Washington State proposed bill to make gold and silver legal tender

Yes.

At the point where this happens, don't expect much gold for your dollars however.

 

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Never thought of that, I was assuming the current price of gold would be the standard. It makes sense. BTW- I want my 9 pounds!

 

What if they never stopped making 90% silver coins for circulation? Would this have prevented or slowed inflation?

 

If they kept making 90% coins and printed paper the same way as before it would have resulted in coin hording and there would be basically no dimes quarters or halves in circulation ever.

 

Well Charmin ultra is the good stuff after all.

 

See Gresham's Law. Coinage is always a problem when governments force people onto fiat currency.

 

Yes make sense but what if all the circulated coins were silver you wouldnt need the larger paper dollar bills because you'd actually be able to buy things with coins. idk just something ive always wondered about.

Shoulda never produced the "bad money" in reference to Greshams Law

 

The government can't go broke? What do you call it when you owe more than you make then? The government does not generate income. It takes money from taxpayers, and when that isn't enough there is no other choice but to devalue the currency by printing more of it to pay the bills that taxes do not cover when leaders are unwilling or unable to curb spending appropriately. From the standpoint of their money is our money, fiscal responsibility has a lot of merit in my opinion. Gold doesn't have to be used as currency in order to back the monetary standard. The benefits of a gold standard can be reaped simply by pegging it with the dollar. This only works if the gold that is claimed to exist actually does. Otherwise the standard cannot work, and that is why it did not work before.

 

This was also the undoing of the bi-metal standard that began when the gold and silver ratio was fixed in 1791. Whichever metal was more valuable on the open market vs. the fixed ratio was hoarded, and disappeared from circulation thus resulting in the demonetization of silver. Had the GSR been allowed to fluctuate with free market forces we might still have a bi-metal standard today, because had silver still been part of the monetary standard when gold was replaced with FRNs then nobody would have wanted the paper, and it isn't possible to replace a bi-metal standard with a single replacement. So for the fiat experiment to begin silver had to be out of the picture.

 

^Yes indeed. This is why they were forced to remove even common metals like copper from the penny and are now looking at it again because even the colored zinc they are using is too expensive. Again, it's another folly that people don't see or understand.

I recently saw where the current head of the US Treasury, turbotax Timmy, suggests that we should rid the US of currency all together. This fits of course because "nothing" is about the only thing that might be worth less than their fiat.

 

It seemed as though you are speaking of the USA, but the US cent still has copper. It is not a colored zinc as you say, but a bimetallic copper/zinc coin. Knowing the facts is important to "understanding".

 

Ok, start of a rant. Please move on if you don't want to read it.

I just wonder why so many people like to punk the US and think its a symptom of our demise how our coins are become more debased. Our nickle is the same composition since 1866, (save wartime emergency). What other country on earth has ever had such a result? I have never heard of such a thing and I am talking the entire span of coinage history. Its an amazing feat, yet doom and gloomers act like it proves we are on our way down. Most other nations had added 5 zeros or more to their money in that timeframe, or it collapsed entirely.

Inflation is a simple fact of human civilization. Did silver and gold coins prevent the British from having to change the penny to a copper coin? Did gold or silver prevent massive inflation in ancient Rome or most other civilizations? I can sort chronologically by size coins produced in 8 different Chinese dynasties. EVERY SINGLE ONE had currency debasement in a couple of hundred years, and this was with a slow, agricultural economy. You put the massive economy type of ours in any of those civilizations hands and our nickel could have stayed the same composition for a generation at most.

People keep talking about putting silver into coinage as a cure. Well talk to our neighbors to the south. They tried repeatedly and all it did was chase coinage from circulation.

Human nature always wants something for nothing, they want stuff from government and don't want to pay taxes. This is as old as civilization, and it causes inflation. To those who wish to demonize "banksters" or whatever, well how successful was communist Russia from preventing inflation? I am pretty sure the "banksters" or whoever weren't running the country there. Who was the big bad "banksters" in ancient Rome where banks physically did not exist?

Fact is we should have changed our money a long time ago, and we were so extremely fortunate to have the run we did its basically unprecedented in modern society.

Ok, end of rant. Sorry.

