Dr. Pepper Ten: A Diet Soda Going its Own Way
Since dudes apparently scoff at diet drinks, the folks behind the new Dr. Pepper Ten soda decided they needed to really butch up their advertising in order to reach the core soda-drinking demographic, which just happens to be teenage boys. The result? An over-the-top, ironically hypermasculine ad campaign touting the new drink as “NOT FOR WOMEN.”
Here’s one of the ads:
Oh, and they’ve also got a Facebook app that’s — get this! — only available to men! I’m not sure the women of the world are going to suffer much from being banned from playing a rudimentary flash game that involves shooting “girly things.”
I know they’re hoping to generate controversy here, but really? This is just too dumb to even get annoyed about, much less angry. It’s not misogynistic; it’s more a parody of misogyny. Is it such a parody – stereotyping guys as macho buffoons — that it’s actually more misandrist than misogynist? You could make an argument for that, but again the ad is so over the top ridiculous, so soaked in irony, it seems silly to get indignant about this either.
So what’s going to happen when the MRAs of the world hear about this ad? Will they, missing the irony, embrace its Diet Soda Going Its Own Way (DSGIOW) mentality? Or will they denounce it as an example of ad world misandry and pretend to be deeply offended?
I’m betting on the latter. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Posted on October 11, 2011, in alpha males, bad boys, MGTOW, misandry, misogyny, MRA, video. Bookmark the permalink. 253 Comments.
CB, it’s my understanding that inflation tends to be higher when the economy is strong and lower when the economy is weak, no?
wheewhoo-
I drank lemonade with my Tijuana hot dogs tonight….
uh, if anyone is gonna make a pee and weiner joke, well I wouldn’t expect less…..
I can’t believe I missed this. DKM wrote, “I don’t know, probably for the same reason that I assume that water is usually wet at room temperature…”
Does water become dry if the temperature rises above or below 75?
I was gonna read Brandon’s wall of text, but I got distracted by his repeated use of the word “pegging.” Thanks, other thread. :p
hehe pegging heh
@Katz: What affects inflation the most is when the Fed opens the “discount window” by increasing the amount of money in circulation. When more money is pushed into the economy (good or bad) the effects of supply and demand take hold. With more supply and the same demand, the price (or in the dollars case, value) decreases.
When the Fed closes the “discount window” and lowers the amount of money in circulation, there is less money in people’s hands hence the value of the dollar goes up since there is less money being chased by the same amount (roughly) of people.
So when Bush and Obama decided to throw more than a trillion dollars “extra” into the system, it is only a matter of time before inflation hits. The only way to “fix” this is to 1) never print and distribute massive amounts of money and 2) closing the “discount window” and removing the money from circulation.
You know the IBV and Inflation Fairies have been claiming that inflation is going to hit, ANY DAY NOW, and it still persists in not happening.
Maybe, just maybe, there is more going on then the idea that printing money=inflation instantly?
Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
I asked CB for a reason.
Oh my god, you fucking gold bug. Me and pecunium destroyed this bullshit the first time you posted and you’re still at it? Fuck you, you randroid piece of shit. Go wank to Atlas Shrugged again, it’d be a better use of your time than asking for an antiquated, idiotic system be reinstated.
Jesus fuck, for all your “OH MY GOLD IS SO SPECIAL AND THE PRICE IS FIXED” BS you still haven’t even responded to “Tell that to Spain Circa 1525″.
Low offiicial currency systems with bank issued notes is not the best system. It causes boom and bust and internal strife between people in different economic fields. Bank collapses would happen, essentially wiping out the value of large parts of currency overnight. The response of the northern courts was to force those who endorsed bank notes to still owe the value, which meant that the person who originally obtained the banknotes, and anyone who endorsed them, risked loosing assets based on bank collapses, but prevented total economic collapse through encouraging refusal of all notes. The south, which preferred to barter property titles (often property titles to human beings), hated these rulings. This was a contributing factor to the civil war, and the root cause of a large amount of pre-civil war economic troubles.
History, you might want to learn a bit of it.
Brandon, so much oversimplification (which is really, not surprising, since, “We need a commodity based standard” is a reductionist explanation of how economies work).
Also, the massive war effort during World War II was the major cause to the US and other countries getting out of the Great Depression. Factories were re-opened and people were hired to manufacture all the needed clothes, bullets, ships, rifles, etc… that were needed for the war.
Not so much.
What ended the Great Depression in the United States? This paper suggests that the recovery was driven by a shift in expectations. This shift was triggered by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR) policy actions. On the monetary policy side, Roosevelt abolished the gold standard and announced an explicit policy objective of inflating the price level to pre-Depression levels. On the fiscal policy side, Roosevelt expanded real and deficit spending which helped make his policy objective credible. The key to the recovery was the successful management of expectations about future policy.
(Great Expectations and the End of the Depression By Gauti B. Eggertsson American Economic Review 2008, 98:4, 1476–1516)
That last bit is important. It’s consumer attitudes which influence spending (at all levels, from the individual getting more than staples to make it through the week, to industry building new plants, and hiring new workers. If no one is buying, no one will spend).
The actual factor which the early escaping economies had was a “floating currency” (i.e. they were not on a gold standard. The answer to the second trivia question, what did the USSR and Switzerland have in common; they were both on a gold standard).
