It's been less that two years since the owners of a small business minting gold coins were imprisoned and all their assets stolen by the federal government.
If you mean the "Liberty Dollar" case then it happened not two but four years ago, and the guy was recently found guilty by a jury on money laundering and other crimes.
He has not been sentenced yet and the forfeiture trial is still ongoing - i.e. his assets are still his, not "stolen".
Take a look at the coins, it's easy to mistake them for specially minted US dollars and complaints from customers about those 'fake dollars' is what brought him the federal charges. He should have made them look more clearly distinct...
Wheat shortages? Unprecedented heat-wave in Russia (global warming, anyone?) and a wheat export ban by Russia - combined with weak wheat production elsewhere as well.
Do basic supply and demand pressures mean anything on the planet you live on? Do you know the concept of inflexible demand, where advanced countries will pay pretty much any price to get the wheat they want, even if it means that they starve poorer countries?
But you really need to address the lies of yours I've already exposed, before getting into new topics...
Why? Econ 101. Commerce comes to a grinding halt if I'm trying to pay you with chickens and you only accept widgets, and you need to pay somebody with gold. It doesn't work.
It's amazing that the human race managed to conduct commerce for thousands of years before the Fed came about.
Have you ever wondered why it took such a long time for modern civilization to evolve, and why civilization basically exploded after the 18th century?
Centralized money, banks and easier access to credit was an important factor: money could be pooled and risk takers did not have to convince someone face to face to take up that risk personally - a pooled entity (banks, big investors) could serve that role more productively.
Before that, during the static gold standard, the lack of liquidity was stifling innovation big time, for thousands of years. Only the super-rich could afford large-scale risk-taking, and their number was low and highly concentrated. More money, more pooling of money and better (and faster) distribution of money activated incredible reserves of the human race.
Just as a side-note, he has (again) not replied to my criticism of the figures he gave:
In the above post he compiled a variation of those lies: pointing out commodities bubbles (which were mostly caused by physical shortages on a finite planet with growing population, well before "money printing" began after the 2008 crisis) while not pointing out deflationary forces that balance out price bubbles. You can see how real aggregate inflation looks like, in the links I provided above.
He clearly knows how to propagate Fox News anti-government propaganda, but sadly he does not know how to interpret and defend them.
You annihilated all the gold-bug arguments in one simple paragraph.
Fact is that the average citizen can buy ten times more loaves of bread than 200 years ago, financed by one year's honest work. They can also buy infinitely more cars, computers - and get guaranteed health care as a citizen's right in most modern countries.
That the absolute numbers printed on the price sticker are increasing slightly every year does not matter much as long as the numbers coming in from your weekly pay-check have numbers increasing by at least as much .
If you check those two numbers over time, then you'll see that indeed the purchasing power of the average US citizen is increasing. (+9% over the last 8 years depicted by that graph - but the trend is very similar 50, 100 or 200 years back as well.)
Note that the real, effective multiplier is a lot lower than even the 10:1 Fed limit: only the liquidity that exits from the financial system into the real economy is actually inflationary. Monies banks owe to each other in their elaborate gambling schemes using derivatives redistribute their profits amongst each other (and act as a tax on the rest of society), but are not bona fide inflationary.
He just posts his lies and if anyone actually points out the inconsistencies in his arguments he runs away into another thread:-)
In the above post he compiled a variation of those lies: pointing out commodities bubbles (which were mostly caused by physical shortages on a finite planet with growing population, well before "money printing" began after the 2008 crisis) while not pointing out deflationary forces that balance out price bubbles. You can see how real aggregate inflation looks like, in the links I provided above.
His motivation seems to be that he's all invested into the current gold bubble (no diversification? Yikes...), and wants to see it continue. He will accept no rational arguments that point out the inconsistencies in his belief system.
In fact the prices for homes and rent must be falling in normal market conditions in a recession (depression actually)
That's the first sliver of truth in your long series of lies - and it promptly contradicts your earlier position - you did not realize that, right?:-)
First note that it's not just residential housing that is in decline - but commercial real estate as well, affecting businesses and the cost of services: it's now cheaper to rent space in the mall, for example.
So what happens, liar, if you combine the deflationary effects of "lower housing prices" (which you finally admitted exists) and other price drops (such as lower labor costs, lower capital costs, etc.) with the inflationary effects of "higher raw commodities prices" which you too pointed out exist? We get to the real inflation data that is an average formed by the price drops and the price increases - not the 76% lie you are still propagating:-)
Btw., the inflation data I linked to here is not government published but it's the MIT Billion Price Index which is a daily updated index derived from the prices published by thousands of businesses. Do you claim that those thousands of independent businesses are all complicit in some sort of vast global conspiracy to hide true price levels?:-)
Also, you have still not replied in substance to the earlier lies of yours that I've exposed:
Are you able to think and reason for yourself, liar, or are you only repeating right-wing talking points without knowing what they really mean and without being able to defend them?
I think you got tricked by British tabloids: they are able to complain about Grandma's Sunday cookies, let alone about a huge health care system that covers and helps tens of millions of people in some of the most dramatic moments in their lives...