Chris

 

Personally Id rather the government not exist or at least leave me completely alone.

One of my biggest goals in life is to start my own country probably on a small or medium island. Away from the damn government, their taxes and their corrupt ways.

I know it will 99.9% not happen for me, but one can dream can't he?

 

OK, it's 5% copper and 95% zinc. The copper is used to do the coloring. Seems to me like you might be missing the scenic forest by looking at a weed on the ground. The point still stands as the last coinage act specifically authorizes the Mint to start looking at other options.

 

Chris, the way I look at it is that gold and silver are tools to prevent inflation and ensure monetary stability, but only if the rulres are followed. If societies like ours and Rome have done by expanding the money supply without the metal to back it up then it will fail because in order for metals to do their job in this capacity the ratio of currency to metal must remain intact. Pegging the price while allowing the ratio to fluctuate is a recipe for failure. Me personally I love my country. Any US bashing I do is a subsequent result of actions I disagree with by leadership that hurt the people and the prosperity of the country I love, and being the world reserve currency it also transcendds nationality to some degree.

 

I hear you about rules should be followed. I wish that too. I am very much a strict Constitutionalist, and a balanced budget amendment supporter. I also wish to be left alone like snapsalot. However, seeing the evidence in 2500 years of coinage history, and another 1000 years of evidence we have of other economic activity, I cannot help but come to the conclusion that inflation and coinage debasement is the normal course of conditions. The only thing that ever seems to reverse it is revolution. Maybe its the nature of bureaucracy, maybe its people getting political power in a system, maybe its simple human greed, but whatever it is it occurs so regularly to be a major foundation of numismatics in arranging the order of issuance. If facing unknown issue dates, the very first thing you do is arrange coins in decreasing weights. This tendency is proven thousands of times in coins.

Do I like it? Of course not. But I am not going to ignore it, and need to incorporate it into my world view. This is why I see the US as being an outlier in being able to keep our composition of coins for so long, it really is an aberration. Almost no other country can boast such a feat. Now when we finally are forced to change it seems like everyone is saying its proof of our own demise. That is what I object to.

You can wish to have the dollar pegged to a certain amount of something, and may think that will help, but if we had done that then 2008 would have led to a full scale deflation depression that we probably would still be in. Now you can argue maybe we wouldn't have been in that position if we had backing for our currency earlier, yada yada, its an endless argument.

Again, I am not saying I like it for one second, just telling you from my reading its a normal, expected course of human events that has been repeated ad infinitum.

 

When George Washington stepped down from the presidency and the 2nd President of the USA was elected, Adams, important people from all over the world came to see the inauguration because it was considered a turning point in human history. Keep in mind we are talking about the election of the 2nd President, not the first.

The reason it was considered such a spectacle not to be missed was because it was the first time in human history that power of an important nation had passed from one hand to another without death, war, or inheritance. This is why people made the very difficult trip to the USA to be a part of it.

The moral of the story here is that nothing should be considered inevitable. The USA is the oldest constitutional government in the world and for most of its 236 years, it was on a fixed standard for money. The country has been on 100% fiat for just 40 years of this. People lose this perspective. Fiat will collapse and the country will move on. You bullion investors know this so stay the course.

 

As further evidence of this. We have this chart. See what has happened in the last 40 years? It's quite clear where we went to 100% fiat in the early 1970s. Does this look like something that will be sustained? Good news - You live at a time that will be noted by future generations.

 

Yes many of us realize sooner or later the current fiat will collapse. It is essentially a fact when using history as evidence. It is why so many today are bull for PMs with more and more continuing to join the ranks.

But this country is far different then it was 200 years ago during its beginning. The government has overgrown what our forefathers set it to be, instead we now have a government that controls and oppresses the people rather then being by and for the people. They fought for freedom, they won their freedom, but now we have given back what they so righteously gave their lives for.

 

Like I posted before, every single chart that treats dollars over time is fatally flawed. Its simply garbage information, useful to scare those who are ignorant of time value of money.

You like to insist that "only gold is money" Fatima. Why do you not present a graph like this showing how many ounces of gold we are in debt? It would still have issues, but would at least have a semblance of truth unlike this outright lie.