http://mises.org/daily/1829

Since you are most likely anti-fiat currency, you should enjoy Rothbard’s essay.

Cheers.

PS: not nutty

Boyd – No, the nutty bit is “gold”.

“Nutty” is still extreme, but I understand (and could agree with) the argument to use a market basket of goods. Some have suggested gold, oil, and half a dozen precious metals. Gold has been used for just about all of mankind’s time on Earth for different reasons. Today, it has several qualities that make it one of the best assets to back currencies.

VERY few of those are mined in the US

I’m not concerned about where gold is mined. Why are you? It is not obvious to me what your premise is here.

At the end of the day, however, ALL of these things only have the value that we ascribe to them.

Correct. Stuck on Mars, diamonds aren’t worth much to you.

a central bank tweaking interest rates/money supply to try to keep the economy churning along.

That’s a different problem.

isn’t obvious to me that it’s a nutty policy

Yeah, I’ve yet to ever get a solid explanation. Here’s another opportunity, so we’ll see what happens.

Pegging your economy to a single marker like that IS nutty-as-in-a-disaster-waiting-to-happen, afaik.

Again, I’m not sure that’s a better policy than having a central bank tweaking interest rates/money supply to try to keep the economy churning along. But it sure isn’t obvious to me that it’s a nutty policy. Indeed, ISTM that “nutty” here is being used to mean “not something that’s commonly proposed among the powerful,” rather than “something that you can see must lead to disaster.” It’s nutty in the same sense that ending the war on drugs, or reducing the war on terror to being real careful whom we issue visas to, or prosecuting US war criminals is nutty–it’s outside the mainstream of views acceptable to the powerful and commonly heard on the big media.

If blowback fully explained terrorism, then we’d be getting attacked every single week by all sorts of insurgent groups in Latin America, where we’ve historically had a far more active and aggressively interventionist hand than anything we’ve ever done in the Middle East until very, very recently.

“Islam isn’t inherently violent but it’s adherents are inherently capable of violence.”

…except there ARE tenets of Islam that are inherently violent and that large swaths of the practitioners of that religion follow. They include everything from the murder of apostates, death for non-crimes and consensual violations of Islamic morality, and the waging of jihad upon other religions. No other major religion in the world today has a tendency toward violence that is even remotely comparable, and even those with violent pasts have generally excised it from their religious tenets with the onset of modernity.

As “un-libertarian” principles, let’s see how Islam stacks up:

- Prefers theocratic government. Check.
- Institutionalized discrimination against women. Check.
- Death penalty against gays. Check.
- Death penalty against apostates and heretics of islam. Check.
- Incompatible with market-based capitalism due to strict usury codes, weak recognition of property rights, and coerced government diversion of wealth into religious institutions. Check.
- Incompatible with democracy as evidenced by the fact that the islamic world is also the least democratic region in existence.
- Disposed to aggressive warfare and violence against its neighbors in pretty much every single part of the world it has ever gone. Check.

Islam is no more “libertarian” than Soviet Marxism. And pretending that terrorism isn’t a product of Islam is about like pretending the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery.

I see what you did there.

And just to be clear, Israel is no saint in the middle eastern conflict. They are a socialistic country with an aggressively expansionist policy towards their neighbors, and should be thoroughly denounced for that on its own.

I read “no saint” and then “socialistic” and “should be thoroughly denounced. While I detest socialism, I don’t believe it is the crux of the issue with Israel’s actions.

But that does not make the corrupt, theocratic, and belligerently anti-liberal Palestinian organization into the good guys, and especially not its Hamas faction.

I am shocked–SHOCKED–to see that two governments are guilty of using violence and oppression against each other. This is where we go blah blah blah anarchist quote for the millionth time and then someone says “But anarchism is nutty.”

In the late-80s it wasn’t my #1 gold standard issue, but it is now: a gold standard prevents the government (the usual currency issuer) from using the printing press to enact a tax on citizens.

I’ll counter Chuchundra’s link with: http://seekingalpha.com/author/paco-ahlgren/articles

That’s about a half dozen articles on gold & gold standard alone from one author (who happens to be Austrian School). Mises.org has some great articles as well.

Yes, this is RTFM. Sorry.

What’s the expiration date for having nutty ideas about the gold standard?

Ironically, this is a nutty statement itself.

PS: The history of gold-backed state currencies is interesting. Also of interest is the history of gold-backed private currencies and state reaction to such. Again, not nutty. Not horse-buggy. Interesting.

Various radical Islamic groups have been at war with us for something like thirty years. This is their default setting; Islam has throughout its history produced small groups of raving nutters.

Your statement is: radical Islam is radical. Point conceded. And, I’ll even let you declare what “radical” means just for fun. BTW, radical factions of every religion (and they all have them) are radical. BTW2, radical religious factions have been at war >30 years. Goes back to caveman times.