The thing is, in the US there are huge private monopolies that have cornered the market for fun and profits and US citizens still don't have universal health-care - you cannot really do worse than that.
That's just the first 6 lies of yours I found interesting enough to counter - there's many more.
But instead of trying to prove your viewpoint fairly, instead of working to remove your stigma of a serial liar you come up with yet another new lie?
if measured in coffee, the value of USD decreased at the lows by 76%.
Oh, now we at last learn about the big underlying concept of your ideology, you re-defined everyday purchasing power to mean the price of 37,500 pounds of raw coffee bean standard contracts and the price of troy ounces of gold?
So out of tens of thousands of products and services that shape our everyday life whose average price influences our purchasing power you managed to pick the two (raw, unprocessed, with no labor costs included) luxory commodities that have experienced the largest bubbles in recent history?
Wow!:-)
How about the price that impacts most families in the most direct way: the price of rent (or the price of acquiring a new house)? How about the price of of a loaf of bread, which has remained virtually unchanged despite a huge increase in grain prices due to the record hot weather in 2010? How about the price of a car and the cost of a haircut?
These are the various everyday living cost components that modern price indices weigh and which influences purchasing power, and yes, the price of coffee is a small part of it as well, but not just the price of the raw beans, but the price of a finished coffee product such as a cup of coffee, which has various types of labor and service costs included...
If you do that, you get nuanced inflation metrics like this one - which not only shows how moderate inflation is at the moment but also shows how the US was (and still is) flirting with dangerous deflation territory...
Not the 76% big lie you are trying to tell us here.
[...] while taking the government numbers at their face value, [...]
The last refuge of the delusional liar: "your numbers must be wrong!".
Here go check the data of an independent inflation tracking project, the Billion Price Index: a daily updated price index derived from literally millions of online prices published not by the government but by thousands of businesses.
proved that inflation was 76% since 2003 counted in US dollars.
In that thread you've told yet another lie: that inflation is somehow coupled to the current gold price bubble. That is not how inflation is defined, but nice try:-)
In reality, despite two commodities bubbles food prices increased by only 20-25% since 2003 (not 76%) - and the second bubble is at its peak right now.
Note that from the graph you can see that since early 2009 (since post-financial-crisis 'money printing' began) up to late 2010 food prices have changed very little: the effects of deflationary forces. Even the commodities bubble of late 2010 and early 2011 has increased prices only by 5%.
That puts another nail into the coffin of your "an increasing monetary base means hyperinflation" hard-money economic theory.
You need to start proving your points with real data and real arguments and you need to stop coming up with new lies if you do not like being called a liar.
hey, dumb ass, I just went outside, asked my neighbors - they are going to vote for the next income/corporate tax cut in 2012. 50% cut. We can't wait till 2014, the canton is going to vote to reduce the income taxes... to 0.
I don't think you really live in Switzerland, as you know so little about the country. Are you still living in Russia?
Swiss insurers are forbidden from discriminating against pre-existing conditions, and they are not allowed to make a profit on the basic health insurance plan.
Swiss regulation, government control, socialism!!:-)
Secondly, the average Swiss tax burden (29.4%) is higher than that in the US. (!)
So good luck convincing the rest of the country that Switzerland needs to abandon their current very high level of civilization, in favour of your ridiculous 0% tax proposal. Do you think Swiss citizens like free-loaders like you?
Thirdly, if you really keep your investments in gold then my condolences: in the past year the price of gold dropped from a peak of 1450 Franken down to the current 1300 Franken price - a more than 10% reduction in your purchasing power, in a single year.
frequent bank crashes and panics where depositors lost all their "hard money", recessions, periods of high unemployment and periods of deflation.
- wrong. The bank runs, etc., they were equally spread out throughout the 19 century, they were contained to specific banks, not to the entire banking institution, [...]
Liar.
The panic of 1873 was triggered by bank failures that snowballed into a full-blown banking crisis that quickly crashed the stock market and then spilled over into the real economy and caused a real depression that lasted several years with peak unemployment of 14%:.
Effects in the U.S.
The failure of the Jay Cooke bank, followed quickly by that of Henry Clews, set off a chain reaction of bank failures and temporarily closed the New York stock market. Factories began to lay off workers as the United States slipped into depression. The effects of the panic were quickly felt in New York, more slowly in Chicago, Virginia City, Nevada and San Francisco.[11][12]
The New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days starting September 20. Of the country's 364 railroads, 89 went bankrupt. A total of 18,000 businesses failed between 1873 and 1875. Unemployment reached 14% by 1876. Construction work halted, wages were cut, real estate values fell and corporate profits vanished.[13]
Many innocent people lost their entire savings and committed suicide after such crashes - it was a cruel, heartless dog-eats-dog "hard money" system.
And you really want those times to come back? Do you also want to bring back slavery, public lashings, witch trials, fiefdoms and nobility? The history of mankind produced centuries full of cruelty, you have a wide selection to pick from.
