Tja, da musste die Banken abschaffen.
Viel Glück.

"... dann wachen "die Massen" auf? Echt? Wann sind denn die Massen das letzte Mal aufgewacht? Und was genau soll dann passieren? Wie gesagt, der Mensch lebt 70 Jahre, stirbt, und die Jungen wiederholen alle Fehler. Menschen sind dumm. Und wenn sie gerade mal eine Ahnung von der Realität bekommen, sind sie alt und niemand hört auf sie.

Das ist immer ein Zyklus, irgendwann kommt ein Crash, und dann eine Währungsreform. Immer wieder ad infinitum, solange wir dem goldenen Kalb des Kapitalismus huldigen. Denn Inflation ist die Basis für das Ganze.
Oder zeig mir wie der Kapitalismus ohne Banken funktioniert.

Lets stick to Engliush, when possible, I gave the German quoted articles only because I did not find translations of them.

Capitalism doe snot need banks necessarily. Capitalism needs

- free markets that do not give you what you desire btu what xyiu can afford,

- "Warengeld" - a money of inherent material value, that gets its agreed value just by market interaction like any other good or commodity, and that state and politicians cannot reset at will and that they cannot inflate in total volume as they like, reaöl opneya IS just any commodity/good that isn suitable to serve as a saving format for value you do not want to spend immediately;

- and enough insight - as classical national economist,the ancestors of today's so-called Austrians had! - to see that while capitalism has an inherent drive toewards forming monoplism but that this monopilsm must be resisted to and must be prevfente djust like life itself has an inherent drive towards age and death, biut craves for trying to prevent dying as long as it can.

The misery starts when politicians promises miracles and wealth raining from heaven in order to get elected, and their private money does not suffice to pay for them. Then they steal it from the others, or the devalue the existing money by inflating its ammounts. The ruin evertyhing and everyone, just for their career. "Wählerbestechungsdemokratie" - voter bribery democracy.

What there is today - IS NO MONEY. It is a a poor surrogate for money. A money that has no inherent vlaue, IS NO MONEY. Just any token. Market must decide what gets accepted as money,a dn what money'S value is. And market must do that alone and unhindered by politicians.

Capitalism in principle needs no banks. Just free trade and free bartering. the rule of law and reason and reliability. Treaties who cannot be sued for when the yget violated. Even more so, since capitalists know that the term "capital" goes far beyond the reference to currency tokens only. Of all forms of capital there are, forged money, Parker's Monopoly notes, is the least important one! ;)

Aim your criticsm at monopolism, and you have my support. But you aim it the wrong target, the cure instead: capitalism. That is absurd.

Thge biggest monopolist, btw, is the state.

You want co control politicians and want to stop them before they have ruined it once again? Then you have to shoot them dead whenver they reach with their hands out for controlling, minting, defining the value of money. Its the worst poltical crime possible to do so, and the key to total control and absol,ute power: controlling the mints. Everybody should be allowed to run a mint if he wants, and no monopolies whatever should ever be accepted. Money must be a market function, never a political agenda.

Nothing has 'inherent value'. The utility anything has depends entirely on circumstance.

Sets of preferences are subjective and individual, yes.

Splitting hairs, the most favourite distracting tactics. Okay, here you get it:

inherent values get attributed by the negotiations of market participants, but the differnce is that they agree on the material value they attribute to ann item or token, may it be a sack of rice or a rare bird'S colourful feather or an ounce of gold. The maket decides these items' value, and that si their inhgerent value. With a bank note, it is different, you use bank notes for bartering not on basis of their material inherent vlaue - which is just the paper and the ink, so a million dollar note still would be worth just pennies in inherent value. The bank note nevertheless gets dealt with as if it had the material value printed on it.

But that is like an ounce of gold in simply bar format, or an ounce of gold minted in a medal or coin. For the coin, you would always pay a little bit more, but when you sell it back to the trader, he nevertheless will often just pay you back the current material value of th gold it contains - that is the inherent value of that 1 ounce of gold. Everything becond that is just a sentimental value. And sentimental valued items are bad items for building reserves and secure your savings in.

