you are in a mental trap, the kind of trap people fall into when they argue for the homunculus mind theory: what is mind, if the external signal are just observed by it, so something has to be inside you to observe the signals, but it's not 'you', it has to be reduced further into infinity.
Things do have intrinsic value, as people need to survive. So wealth are those things: food, energy, clothing, medication, etc.
Money is not in itself one of those things, it is the store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account to be able to get the things that you need to survive (thus things that actually do have value in themselves for you, and if you disregard that value, you'll die from hunger and cold and sickness and you won't be asking that question any longer.)
The value of gold as money, is that you can get the things for it, that are necessary for your survival. Whether this value is attached to gold or is intrinsic - doesn't matter. What matters is that it's true, and there is no further space to reduce it.
gov't can do whatever it wants actually, the people are getting rid of the fake money, that the gov't is printing, and eventually the gov't WILL have to sell their reserves, as gov'ts will become totally insolvent, and the welfare state mentality will force the reserves to be sold to keep the welfare flowing for yet another day.
Gold is money. Cattle is not money, it's not suitable to be money, but you can barter with it, the problem will be setting a price that makes any sense relative to other things.
Money is store of value (cattle is not really, once you eat it, it's gone). It's possible to use cattle as store of value, but much more difficult, especially if you want to be able to move (be mobile).
Money is unit of account - try doing that with one cow. How will you decide what an egg is worth in cows? Pretty hard.
Money is means of trade - this you can do with cattle, but again, you have to find a willing partner for the trade to exchange for a cow or for part of a cow, and it's not good for long term exchanges, where you have to store part of a cow somehow, it gets messy.
Again, to clear it up for you: cattle is wealth and gold is money.
The proof is right under your nose (if you live in USA).
19 century: The value of dollar rose by a factor of 2. The prices were falling, so for example bread cost less with every passing year, however at the same time USA became the manufacturing powerhouse, and all that manufacturing and production allowed it to pay back the debts to the European countries that US took on to build the production capacity, and US consumer became the wealthiest in the world relative to his earnings.
What I don't want to do, is repeat the same thing 20 times over.
If they'd actually moved in lockstep between those two points, you might have something. Though I don't see how it would be any better at proving gold was money than that cotton was money.
and that's why you should go read the link I just posted in this comment in the first paragraph, it will explain to you what money is.
People see Federal Reserve Notes as money too.
- well, sure, but that's not money that can keep value and keep existing, it will be destroyed by the politicians, who print it.
What's bad about it, is that once it's destroyed, as in once people lose all faith in it completely, then it won't matter how much of it exists in circulation, even if 99% of it is removed from circulation then, nobody would want it anyway.
-- This thread is very large now, so if you want to make more claims about my positions and ability to respond to comments, just read the thread, I might have provided the response already.
2003: gold 350, cotton 50. 2011: gold 1500, cotton 200. The ratio holds. The price in USD goes up by x4. That's a better justification than 'gold is money'.
The prices in fiat currencies are determined in open market, and the market says that fiat is garbage.
As to 1981 - Volcker was a hero, really. Pushed the interest rates up to 18 or more percent, didn't he? Gold started at 35 in 1971 (well, that was the artificial price) and then it ended up in 250-350 territory until the nineties, when it started going up again based on loose monetary policy, free money by all the Fed chairmen and insane borrowing by the US gov't.
Funny, GS is not interested in having real money - they benefit immensely from US Fed printing and US Treasury buying, they are the front runners in that scheme. They benefited greatly from the housing bubble, that the US gov't inflated with cheap money, FHA, Freddie/Fannie, which caused the lax lending standards all over the place and allowed banks to repackage and securitize the terrible loans and mortgages because of the gov't guarantee.
No, GS is really not interested in 'gold bubble', they are trading up and down, they are manipulating the market, just like they did this month with Oil, first releasing 'forecast' that Brent will fall to 105 from 125, then buying on the rumor they started at 112 and then forecasting it will go back up to 120 or so, so suckers will be buying from them again, and they'll make the spread.
It's good to be GS, what can I say, good for them. Too bad for the pensions of folks, who are forced by gov't to hold their retirement money in those 401Ks
However if you think that gold and cotton are both in a bubble (and not somehow going up in price relative to the fiat, that is printed by the trillion) then explain the entire CRB, because all commodities and food and energy (everything that people actually use) are going up and have been for over a decade. You think it's a bubble, OK, trade that way. I believe US bond is in a huge bubble, and US dollar is on a verge of a collapse based on all the printing.