Btw., what is most telling is not what you choose to reply to, but the historic proof portion of my argument that you left out completely and left unanswered:
Proof for that is the 'gilded age' era of the 19th century USA: it was on a "growing monetary base gold standard", because massive amounts of gold (relative to the output of the economy) was mined, which kept the monetary base growing and stimulative . There was always enough 'new money printed' for investments: 65 metric tons of new gold was mined every year.
What happened once this 'gold stimulus' effect became much smaller, near the end of the 19th century? (gold production was still constant 65 metric tons a year - but the US itself was 10 times more populous and had 10 times higher GDP than at the beginning of the century): frequent bank crashes and panics where depositors lost all their "hard money", recessions, periods of high unemployment and periods of deflation.
You did not expect that the main object of your affection (the 19th century US, the 'gilded age') would prove you wrong, right? A monetary base that 'prints money' by mining gold it is not something that fits into your rigid model, right?
Purchasing power of one USD went down by 19.5%, but personal income (measured in dollars) went up by 28.5% - so the per capita purchasing power of the average US citizen went up by about 9% in the time-frame you stated.
Money is only a store of value, which I store in gold, because in reality I don't trust any government with a printing press.
You are free to invest into whatever you desire to (I hope you liked the recent 2% drop in the price of gold and the resulting 2% reduction in your purchasing power), but do you realize that the idea you are promoting here and elsewhere, the return to the gold standard would mean to force everyone else to use gold as money? Do you also realize that returning to the gold standard would be equivalent to theft of unparalleled proportion?
Why is the gold standard theft? The math is very simple: most of the gold that can be mined has already been brought above ground, only about 30% remains to be mined.
That means that if you today force everyone to accept gold as a 'store of value' and use gold to do that, then all future value that is produced (in excess to dwindling gold production) is forcibly redistributed to current owners of gold...
A well managed monetary base grows proportionally with the combined value of the economy. Proof for that is the 'gilded age' era of the 19th century USA: it was on a "growing monetary base gold standard", because massive amounts of gold (relative to the output of the economy) was mined, which kept the monetary base growing and stimulative . There was always enough 'new money printed' for investments: 65 metric tons of new gold was mined every year.
What happened once this 'gold stimulus' effect became much smaller, near the end of the 19th century? (gold production was still constant 65 metric tons a year - but the US itself was 10 times more populous and had 10 times higher GDP than at the beginning of the century): frequent bank crashes and panics where depositors lost all their "hard money", recessions, periods of high unemployment and periods of deflation.
If we introduced the gold standard, "hard money", "sound money" today it would become a hidden tax on civilization: paid to those who already own gold. In other words, it's a hidden tax on the poor, paid to the rich. It results not only in injustice but economic stagnation as well: as most hard money countries learned the hard way up to 1937 by which time all developed economies dropped the gold standard like a hot potato - and those who dropped the gold standard faster recovered faster from the Great Depression.
Most voters seem to prefer visible taxes and visible inflation instead, and I prefer a fee structure where those who benefit from modern civilization most pay a fee for the riches they earn utilizing modern civilization. Civilization is not cheap. One of the simplest metrics to determine how much a person benefits from modern civilization is "annual personal income".
Oh, also, the "weapon" paradigm totally misrepresents the asymmetry of offense vs defense. In your tank vs ak-47 example, yes, if you know about an AK-47, you can defend against it. But to defend against it you need a tank -- to negate a thousand-dollar threat you need a million-dollar defense. Your land mine analogy works the same: it's far more expensive and hazardous to clear a minefield than it is to deploy it.
But for cyber weapons, an attack that cost millions to research can be negated for pennies by typing "mysql_real_escape_string()" in the right place.
While the assymetry is there (did you really expect 'weapons of information' to be 100% equivalent to physical weapons?) you do not need a million dollar defense against a known $1000 AK47 position: you only need a $100 mortar, or a well placed $10 bullet or a $1 knife.
With the tank example I wanted to highlight how deadly damage the right kind of information can inflict, even against million dollar defenses. The tank gunner will still be dead after the incident even though we know it very well that had he known about that AK47 position he could easily have eliminated it, with the flick of a finger - with less effort than than 'typing "mysql_real_escape_string()" in the right place'.
But if you buy $1 billion in "cyber weapons", five years later -- even six months later -- you've got absolutely nothing.
Depends on the quality of those 'cyber weapons'.
If they are of Stuxnet's quality then they can be very efficient and very deniable as well. Think of a weapon doing damage to Iran equivalent to the economic and military damage done by a dozen modern plutonium warheads and 2 years down the line they are still not able to pinpoint the attackers and prove that it was an act of war?
What kind of shelf time did Stuxnet have? Some of the zero-day Windows exploits it used were years old.
But yes, you are right that 'weapons of information' are much less physical than physical weapons and they are indeed often use-once weapons and if discovered/published lose their value very quickly. So it would be foolish to rely on them as the only weapon.
That does not mean that they can not be very effective weapons though and it does not mean we should not protect against them.
The idea of "Cyber Weapons" is a deliberately wrong paradigm whose only purpose is to wring money out of national defense agencies. A cyber attack is nothing more than an idea. If you know something about computer security which the other guy doesn't, you can attack him with it. But as soon as he (or his operating system or antivirus vendor) knows it too, you've got nothing.
