Gold...........Which way its going?

[Mega]

Re: Gold...........Which way its going?

Don't forget to e-mail Ed!
Mike

[Master Shake]

Re: Gold...........Which way its going?

Let this incredible train wreck be a lesson to every person who may have been silly enough to believe in de-regulation, free market capitalism, low interest rates, and supply-side economics.

As opposed to what, Steve? Command economies? All in all, the two countries that pioneered free-market capitalism, England and the USA, have been the most prosperous, productive countries over the past three centuries, with the greatest amount of individual liberty.

[Munger]

Re: Gold...........Which way its going?

acric5 wrote: "...All government intervention is for its own self interest, this is an absolute and dispels the notion of choice. Nothing the Government does reduces its control and influence over the population..."

Truer words were never spoken.
The one flaw I see in our Constitution is the lack of term-limits for congressmen and senators. I suppose Jefferson, Madison and Washington et.al. never imagined that anyone would remain in Washington for three decades !

Uhhhh........

"Six of the most brilliant political figures in the first 50 years of our country; James Madison, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, John Calhoun and Stephen A. Douglas served a combined 140 years in Congress."

And

No man can be a competent legislator who does not add to an upright intention and a sound judgment a certain degree of knowledge of the subjects on which he is to legislate. A part of this knowledge may be acquired by means of information which lie within the compass of men in private as well as public stations. Another part can only be attained, or at least thoroughly attained, by actual experience in the station which requires the use of it. The period of service, ought, therefore, in all such cases, to bear some proportion to the extent of practical knowledge requisite to the due performance of the service. The period of legislative service established in most of the States for the more numerous branch is, as we have seen, one year. The question then may be put into this simple form: does the period of two years bear no greater proportion to the knowledge requisite for federal legislation than one year does to the knowledge requisite for State legislation?

The very statement of the question, in this form, suggests the answer that ought to be given to it. In a single State, the requisite knowledge relates to the existing laws which are uniform throughout the State, and with which all the citizens are more or less conversant; and to the general affairs of the State, which lie within a small compass, are not very diversified, and occupy much of the attention and conversation of every class of people. The great theatre of the United States presents a very different scene.

The laws are so far from being uniform, that they vary in every State; whilst the public affairs of the Union are spread throughout a very extensive region, and are extremely diversified by t e local affairs connected with them, and can with difficulty be correctly learnt in any other place than in the central councils to which a knowledge of them will be brought by the representatives of every part of the empire. Yet some knowledge of the affairs, and even of the laws, of all the States, ought to be possessed by the members from each of the States. How can foreign trade be properly regulated by uniform laws, without some acquaintance with the commerce, the ports, the usages, and the regulatious of the different States? How can the trade between the different States be duly regulated, without some knowledge of their relative situations in these and other respects? How can taxes be judiciously imposed and effectually collected, if they be not accommodated to the different laws and local circumstances relating to these objects in the different States? How can uniform regulations for the militia be duly provided, without a similar knowledge of many internal circumstances by which the States are distinguished from each other?

These are the principal objects of federal legislation, and suggest most forcibly the extensive information which the representatives ought to acquire. The other interior objects will require a proportional degree of information with regard to them. It is true that all these difficulties will, by degrees, be very much diminished. The most laborious task will be the proper inauguration of the government and the primeval formation of a federal code. Improvements on the first draughts will every year become both easier and fewer. Past transactions of the government will be a ready and accurate source of information to new members. The affairs of the Union will become more and more objects of curiosity and conversation among the citizens at large. And the increased intercourse among those of different States will contribute not a little to diffuse a mutual knowledge of their affairs, as this again will contribute to a general assimilation of their manners and laws. But with all these abatements, the business of federal legislation must continue so far to exceed, both in novelty and difficulty, the legislative business of a single State, as to justify the longer period of service assigned to those who are to transact it.

A branch of knowledge which belongs to the acquirements of a federal representative, and which has not been mentioned is that of foreign affairs. In regulating our own commerce he ought to be not only acquainted with the treaties between the United States and other nations, but also with the commercial policy and laws of other nations. He ought not to be altogether ignorant of the law of nations; for that, as far as it is a proper object of municipal legislation, is submitted to the federal government.