Production capacity is wealth. A wealthy economy, is economy that produces everything that people need and the prices are as low as possible based on the current maximum level of technology.
Economy that is poor, is economy that cannot provide its people with most of what they need.
By this definition the US economy is poor, as USA does not have production capacity to provide for its population's needs.
well, sure. But you are again, mixing terms. Cotton is a raw material - product, it's wealth. Gold is money. In some cases cotton can be more useful than gold: socks have cotton in them for example, you won't use gold for socks. But you can buy socks with gold.
With fiat you will buy less and less cotton over time, as fiat is printed by politicians, but with gold you'll buy at worst the same amount and hopefully if cotton production is increased, you'll get more for the same amount of gold tomorrow once that happens.
0. It cannot be printed by politicians to buy elections. 1. It's rare, but not too rare. 2. It's easy to test (chemically or with ultrasound for thick bars). 3. It's easily recognizable. 4. It has no major industrial use. 5. It does not change over time, drop it in the ocean, recover it centuries later and it's the same. 6. Easy to work with (easy to split, melt, mint coins, etc.) 7. It's stable, it does not explode, it's not a poison, not radioactive, not a gas, does not corrode, does not decay radioactively. 8. People like it, it looks nice.
Point is those ARE intrinsic values. Saying they are not is like falling into the homunculus theory of mind fallacy, where you expect things to be reduced forever, and this infinite regress would not answer the question of what is really your mind vs what is the observer. We are physical beings, not spirits, we live in physical world, and things we value are physical because they allow us to get things we need for survival.
Well, I build products and provide services as well, I'll take gold any day over any currency of any country. Now, your gov't makes it illegal to not accept legal tender and it creates various artificial boundaries to using real money, namely capital gains tax, which is unfairly taxing any increase in gold's value relative to your fiat currency, even though the only reason the gold's value in your currency is increasing is the inflation.
So by trying to avoid inflation, you become somebody to take advantage of. Of-course instead of storing value in gold, you can buy products today, so that when inflation that is created every day translates to higher prices, you'll have the advantage, that you already own the goods you need and you won't be taxed capital gains on that.
As to where am I paying in gold credits: J.P. Morgan accepts gold as collateral to counter-party debt. You can buy stocks at JPM with gold, that's what I am saying. There will be more and more banks doing this, and there will be more and more gold backed accounts and credit cards, and they will be preferred over any other type of credit or fiat.
As to 'full faith and credit of the US gov't" - I don't have that faith and US has no credit. The value of USD fell by huge amount since the Fed was created in 1913, since 2003 alone, the USD lost 75% of value.
Gold was 350/ounce, cotton was 50/pound. Now gold is 1500/ounce, cotton is over 200/pound. The ratio holds, the USD denominated price goes up.
Gold is money especially given that it's not good for anything much beyond that and some limited industrial/jewelry use, and yet based on all of its properties, people see it as money. It's not wealth, production capacity is wealth. Products are wealth. It's money. It definitely is much better money than any fiat.
Also you can't force people to hold US dollars and bonds once they realize what those things really are, especially now, that most of US spending is done on borrowed time and money, this includes the military.
Women are not as dumb as some would believe - they don't take fake money, they require the real deal, and screw the 'legal tender', which has to be accepted just because politicians say so.
However this is not needed if you simply hold an account in a bank, that would have your account backed with gold, you'd have a credit card or bank card from there, that's all. Of-course banks used to issue bank notes - actual gold promises for different amounts.
As to modern world requiring trust - you are right, and fiat cannot be trusted not because it's just paper, but because the printing presses are in the hands of politicians.
It's all about relative terms, you want to invest into something that will make you MORE money, it's called cost of opportunity, because if you don't provide products in competing economy, somebody else will. Sure, you'll have a fixed amount of money that will appreciate in value over time, but that's all you'll have.
In 19 century USA the value of US dollar was appreciating, the prices were falling due to HEAVY competition though.
This is the same reason that money printed by governments is worth something: we all agree that it is.
- this is true. Now, those of us who think that gov't printed fiat is worth nothing, move to the real money, that's all there is to it. I don't see fiat as worth anything. It certainly is worth less and less every day even for those who disagree with me, otherwise things wouldn't be constantly rising in price, all because the fiat is printed but nothing backs it up - neither production nor gold.