This is completely unlike a weapon. An AK-47 is still deadly even if your opponent knows what an assault rifle is, but an unpatched SQL injection vulnerability is useless the moment your opponent learns about it.
While I agree with you that this (like any other public security scare) will be used to wring out monies (private and public monies alike), I do not think that the distinction you outline exists in such a clear way: a security vulnerability has weapon-alike properties too.
A security hole is like a landmine not discovered yet: destructive if you do not know about it and you walk straight over it, but pretty harmless if a red flag shows where it is.
Similarly, an AK-47 is pretty harmless to a tank crew that knows about its position, while absolutely deadly if unprepared.
As I mentioned it before, the economic model of the 19th century US 'gold standard' was in fact surprisingly close to a central bank printing money: it's just that instead of a central bank it was nature that threw a (meanwhile, unfortunately, exhausted) supply of gold at us.
To further underline this observation, and to give you a perspective about how immensely huge the "gold stimulus" was in the 19th century US:
During much of the 19th century the US mined a very steady amount of gold per year, which stimulated the economy and which printed money out of thin air (erm, rock).
In 1800 US population was barely above 5 million people. By 1820 this has almost doubled to 9 million. Industrial scale mining of gold started after the 40s and production was racked up to about 65 metric tons per year. The 1820 GDP of the US was barely above 10 billion dollars (2009 dollars). 65 metric tons were about two million troy ounces of gold per year, which stimulated about 2 billion dollars per year (2009 dollars). That is a stimulus of about 20% of GDP.
With that kind of monetary stimulus no wonder that the 19th century US economy took off like a rocket, despite the civil war!
The "gilded age" economic wonder came to a halt after the 1893 crash and deflation: by that time the (fixed mount) "gold stimulus" faded away in effect and was only around 1-2% of the GDP.
The result was the crash of the "panic of 1893" and the crippling years of deflation after that. Hard money and an inflexible monetary base started showing its disadvantages.
By switching to the gold standard you would condemn the world to the same fate. Not very smart from you.
Full scale nonsense, as it was never observed in history of capitalist US market, that those with money were not interesting in growing it through investment into businesses, which grew the US economy over 19 century. Your entire premise that that people do not want to increase their capital through investing their money is completely false on the face of the fact that on the gold standard, USA became the most productive and efficient economy in 19 century, while gold was increasing in price.
What was not observed, a ruling class sitting on their hoard of gold and letting everyone else do the hard work? FYI, almost all of medieval Europe was on the gold standard and centuries were spent under that model:-)
You are also not willing to (or unable to) address the fact that the USA in the 19th century was not experiencing deflation only (I linked to the historic data, there were inflationary periods as well), nor was the US on the regular gold standard: massive amounts of gold was mined, which 'stimulated' the economy for decades.
As I mentioned it before, the economic model of the 19th century US 'gold standard' was in fact surprisingly close to a central bank printing money: it's just that instead of a central bank it was nature that threw a (meanwhile, unfortunately, exhausted) supply of gold at us.
None of these historic facts fit into your crude, simplified model of how economies and money works in general.
So I still maintain that you have no basis to criticise RMS in such a tone. While I do not agree with RMS, he is at least fairly self-consistent.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been less that two years since the owners of a small business minting gold coins were imprisoned and all their assets stolen by the federal government.
If you mean the "Liberty Dollar" case then it happened not two but four years ago, and the guy was recently found guilty by a jury on money laundering and other crimes.
He has not been sentenced yet and the forfeiture trial is still ongoing - i.e. his assets are still his, not "stolen".
Take a look at the coins, it's easy to mistake them for specially minted US dollars and complaints from customers about those 'fake dollars' is what brought him the federal charges. He should have made them look more clearly distinct ...
[...] shortages of supply in commodities? On which planet?
On the third (blue) planet of the Solar System, Milky Way, liar.
It is clearly not the planet you are living on.
Oil shortages? Peak oil shortages in supply combined with unprecedented growth of oil demand from China.
Sugar shortages? Record bad weather in Brasil and a record typhoon in Australia hitting the biggest sugar production area (global warming, anyone?) hurting supplies combined with unprecedented sugar demand from India - the largest sugar consumer on the planet.
Wheat shortages? Unprecedented heat-wave in Russia (global warming, anyone?) and a wheat export ban by Russia - combined with weak wheat production elsewhere as well.
Do basic supply and demand pressures mean anything on the planet you live on? Do you know the concept of inflexible demand, where advanced countries will pay pretty much any price to get the wheat they want, even if it means that they starve poorer countries?
But you really need to address the lies of yours I've already exposed, before getting into new topics ...
Why? Econ 101. Commerce comes to a grinding halt if I'm trying to pay you with chickens and you only accept widgets, and you need to pay somebody with gold. It doesn't work.
It's amazing that the human race managed to conduct commerce for thousands of years before the Fed came about.
Have you ever wondered why it took such a long time for modern civilization to evolve, and why civilization basically exploded after the 18th century?