And although the House of Representatives is not immediately to participate in foreign negotiations and arrangements, yet from the necessary connection between the several branches of public affairs, those particular branches will frequently deserve attention in the ordinary course of legislation, and will sometimes demand particular legislative sanction and co-operation. Some portion of this knowledge may, no doubt, be acquired in a man's closet; but some of it also can only be derived from the public sources of information; and all of it will be acquired to best effect by a practical attention to the subject during the period of actual service in the legislature.

There are other considerations, of less importance, perhaps, but which are not unworthy of notice. The distance which many of the representatives will be obliged to travel, and the arrangements rendered necessary by that circumstance, might be much more serious objections with fit men to this service, if limited to a single year, than if extended to two years. No argument can be drawn on this subject, from the case of the delegates to the existing Congress. They are elected annually, it is true; but their re-election is considered by the legislative assemblies almost as a matter of course. The election of the representatives by the people would not be governed by the same principle. A few of the members, as happens in all such assemblies, will possess superior talents; will, by frequent reelections, become members of long standing; will be thoroughly masters of the public business, and perhaps not unwilling to avail themselves of those advantages. The greater the proportion of new members, and the less the information of the bulk of the members the more apt will they be to fall into the snares that may be laid for them. This remark is no less applicable to the relation which will subsist between the House of Representatives and the Senate. It is an inconvenience mingled with the advantages of our frequent elections even in single States, where they are large, and hold but one legislative session in a year, that spurious elections cannot be investigated and annulled in time for the decision to have its due effect. If a return can be obtained, no matter by what unlawful means, the irregular member, who takes his seat of course, is sure of holding it a sufficient time to answer his purposes. Hence, a very pernicious encouragement is given to the use of unlawful means, for obtaining irregular returns. Were elections for the federal legislature to be annual, this practice might become a very serious abuse, particularly in the more distant States. Each house is, as it necessarily must be, the judge of the elections, qualifications, and returns of its members; and whatever improvements may be suggested by experience, for simplifying and accelerating the process in disputed cases, so great a portion of a year would unavoidably elapse, before an illegitimate member could be dispossessed of his seat, that the prospect of such an event would be little check to unfair and illicit means of obtaining a seat. All these considerations taken together warrant us in affirming, that biennial elections will be as useful to the affairs of the public as we have seen that they will be safe to the liberty of the people.

James Madison, Federalist Papers No. 53
http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/fed/blfed53.htm

[Munger]

Re: Gold...........Which way its going?

It's very easy to blame ALL of this on the Republicans, but it's simply not true. I'm re-posting this response I gave on another forum addressing this very same subject:

You sound like a very angry man, Steve, and considering the present mess our country finds itself in you have good reason to be angry. And the Republicans of this present day deserve much [if not most] of the scorn heaped upon them. Yet it helps to remember, as Churchill once said,
” The truth is so important that she is usually surrounded by a bodyguard of lies”.:p

There is nothing “new” or “conservative” about the NeoCons. They are the “Boat-People” of the McGovern Revolution, which took over the Democratic Party from 1969 – 1972. They fled the hard-left lurch within their own party to the Republican Party of that day, which was Nixonian and certainly not conservative in the traditional sense, and they carried their Wilsonian Utopianism with them (“We must fight to make the world safe for democracy”, Woodrow Wilson, 1917; does this ring any bells?). Such views of the world are naive beyond belief, and, if made into the foreign policy of the United States (as George W. Dumbass did) they will bleed and bankrupt our nation. As an example, IF, as “W” said, we will not allow dictators to threaten us, and after he found no nuclear weapons in Iraq, justified the invasion because “freedom is on the march”, then we should immediately plan an invasion of Mainland China so we could free the greatest number of captives from tyranny! Sounds insane, doesn’t it? That’s because it IS insane. And it was the intellectual elite within the Democratic Party that gave birth to this idea, though not for cynical reasons like Bush. (Woodrow Wilson was one of only two Democrats elected President over a period of seventy-two years, and before taking office in 1913 he had been the President of Princeton University). Now to be fair there was also a “Progressive” movement within the Republican Party led by Teddy Roosevelt that would have sympathized with this utopian nonsense (although in a more calculated fashion), so we must be careful not to assign all of the blame to the Democrats. Neither party has a monopoly on fools.