In the end, bank notes are no valuable items in themselves, they are FIAT money only, fiat from Latin: "it will be, it shall become". It means money, or value one hopes hat will materialise, so to speak, while it is no value in is current form. In fact a bank note is just a written certificate of debt, which would be okay if the value of the note that is printed on it would equal a security stored in the safe of the bank. You have one dollarnote, becasue it is easier to handle and smaller in weight, but for it you have a security stored at the bajk that equals this one dollar, may it be precious metla or anything else. It is like the ticket you get when you hand over your coat while visiting the opera - you have that ticket, and they have the coat. Yo give back the ticket, and you get back the coat.

Not with the money today! If you demand all money notes tobe turned into material assets again, the system would collapse after less than 1% of the paper money being exchnaged for gold, silver, palladium or whatever they had "in stock".

Two forms of credit there are, the one is reasonable and economically reliable, stable, the other paves the road to disaster. First, there is credit that bases on somebody else not consuming something, and what he saved by not consuming it himself, he lends to somebody. No dysbalance between real world assets and bilance credit in the books until here, everything is fine, you get a coat back when you hand over the ticket. The other form of credit is to hand out notes of debtness (=bank notes) for which no consumer items were saved, you effectively hand out these leafs of paper without them being backed by any securities. And this is lethal for every financial system and economy in the end, always, unavoidably. And this is what they do since over 100 years, excessively, and more and more excessively so. You do n ot get a coat when handing over your ticket, becasue nobody has handed them in a coat as a security in the first. There is no coat you could get.

We cannot escape the consequences of this stupidity. Some fall earlier than others, the sequences of players falling may vary a bit - but in the end falling they all will.


There is no coat you could get, I said above. Its like this with over 99% of the money the banks are doing business with currently!

We wanted to be so sly, we considered ourselves to be so clever with all these super-sly and super-clever "financial products", with all these ways of delaying to calculate the totals and to hide the lack of securities. We are so much at ease with our well-thought out mechnaisms and the big locks on th doors of the safe.

The problem just is: this safe is empty. Your claim for your share of its content, gets you nothing. And all this becasue we beleive ruthless poltical basters telling us that we could endlessly live beyind our means and spend more than we can afford, and that money can be multiplied infinitely by the magic of alchemy. But money MUST be limited in total, global availability, only then it can have any inherent value. Without inherent, market-negotiated value, without money being an ordnary trading good like all others, it is no money, but fraud and theft.

The day the huge masses realise this, is the day when war breaks out in Europe's streets.

Okay. Now I just wait for somebody reminding us of that "you cannot eat gold"; or something different that nevertheless is as clever. For example "Try to buy a leaf of bread with your 1 ounce gold bar". Its pointless remarks like these that really make my day.

No, I am not 'splitting hairs'. Gold has value because people decide it has. So does currency, 'fiat' or otherwise. There is nothing inherent about value in either. 'Value' is a social construct, not a physical property, as your own attempts to define the value make clear. You are simply misusing the word. It doesn't mean what you are trying to make it mean. As for the rest of your arguments, I am no great fan of the capitalist system myself, so I have no need to defend it, beyond suggesting that solutions to the many inequties it brings are unlikely to be found through the accumulation of shiny rocks.

1200 dollars in physical gold (currently around 1 ounce), is not the same like a stash of 1200 1-dollar notes. Either you eat a real pie, then you can enjoy it, or you just imagine to eat a pie whose taste and sweetness and dough only exists in your imagination . But don't tell both were the same, the real thing and the imagined thing. I prefer the real pie every time, and if you think your fanatsy eases your appetite, then trade me your material pie so that that burden is off your shoulders, and I eat the rela thing then and tell you how sweet it tastes - then we both have what we wanted to get: me the pie, and you your imagine. - Lefties and capitalism-haters dont like that, I know. Still, market laws are behaving like natural laws a bit - they never bow to ideology or wishful thinking. If you violate them, you cannot avoid forever the consequences of doing so - they find you sooner or later. Nothing ever gets forgotten, not a single taler gets lost. The debts will be paid for down to the last Taler - and often the currency then is pain and suffering and national disaster.

