Weimar Republican
January 22nd, 2010Woe to Thee, O Land, When Thy King is a Child
Are we finally reaching the point where gravity catches up with us and we have to admit we can’t finance the future by eating it?
The Dow is down over eighty points, and we just had two days that were even worse. Sooner or later, before we can have a real recovery, somebody somewhere has to make some money–has to create some wealth–and given our unemployment figures, that doesn’t seem to be happening. And we still have a gigantic glut of foreclosed homes the banks are sitting on. They can’t hold them forever. Eventually, they’re going to be put on the market or bulldozed. It will be interesting to see what happens to home loans and property values.
Because we borrowed an astronomical amount of money to finance the recovery, in the future, we have to make more money than usual in order to have the same prosperity we had in the past. It’s just like a student loan; you borrow money when you’re 20, and by the time you pay it off, every pizza you ate in college cost $50. What happens when you graduate with debt and then can’t get a job? That’s America’s situation.
Where is the evidence that we’re going to do better in 2015 than we did in 2005? Why would anyone think that was possible, let alone likely? And if we try to solve the problem by inflating the currency, we’ll just end up with larger numbers of smaller dollars. We’ll all be millionaires, and nobody will have a second pair of shoes. It’s still poverty, no matter how you look at it. We may be able to cheat the Chinese via inflation, but we’ll also be burning our cash reserves.
I don’t know why God provided me with silver coins, but it looks like I should be happy about it. I inherited a bunch of circulated silver coins from my grandfather. He snapped them up after Johnson turned our money into steel slugs. Seemed crazy at the time, but if we have a depression, I’ll be able to buy bread.
People think silver coins are worthless. They’re ignorant. The coins are 90% silver.
I just looked it up. My nickels are worth a dollar each. The dimes are worth over a dollar. The quarters are worth over three dollars. Wish I had enough of them to keep me alive for a year or two. Maybe I should buy some.
Gold is fine, but in a depression, it would be hard to spend. Owning gold would be like carrying thousand-dollar bills. A piece the size of a sesame seed would buy a dozen eggs. That’s useless. They don’t make coins that small. And what are you going to do, if you own it? Run a smelter in your kitchen? Forget it. Even if you could cut your gold into small pieces, no one would trust it. This is why mints exist. The purpose of a mint isn’t to make coins. It’s to make coins people can trust. Otherwise, private enterprises would be making gold coins diluted with copper and brass.
A silver coin, unlike a gold coin, will have a useful value. One of my dimes is worth a dozen eggs. Spending gold will be very difficult, but handing over a dime and grabbing a dozen eggs will be simple. Gold will only be useful if you’re buying a car or real estate. Or you’ll be able to trade it for silver, at a loss.
People say you don’t have to have precious metal in your possession in order to use it. You can trade it electronically. Good luck with that. If things get weird, I don’t want my money in the vault of some metals dealer three thousand miles away, waiting for him to declare bankruptcy and disappear. Savings accounts are insured by the government. Gold? No. When it’s gone, it’s gone. You can have private insurance, but would you trust it? Look at AIG. And the insurance wouldn’t compensate you in gold. You’d get worthless paper dollars. Better to stuff a few bags of silver in a deposit box at a local bank. If the bank fails, money will vanish, but goods in deposit boxes will remain.
If Obama and the Fed manage to eat our savings by printing money, what will we have left? Subsistence agriculture and bread lines. People in cities will starve. It may be especially bad in Florida, where we are suffering an unprecedented wave of blights and exotic pests. Oranges are probably going to get very scarce over the next five years because citrus greening is incurable. We may lose our bananas. Growing tomatoes here is already very hard; without chemicals, it can’t be done.
What do you do when you live in Miami and times get hard? The fish and peacocks and ducks would disappear in two months. Squirrels and pigeons would follow. You can’t grow enough fruit to live on, if you have a typical lot. It’s hard to grow vegetables here, and most lots are small anyway. Many homes here have topsoil six inches deep. Under that, it’s pure coral.
I never pray for God to fix things for us. Not exactly. I pray that we will turn to him and submit to him because of our problems, and that he’ll give us recovery only after that happens. We won’t learn anything from an unconditional handout. It would be a false kindness, and God doesn’t deal in those. I actually pray he will maintain the recession until we have revival. Otherwise, the suffering will be in vain. I also ask that he end the recession for those who have turned to him already.
