FAITH AND HARD CASH | 2008-02-25
Dave's discussion below shows, among other things, that he is dealing in a reality he hasn't quite grasped yet. It is important that he not let common popular ideas get him off track. He must stick with Mantra logic.
Let's get specific. In common parlance, faith and hard cash are two ends of a spectrum. "Show me the MONEY" is supposed to be hard reality whereas faith is supposed to be wimpish. But, as Dave makes clear, it is faith in Germans that made the Deutschmark the hardest of currencies.
"Show me the money" sounds realistic, but it hasn't been that long since the Hard Currency, pieces of official paper, was considered wimpish. "Show me the METAL," Show me the GOLD" was the essence of Practicality until Roosevelt outlawed the possession of gold and the 20s gold bonds were called in.
So is Real Money gold or paper?
Real Money is what you can SPEND. How do you KNOW your paper or your gold will be accepted? Chances are your gold won't. You can't use gold coins as a medium of exchange.
You CAN use paper as a medium of exchange.
In fact, you can't USE your gold coins as a medium exchange unless you have a piece of paper from a goldsmith saying they're the Real McCoy. In the real world, you take your Hard Currency to the gold dealer and get pieces of paper, real money, for it.
Lots of people have gold for exchange when The Catastrophe hits. They do that because society will be in a state of collapse. They do that because all the stores will be closed.
So how in the HELL, in the midst of a catastrophe like that, are they going to get anyone to testify that it is REAL gold? We've all seen real gold, but how many touchstones have we seen?
So what IS money?
Money is what you accept because you have FAITH that anyone will accept it from you.
Money is faith.
In the 1960s survivalists talked about how only GOLD would work in The Great Collapse. I thought that was laugh then, but I couldn't explain it to them.
Libertarians insist on their Magic Money, based on Hard and Objective Metal and the Magic Border Lines. But, as Dave points out, the Magic Border Line that makes wages higher is based entirely on faith in the PEOPLE north of that Line as opposed to PEOPLE south of that line.
Japan has less natural resources by far than Mexico has. But if you took all the Mexicans and moved them to Japan and took all the Japanese and moved them to Mexico, Mexicans would be worse off than they are now. I wrote that in the New Right Papers in 1982 after presenting it to before Nobel Laureates at an economics convention. No one EVER disagreed. But no one repeated it, either.
You can't SAY that and have a career in academia, as Nobel Laureate Dr. Watson's firing has just demonstrated.
AGAIN.
All the careerists in every field are OPENLY rejecting serious analysis that leads in politically incorrect directions. Which means that it is in precisely those directions that unexplored truth is piling up. It is a failure to move in those directions that is leading to the ever more impossible bottlenecks we are faced with in public policy.
Dave, BUGS participants, we have reality all to ourselves.