Centralized money, banks and easier access to credit was an important factor: money could be pooled and risk takers did not have to convince someone face to face to take up that risk personally - a pooled entity (banks, big investors) could serve that role more productively.
Before that, during the static gold standard, the lack of liquidity was stifling innovation big time, for thousands of years. Only the super-rich could afford large-scale risk-taking, and their number was low and highly concentrated. More money, more pooling of money and better (and faster) distribution of money activated incredible reserves of the human race.
Just as a side-note, he has (again) not replied to my criticism of the figures he gave:
In the above post he compiled a variation of those lies: pointing out commodities bubbles (which were mostly caused by physical shortages on a finite planet with growing population, well before "money printing" began after the 2008 crisis) while not pointing out deflationary forces that balance out price bubbles. You can see how real aggregate inflation looks like, in the links I provided above.
He clearly knows how to propagate Fox News anti-government propaganda, but sadly he does not know how to interpret and defend them.
Gold-bug trolls are not what they used to be! :-)
This.
You annihilated all the gold-bug arguments in one simple paragraph.
Fact is that the average citizen can buy ten times more loaves of bread than 200 years ago, financed by one year's honest work. They can also buy infinitely more cars, computers - and get guaranteed health care as a citizen's right in most modern countries.
That the absolute numbers printed on the price sticker are increasing slightly every year does not matter much as long as the numbers coming in from your weekly pay-check have numbers increasing by at least as much .
If you check those two numbers over time, then you'll see that indeed the purchasing power of the average US citizen is increasing. (+9% over the last 8 years depicted by that graph - but the trend is very similar 50, 100 or 200 years back as well.)
Note that the real, effective multiplier is a lot lower than even the 10:1 Fed limit: only the liquidity that exits from the financial system into the real economy is actually inflationary. Monies banks owe to each other in their elaborate gambling schemes using derivatives redistribute their profits amongst each other (and act as a tax on the rest of society), but are not bona fide inflationary.
Just a warning to those who feel like replying to this "roman_mir" gold-bug troll, he's a serial liar here on Slashdot:
He lied about US purchasing power.
He lied about 19th century US economics.
He lied about taxation levels of the country you supposedly live in.
He lied about 19th century depressions.
He lied about the current level of inflation.
He lied about the consumer price index.
He just posts his lies and if anyone actually points out the inconsistencies in his arguments he runs away into another thread :-)
In the above post he compiled a variation of those lies: pointing out commodities bubbles (which were mostly caused by physical shortages on a finite planet with growing population, well before "money printing" began after the 2008 crisis) while not pointing out deflationary forces that balance out price bubbles. You can see how real aggregate inflation looks like, in the links I provided above.
His motivation seems to be that he's all invested into the current gold bubble (no diversification? Yikes ...), and wants to see it continue. He will accept no rational arguments that point out the inconsistencies in his belief system.
JFYI.
In fact the prices for homes and rent must be falling in normal market conditions in a recession (depression actually)
That's the first sliver of truth in your long series of lies - and it promptly contradicts your earlier position - you did not realize that, right? :-)
First note that it's not just residential housing that is in decline - but commercial real estate as well, affecting businesses and the cost of services: it's now cheaper to rent space in the mall, for example.
So what happens, liar, if you combine the deflationary effects of "lower housing prices" (which you finally admitted exists) and other price drops (such as lower labor costs, lower capital costs, etc.) with the inflationary effects of "higher raw commodities prices" which you too pointed out exist? We get to the real inflation data that is an average formed by the price drops and the price increases - not the 76% lie you are still propagating :-)
Btw., the inflation data I linked to here is not government published but it's the MIT Billion Price Index which is a daily updated index derived from the prices published by thousands of businesses. Do you claim that those thousands of independent businesses are all complicit in some sort of vast global conspiracy to hide true price levels? :-)
Also, you have still not replied in substance to the earlier lies of yours that I've exposed:
You lied about US purchasing power.
You lied about 19th century US economics.
You lied about taxation levels of the country you allegedly live in.
You lied about 19th century depressions.
You lied about the current level of inflation.
You lied about the consumer price index.
Are you able to think and reason for yourself, liar, or are you only repeating right-wing talking points without knowing what they really mean and without being able to defend them?
[...] driving 10 miles over the speed limit in a 25 [...]
FYI, the energy your 2 tons car (or 0.2 tons motorcycle) carries at 35 mph is exactly twice the energy it carries at 25 mph.
This is non-intuitive but true, comes from "energy = mass*velocity*velocity". Our universe is weird.
So if you get involved in an accident driving "only" 10 mph more you can cause twice as grievous injuries to pedestrians and other drivers.
This is why speeding limits have to be enforced in a non-linear fashion.
Registration problems on the other hand are of purely administrative nature, they do not directly endanger other citizens.
Just wondering, you said in your first comment that a cop came in over a noise complaint, and you also said:
I ran into the kitchen where there was like 20 people.
So the kitchen had 20 people already - were you partying? How late was it?
What I'm trying to get at, was the noise complaint, by any chance, justified?
