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To: justshutupandtakeit
So it looks like we are in agreement that a fixed money supply would reflect progress/technological change through increased purchasing power. As to your comment that:

History has shown what happens to attempts to have a Gold Standard. It doesn't work.

This is pretty cavalier. For 5000 years (minus about 30) money was a commodity. It worked fine, except those who understood money best got government to grant them a money creating monopoly. They also convinced enough others that this all made sense.

[a gold standard] gives a natural advantage to countries with mines. Why should the world accept a system which empowers South AFrica or Russia merely because of metal deposits?

Nonsense. First see my post 105. Then, tell me why you prefer the current system which gives Russia credit created from nothing that they can NEVER repay anyway to buy goods rather than have them mine gold for those goods. I prefer an honest monetary system to a debt based fraud.

179 posted on 07/24/2002 3:19:40 PM PDT by Deuce
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To: Deuce
For the last 3000 yrs or so States used gold to make money. They stamped it, forged it shaped it marked it. Often there was no uniform weight for each coin. It was initially made into money while the minter took a little "seigniorage" thus it was less than face value. Study of Roman monetary history shows how the authorities regularly debased the coinage and reduced the metal content. This was a standard practice for every monetary policy based on metals. Thus, even the metal coins were a "fiat" currency since they often contained far less gold than the face value. It appears there was no such thing as "money" until the Lydians began to make coins from gold/silver alloys about 3000 yrs. ago.

What leads you to the conclusion that a chronic undersupply of money is a system that "worked fine"? That is nothing like the history I have read. It was so bad in N. America that the colonists used tobacco as money and wampum among other things.

Nor have governments given anyone a monopoly on creating money. Every time a loan is made by a banker money is created and there is no monopoly of this power. Governments convinced no one that banks make sense, this was done by the experts who understood finance such as Hamilton and the great writers in economic theory such as Mill, Ricardo, Smith and Marshall.

There is nothing in your post 105 which I need review merely a confession of faith. It has to be faith since a review of history clearly shows that the gold standard was never actually in practice and the scarcity of the commodity forced country after country to allow other money to be created. In actuality, gold cannot be used by itself as money since it is far too soft. It must be mixed with other metal to make it hard enough to use and prevent "clipping" by sharpers.

By 1692 England was forced to charter the Bank of England to finance the government's wars. A hundred yrs. later Hamilton brought the American economy into the modern world (out of the world of superstition) by creating the National Bank which worked so well its deadly enemies dropped their opposition.

There is nothing "honest" about gold that is mere rhetoric with nothing to base it on. Holding that "honest" money since 1980 would have cost you 2/3s of its value. Better to have held the "dishonest" dollars which now would purchase 3x the quantity of "honest" gold. Honestly, LoL.
275 posted on 07/25/2002 9:17:42 AM PDT by justshutupandtakeit
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