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Get with the times. something like goldmoney lets people exchange weight of gold without ever even having to convert it to any other currency. You can price your products, services and labour in weight of gold, governments and their fiat can go fuck themselves.

I give you.... Gold Money. There you go, no need to move gold out of vault and to 'recertify it' to transact in it.

"Where do people get this stuff?

Oh, you know, no where in particular. It's not like Milton Friedman won a nobel prize for it or anything. It's not like that's how they teach Economic History at, say, MIT and the University of Chicago. It's not like your own response refuting this also advances the same claim:

"It is interesting to note that during the Depression real wage rates generally increased due to the fact that prices of goods fell more quickly than monetary wages; this seems to be a general trend for deflationary economies. The widespread unemployment of the era was due to attempts by the government and government-supported unions to prohibit any decrease in monetary wage-rages. It should be obvious that if real wage rates (the price of labor) are increasing due to fixed monetary wages and falling prices the result will be a decrease in the demand for labor, and thus unemployment. If the real wage rates had remained at market levels (with roughly the same "purchasing power" as before the Depression) unemployment would not have been nearly so much of an issue; it would have been limited to "frictional" unemployment as people transitioned from the industries swollen by the inflationary malinvestments of the boom period into more productive lines of work."

Or, in other words, the massive deflation, in conjunction with price controls that would not allow prices (most particularly wages) to adjust to the new conditions they had created, stopped us from pulling out of a recession and instead sunk into a depression. It's interesting that half of your entire text following your thesis "Neither deflation nor the gold standard caused the Great Depression" is about how deflation contributed to The Depression.

This is just the summary; for the full analysis of the events leading up to and contributing to the Great Depression see A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz. America's Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard is pretty thoroughly discredited by modern economists. I understand why you feel the way you do believing in that book, because like Ron Paul, it advocates a gold standard. Note that, in my post, I didn't say that the gold standard caused the depression, I said deflation caused it, which, together with price controls, is the predominant view among today's economists, be they Monetarists, Keynsenians, Neo-keynsians, or even Austrian School (Rothbard excepted.) And there's no doubt, looking at the price of gold, that we would have suffered severe deflation over the past five years if we'd been on a gold standard, as over the past five years, US dollar monetary inflation has been about 1%, while the relative value of gold with respect to the dollar has increased 50%.

Still, I it's surprising that you imagine where people get looney ideas about deflation and the gold standard being involved with the depression even when they read discredit books like Rothbard's, which says on pages 14-15:

"The depression phase begins with the end of inflation, and can proceed without any further changes from the side of money. Deflation has almost always set in, however. In the first place, the inflation took place as an expansion of bank credit; now, the financial difficulties and bankruptcies among borrowers cause banks to pull in their horns and contract credit. Under the gold standard, banks have another reason for contracting credit--if they had ended inflation because of a gold drain to foreign countries. The threat of this drain forces them to contract their outstanding loans. Furthermore the rash of business failures may cause questions to be raised about the banks; and banks, being inherently bankrupt anyway, can ill afford such questions.11 Hence, the money supply will contract because of actual bank runs, and because banks will tighten their position in fear of such runs." This

An easy way to get into physical gold and silver is http://www.goldmoney.com/

People use PayPal because Ebay demand that they do. Crucially paypal means that you don't have to give bank details to customers/suppliers.

There's e-gold, GoldMoney etc. They're basically banks, can do instant payments. The difference being you can actually get your hands on the gold.

true you cant print money out of thin air with a gold standard... but im not sure it was a bad thing to move away from the gold standard, i mean theres only so much gold and such... and deflation can be good, but i do agree it comes with recession... hey heres another link for you... they got a write up in busienss 2.0 and its an amusing business, if you like the gold standard youd like this...

http://goldmoney.com/

be sure and look at their "in the news" like section, it shows its legit...i have debated about putting some away in there...

Oh really? Well... look at this chart on the price of gold over only the past TEN years.

http://goldmoney.com/en/charts/usd120.png

But http://e-gold.com/, http://goldmoney.com/, http://e-bullion.com/ and http://pecunix.com/ have not flopped.

There is a universe of no-chargeback payment systems out there. Many of them also seem to have the property of being based around precious metals. The first online was e-gold in 1996. Others have arrived since then of somewhat similar flavour: e-bullion.com, pecunix.com, libertydollar.org, goldmoney.com.
A good comparison chart is here.
BTW, I see that magnatune.com supports one of these now, but ebay is still PayPal only - no surprise.

E-gold or Goldmoney are payment systems based on transfers of ownership of real physical gold, denominated by mass. Goldmoney scales down to 0.001g (which is worth just over one US cent at todays wartime-high gold prices) and all the way up to infinity. E-gold scales up likewise to infinity and down further (to about 4/100 of a cent at todays prices), and has an e-silver version if you want to go yet smaller.

...because tax is literally and only theft. One robber is a thief. Ten robbers are thieves. A nationful of voting robbers-by-proxy are thieves, and entitled to precicely nothing.

You earned your property, keep it, by any means you can.

I recommend GoldMoney

• e-gold The first and biggest
• GoldMoney More offshore
• E-BullionWe try harder because we're smaller

Well, not ALL capital is based on imaginary stuff. There's a small but growing market for the real thing, too. (And just so this doesn't descend into absolute-shameless-plug-land, e-gold just got some competition, called Goldmoney that's also based on grams of the filthy yellow metal). I've spent the last few years of my life studying the subject of Money pretty closely, and I'm still learning a lot. I think that electronic privately issued currencies (not just gold-backed ones, either) will change the world rapidly, and I hope Mr. DeSoto is right about helping the poor.

As more folks get used to it, I predict "grams of gold" will be the currency of the future on the internet if-and-when the dollar ever falters. As usual, anyone on Slashdot who wants can contact me and try a small spot of e-gold, as I want to encourage programmers to play with it (and the competition, even, but I can't give theirs away!). Thanks.
JMR