Even well intentioned cops will do a lot of weird shit if they think they are rightfully protecting others from you .
Yet Canadians are happier about their universal health-care system than US citizens - and Canadian GDP proportional health care costs are half that of the US.
I think you got tricked by British tabloids: they are able to complain about Grandma's Sunday cookies, let alone about a huge health care system that covers and helps tens of millions of people in some of the most dramatic moments in their lives ...
The thing is, in the US there are huge private monopolies that have cornered the market for fun and profits and US citizens still don't have universal health-care - you cannot really do worse than that.
Let me just recount the last 3 days of your "hard money arguments" here on Slashdot, for everyone's education and amusement:
You lied about US purchasing power.
You lied about 19th century US economics.
You lied about taxation levels of the country you supposedly live in.
You lied about 19th century depressions.
You lied about the current level of inflation.
You lied about the consumer price index.
That's just the first 6 lies of yours I found interesting enough to counter - there's many more.
But instead of trying to prove your viewpoint fairly, instead of working to remove your
stigma of a serial liar you come up with yet another new lie?
if measured in coffee, the value of USD decreased at the lows by 76%.
Oh, now we at last learn about the big underlying concept of your ideology,
you re-defined everyday purchasing power to mean the price of 37,500
pounds of raw coffee bean standard contracts and the price of
troy ounces of gold?
So out of tens of thousands of products and services that shape our everyday life
whose average price influences our purchasing power you managed to pick the
two (raw, unprocessed, with no labor costs included) luxory commodities that have
experienced the largest bubbles in recent history?
Wow! :-)
How about the price that impacts most families in the most direct way: the price
of rent (or the price of acquiring a new house)? How about the price of of a loaf
of bread, which has remained virtually unchanged despite a huge increase in grain
prices due to the record hot weather in 2010? How about the price of a car and
the cost of a haircut?
These are the various everyday living cost components that modern price indices ...
weigh and which influences purchasing power, and yes, the price of coffee is a small part of
it as well, but not just the price of the raw beans, but the price of a
finished coffee product such as a cup of coffee, which has various
types of labor and service costs included
If you do that, you get nuanced inflation metrics like this one - which not only ...
shows how moderate inflation is at the moment but also shows how the US was (and still is)
flirting with dangerous deflation territory
Not the 76% big lie you are trying to tell us here.
[...] while taking the government numbers at their face value, [...]
The last refuge of the delusional liar: "your numbers must be wrong!".
Here go check the data of an independent inflation tracking project, the Billion Price Index: a daily updated price index derived from literally millions of online prices published not by the government but by thousands of businesses.
The BPI confirms the CPI metrics.
So this confirms once again that you are a serial liar.
Here is what you need to do: stop reading my comments. bye bye.
The last refuge of the fake libertarian: "go, go, go away, I do not want to read your comments, I'm unable to counter them!".
This is Slashdot, not Fox News :-)
proved that inflation was 76% since 2003 counted in US dollars.
In that thread you've told yet another lie: that inflation is somehow coupled to the current gold price bubble. That is not how inflation is defined, but nice try :-)
In reality, despite two commodities bubbles food prices increased by only 20-25% since 2003 (not 76%) - and the second bubble is at its peak right now.
Note that from the graph you can see that since early 2009 (since post-financial-crisis 'money printing' began) up to late 2010 food prices have changed very little: the effects of deflationary forces. Even the commodities bubble of late 2010 and early 2011 has increased prices only by 5%.
That puts another nail into the coffin of your "an increasing monetary base means hyperinflation" hard-money economic theory.
You need to start proving your points with real data and real arguments and you need to stop coming up with new lies if you do not like being called a liar.
hey, dumb ass, I just went outside, asked my neighbors - they are going to vote for the next income/corporate tax cut in 2012. 50% cut. We can't wait till 2014, the canton is going to vote to reduce the income taxes ... to 0.
I don't think you really live in Switzerland, as you know so little about the country. Are you still living in Russia?
Firstly, the Swiss government sector is certainly not small, it spends a third of the country's GDP (32%) on services like compulsory, universal healthcare covering not just every Swiss citizen but everyone who resides in Switzerland for longer than 3 months.
Swiss insurers are forbidden from discriminating against pre-existing conditions, and they are not allowed to make a profit on the basic health insurance plan.
Swiss regulation, government control, socialism!! :-)
Secondly, the average Swiss tax burden (29.4%) is higher than that in the US. (!)
So good luck convincing the rest of the country that Switzerland needs to abandon their current very high level of civilization, in favour of your ridiculous 0% tax proposal. Do you think Swiss citizens like free-loaders like you?
Thirdly, if you really keep your investments in gold then my condolences: in the past year the price of gold dropped from a peak of 1450 Franken down to the current 1300 Franken price - a more than 10% reduction in your purchasing power, in a single year.
frequent bank crashes and panics where depositors lost all their "hard money", recessions, periods of high unemployment and periods of deflation.
- wrong. The bank runs, etc., they were equally spread out throughout the 19 century, they were contained to specific banks, not to the entire banking institution, [...]
