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Again, you're just glossing over everything. Stocks in the Fed are the way to participate for the membership FDIC-insured banks. They don't confer the power to set the policy. Also, your list is just a pure BS from a conspiracy site.

http://www.usagold.com/federal... - here's a nice discussion.

Oh god, you're insane.

- the number of logical fallacies you have displayed in these threads leads me to believe you are not very good at providing factual argumentation, you do not back up your conclusions with any actual evidence, but you like to jump to them.

Money only has value to the extent that people are prepared to accept particular amounts.

- you didn't pay attention to the data, did you? US dollar has been losing value steadily, and since the Fed was created in 1913 it lost 98% of it (more than that now.) Pay attention to the data, otherwise you'll look foolish.

"Counterfeit" money is some instrument which you claim to have particular features but which does not have those features.

- counterfeit. Money that's not genuine. Imitation of money.

US dollars that are passed around by the Fed have such exact features. Every new dollar printed is worth less than any dollar in existence, so every new dollar is NOT like any previous dollar. It is not genuine.

A dollar from 1950 is not the same as dollar from 1918. It is also different from dollar in 2011. The difference between them is staggering. With 2011 dollars you can buy 1/20th of what you could buy for the same amount in 1912 when we talk about commodities: wheat, cotton, rice, pork, coffee etc., and yes, gold. If you are interested to see what real money looks like, here are some pictures. for $20.67 you could have about 2.41 troy oz of gold.

There are many reasons why gold is real money and why in most languages the world for money is actually 'gold' or some form of it. You can't change the facts, you see.

Money which is not backed by a gold standard is not "counterfeit".

- money that is not backed by ANYTHING is counterfeit. For example Chinese currency is 'backed' by their reserves of US dollars/debt. Their problem is that US dollars/debt is backed by nothing, so they chose a wrong backing, but their money is not counterfeit in itself. Of-course if they continue on path of printing as much as they get of the US dollars flowing into their vaults, then it's not really any better than being backed by nothing. In case of Chinese, they are a producer nation and as such they immediately suffer the consequence of higher prices for the levels of inflation they are responsible for. It looks like they may have a revolt on their hands if they don't stop printing and causing massive price hikes. They will have to stop printing and will have to re-evaluate their currency in amount of gold they have. This is going to happen sometime soon.

Use of emotive language doesn't prove anything.

- I don't see where is 'emotive language' used by me at all, but I wonder when is it that you are going to present any proof of anything at all in any of your comments?

What backing does gold have? You've just changed the problem from one of the government being able to print more money - responsibly or irresponsibly - to inflation created by the mining of gold or deflation created by a growing economy lacking gold.

- deflation is a good thing for an economy, as people gain purchasing power. It's only bad for governments, as they have to give their debts back, and they don't like to do that in real money while they do like to live beyond their means.

I provided a link on top, where you can go to learn at least something from this thread, something about gold and its value. Of-course you are ready to dismiss it, after all, it's only history of the evolution of human economy. What you do not realize is that the fiat system without backing by a recognizable, unchangeable, accessible, moderately

What about the entire Austrian school, which holds that government meddling is what caused the crisis and more meddling can only make things worse? That answer does not address the question. The question asked for a specific "serious economist or capitalist", not a generic "school." Is there a specific person representing this "Austrian school" who is quoted in a reliable source as saying that no action was a valid alternative?

 
  How about Greenspan himself? Once upon a time, he was no big fan of the Federal Reserve, and even blamed it in part for the Great Depression.

You seem to be under the impression that all the banks just failed had the ability to print money. If they had, do you think they would have failed?

Printing too much money doesn't cause this kind of crisis, which is actually about a shortage of money. What printing too much money does is cause inflation. That's how the German hyperinflation happened. During that period, the German economy roared right along, and everybody was employed, even though they were paid with worthless paper.

Is Allen Greenspan enough of a "serious, respected economist" for you? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan#Greenspan_and_Objectivism http://www.gold-eagle.com/greenspan011098.html http://www.usagold.com/gildedopinion/greenspan.html

Like Alan Greenspan?

You might also consider reading a paper by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, called Gold and Economic Freedom, which suggests that the central banks might not always know what they're doing, or at least always do the right thing...

Correction: Ron Paul's prediction of the dot com bubble bursting was under the the 4th paragraph under the "7/22/97" section.

He believes that the fetus/baby is an individual, too, with the same rights as any other individual. In the case of partial birth abortion, I don't know how anyone can disagree.

Ever heard of a thing called inflation? That is from not being on the gold standard
"No, it wasn't. We haven't been on the gold standard for decades and inflation has been very low. Besides, there is a much, much better, more plentiful standard: oil, which is traded in dollars."

http://www.gold-eagle.com/editorials_05/waltzek122 405.html

We have never had inflation from fiat currency?? From 1913, when the Federal Reserve was created, $.04 (4 cents) has become today's $1. Secondly, we've been off the gold standard since 1913; that just ended totally in the '70s, and inflation had already started due to not being completely on the gold standard.

http://inflationdata.com/inflation/Inflation_Rat e/HistoricalInflation.aspx?dsInflation_currentPage =2

According to that link, we've had 95% inflation since 1982. (Keep in mind that inflation compounds, just like interest.)

http://mwhodges.home.att.net/inflation.htm

"a dollar in 1950 will buy only 12 cents worth of goods today, 88% less than before"

If you want to read some further ramblings from another "nitwit", here is Alan Greenspan's essay on why the US should remain on the gold standard. As chairman of the Fed, he said that he still believed in what he'd written even though his job did the opposite. Man, that Greenspan guy, he sure was a nitwit if there ever was one. He wasn't a highly respected academic or intellectual or the best Fed chairman ever, nope, he was just a nitwit. In fact, since for years he was considered the leading economic authority in America, America is just full of these "economic nitwits"!

http://www.usagold.com/gildedopinion/greenspan.htm l

About that oil thing, oil is a diminishing resource and OPEC has made serious threats to sell it in euros.