Gold is in the middle of a huge bubble right now.
- I've been hearing that for a decade. However there is a huge bubble, it's not in gold, it's in US government bonds (and bonds of other countries as well, but mostly US.)
If it were traded like a normal commodity it would be worth way less.
- it's a monetary metal, not a 'normal commodity' like oil or pork bellies.
Once people stop being so paranoid it is going to crash hard.
- no, once gold ounce gets to 1:1 ratio with Dow, then it would mean Dow is cheap enough to buy, but in fiat currencies, that are being printed there is no reason for it to 'crash hard'.
Also, since it is constantly being mined, it too is constantly getting devalued.
- it's being mined, not printed. They produce very little of it on grand schema of things. This cannot be said about fiat.
How much gold does it take to buy a loaf of bread?
- depends where you are, but somewhere around 1/1500 to 1/350 of a troy ounce per loaf is a good price range depending on where you live, I suppose.
For that matter, where can you buy a loaf of bread with gold?
- anywhere they take a credit card of a bank card?
And how do you measure out that small an amount of gold?
- you don't. You transfer gold credits.
Banks used to issue actual notes - pieces of paper fully backed by an amount of gold written on them. That's how you use gold for trade without carrying the heavy stuff around.
I never said that, so I am now asking you right back: why is wealth gold?
Now, what I said was that production capacity is wealth and gold is money. To your question about properties of gold in itself, there is a good primer on that right here, will take just over 4 minutes (there is a longer version, I don't have the link).
As to things being measured in gold after some cataclysmic event: I certainly would prefer gold to ANY currency at that point. History proves me correct, as during any war you could get things for gold, but not for currencies, which immediately became irrelevant.
Now, I said WEALTH is production capacity, so that is what people actually need, and if rifles and bread are what people need, then that's the real wealth. However gold is actual money - store of value, unit of account, means of trade. It's unchangeable, easy to test, easy to work with, easy to reclaim, rare enough, but not too rare, easily recognizable, does not have major industrial use, etc. It's pretty much made to be used money unlike anything else (there are other possibilities, but they have more drawbacks than gold in various ways.)
Last thing: French loaves are real wealth and gold is real money.
If you need a loaf of bread and there is no bread in vicinity at all, then you can't buy it with any money, including gold, but if there is a way to get some of that bread in exchange for something and you have gold, you stand a much better chance of getting that bread, than anybody with fiat in their pocket.
No, I don't need to pay gold at the register, it's not needed at all. However bank accounts and credit lines, etc., will be backed with gold again.
Is the world going to switch to the gold standard? What do you think it's doing all this time, the decade that is seeing gold reserves being grown by individuals and national banks?
BTW., the transition will be sudden and abrupt. Nobody wants "an orderly decline" - once you realize that the value is gone, and it's all going down and not up in real terms, why would you wait for your money to decline in value orderly?
Money is a store of value, unit of account and medium of exchange.
Fiat is the last thing that can do any of that, whenever it rises, it eventually falls. The thing holds value relative to other commodities (barring changes in production output) is gold.
1. Wealth is production capacity, money is gold. 2. There are enough countries in the world now, that are doing the right thing, lowering taxes, becoming more business friendly. USA is not one of them.
There is such thing as Gresham's law, and gov't decree only makes the matters worse due to capital flight. You can outlaw real money, but you can't make your fake money have any value artificially.
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I don't know if anybody wants to live in Lucerne, I don't mind though, but maybe I am not civilized enough.
you are in a mental trap, the kind of trap people fall into when they argue for the homunculus mind theory: what is mind, if the external signal are just observed by it, so something has to be inside you to observe the signals, but it's not 'you', it has to be reduced further into infinity.
Things do have intrinsic value, as people need to survive. So wealth are those things: food, energy, clothing, medication, etc.
Money is not in itself one of those things, it is the store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account to be able to get the things that you need to survive (thus things that actually do have value in themselves for you, and if you disregard that value, you'll die from hunger and cold and sickness and you won't be asking that question any longer.)