Liar.
The panic of 1873 was triggered by bank failures that snowballed into a full-blown banking crisis that quickly crashed the stock market and then spilled over into the real economy and caused a real depression that lasted several years with peak unemployment of 14%: .
Effects in the U.S.
The failure of the Jay Cooke bank, followed quickly by that of Henry Clews, set off a chain reaction of bank failures and temporarily closed the New York stock market. Factories began to lay off workers as the United States slipped into depression. The effects of the panic were quickly felt in New York, more slowly in Chicago, Virginia City, Nevada and San Francisco.[11][12]
The New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days starting September 20. Of the country's 364 railroads, 89 went bankrupt. A total of 18,000 businesses failed between 1873 and 1875. Unemployment reached 14% by 1876. Construction work halted, wages were cut, real estate values fell and corporate profits vanished.[13]
Tens of thousands of US families lost their entire life savings - there was no FDIC nor any Fed-of-last-resort in those years yet, so people were completely unprotected against bank crashes.
Many innocent people lost their entire savings and committed suicide after such crashes - it was a cruel, heartless dog-eats-dog "hard money" system.
And you really want those times to come back? Do you also want to bring back slavery, public lashings, witch trials, fiefdoms and nobility? The history of mankind produced centuries full of cruelty, you have a wide selection to pick from.
Btw., what is most telling is not what you choose to reply to, but the historic proof portion of my argument that you left out completely and left unanswered :
Proof for that is the 'gilded age' era of the 19th century USA: it was on a "growing monetary base gold standard", because massive amounts of gold (relative to the output of the economy) was mined, which kept the monetary base growing and stimulative . There was always enough 'new money printed' for investments: 65 metric tons of new gold was mined every year.
What happened once this 'gold stimulus' effect became much smaller, near the end of the 19th century? (gold production was still constant 65 metric tons a year - but the US itself was 10 times more populous and had 10 times higher GDP than at the beginning of the century): frequent bank crashes and panics where depositors lost all their "hard money", recessions, periods of high unemployment and periods of deflation.
You did not expect that the main object of your affection (the 19th century US, the 'gilded age') would prove you wrong , right? A monetary base that 'prints money' by mining gold it is not something that fits into your rigid model, right?
I hope you liked the recent 2% drop in the price of gold and the resulting 2% reduction in your purchasing power
- I hope you don't find your 76% reduction of purchasing power since 2003 too destructive for your life's decisions.
Liar.
Here's the purchasing power of the dollar, versus per capita real disposable income.
Purchasing power of one USD went down by 19.5%, but personal income (measured in dollars) went up by 28.5% - so the per capita purchasing power of the average US citizen went up by about 9% in the time-frame you stated.
Money is only a store of value, which I store in gold, because in reality I don't trust any government with a printing press.
You are free to invest into whatever you desire to (I hope you liked the recent 2% drop in the price of gold and the resulting 2% reduction in your purchasing power), but do you realize that the idea you are promoting here and elsewhere, the return to the gold standard would mean to force everyone else to use gold as money? Do you also realize that returning to the gold standard would be equivalent to theft of unparalleled proportion?
Why is the gold standard theft? The math is very simple: most of the gold that can be mined has already been brought above ground, only about 30% remains to be mined.
That means that if you today force everyone to accept gold as a 'store of value' and use gold to do that, then all future value that is produced (in excess to dwindling gold production) is forcibly redistributed to current owners of gold ...
A well managed monetary base grows proportionally with the combined value of the economy. Proof for that is the 'gilded age' era of the 19th century USA: it was on a "growing monetary base gold standard", because massive amounts of gold (relative to the output of the economy) was mined, which kept the monetary base growing and stimulative . There was always enough 'new money printed' for investments: 65 metric tons of new gold was mined every year.
What happened once this 'gold stimulus' effect became much smaller, near the end of the 19th century? (gold production was still constant 65 metric tons a year - but the US itself was 10 times more populous and had 10 times higher GDP than at the beginning of the century): frequent bank crashes and panics where depositors lost all their "hard money", recessions, periods of high unemployment and periods of deflation.
If we introduced the gold standard, "hard money", "sound money" today it would become a hidden tax on civilization: paid to those who already own gold. In other words, it's a hidden tax on the poor, paid to the rich. It results not only in injustice but economic stagnation as well: as most hard money countries learned the hard way up to 1937 by which time all developed economies dropped the gold standard like a hot potato - and those who dropped the gold standard faster recovered faster from the Great Depression.
Most voters seem to prefer visible taxes and visible inflation instead, and I prefer a fee structure where those who benefit from modern civilization most pay a fee for the riches they earn utilizing modern civilization. Civilization is not cheap . One of the simplest metrics to determine how much a person benefits from modern civilization is "annual personal income".
Oh, also, the "weapon" paradigm totally misrepresents the asymmetry of offense vs defense. In your tank vs ak-47 example, yes, if you know about an AK-47, you can defend against it. But to defend against it you need a tank -- to negate a thousand-dollar threat you need a million-dollar defense. Your land mine analogy works the same: it's far more expensive and hazardous to clear a minefield than it is to deploy it.