Now to the problem of inflation.The men who founded this republic knew full well the fraud of paper fiat money and prohibited such in Article I, section 8. No less than Oliver Wendell Holmes insisted that the language must be taken literally, that “coin money” meant to strike of metallic coins, and that the whole of the Constitution’s monetary provision was clearly intended to exclude everything from use as a circulating medium of exchange except gold and silver. So did James Madison (The Federalist #44, 1788.) So the present system of TOTALLY fiat money is clearly unconstitutional to any reasonable jurist, except for the likes of Stephen Breyer, the wonderful Clinton appointee who wrote the opinion expanding Eminent Domain to seize private property for NON-public use!

It was the Republican Party in the late 1800s that defended the gold standard from over twenty years of near continuous assault by the “Free Silver” group in the Democratic Party led by William Jennings Bryan. The Federal Reserve was established during the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson (Democrat) and the confiscation of gold and the abandonment of the US Gold Standard was done by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Democrat). It was Lyndon Baines Johnson (“Daddy Bird” – the biggest spender of all Democrats) who fired the opening salvo against the pseudo-convertibility of Bretton Woods in 1968, when he stopped the redemption of gold bullion for US Dollars held by individual foreign nationals through the issuance of SDRs. Nixon administered the coup-de-grace in 1971 when he ended ALL convertibility, denying even foreign central banks (most notably the French) the right to convert to US gold bullion. He defaulted on the Dollar, but the deed was already accomplished before he took office. Nixon refused to reappoint William McChesney Martin – the best central banker of them all – when his term expired in 1970. Although Martin was a Democrat, he stood up to political pressure from LBJ and refused to debase the Dollar. (He was one of the finest public servants this nation ever had – read about him!). The self-serving Nixon blamed him for his loss in 1960 against JFK and appointed Arthur Burns instead, arguably the worst Fed Chairman ever, until Greenspan and Bernanke.
Thus began the colossal mess, which we now find ourselves in, the deed having already been accomplished before Barack Obama took office.
(I wonder if now having surveyed the situation Obama is tempted to ask for a recount!)
:p:p

We have only had two conservative Presidents since Coolidge: Eisenhower and Reagan. Both of them placed the national interests of the United States FIRST, and through a prudent foreign policy knew when to hold ‘em and when to fold’em.
Both of them actually read the Federalist Papers as well as Washington’s Farewell Address and had the prudence and good sense to know that wars bring about the death of republics, and that this is what our country was meant to be – not an empire.
:p
The tax cuts passed by the Democratic Congress during Reagan’s first year in office were not the cause of all of our problems. Tax receipts to the US Treasury almost doubled from 1981 to 1988 (up 88%). It was out-of-control spending by the House of Representatives under “Tip” O’Neil, Jim Wright, and Tom Foley that drove the deficits to such high levels. There was a large military build-up during those years, and I supported it then and make no apology for that now. Johnson and Nixon had squandered a whole decade of military procurement in Vietnam. The Soviet Union was a mortal threat to the United States and was at its peak of military power, even as its economy was in terminal decline. With men like Brehznev, Chernenko, and Andropov running their government it was a very dangerous period indeed. But, even with the military build-up, there was no excuse for the Congress to far more than double Federal spending during those eight years. In fairness, the Republicans controlled the Senate for six of those eight years and did little to hold down Federal outlays.
As a people we have always been willing to listen to “vote buyers” running for congress who love to promise us things that the government (read: “someone else”) will pay for. As Walt Kelly said through his famous cartoon character, Pogo Possum, “We have met the enemy, and they is us”.
:p
There is plenty of guilt to go around, and I NEVER voted for either of the Bushes. The only answer from the government side would likely come from Ron Paul or someone else just like him, in terms of economic and foreign policy. I am far too conservative in the real sense of the word to be a Republican. But looking for fiscal responsibility from the Democrats is a pipe dream.
:p:p
:p:p
:p:p

A very silly post. Thank you. Both Dems and GOP do bad things. I might point out, though I'm sure you will not change your tune in the slightest, that the Laffer bit about tax cuts doubling revenue is utter nonsense. See this, and this. ("Income tax receipts grew noticeably more slowly than usual in the 1980s, after the large cuts in individual and corporate income tax rates in 1981." By contrast "income tax collections grew much more rapidly in the 1990s," when "marginal income tax rates at the top of the income spectrum were raised," CBPP noted.)