The value of gold as money, is that you can get the things for it, that are necessary for your survival. Whether this value is attached to gold or is intrinsic - doesn't matter. What matters is that it's true, and there is no further space to reduce it.
gov't can do whatever it wants actually, the people are getting rid of the fake money, that the gov't is printing, and eventually the gov't WILL have to sell their reserves, as gov'ts will become totally insolvent, and the welfare state mentality will force the reserves to be sold to keep the welfare flowing for yet another day.
A herd of cattle is real money
- no, you should pay attention to this thread if you are going to reply in it. Your cattle is wealth.
Gold is money.
Cattle is not money, it's not suitable to be money, but you can barter with it, the problem will be setting a price that makes any sense relative to other things.
Money is store of value (cattle is not really, once you eat it, it's gone). It's possible to use cattle as store of value, but much more difficult, especially if you want to be able to move (be mobile).
Money is unit of account - try doing that with one cow. How will you decide what an egg is worth in cows? Pretty hard.
Money is means of trade - this you can do with cattle, but again, you have to find a willing partner for the trade to exchange for a cow or for part of a cow, and it's not good for long term exchanges, where you have to store part of a cow somehow, it gets messy.
Again, to clear it up for you: cattle is wealth and gold is money.
The proof is right under your nose (if you live in USA).
19 century: The value of dollar rose by a factor of 2. The prices were falling, so for example bread cost less with every passing year, however at the same time USA became the manufacturing powerhouse, and all that manufacturing and production allowed it to pay back the debts to the European countries that US took on to build the production capacity, and US consumer became the wealthiest in the world relative to his earnings.
What do you mean 'I can't put it into words'?
What I don't want to do, is repeat the same thing 20 times over.
If they'd actually moved in lockstep between those two points, you might have something. Though I don't see how it would be any better at proving gold was money than that cotton was money.
and that's why you should go read the link I just posted in this comment in the first paragraph, it will explain to you what money is.
People see Federal Reserve Notes as money too.
- well, sure, but that's not money that can keep value and keep existing, it will be destroyed by the politicians, who print it.
What's bad about it, is that once it's destroyed, as in once people lose all faith in it completely, then it won't matter how much of it exists in circulation, even if 99% of it is removed from circulation then, nobody would want it anyway.
--
This thread is very large now, so if you want to make more claims about my positions and ability to respond to comments, just read the thread, I might have provided the response already.
2003: gold 350, cotton 50. 2011: gold 1500, cotton 200. The ratio holds. The price in USD goes up by x4. That's a better justification than 'gold is money'.
The prices in fiat currencies are determined in open market, and the market says that fiat is garbage.
As to 1981 - Volcker was a hero, really. Pushed the interest rates up to 18 or more percent, didn't he? Gold started at 35 in 1971 (well, that was the artificial price) and then it ended up in 250-350 territory until the nineties, when it started going up again based on loose monetary policy, free money by all the Fed chairmen and insane borrowing by the US gov't.
So where do you see an inconsistency exactly?
Funny, GS is not interested in having real money - they benefit immensely from US Fed printing and US Treasury buying, they are the front runners in that scheme. They benefited greatly from the housing bubble, that the US gov't inflated with cheap money, FHA, Freddie/Fannie, which caused the lax lending standards all over the place and allowed banks to repackage and securitize the terrible loans and mortgages because of the gov't guarantee.
No, GS is really not interested in 'gold bubble', they are trading up and down, they are manipulating the market, just like they did this month with Oil, first releasing 'forecast' that Brent will fall to 105 from 125, then buying on the rumor they started at 112 and then forecasting it will go back up to 120 or so, so suckers will be buying from them again, and they'll make the spread.
It's good to be GS, what can I say, good for them. Too bad for the pensions of folks, who are forced by gov't to hold their retirement money in those 401Ks
However if you think that gold and cotton are both in a bubble (and not somehow going up in price relative to the fiat, that is printed by the trillion) then explain the entire CRB, because all commodities and food and energy (everything that people actually use) are going up and have been for over a decade. You think it's a bubble, OK, trade that way. I believe US bond is in a huge bubble, and US dollar is on a verge of a collapse based on all the printing.
AFAIC the US rating should be F today, not AAA.
I agree with you on this though.
I agree, because first: those things are useful in case of things taking a bad turn and second: those things will go up in price, especially in USA.
However the more logical conclusion is to convert whatever you have into real money and skip the destruction altogether and leave.
Assets and money (gold) are capital.