But for cyber weapons, an attack that cost millions to research can be negated for pennies by typing "mysql_real_escape_string()" in the right place.
While the assymetry is there (did you really expect 'weapons of information' to be 100% equivalent to physical weapons?) you do not need a million dollar defense against a known $1000 AK47 position: you only need a $100 mortar, or a well placed $10 bullet or a $1 knife.
With the tank example I wanted to highlight how deadly damage the right kind of information can inflict, even against million dollar defenses. The tank gunner will still be dead after the incident even though we know it very well that had he known about that AK47 position he could easily have eliminated it, with the flick of a finger - with less effort than than 'typing "mysql_real_escape_string()" in the right place'.
There were several reports of injuries caused by damage to industrial equipment by Stuxnet.
But if you buy $1 billion in "cyber weapons", five years later -- even six months later -- you've got absolutely nothing.
Depends on the quality of those 'cyber weapons'.
If they are of Stuxnet's quality then they can be very efficient and very deniable as well. Think of a weapon doing damage to Iran equivalent to the economic and military damage done by a dozen modern plutonium warheads and 2 years down the line they are still not able to pinpoint the attackers and prove that it was an act of war?
What kind of shelf time did Stuxnet have? Some of the zero-day Windows exploits it used were years old.
But yes, you are right that 'weapons of information' are much less physical than physical weapons and they are indeed often use-once weapons and if discovered/published lose their value very quickly. So it would be foolish to rely on them as the only weapon.
That does not mean that they can not be very effective weapons though and it does not mean we should not protect against them.
The idea of "Cyber Weapons" is a deliberately wrong paradigm whose only purpose is to wring money out of national defense agencies. A cyber attack is nothing more than an idea. If you know something about computer security which the other guy doesn't, you can attack him with it. But as soon as he (or his operating system or antivirus vendor) knows it too, you've got nothing.
This is completely unlike a weapon. An AK-47 is still deadly even if your opponent knows what an assault rifle is, but an unpatched SQL injection vulnerability is useless the moment your opponent learns about it.
While I agree with you that this (like any other public security scare) will be used to wring out monies (private and public monies alike), I do not think that the distinction you outline exists in such a clear way: a security vulnerability has weapon-alike properties too.
A security hole is like a landmine not discovered yet: destructive if you do not know about it and you walk straight over it, but pretty harmless if a red flag shows where it is.
Similarly, an AK-47 is pretty harmless to a tank crew that knows about its position, while absolutely deadly if unprepared.
As I mentioned it before, the economic model of the 19th century US 'gold standard' was in fact surprisingly close to a central bank printing money: it's just that instead of a central bank it was nature that threw a (meanwhile, unfortunately, exhausted) supply of gold at us.
To further underline this observation, and to give you a perspective about how immensely huge the "gold stimulus" was in the 19th century US:
During much of the 19th century the US mined a very steady amount of gold per year, which stimulated the economy and which printed money out of thin air (erm, rock).
In 1800 US population was barely above 5 million people. By 1820 this has almost doubled to 9 million. Industrial scale mining of gold started after the 40s and production was racked up to about 65 metric tons per year. The 1820 GDP of the US was barely above 10 billion dollars (2009 dollars). 65 metric tons were about two million troy ounces of gold per year, which stimulated about 2 billion dollars per year (2009 dollars). That is a stimulus of about 20% of GDP .
With that kind of monetary stimulus no wonder that the 19th century US economy took off like a rocket, despite the civil war!
The "gilded age" economic wonder came to a halt after the 1893 crash and deflation: by that time the (fixed mount) "gold stimulus" faded away in effect and was only around 1-2% of the GDP.
The result was the crash of the "panic of 1893" and the crippling years of deflation after that. Hard money and an inflexible monetary base started showing its disadvantages.
By switching to the gold standard you would condemn the world to the same fate. Not very smart from you.
Full scale nonsense, as it was never observed in history of capitalist US market, that those with money were not interesting in growing it through investment into businesses, which grew the US economy over 19 century. Your entire premise that that people do not want to increase their capital through investing their money is completely false on the face of the fact that on the gold standard, USA became the most productive and efficient economy in 19 century, while gold was increasing in price.
What was not observed, a ruling class sitting on their hoard of gold and letting everyone else do the hard work? FYI, almost all of medieval Europe was on the gold standard and centuries were spent under that model :-)
You are also not willing to (or unable to) address the fact that the USA in the 19th century was not experiencing deflation only (I linked to the historic data, there were inflationary periods as well), nor was the US on the regular gold standard: massive amounts of gold was mined, which 'stimulated' the economy for decades.
As I mentioned it before, the economic model of the 19th century US 'gold standard' was in fact surprisingly close to a central bank printing money: it's just that instead of a central bank it was nature that threw a (meanwhile, unfortunately, exhausted) supply of gold at us.
None of these historic facts fit into your crude, simplified model of how economies and money works in general.
So I still maintain that you have no basis to criticise RMS in such a tone. While I do not agree with RMS, he is at least fairly self-consistent.