Obama thinks a chicken can make a living by eating its own eggs. Everything he tells us goes against common sense, history, and basic economics. Borrowing only leads to prosperity when you reasonably anticipate that the borrowed money will enable you to make enough money to repay it. Otherwise, the result is bankruptcy. Can a nation declare bankruptcy? I guess so, but it won’t protect us from harsh consequences. We may weasel out of our debts by devaluing the currency, but we’ll all become poorer, and we’ll have to pay higher interest to China the next time they lend to us. This is how bad credit works. Everything costs more. But it’s worth it, so we can have essential government services, such as the subsidy of multimillion-dollar studies to tell us why trout can’t fly.
I think we’re going to have labor pains for a while. Things will get better and then worse, over and over, until the big collapse comes. The fluctuations will warn people and help those who are teachable to make preparations. Hopefully I’ll be ready. Life isn’t perfect when you’re in good standing with God, but it’s a whole lot better.
January 22nd, 2010 at 11:44 AM
Obama thinks a chicken can make a living by eating its own eggs.
That is such a great phrase, I have posted that paragraph in my blog.
January 22nd, 2010 at 11:59 AM
I like to think ammo will be the currency default in the case of a depression.
January 22nd, 2010 at 12:10 PM
Although referring to Baptism – I think this has a lot to do with Christianity in General today. In Matthew 3:
“”Brood of snakes! What do you think you’re doing slithering down here to the river? Do you think a little water on your snakeskins is going to make any difference? It’s your life that must change, not your skin!”
Lives really need to change. And it’s not going to have to be just “token change”. It’s going to have to be change like I have seen you go through, like I am going through right now, and many others. God is preparing for something. Just what is that something. Keep fasting – keep praying. Stay faithful.
January 22nd, 2010 at 12:20 PM
Trout can’t fly?
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Pish posh to you, sir!
January 22nd, 2010 at 12:52 PM
Watch the language. Children read this blog. And, according to some, write it.
January 22nd, 2010 at 12:53 PM
“Because we borrowed an astronomical amount of money to finance the recovery” and W failed by not openly and aggressively opposing Barney Frank’s social engineering to get a mortgage for “Michael and Jerome”:
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http://www.hulu.com/watch/38041/saturday-night-live-washington-approves-the-bailout
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That piece of humor is one of the best and most courageous things SNL ever did. Not surprised that both parties couldn’t stand their idols being smashed.
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But the Bush clan has never been about fiscal conservatism. The father hated Reaganomics. W never vetoed a spending bill.
January 22nd, 2010 at 12:56 PM
Bush blew it when it came to spending, and the bailout was obscene, but I think his veto shyness came from a terror of alienating mindless swing voters in a time of razor-thin electoral margins.
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Swing voters are the stupidest creatures under the heavens. They should be confined in pens and fed dog chow.
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http://swingvoter.blogspot.com/
January 22nd, 2010 at 2:36 PM
Many reasonable swing voters are libertarians. And it is precisely libertarians and not ideologues that will enable a non-Democrat government. Some good discussion over on National Review by Jonah Goldberg and others.
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http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MGE2Njk3NWUwNmM3NTNlZTJhMGVlMjZkZmE3MzVjNTU=
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http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDY5NTg2MmQ2MTk5NDE1NjNlZWQ5NmE5MjA4MjMxNzQ=
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See also http://www.ontheissues.org/senate/Scott_Brown.htm#Abortion
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Scott Brown is not an absolutist on abortion. Had he been, 50,000 of his voters would probably have not voted for him and we’d have Senator Coakley and a gloating Pelosi, Reid and Obama ramrodding both Obamacare and economy-crushing policies that would result in an accelerated abortion rate. Abortion opponents need to do the math and realize that they are largely responsible (no matter their intent) for the greater number of abortions due to not backing an imperfect conservative and allowing a Democrat to win and set policy. This is not a battle that can be won in absolute terms instantly. Chipping away at abortion by 10% per year is a far more realistic goal to shoot for. Even if the GOP had a filibuster-proof supermajority (which hasn’t happened in our, our parent’s or our grandparent’s voting lifetimes), there is no way that abortion will be outlawed (nor should it be — because there ARE times when a mother’s life is legitimately at stake and it is really bad law to favor potential life over actual life). The goal should be to make it rare and to change American culture so that there is the disincentive of stigma for those, especially unmarrieds, who use it as post-facto contraception.
