This is such a wildly unpopular notion, and yet I've never heard a reasonably articulated counterargument.
It's like people who understand supply and demand short-circuit when they think that the same laws don't apply to money too.
It's like people who understand supply and demand short-circuit when they think that the same laws don't apply to money too.
Everyone who understands American economic policy knows that the currency is being slowly devalued on purpose. This is not a conspiracy theory, it is common knowledge. The inflation target is always greater than 0. This is in part because of the perceived risks of deflation -- better to be on one side of the line than the other -- but also, generally, the point is to encourage people to spend or invest rather than passively save, because spending and investment grow the economy.
To a libertarian this is one of the most oppressive things about the way the government works currently ... it forces everyone to work more than they would ideally have to, in a sense. (But I say "in a sense" because if the economy were at a much less active level as "normal" maybe everyone would have lower quality of life. I don't know.) If you ever wondered why Ron Paul dislikes the Fed so much, well, it's because of reasons like this.
This part I don't get. It is generally straightforward to invest one's fiat currency in a very secure (and privately run in a nicely capitalist way!) instrument that has positive real interest rate.
If you're part of society you're ideally using labor and resources from other specialists such as farmers and miners who need some reason to move dirt around to make your life better. If you have money then you put that to work helping those people be more efficient, and maybe spawn other kinds of specialists like web developers.
If however you'd rather not be a part of this society, then you're free to opt out. But then you don't get the benefits of "being on the team" and now either your standard of living goes down (I.e. homelessness) or you have to work super hard (I.e. living off grid in some remote area).
I've seen ℅ used a couple of times recently where I would have used %. Is there a connotation or other difference in meaning implied by ℅ (care of) instead of % (percent)?
And on every corner, people that accumulate wealth are vilified (see talk of inequality, and progressive taxation). If we can't accumulate wealth and pass it off to better the lives of our own offspring, then we're nothing more than insects that live, work, and eventually disappear into nothingness.
Until I pull out a silver quarter or silver dollar and prove to them how much the private federal reserve has devalued their money.
Then it's like, "Oh. Wow. You're right."
The real issue with a currency based on precious metal is that the reverse grows at such a rate much slower (<1% annually for gold IIRC) than economic growth. In a deflationary market, rational actors would simply remove money from circulation because it will just increase in value on its own, whilst the economy collapses.
So your old coin isn't competing against some ratty old dollar bill, it's competing against the real value of my index fund shares.
Which, by the way, are winning: http://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/fda.jpg
Apologies that I can't find a better source right now: http://www.lsned.com/newton-invented-ridges-coins/
Gold and silver is high because asians with money in places like China and India don't trust their governments. Period.
Reliance on gold and the resulting starvation of capital caused a lot of economic and social devastation 100-130 years ago.