I must also say that you are terribly misinterpreting Federalist #44, though that was probably the intention, which states only that States do not have the right to coin money or issue paper money. It does not say that the Federal government does not have the power to issue paper money.

"The extension of the prohibition [of allowing a State to coin its own money] to bills of credit must give pleasure to every citizen, in proportion to his love of justice and his knowledge of the true springs of public prosperity. The loss which America has sustained since the peace, from the pestilent effects of paper money on the necessary confidence between man and man, on the necessary confidence in the public councils, on the industry and morals of the people, and on the character of republican government, constitutes an enormous debt against the States chargeable with this unadvised measure, which must long remain unsatisfied; or rather an accumulation of guilt, which can be expiated no otherwise than by a voluntary sacrifice on the altar of justice, of the power which has been the instrument of it. In addition to these persuasive considerations, it may be observed, that the same reasons which show the necessity of denying to the States the power of regulating coin, prove with equal force that they ought not to be at liberty to substitute a paper medium in the place of coin. Had every State a right to regulate the value of its coin, there might be as many different currencies as States, and thus the intercourse among them would be impeded; retrospective alterations in its value might be made, and thus the citizens of other States be injured, and animosities be kindled among the States themselves. The subjects of foreign powers might suffer from the same cause, and hence the Union be discredited and embroiled by the indiscretion of a single member. No one of these mischiefs is less incident to a power in the States to emit paper money, than to coin gold or silver. The power to make any thing but gold and silver a tender in payment of debts, is withdrawn from the States, on the same principle with that of issuing a paper currency."

[Guest]

Re: Gold...........Which way its going?

Thank you for an excellent post. Very informative. I may make a copy of it because it is a good read about history.

My God, there exist some intellegent people in the South! I am shocked.

Try spelling "intelligent" correctly, then maybe you can toss out some bigoted comments about the south with a little more credibility.

I wonder what the reaction would be had you joked about jews or blacks or a myriad of groups it's not currently fashionable to rag on for kicks. I guess the current fad is to bash Christians, Republicans, and Southerners, which is about the same as rednecks in the 50's and 60's making black jokes. Somehow I doubt you'd have tossed out "wow, there really are some smart black people! I'm shocked!" as casually.

You see, "The Dukes of Hazzard", "The Beverly Hillbillies", and "In the heat of the night" aren't real. They're TV shows.

[Master Shake]

Re: Gold...........Which way its going?

Try spelling "intelligent" correctly, then maybe you can toss out some bigoted comments about the south with a little more credibility.

I wonder what the reaction would be had you joked about jews or blacks or a myriad of groups it's not currently fashionable to rag on for kicks. I guess the current fad is to bash Christians, Republicans, and Southerners, which is about the same as rednecks in the 50's and 60's making black jokes. Somehow I doubt you'd have tossed out "wow, there really are some smart black people! I'm shocked!" as casually.

You see, "The Dukes of Hazzard", "The Beverly Hillbillies", and "In the heat of the night" aren't real. They're TV shows.

Don't be dissin' The Beverly Hillbillies by referring to them in the same sentence as The Dukes of Hazzard.

And Uncle Jed, though unschooled, was wiser and a better man than Milburn Drysdale.

[Master Shake]

Re: Gold...........Which way its going?

A very silly post. Thank you. Both Dems and GOP do bad things. I might point out, though I'm sure you will not change your tune in the slightest, that the Laffer bit about tax cuts doubling revenue is utter nonsense. See this, and this. ("Income tax receipts grew noticeably more slowly than usual in the 1980s, after the large cuts in individual and corporate income tax rates in 1981." By contrast "income tax collections grew much more rapidly in the 1990s," when "marginal income tax rates at the top of the income spectrum were raised," CBPP noted.)

But they did grow.