Tippit's Nightmare
- Thread starter Solitaire
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Corsair 115
Penultimate Amazing
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The Enrichment Center thanks you for your participation in this monetary experiment! And now there will be cake!
timhau
NWO Litter Technician
That's the Onion piece that sent a few goldbugs on a Finnish-language investing site into an extatic frenzy.
Let's have a little look-see...
Whoa!
Let's stop there.
P.S. I couldn't help notice the similarity to the guy in Tippit's avatar and the guy pictured in the article. Hm.
2010 called, it wants its satire back. Also I've never claimed that fiat money is worthless, only that it enables the perpetual and regressive inflation tax.
Collective monetary enlightenment, not necessarily as depicted in that clever Onion piece, would be a great thing, not a nightmare.
Verde
Muse
I predict there will come a time that The Onion and Colbert will be the only sources of reliable information.
V.
V.
Ziggurat
Penultimate Amazing
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psionl0
Skeptical about skeptics
kevsta
RBL CHeck Failed
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in real terms fiat money is worthless. ie if we were invaded by extra terrestrials, they wouldn't be rounding up and exporting our piles of paper "money", would they?
how long this collective agreement / delusion will last this time round is the only question, but there's no doubt that the emperor actually doesn't have any clothes on, and that one day at some point in the future, dollars will be worthless.
It depends on what the aliens want.
It could be that they really value bovine excrement in which case all that gold and silver people have been hoarding would be useless.
I'll stick with my so called useless fiat money if you don't mind what with it being freely exchangeable for goods and services.
phildonnia
Master Poster
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Here's a thought experiment: suppose that aliens were secretly studying us. However, due to the nature of their instruments, they were unable to see fiat money. What would they make of our behavior? Would they wonder why some people work at difficult or dangerous jobs? Would they wonder why some live in comfort and others in squalor? Would they marvel at the efficiency of our production? Would they have cause to hypothesize a hidden system of communicating the value of labor and commodities?
And what would they think of people who spend their scarce energy digging up and refining ore, just to put it in a box and guard it?
And what would they think of people who spend their scarce energy digging up and refining ore, just to put it in a box and guard it?
Chaos
Penultimate Amazing
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They aren´t going to be rounding up the gold and silver, either.
And how long will the emperor have to continue wearing his clothes before the cranks finally admit that he is not in fact naked?
not_so_new
Graduate Poster
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kevsta
RBL CHeck Failed
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of course, they would be here for the unobtainium.
isnt directly calling me a crank in your opening salvo against the rules or something? ok I suppose if you have bitten you must have thought I was lumping you in with the "delusional" .. so I'll overlook it this time
I like this, clever writing.
Of course there needs to be currency and yes at street level fiat works ok for periods of time, but i'm sure even you would admit it has fundamental problems and things are not going so well?
but "just to put it in a box" is not really the whole picture is it? some interesting reading Peak Silver Revisited.pdf
Eric Sprott is predicting silver to 30-bag it from here in the next decade on fundamentals, it's possible it will be way too scarce and expensive to be used as money, in our lifetimes.
If the price of silver were to approach the price of gold it would likely be capped thereabouts because gold could replace silver in most industrial instances, and there is a lot more of it around.
It's not worthless in real terms, it has some intrinsic value. It has British Thermal Unit value, artistic value, and any other value associated with that of paper, from wiping yourself, to writing things on it. Of course, most of its value is extrinsic, from the fact that the US military viciously protects the sale of oil worldwide almost exclusively in it, big guys with guns at the IRS demand it when you remit your taxes, and judges recognize it as legal tender for all debts, public and private. The fact that it's relatively hard to counterfeit, and great effort is spent on behalf of the institutional counterfeiters to limit its supply in this regard, also adds extrinsic value. If extra-terrestrials had the power to topple the authorities which give fiat money extrinsic value, then its market value would rapidly approach its intrinsic value.
There are some trolls here who occasionally post with the retarded "If you think your Federal Reserve Notes are worthless, just give them to me" line. It's important to be accurate when deconstructing this.
I totally agree. History shows that all fiat currencies eventually reach their intrinsic value.
But convincing everyone why we should abolish fiat money shouldn't be based on a falsehood, ie: that it's "worthless". It should be based on the fact that fiat money enables a regressive and perpetual looting by whomever controls the supply.
Your hypothetical is ridiculous for a number of reasons. Given they had the technology to arrive here, they would undoubtedly be intelligent enough to grasp the concept of fiat money. More likely, they would wonder how such a technologically advanced society hadn't yet come to the collective realization that fiat money was a scheme to steal real wealth. They would undoubtedly know that fiat money was the cause of most of the squalor, and wealth condensation amongst the few empowered to issue such money in exchange for real goods and services.
The scarce energy and resources spent digging up gold is done because gold is beautiful and rare, and pales in comparison to the economic cost and the wealth extracted by the elite few who have the legal right to counterfeit what we call money.
mhaze
Banned
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Argentina, 2000, economic collapse.
Brief summary.
The only people that came out with some of their wealth and or savings, excluding the political figures at the top, were those with money in precious metals or real estate.
It's astonishing how many people fall for the "It can't happen to US" and "We're in uncharted territory" lies.
Brief summary.
The only people that came out with some of their wealth and or savings, excluding the political figures at the top, were those with money in precious metals or real estate.
It's astonishing how many people fall for the "It can't happen to US" and "We're in uncharted territory" lies.
I would also point out that far more real wealth has been looted by normal, run of the mill inflation, at a few points per annum, than under hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is just what happens when the pols and banksters stop caring about the public's perception of what causes inflation, and/or the malinvestment generated requires sufficiently larger injections of capital in order to subsidize banks and keep them afloat.