So, here we sit in Rand's world of Atlas Shrugged. Post the time of gold and silver confiscation. Rand's characters still placed a high value on gold, viewed gold as the commodity of work as explained in the Money Speech. Many are collecting, buying, and hoarding gold in anticipation of the ultimate collapse and a hedge against inflation. But the reality is our dollars ceased to be backed by gold a long time ago and we converted to a debt system.
So what is to be made of the sage advice from the money speech in our current times. I am one of those folks described by Trafficant that has never, “earned real money” in my entire life.
When I worked as a bank teller in the mid-90’s every now and then someone would bring in an old Silver Certificate bill. Usually it was kids who got it from a relative for a birthday or holiday etc. Cool looking at the time with the blue ink etc. And they would deposit them into their kids savings accounts. I often wondered if they could still be taken to the Federal Reserve and be claimed for the real silver. It was one of those foolish questions I never asked at the bank...I wish I had. But the point of sharing this is to demonstrate and show how millions of Americans have no clue what real money is.
As the time is approaching and those who have hoarded away silver and gold, I wonder if Americans will be able to comprehend the silver dollar handed to them in exchange for a loaf of bread vs. the fiat(serf) dollars we've all earned all our lives? Will the American mind be able to wrap around the idea of real money?
I handle money in exchange for goods and services every day. There are times that Rand's Money Speech and Money History collide in my mind as I take and tuck those fiat dollars into my cash register. Each dollar in denominations of $1,$5,$10, $20, and the occasional $50 or $100 is servitude, is the debt of my customers, is the debt of our Nation. It is drawn on an overdrawn account in a grand scheme of economic “kiting.”
Yesterday I had a little girl, maybe 5 or 6, stop in with her Mom. As I totaled the transaction and stated the total was x dollars with tax. The little girl who was paying asked me, “What's tax?” It took all my strength from blurting out the debt we were placing on her generation, her servitude to the Nation. Instead, I looked at Mom and said, “Your Mom can explain it to you.”
The Money Speech teaches us that money holds no value to the looters of the system. It is those who produce that put the value to those pieces of paper in our wallets, savings accounts, and even in the Stock markets around the world. The dollar is not backed by the gold in Ft. Knox, but the good faith of the people of the United States. It is backed by our productivity, by our very real labor. And that labor is being devalued by the Federal Reserve, by Timothy Geithner, and finally this week we gave away our sovereignty at the G20 to the rest of the world.
Any FReepers out there hiring and paying in real gold or silver?
I make no pretense about being a great thinker. I am a practical man who has made his living manufacturing physical products, from screws and fasteners to radio transmitters and at one time even semi-automatic weapons. And I have learned the hard way that every effect has a cause. For every part out of tolerance there is a dull cutting tool. For every machine that wont do what it was designed to do there is a faulty gear or a broken bolt.For every product that wont work there is something inside it that is screwed up. As we used to say,there are no "bad angles" coming down to screw things up....all problems are caused by something real and tangible.
Now, that is not to say that there are not philosophical and spiritual underlying causes to problems. But as someone who has lived a life of finding solutions to manufacturing problems when you cannot go back to the drawing board my whole orientation is to attack the actual situation and jerry rig it to fix it and move on. I am not an engineer. I am a production man who lives in the present and must exist in the real world with real customers and real deadlines. Which brings me to my favorite character in AS, Francisco d'Anconia.
That man took direct action. It wasn't a final solution to the underlining philosophical problems of society...that was left to John Galt....but he hit at every perpetrator he could get at by bankrupting his company and taking them down with him.
So if the Beast is the Federal Reserve Central Bank that creates money out of thin air and forces our people to take fiat "money" and stay slaves in debt to the Central bankers and live or die on the banker's "Credit Scores" to get loans then the solution seems to this practical man rather simple;
1. Don't tear up your credit cards....no, max them out....tear up your credit card BILLS. Just stop paying them. Don't waste your time filing bankrupcy because that just puts you into a system that is rigged against you. Just stop paying and go cash.
2. If they control our behavior by making us slaves to their "Credit Scores" then repudiate your good credit by not paying any debts to the banks and credit card companies.
3.Use their funny money against them by cashing out all your bank accounts, CD's, T-Bills, Stocks and Bonds and use their fiat money for your living expenses.
4. And tell the Federal Reserve that you would appreciate it if they would pay off all your "Bank to You" loans with their fiat currency the same way they paid off all the "Bank to Bank" loans.
Going Galt today may just mean to repudiate their system of slavery by taking them down with us. Just like d'Ancionia. And then the real producers in society can pick up the pieces after the collapse.
We are only victims of the system because we have given them our sanction by playing their game of good little debtor's always trying to pay them back. Sorry boys, you're on your on and you wont have our productivity to feed on anymore!
Anyway, thats how it looks this sunday morning.
The employer agreed to pay his people in gold and silver eagles. For example, let's say an employee earned $1100 in a pay period. He paid the employee 1 gold eagle, worth around $950 at the time, and the remainder of $150 was paid in silver eagles, which were worth around $22 at the time. So far, so good.
But when it came to reporting to the IRS, the employer reported the face value of the coins. The face value of a gold eagle is $50, and the face value of a silver eagle is $1. So for $1100 in gold and silver, the employee's taxable wages were $56. This had the effect of permitting the employee to opt out of the income tax system.
The IRS took the employer to court. The employer's lawyer brought up two Supreme Court decisions from the post-Civil War era that said the face value of the coin of the realm was sacred. Under those opinions, what the employer did was legal, and how his employees reported their tax liability was legal. The jury hung on all counts.
Granted, the IRS could refile, or seek a case in a jurisdiction more sympathetic to the government, or ask Congress to exempt gold and silver eagles from the face value condition. But in the absence of that, the IRS doesn't have a case.
Shortly after, a gold clause in a 1912 contract related to a real estate situation in New York City was reactivated, after having been dormant since FDR in 1933.
As a joke, shortly thereafter, a multimillion dollar apartment in Manhattan was priced in both dollars and ounces of gold.
Soon, it won't be a joke.