Production capacity is wealth. A wealthy economy, is economy that produces everything that people need and the prices are as low as possible based on the current maximum level of technology.
Economy that is poor, is economy that cannot provide its people with most of what they need.
By this definition the US economy is poor, as USA does not have production capacity to provide for its population's needs.
Wealth is all about production.
well, sure. But you are again, mixing terms. Cotton is a raw material - product, it's wealth. Gold is money. In some cases cotton can be more useful than gold: socks have cotton in them for example, you won't use gold for socks. But you can buy socks with gold.
With fiat you will buy less and less cotton over time, as fiat is printed by politicians, but with gold you'll buy at worst the same amount and hopefully if cotton production is increased, you'll get more for the same amount of gold tomorrow once that happens.
You are way off base on the number of reasons why gold is money and would have been money if it all had to play out over again
found the full version.
0. It cannot be printed by politicians to buy elections.
1. It's rare, but not too rare.
2. It's easy to test (chemically or with ultrasound for thick bars).
3. It's easily recognizable.
4. It has no major industrial use.
5. It does not change over time, drop it in the ocean, recover it centuries later and it's the same.
6. Easy to work with (easy to split, melt, mint coins, etc.)
7. It's stable, it does not explode, it's not a poison, not radioactive, not a gas, does not corrode, does not decay radioactively.
8. People like it, it looks nice.
Point is those ARE intrinsic values. Saying they are not is like falling into the homunculus theory of mind fallacy, where you expect things to be reduced forever, and this infinite regress would not answer the question of what is really your mind vs what is the observer. We are physical beings, not spirits, we live in physical world, and things we value are physical because they allow us to get things we need for survival.
Well, I build products and provide services as well, I'll take gold any day over any currency of any country. Now, your gov't makes it illegal to not accept legal tender and it creates various artificial boundaries to using real money, namely capital gains tax, which is unfairly taxing any increase in gold's value relative to your fiat currency, even though the only reason the gold's value in your currency is increasing is the inflation.
So by trying to avoid inflation, you become somebody to take advantage of. Of-course instead of storing value in gold, you can buy products today, so that when inflation that is created every day translates to higher prices, you'll have the advantage, that you already own the goods you need and you won't be taxed capital gains on that.
As to where am I paying in gold credits: J.P. Morgan accepts gold as collateral to counter-party debt. You can buy stocks at JPM with gold, that's what I am saying. There will be more and more banks doing this, and there will be more and more gold backed accounts and credit cards, and they will be preferred over any other type of credit or fiat.
There is more to the reasons gold is money than you think.
As to 'full faith and credit of the US gov't" - I don't have that faith and US has no credit. The value of USD fell by huge amount since the Fed was created in 1913, since 2003 alone, the USD lost 75% of value.
Gold was 350/ounce, cotton was 50/pound. Now gold is 1500/ounce, cotton is over 200/pound. The ratio holds, the USD denominated price goes up.
Gold is money especially given that it's not good for anything much beyond that and some limited industrial/jewelry use, and yet based on all of its properties, people see it as money. It's not wealth, production capacity is wealth. Products are wealth. It's money. It definitely is much better money than any fiat.
Also you can't force people to hold US dollars and bonds once they realize what those things really are, especially now, that most of US spending is done on borrowed time and money, this includes the military.
why, is getting laid by hot women not good enough for you? Anyway, here is something to start with.
Women are not as dumb as some would believe - they don't take fake money, they require the real deal, and screw the 'legal tender', which has to be accepted just because politicians say so.
You are mixing up ideas.
Food and guns are products - wealth. Gold is money.
Gold is easily tested to be either pure or it's in coins, which are recognized and also can be tested easily (that's where the term 'acid test' comes from). Large bars are normally tested with ultrasound, as density of gold is precisely known, and so are densities of other metals, it's what they do in banks.
However this is not needed if you simply hold an account in a bank, that would have your account backed with gold, you'd have a credit card or bank card from there, that's all. Of-course banks used to issue bank notes - actual gold promises for different amounts.
As to modern world requiring trust - you are right, and fiat cannot be trusted not because it's just paper, but because the printing presses are in the hands of politicians.
It's all about relative terms, you want to invest into something that will make you MORE money, it's called cost of opportunity, because if you don't provide products in competing economy, somebody else will. Sure, you'll have a fixed amount of money that will appreciate in value over time, but that's all you'll have.
