“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all their bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”
– “Gold and Economic Freedom” – 1966 by Dr. Alan Greenspan

There is one good thing to say about the social isolation that comes with poverty. The opportunities to read more, to see more amazing films, has been a revelation. At this point, even if I had more free time, I would rather spend it reading Shakespeare’s historical plays than hanging out with my well-heeled, sub-literate relations and former friends. Who knew?

Also most jobs are work, that is we would not choose to do them if we didn’t have to. Under capitalism a great many jobs are involved with who owns what. We make meters of all sorts, cash registers and there are accountants and lawyers, lilys of the field who do nothing productive.

My point is our problems are systemic and cannot be solved without changing the system. I believe utopia, a classless society, is the way to go. Utopia gets by with as few jobs as possible, the opposite of capitalism. If you see utopia as preposterous, you might ask yourself why you do.

Good question on Iraq budget. I think you are correct, it will HAVE to come off the credit card, but I do think that has to happen along with withdrawing from Iraq. Either way, we need to make sure the next generations are not paying for this war into their retirement.

Kevinp-

Thanks for linking to the switch grass article. I was going to link to a USDA article about it. Your link is great! Thanks.

JimC and dmac…thanks for your kind expressions.

We need to remember the framing over and over and over again.
This isn’t “the government”—it is neoconomics as promulgated by the Bush Administration and the Republican philosophy-controlled Fed.

Let us never unwittingly spread phony predicates no more forever.

We really need a thread on this subject. It is being touted as the biggest revamping of the Federal Reserve since the Depression.

I’m no economist, someone else can likely answer this much better.

America needs productive Jobs, jobs, jobs that pay decent wages…priority that employees are an asset, not an expense, would be a nice idea. Someone who said earlier that it’s finally starting to trickle up that the economy is screwed is right.

And, of course, we gotta seemingly now put our entire corn crop into ethanol (at a net BTU loss), which is already ripplingly through the rest of food commodity prices.

We obviously haven’t yet done that, but are you saying that it’s the speculation on that which is helping to drive food prices? Clearly that can’t continue and, like a fever, will break when it’s painfully obvious ethanol using food grains isn’t going to work (economically, if not energy wise).