These occurrences described in this recent article may indicate that people are garbage. Or it may indicate that economic pressures are at this time bearing down on some who, at the margin, are the first to abandon scruples they would otherwise maintain. Could it be that these who steal copper grounding rods and aluminum siding are those who might have worked in a factory that closed down only to reopen in Mexico or China? I don't know what their story is.
It is not just copper that is expensive. Now it is nickel. Nickel soars Everything is expensive, health care, energy, housing, everything.
Every time you measure the value of something, you must measure the value of it relative to something else. When you measure the value of copper relative to the U.S. Dollar, you imagine for practical reasons the value of the U.S. Dollar over time to be fixed, or constant. This produces the illusion of copper "going up." But if you measure the value of the U.S. Dollar relative to copper, and imagine copper to be fixed in value over time, the illusion that the dollar is going down is produced.
The illusion is in that when the values of two things go up or go down together, they will both appear to be parallel and constant. Or if one goes up while the other goes down, their divergence will be exaggerated.
The fact is, nothing is ever fixed in value, but some things can be more fixed, and less volatile than other things. Gold has a reputation for being the numeraire par excellence, because of its, to coin a term, inertia of value. By inertia, I mean it would be much much more difficult than other commodities or fiduciary instruments to get its value to rise and fall abruptly.
The U.S. Dollar has very little inertia because it is not "primary money," which only gold and silver coin can be. The U.S. Dollar is low-order, low-class money, a fiduciary instrument, fiat money, and debt based. The total volume of fiat money can increase rapidly and the purchasing power of it be diminished as fast.
To reduce the illusory effects produced by comparing small numbers of commodities, increase the number so that they average out. Create a basket of commodities and compare that to your fiat money. I submit that all things appearing to be more expensive, your "basket," should be your standard, your "zero line" on the graph, and the value of your U.S. Dollar be compared to that. In this case you will see the value of your fiat money go down exponentially. And that won't be illusory. Compare it to gold, and gold is not going down. Gold preserves value. The U.S. dollar loses value prodigously.
Iron (manhole covers, railings) = purchasing power.
Aluminum (siding, cans) = purchasing power.
Copper (wire, grounding rods, pipes) = purchasing power.
These people who are stealing metal scrap are actually, stealing purchasing power, and monetizing it, extralegally. They may be doing it out of desperation, as the Argentines did. Or they may be doing it out of greed.
But either way, they are doing it because the purchasing power of the U.S. Dollar is, because of abuse and mismanagement, being depreciated so rapidly that metals are being spontaneously monetized. A grounding rod, copper pipes, copper wire, is like a whole bunch of pennies, back when the pennies were still copper. Pennies used to be iron as well. There is a reason for that. Iron has value. Less value per pound than gold or silver, but it has value. The same applies to all these metals.
That this scrap scavenging is happening here, is a sign of a sick economy, and inflationary times. You can denounce the scavengers, the thieves, but don't fail to make the connection between their bad behavior, and the degrading condition of our economy.
Well said.
that's the long way to go about explaining it. you could also blame it on contractors trying to get uber cheap material. its been done alot, especially at new work sites. guys will hit new builds at night grabbing materials, tools, anything they can, then turn around and use them, charging people less because it didn't cost them anything.
of course if the MSM reported it, it would probably read "contractors, hit by high gas prices resort to alternative sources of building materials"