Sorry, how does me pointing out that your own arguments demonstrate that the value of gold is a social construct constitute a 'fantasy'?

As for the rest, I think we are all familiar with your chicken little obsessions and your belief that failure to follow the ludicrous tenets of the von Mises cult will lead to the imminent collapse of civilisation. As a demonstration of faith, perhaps such obsessiveness deserves applause, but as evidence of critical thinking from someone who appears to have a little historical knowledge, it is risible. And no, there is nothing remotely 'natural' about the market. People create it. People break it. And the natural world doesn't give two hoots either way.

Any opinions regarding the security conference?

We simply do an experiment. You take your 100 paper dollars, and I take my 3 grams of physical gold, and then we head into a failed state with persecution, black market and a currency that is hyperinflating 200% every day and essentially is broken down. And then we see who can barter with what he has - you with your 100 paper tokens that after one hour already have lost significant value again and does so every minute and every hour coming, or me with my three grams of gold. I am extremely confident that my bucket will be several times as full than yours every time we do this.

I have 10 thousand years of history of mankind and gold and bartering on my side. You have 800 and something years of history of failing paper money experiments - every single one of them! - on yours. When we get on the black market, we soon find out who finds somebody to barter with, and who get something and who gets nothing. Even if the price of gold can rise and drop widely - SOMETHING you always get for it. You cannot say the same about banknotes, as history has already proven many times. And then even you will know what the difference between banknotes without and physical items with inherent market value is. ;) There is a reason why states that want to enforce the use of their forged money need to prohibit rivalling physical tokens with intrinsic, inherent value. Man's preferences here are very clear - since centuries.

Its getting tiresome to explain these very same fundamentals, these very same essential basic fundamentals time and again. And when you say you dislike capitalism anyway, then it is especially hopeless anyway. But your socialist ways (since the opposite of capitalism is planned economy, there is no third option) will never work - and the simple reason is that man simply is not what socialism would like him to be, and asking a life form constantly to be somethign different than what it is, is against its nature and thus will never succeed over time. And pressure to enforce complainac eof this kind just will create violence in self-defence.

I would love to see this being done. Why? - would you ask. Because this implies that US is a failed state with currency that is hyperinflating 200% every day.

If this is not the case and people in the country in question understand what USD banknotes are (and we have to assume that for the experiment to be fair) then the person with cash is more likely to be better off, simply because it is more convenient to use money instead of the physical gold. I mean 3 grams is like a 1/6th of a cubic milimeter of gold, it is pretty hard to split it into 100 units to exchange it.

Regarding the rationality of that choice (apart from the convenience factor which is quite clearly there) - assuming that the USD is not hyperinflating and maintains it's buying power, then in that specific scenario there is little difference (apart from convenience, which is on the side of the USD banknotes), as what the person in question cares about is the value others assighn to the USD (and hence - it's purchasing power) which, the last time I checked, was quite good.
In fact in real hyperinflating situations (ie Russia in the 90s) foreighn currences were prefered to the gold and other such means.

Regarding gold - it's value is a subjective construct, if it was used just a regular good it would hold little value as there are few practical applications for it. The only difference between gold and cash (and other forms of money - I mean apart from metal and paper and now digintal money there were many, many others) is that it's value has been assighned by people for longer (which means little) and the money mass tends to not change rapidly (though we did see that happen with the other kinds of metal money - ie copper coins).

One could argue that this lack of change in the monetary mass (and the lack of convenience) is highly detrimental, as the money mass could not expand after the expansion of the economy, precluding the consumers from buying goods that they are otherwise capable of buying, as their demand is not supported by their liquid reserves.

"10 thousand years of history of mankind"? You are simply making things up.

Gold digging done by humans since ~5500 before Christ, maybe even earlier - plus 2000 years since Christ, makes 7600 years.