If firmly suppressed they seldom rise above the level of local banditry. If allowed to grow or even encouraged…

Why would God allow such a thing? But seriously, “allowed to grow” & “firmly suppressed” is about as totalitarian a statement as you can get which ironically is what feeds radical religious factions. When truly “allowed to grow” they die, unless they are seen as an answer to an oppressive (maybe one trying to surpress) state/thug. Even then, they die out pretty quickly. You aren’t citing sources, so neither will I.

If allowed to grow or even encouraged they make haphazard and stupid war against all of civilization, Muslim and non-muslim alike.

Had to break this one out. So, radical religious factions act identically to states. War on “terror” = kill civilians. War on drugs = throw everyone in jail, SWAT raid wrong (and right) houses and kill everyone. War on Germany, Japan, etc. = kill lots of civilians. War on Iran (undeclared) = shoot down civilian jumbo jet after ousting democratically elected head of state to plant brutal Shah. War on Cuba = allow famous people to visit but embargo puts Cubans in generations-long poverty.

Got it!

What is sad is that no candidate or pundit of either political party or any political stripe is willing to get behind a sensible way forward;

I am skeptical that you have such a plan.

1) Eliminate by military force such core groups as are a serious threat: the government of Iran, the ‘government’ of the pseudo-state of Palestine, two or three active terrorist networks.

I was right! What rock allows one to sleep under it for a full decade?

2) Thoroughly frighten various Heads of State that are using or have used Terrorist connections to forward their ambitions. Q’addafi (or however it’s being spelled this week) springs to mind.

But Israel is our friend…and WE are the USA? How would it look to frighten our own President? But, I’m willing to give it a try. Then, we tackle the Canada problem.

Establish firmly that the civilized people of the world WILL NOT TOLERATE ‘honor’ killings and similar Islamic barbarity.

Firmly establishing something is awesomely effective at changing cultures.

5) DON’T Nation Build. DON’T try to solve the middle east’s problems. Establish a minimum level of acceptable behavior for middle east Nations, and otherwise leave them alone.

And if they don’t…NATION BUILD’N TIME!
Sometimes you should really be consistent.

6) WHEN an Islamic group or Nation oversteps the limits that you have established, come down on them like the Wrath of God. Preferably some fairly nasty pagan God, like Wotan. Then LEAVE. Cleaning up the mess is THEIR PROBLEM. If we aren’t going to conquer the world and run it our way, we need to pack up and go home when the threat to us is gone.

As a US weapons manufacturer, I approve of this plan. But, as a US (re)construction company I think this is morally horrific.

What’s that Tropical Thunder quote? “Never go full…” something?

Eli Lilly (#20) knows meds.

But that does not make the corrupt, theocratic, and belligerently anti-liberal Palestinian organization into the good guys, and especially not its Hamas faction.

To paraphrase Ayn Rand, at least the Israelis are somewhat civilized.

That noted, I’ve never suggested that Islam, as a singular unit, is universally extreme. I have however suggested that the adherents of Islam are disproportionately prone to violent and coercive expressions of their religious “faith” than any other of the world’s major religions today, and that is a statement I stand completely behind.

A simple cataloging of the world’s active and recent armed conflicts reveals that an Islamic group is at least one of the belligerents in almost every single case. Sometimes it’s both, such as the Shia-Sunni split. There is no other religion in the modern world that breaks out in a religiously-inspired war against practically all of its neighbors no matter where it happens to be, and no other religion where extremist fringe elements have such a prominent and sizable presence within that religion at large. Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, 9/11, London, Madrid, Mumbai, Bali, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Cyprus, Kashmir, Darfur, Somalia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Thailand…what do they all have in common? Armed conflicts and terror attacks where islamic radicals were at least one of the belligerents. You can’t claim with a straight face that Opus Dei is some sort of Catholic equivalent to that. Nothing else even comes close.

“It’s roughly the same as advocating a return to the horse and buggy as a solution for current transportation issues.”

Um, no it isn’t. That statement shows a pretty serious misunderstanding of money. Faith based currency isn’t analogous to transportation. Having a quasi governering body that gets to decide how much money to print and not print so they can decide what interests should be is not a free market.

Commodity currency is not perfect. The value of our economy is more than just gold and silver. But at least it creates a value that isn’t easily manipulated by forces outside your control.

Quite a few countries peg their currency to some outside currency, usually the US dollar. This trades off the ability to manage your money supply for having an outside force that’s setting your inflation rate and is much less susceptible to domestic political pressure than your own central bank would be. It seems to me that this is almost the situation we would be in, if we went on the gold standard. It’s not obvious to me that this is a nutty thing to do in either case. Maybe suboptimal–perhaps having the Fed tweaking the money supply, with an eye to inflation, interest rates, unemployment, exchange rates, balance of payments/trade, etc., leads to broadly better outcomes. But not nuts.