[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

What can I say? Let's give 'em a hand! Or, perhaps, an extended-middle-digit salute!

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

"Con" is the opposite of "pro"; therefore, "Congress" is the opposite of "progress." --Gallagher.

[Ol' Dan Tucker]

Man am I sure ever glad the adults are in charge of the purse strings. </sarcasm>

[momf]

" ...that's something that ought to worry us all. If it worries us more, maybe it will worry our elected representatives more, too."

It won't worry them a bit unless the public, spurred on by groups of bloggers and other concerned citizens take it on to worry them. If we all signed petitions, sent letters, called, etc. demanding they have to read every line of a bill before voting. After all we didn't elect their aides and interns to represent us. If we demanded the pork be taken out and voted on a "piggy" bill by itself; and every vote by published for their constitutes to see and respond to we might not spend so much for so few.

[bvw]

Without some form of a gold standard, it's hard to avoid transitioning to fascism or a hard oligarchy. The government today no longer needs to tax. They can just pay bills with newly "minted" money. And they do.

And because of that, the advantge is to those most close to the one well of money. That advantage is a force -- a directional force like gravity, inescapable it draws all power to it.

Gold is distributable, and mines are distributed. Gold can be hidden and hoared, smuggled. It breaks through tyranny because of that. Fiat money like we have is centralizing -- the central power can overwhelm all attempts to smuggle, to hoard. And it does, it has, is now so doing.

The Constitution forces centralized money -- otherwise there could be multiple fiat currencies. The Constitution's Framers, most of them, thought that and favored that centralization to AVOID coin clipping, debased coin currencies. It was merely a centralization of measure. One set of weights!

They were thinking COINS. They knew paper. The CONSTITUTION says "coin" money. Our "RULING CLASS" now takes that to mean just a verb, with no sense of it being the noun --a coin. So that our money can be paper. The Founder's wanted the Federal Money to be coin!

Coins are not centralized. A "dollar" -- that's a old Spanish measure of WEIGHT of gold -- is a dollar of gold, no matter how quickly the Congress can pass bills spending money -- in a gold coin system they'd have to beg us for gold.

Today -- not. They take our wealth at will by whimsy of the printing press and CPU's execution of programmed EFT, in oer the network. We have no recourse. Our individual monies and stores are naked - raped and abused.