Posted on 05/22/2019 2:57:48 AM PDT by Kaslin
Look at the dollar bills in your wallet. They say they are "legal tender for all debts."
But are they? What makes them valuable? What makes them worth anything?
Each bill says, "In God We Trust." But God won't guarantee their value.
The $20 bill depicts the White House. Congress is on $50s. But neither guarantees the value of our dollars.
I wouldn't trust them if they did. I don't trust politicians, generally, but I especially don't trust them with money. Since President Richard Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard, the dollar has lost 80 percent of its value.
So what makes money trustworthy?
A new PBS documentary, "In Money We Trust?" points out that money is only useful if people agree that it can be trusted.
I made a short version of the documentary.
To earn trust, money should be "reliable, like a clock," says Forbes magazine publisher Steve Forbes. "It has to be fixed in value: 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute. Imagine if that floated each day. That would make life chaotic."
Throughout history, people needed a way to assign a fixed value to money.
"The best mechanism for this would be some kind of commodity that's permanent, easily transported, easily understood by everyone. And that medium was, of course, gold," says anthropologist Jack Weatherford in the documentary.
But gold isn't the only thing to which people have pegged the value of money. They've also linked it to things such as silver, crops and salt. Salt-based trade is where we got the word "salary."
But gold created "a kind of mobility in people's lives that they never had before," says Weatherford.
But gold is heavy -- hard to carry around. That limited trade.
So people created banks.
"The Knights Templar developed a system where they said, 'Well, you can just deposit your money here with us and then, when you need some, withdraw it from your account,'" explains economist Nathan Lewis. "This enabled the peasants to travel Europe without being in danger of being robbed."
That meant people could engage in more trade.
"You could ... sell a bond in London," says Lewis, "and build a railroad in India."
The increased trade made the world much richer.
In the United States, the first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, fixed the dollar to gold and silver. The whole world came to trust the dollar as a reliable indicator of value.
But governments like to enrich themselves by debasing currency, making it appear the government has more wealth than it really does -- spreading the same wealth over more units of currency.
The evil emperor Nero did it in ancient Rome, says Weatherford. "They would call in all the coins, melt them down, reissue them -- of course, with his picture on them," but with less gold in each coin. Rome's decline was tied to the decrease in the trustworthiness of its currency.
"When you change the value of money, you're stealing property," says Forbes.
That happened in Germany after World War I. The victorious nations demanded that Germany pay for the cost of the war. So, Germany just printed more bills. That created massive inflation. That inflation helped elect Hitler.
Governments rarely resist the temptation to print more currency.
During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt confiscated private supplies of gold.
Without a clear legal peg of each dollar to a specific amount of gold, the government could print more currency. That only added to the financial instability.
After World War II, governments returned to gold-based currency. "Those two decades," says Lewis, "were the most successful economically of any time."
The documentary argues that a return to the gold standard is what's needed to have reliable money.
Today, most economists disagree.
But "In Money We Trust?" will give you a new appreciation for how important it is that we get this right.
As technologist George Gilder concludes in the documentary, "All this is the struggle for trust."
One basic problem with gold/silver currency for governments is that the wealth becomes detached from any national government or its policies; crossing borders with those metals makes you wealthy in any country.
With hundreds of trillions in unfunded liabilities, and trillions more in undisciplined spending, our government is taxing using the “back door” of inflation and currency devaluation.
Until we can spend only what we tax our dollars will be worth less tomorrow than they are today.
Tie the dollar back to gold. It will be painful, more than taking the parents credit card back from the teenager, but it is necessary.
One major problem with gold and silver as money is today is too easy to fake.
People buy that ‘gold’ from ‘Rosland Capital’, pay someone else to store it, and when they go to sell it find out that some is fake.
Good luck getting the people hawking the ‘gold’ to stand behind the product.
You can send all your worthless $20's and $50's to me. I'll dispose of them for you.
Our money has no inherent value...only what we ascribe to it.
That goes for dollars, rials, euros, pesos, any money at all.
It has become how we can spend spend spend with no repercussions as along as people will continue to believe in their value. I do not know that it has to be “backed” by anything at all.
Cyber currencies such as bitcoin are extensions of that idea: they are simply imaginary based on following a set rituals based on nothing.
Maybe the Chinese have stumbled onto something: Money will mean nothing and your basic needs will be provided. Your wealth and value,though, will be your social rating score.
That will be true government control.
Paper money is faked as well.
I’m not talking about carrying fake Chinese gold & silver bars around - I’m talking about using the money we used in the past, which contained gold & silver. When you cross a border, the person on the other side doesn’t care whose face is on the money, or what language - they only care about the content.
In a world where the US wants the most stable currency to be the US dollar, we’d lose that position if every country continued using the precious metals because it would be irrelevant who issued it.
“I’m talking about using the money we used in the past, which contained gold & silver. When you cross a border, the person on the other side doesn’t care whose face is on the money, or what language - they only care about the content.”
The problem is that today people can in fact fake that gold so good that only a expert with lots of expensive equipment can tell the fakes from real gold coins.
True, but the same problem persists with paper money. When the US changed the $100 years ago, I was in another country a couple of months later and they already wouldn’t accept them - too many fakes.
I don’t have all the answers, but I’d rather have the metal than a piece of paper.
I would rather have the one that was backed by the US government because it is more trusted than gold that could be fake.
“Gold is heavy - hard to carry around.”
Not this %%+&@ again.
Do electric cars use less energy and therefore pollute less than gasoline cars? It's easy to determine. Add up the total cost of ownership. If it is more, they are using more energy. The same applies to solar, wind, hydro, natural gas, and nuclear energy.
Gold requires a stable amount of energy to find and mine from the Earth, which is why it can be used to indirectly store energy use data. That is all there is to know about money data stored as gold.
Handling government currency devaluation is easy: move out of the currency into something else such as land, stocks, energy ownership. Sometimes even better is owe money that can be paid back in the future with devalued currency.
God created all energy in this universe, from which everything we know of is made from. God is pure energy. So really it does all tie back to trusting in God.
As a practical matter, the government doesn’t back the paper currency either.
If you get stuck with a fake $100 bill, nobody will reimburse you.
The currency is valuable in part because it is useful to pay taxes. As people borrow from banks, more currency is loaned into existence. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s kind of how it works.
Those intricately printed paper bills are worth nothing in themselves. However, there is a good chance that you can exchange them for items of real value, and so that’s why we keep them.
But they lose value with time. Inflation is built into the currency system. My first job paid $1.65 an hour and an apartment was $25 a month. There is no way to avoid the loss of purchasing power. Government has built inflation into the system by printing more and more bills and “creating” more electronic money.
That doesn't strike me as a problem.
I'm as much in favor of the nation-state as anyone, but I don't think people should be hostage to a particular government's currency manipulation.
In God we trust. The rest pay cash.
I’ve long believed that money — more accurately, wealth or capital — is a form of energy. As such, it must obey the laws of energy.
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