In 19 century USA the value of US dollar was appreciating, the prices were falling due to HEAVY competition though.
Gold is only good for trade since we all agree that it is worth something.
- no, it has actual intrinsic properties that allow people to accept gold as unit of account/means of trade/store of value.
This is the same reason that money printed by governments is worth something: we all agree that it is.
- this is true. Now, those of us who think that gov't printed fiat is worth nothing, move to the real money, that's all there is to it. I don't see fiat as worth anything. It certainly is worth less and less every day even for those who disagree with me, otherwise things wouldn't be constantly rising in price, all because the fiat is printed but nothing backs it up - neither production nor gold.
Gold is in the middle of a huge bubble right now.
- I've been hearing that for a decade. However there is a huge bubble, it's not in gold, it's in US government bonds (and bonds of other countries as well, but mostly US.)
If it were traded like a normal commodity it would be worth way less.
- it's a monetary metal, not a 'normal commodity' like oil or pork bellies.
Once people stop being so paranoid it is going to crash hard.
- no, once gold ounce gets to 1:1 ratio with Dow, then it would mean Dow is cheap enough to buy, but in fiat currencies, that are being printed there is no reason for it to 'crash hard'.
Also, since it is constantly being mined, it too is constantly getting devalued.
- it's being mined, not printed. They produce very little of it on grand schema of things. This cannot be said about fiat.
How much gold does it take to buy a loaf of bread?
- depends where you are, but somewhere around 1/1500 to 1/350 of a troy ounce per loaf is a good price range depending on where you live, I suppose.
For that matter, where can you buy a loaf of bread with gold?
- anywhere they take a credit card of a bank card?
And how do you measure out that small an amount of gold?
- you don't. You transfer gold credits.
Banks used to issue actual notes - pieces of paper fully backed by an amount of gold written on them. That's how you use gold for trade without carrying the heavy stuff around.
Why is wealth gold?
- indeed.
I never said that, so I am now asking you right back: why is wealth gold?
Now, what I said was that production capacity is wealth and gold is money. To your question about properties of gold in itself, there is a good primer on that right here, will take just over 4 minutes (there is a longer version, I don't have the link).
As to things being measured in gold after some cataclysmic event: I certainly would prefer gold to ANY currency at that point. History proves me correct, as during any war you could get things for gold, but not for currencies, which immediately became irrelevant.
Now, I said WEALTH is production capacity, so that is what people actually need, and if rifles and bread are what people need, then that's the real wealth. However gold is actual money - store of value, unit of account, means of trade. It's unchangeable, easy to test, easy to work with, easy to reclaim, rare enough, but not too rare, easily recognizable, does not have major industrial use, etc. It's pretty much made to be used money unlike anything else (there are other possibilities, but they have more drawbacks than gold in various ways.)
Last thing: French loaves are real wealth and gold is real money.
If you need a loaf of bread and there is no bread in vicinity at all, then you can't buy it with any money, including gold, but if there is a way to get some of that bread in exchange for something and you have gold, you stand a much better chance of getting that bread, than anybody with fiat in their pocket.
Gold has actual value in our physical world, learn why.
As to the value of it being 'arbitrary' - however the relative value is decided, it's stable.
2003: 1 ounce of gold was USD350, one pound of cotton was USD50.
2011: 1 ounce of gold over USD1500, one pound of cotton over USD200.
Notice anything?
No, I don't need to pay gold at the register, it's not needed at all. However bank accounts and credit lines, etc., will be backed with gold again.
Is the world going to switch to the gold standard? What do you think it's doing all this time, the decade that is seeing gold reserves being grown by individuals and national banks?
BTW., the transition will be sudden and abrupt. Nobody wants "an orderly decline" - once you realize that the value is gone, and it's all going down and not up in real terms, why would you wait for your money to decline in value orderly?
Sure there is.
Money is a store of value, unit of account and medium of exchange.
Fiat is the last thing that can do any of that, whenever it rises, it eventually falls. The thing holds value relative to other commodities (barring changes in production output) is gold.
1. Wealth is production capacity, money is gold.
2. There are enough countries in the world now, that are doing the right thing, lowering taxes, becoming more business friendly. USA is not one of them.
There is such thing as Gresham's law, and gov't decree only makes the matters worse due to capital flight. You can outlaw real money, but you can't make your fake money have any value artificially.