"If we can reinvent the car, imagine the jobs we can create." said bill sponsor Rep. Bob Inglis, R-S.C."

Who's this "we" he's talking about? Politicians never actually do anything except take credit for others' work while taxing and inflating them to the poorhouse in the process.

(But, hey, at least after being taxed/inflated into the poorhouse you'll have a whole plethora of welfare programs to choose from.)

Are you talking about this conspiracy theory? If so, then do you have a rebuttal to my link? I'm honestly interested...

However there is an especially insidious reason to believe this market will be quite limited this time around, compared even to the depression of the 1930's, and that is the nature of the individuals in whose hands the net assets are concentrated.

When Greenspan decided to depart from his gold standard by keeping interest rates high relative to gold during the crash he in effect decided to concentrate net asset ownership in the hands of people who don't necessarily have the best of characters -- indeed they are far from the ideal of heroic capitalists so promoted by Alan Greenspan himself when he was a devotee of Ayn Rand's.

As I stated in a white paper posted to sci.space in 1992 (resulting from having spent a few years doing politics in Washington to promote commercial incentives for space launch companies):

Just as important, capital welfare severely distorts the
optimization of asset ownership in society by placing, as a
matter of public policy, ever more assets under the control of
those who already have the most assets. Capitalism expresses its
worst potentials when capital welfare debilitates the character
of the wealthy while it gives them ever more economic authority.
This asset centralization impoverishes the population at large,
ending with a collapse in consumer demand. Supply-side theory
fails to predict this collapse because it fails to deal with the
fact that the wealthy are just as prone to character erosion by
welfare as are the poor. It is even more destructive than
welfare for the poor because it corrupts the decision makers in
the economy. In the face of collapsing consumer demand and
capital welfare, acquisition of more capital assets is promoted
over the productive use or investment of those assets.

Political rhetoric defining "the rich" or "the wealthy" as those
with high levels of income or capital appreciation, focuses
public sentiment against the most productive members of society
and away from the centralization of net assets as the underlying
problem.

The incentive for productivity in the economy, left after the
disincentives of capital welfare are subtracted, is the long-term
economic growth rate minus the interest rate on the national
debt. When the interest rate being paid on the national debt
equals the growth rate of the economy, the fruits of all
productivity are being confiscated to pay capital welfare and the
incentives for productive investment and labor disappear. When
the incentives for productivity become negative due to capital
welfare in excess of the economic growth rate, wealth is
structurally centralized at the expense of others in the economy.
The absolute level of net assets owned by the general population
actually decreases so as to increase the net assets of the
wealthy. This not only removes all incentives for production and
entrepreneurial investment from the economy, but consumer demand
collapses as credit is liquidated to pay for necessities.
Depression ensues. It is under these circumstances that demands
for socialist intervention in the economy via "pub

If the US government increased its budget to 7 trillion next year (creating massive deficit spending, resulting in hyperinflation), how long would your faith in that dollar last? Or if they reduced and balanced the budget, and the deflationary pressures that are currently in effect sent us into a depression... how long would you accept the dollar?

You'd have to be terminally thick to think stock options and other indirect employee benefits from Microsoft were worth the paper they're written on, in the long run.

`Fraud! ' came the cry! Microsoft overvalues shares.

Nett worth is a linear measure, donation is time-dependent. A typical single mother will have a net worth of close to zero dollars (and not always on the positive side of that), so anything she gives would by your measure be essentially infinite.

Try rating Trey's donations against his income and when you're finished doing that, have a closer look at the charities he gives to and how he does that giving.

Y'know, if you hadn't over-reached yourself and used that word `all' in front of `legal', you might have escaped unpunished for that one sentence. However, read this and weep. There's a lot more elsewhere.

Sorry, what was it that your clueless comments prove?

...even though the officials say that it is the main reason for the decision.

The big win for Mexico will be in accessible systems. Education doesn't happen in schools, education happens where people have uninhibited access to things. You can spend as much money as you like on schools and only make the educational situation worse (the USA has thoroughly proven this).

Poverty programs also have a very patchy history.

Installing systems that people can actually do stuff with will only impact a few percent of the users at first, but as more discover the power now at their fingertips - and more importantly, the documentation inherent in the source code, and the ability to make incremental changes (``experiments'') - the effect will snowball.

Whether it snowballs enough for Mexico to survive when Microsoft's massive financial fraud kills Microsoft and possibly also the US economy, is a different question. But certainly they will be better off.

Either way, it is entirely possible that ``destroying the economy they live in'' is the best possible large-scale move, since it will be replaced by something else.

The best training by far is actually doing stuff, not meta-doing stuff in a classroom.

The best business incentive is wanting to do it, and knowing that you can, and knowing that there is some point in starting and running a business. Linux will help to provide tools helpful for many small businesses, and so increase the incentive to start one.

BTW, I think the ``5 MS developers'' quip is a pretty staggering bit of imperialist ignorance. Are there any Mexicans reading this who would care to comment?