presidential election has been a glaring disappointment at best or an abject failure at worst. The Democratic Party has to draft another covenant with the "real" citizens of the nation and not the "fat cats and aristocrats" they've been so enamored with for far too long.
Ok, And. Thom.