Plus minus some more or less. Big deal.

Its one of the earliest metals man learned to work on.

http://alphahistory.com/weimarrepubl...inflation.jpeg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3jGYwD1MuP...blic,+1922.jpg

http://prepare-and-protect.net/wp-co...rinflation.jpg

http://de.academic.ru/pictures/dewiki/76/Lot3_rev.jpg
500,000 and 5,000,000 and 10,000,000 and 50,000,000 Reichmsark notes.

http://de.academic.ru/pictures/dewik...arden_mark.jpg
5,000,000,000 Mark.

http://de.academic.ru/pictures/dewik...ldschein-2.jpg


100,000,000,000,000 Mark.

My apology if you got dizzy from the many zeros. Imagine the taste of a leaf of bread costing several million Mark, maybe that helps you to get back your balance.

Yup. People have dug for gold for a long time. They have also whittled wood, weaved baskets and climbed trees to get coconuts. Big deal. Proves precisely nothing about the value ascribed to such things as being 'natural' or 'inherent'. Because it isn't. If gold has 'value', it is because people think it does. And because they believe in an abstraction called 'value'. Ask a physicist. If he wants to know the mass of something, he can measure it. Likewise the density. Or the coefficient of expansion. 'Value' though? All he can do is look up the price - which simply tells him what other people will swap it for. Don't need a physicist to do that, because it isn't a physical attribute.

:up:
Like .. money.

You guys are a kind of a gang, I tell you.

http://www.sbcgold.com/blog/the-intr...ld-and-silver/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrin...e_(numismatics)

I mean that is fine, just irrelevant. Because if you are trying to use the German hyperinflation case in the gold vs cash USD model you have introduced above, then those piramids of cash are irrelevant, as they represent local hyperinflating currency and not foreighn (assumed to not be hyperinflating) currency - the USD for example.

Well and you prove us right, because it breaks down to two things - how much value people attribute to a means of exchange (which is subjective) and how convenient it is to use (where paper and more so electronic money win against gold, that 100 USD in cash vs monetary gold example is great, as it shows how inconvenient gold actually is).

The subjective value attribution is the important bit, because if you call that process natural then you view humans as objects rather than subjects and thus deny them agency.

So, a gold-bullion dealer's website claims that gold has 'intrinsic value'? Whoop-de-doo. And a garbled Wikipedia article written by random blokes on the internet, citing no sources for anything whatsoever, and not actually supporting anything of any significance anyway? If this is the best you can come up with I suggest you find a new topic for your millennialist doom-mongering: if you are stuck for ideas, I was just reading about the theory that extracting oil from the ground reduces lubrication for the tectonic plates, and if continued unchecked will lead to civilisation-destroying earthquakes. Should be good for a week or two's Eeyorish* prognostications.

*I assume a man as well-read as you is familiar with Winnie the Pooh? If not, I recommend the tale of the honey-pot gift as a lesson in value as a social construct. Constructed on the fly by a bear of little (but sufficient) brain with a sweet tooth and no self-control. :03:

:o Don't give Trump ideas :timeout:
:haha:


@Skybird we certainly know what you mean. Plutonium in purest form is even more worth, but also difficult to handle. Gold is the quasi-standard, of course. But when aliens from a planet of pure gold landed here, the price would fall. If more gold is being excavated and cast, the price will also fall.

It is with gold, as it is with diamonds. DeBeers owns all resource sites, and punishes everyone who interferes. It is an artificial rareness, because there are so much diamonds in the world, all women of the world would break down trying to wear them. There is also more than enough gold.

If there was a real worldwide crisis, affecting all (really all), you can then try to eat your gold, or try to sell it. Good luck.
I just can advise you, if you want to buy gold, buy it in bullion form. No necklaces, no Krugerrand. Gold is not worth that much, unless it is cast bullion form, with the exact weight and the casting institution stamped on it.

Don't try to resell gold in other form, or a diamond. Even worse than buying a new car, considering the loss of value within the first year.