January 22nd, 2010 at 2:50 PM
You can buy bags of varying weights of “junk silver” aka circulated pre-’65 coins from dealers. I definitely recommend it. My grandfather left me over 100 silver dollars. It’s in my hoard for future use. 🙂 He also left me tools, knives and two guns. He’s the person that got me into these things in the first place. How can you beat that?
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I have been buying silver and avoiding gold for some time. Silver is at a historically low value right now in relation to the price of gold. This is due to various factors, but I really think that this will change drastically soon. Why? Gold is expensive. People will put their paper currency into hard assets as inflation increases. The average person cannot afford to buy much gold, and it’s too valuable to use for common purchases, as you note. So look to an increased interest in silver.
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Gold is great for “wealth preservation,” but not for buying day to day items.
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By the way, in Argentina, they opened safety deposit boxes, too. Consider getting a discreet safe at home. I like floor safes for this use. I have a proper gun safe – two, actually – but a floor safe that you can sink into the ground and seal in place with rebar-reinforced concrete is something to consider:
http://www.sentrysafe.com/products/productDetail.aspx?s=73&WT.si_n=ShoppingCart&WT.si_p=CartView
January 22nd, 2010 at 3:03 PM
Libertarians are the biggest idiots on the planet, and absolutists to boot. They do bright things like voting for Kerry because Bush wasn’t the perfect small-government candidate. They will never get a libertarian into the White House, so they ought to pick the candidate who will grow government least. That’s almost always the Republican. We thought Bush was bad; look at Obama.
January 22nd, 2010 at 3:11 PM
There are kooky isolationist libertarians like Ron Paul. And then there are consequentialist libertarians like Larry Elder and Milton Friedman… and me.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialist_libertarianism see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Republican and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_conservatism The latter link notes Ronald Reagan often is quoted as saying: “I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”
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It’s hailing in Los Angeles. Maybe I should stop commenting. 🙂
January 22nd, 2010 at 3:22 PM
Ah… you’re referring to members of the Libertarian Party. Yes, they’re idiots.
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Intelligent libertarians should work hard within the GOP and steer the party to small government policies. Third parties result in two sub-majority Clinton victories.
January 22nd, 2010 at 3:23 PM
It stopped hailing. Now I’m a bit nervous about that death of the firstborn thing in this week’s Torah portion.
January 22nd, 2010 at 3:31 PM
Elder was smart enough to join the GOP, after making weird remarks about there being no difference between Republicans and Democrats.
January 22nd, 2010 at 4:58 PM
Libertarians make me laugh. They nominated essentially a bookie for POTUS in 2008. Wayne Allyn Root. I’ve heard his commercials for “can’t miss football pick of the week” on sports talk radio.
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I used to be sympathetic to Libertarians. Then I attended one of their party meetings. And you think DragonCon is weird? Those folks made the gathering look like a group therapy session for sex offenders. Seriously. Heck, probably could have been sex offenders given their stances on such matter.
January 22nd, 2010 at 5:00 PM
Sorry, Root was the VP candidate. The king of sour grapes, Bob Bar,r was the POTUS candidate.
January 22nd, 2010 at 6:01 PM
I am going to by some silver and gold coins from a local dealer.
January 22nd, 2010 at 6:47 PM
Northwest territorial mint is good for junk silver- don’t seem to gouge you too much above the spot price and have been reliable. YMMV.
January 22nd, 2010 at 8:06 PM
A piece of paper that says you own ten ounces of gold will be as useless as not having the gold at all if things go into a true tailspin.
The Northmen relied on weight of precious metal rather than the value placed on a coin.
No Viking worth his sword would be caught without pan scales and weights and a bag full of hack silver and hack gold.
Add a few emeralds or rubies=Bonus!
How come nobody ever blames Nixon for the current economic situation?
He catapaulted us into relations with the Chinese and it all went south from there,,,,