What Roosevelt did was unpeg the dollar from gold and increase spending, with the idea of 1: increasing spending, which would increase demand. The net effect of this was a return to a pre-1929 level of economy by 1937 (well before any form of war spending could be used to account for the increase). At which point the idea of, “fiscal austerity” was trumpeted as if a balanced budget were needful to make things work.
The economy immediately contracted, and the “double dip depression” was born.
As to the idea of inflation being bad, always and everywhere, the rate of inflation through the war was higher than you probably imagine. 1942 had an annual inflation rate of almost 11 percent. It wasn’t just the war, as 1947 was 14.4. and 1948 was 8.1.
Brandon: @Katz: What affects inflation the most is when the Fed opens the “discount window” by increasing the amount of money in circulation. When more money is pushed into the economy (good or bad) the effects of supply and demand take hold. With more supply and the same demand, the price (or in the dollars case, value) decreases.
: The overall rate of inflation for 2009 was -0.4 percent. For 2010 it was 2010 percent. 2011 looks to be ending the year at somewhere between 2-3 percent.
So how does that work again?
Brandon: Let’s take a look at the math of your “gold standard”. At 500 per oz, the profits alone, for the second quarter of 2011 require a lot of gold.
How much? Per the US Department of Commerce, the Bureau of Economic Analysis the Profits from current production (corporate profits with inventory valuation and capital consumption adjustments) increased $61.2 billion in the second quarter.
That increase would, at 500 dollars per oz require 122,400,000,000 troy oz (or 7,650,000,000 lbs troy) to cover. That’s not the total profits, that’s the increase in profits, for one quarter; in an economy which is not working anywhere near it’s full capacity.
Whatever commodity you peg a currency to has to deal with that sort of problem.
Yes, inflation usually accompanies economic growth. As problems go, inflation, within limits, is a fairly happy one for an ecomony to have. Even in the “stagflation” era of the late 70s, the Fed was able to intervene by raising interest rates to about 18%. The problem with goldbugs is that they imagine inflation to be the Worst. Thing. Evar. In fact, deflation is a much bigger concern, since it is harder to reverse through central bank intervention.
Inflation, again within limits, tends to benefit wage earners and debtors, as wages tend to rise and debts become less relative to prices. Inflation tends to hurt creditors and investors, which is why it’s such a bogeyman to our elite classes.
Hellkell, yep, NWO and the well put together bible of his comments in the forums. Wow.
Molly, the forums are awesome.
I hope my question didn’t come across as being critical of responses. I absolutely agree with debating (forcibly, sharp weapons optional) the breaks in rational or fair thought anyone runs into.
Perhaps a bit of back story:
http://www.sociopathworld.com
WARNING! There be dragons there. Anyway, I grew up with some of these - as in diagnosed-by-multiple-heath-care-professionals-as-psychopaths. If you read through the FAQ and any of the comments, you’ll start to see a lot of “coincidences” in behavior between Mr. Meller and Co. and the neurologies they’re describing.
My point: not only are some people completely unable to understand any point outside their own “reality,” the act of opening dialogue with them feeds into their psychosis because by acknowledging what they said…
You’re making it more real - even to them.
Kinda makes you wonder about all the Trolly McTrollersons out there, eh?
Pinatas, though! Pinatas are awesome. Especially ones that have good chocolate inside. If there’s a realistic chance of getting rewarded with the sweets, swing away. I just have a thing about unrewarded efforts with that variety of upright-walking-primate.
Well, the first problem is the Federal Reserve doesn’t print money, the US Treasury does. The Federal Reserve sets up a series of monetary policies that regulate the recommended loan rate that the Federal Government issues out US Treasury bonds in response to inflation, international and internal demand, and moderate international exchange rates.
See The August Shock, 1971.
No, actually they aren’t. You’re right that we currently have a liquidity problem, but using a limited commodity won’t solve it, it’ll make it worse. That’s why I pointed to the Silver Crisis of 1465 and, more recently the problems with the Bretton-Woods act which led to Nixon and the August Shock.
Arguable. Had the US not been in such a strong position post WW2 the dollar never would have been the fiat currency for international trade. It’s also the reason why the USSR never joined the Bretton-Woods agreement. In practice, the “wealth” of a nation depends entirely on natural resources and ability to project power onto other nations to corner their resources.
See Colonialism.
@Elizabeth: Inflation slowly erodes a currency. It doesn’t just happen all of a sudden. Each month the CPI calculates the inflation rate and it gets aggregated into an annual inflation rate. I think currently it is at a little over 3.50% as of August. But there is still 4 more months to calculate. I could see the 2011 inflation rate at about 4-5%.
Also, hyperinflation happens much more with paper money than “hard currencies”. See Weimar Republic and the Republic of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe had the good fortune to have it’s prices double every day and the state was issuing out 100 trillion dollar notes.
@Rutee: I have never read Atlas Shrugged nor have I seen the movie that recently came out.
@CaptainBathrobe: Small amounts of inflation (1-2% per year) aren’t devastating and can help move the economy up to a certain point. It can’t replace actual economic growth though.
It doesn’t really help wage earners, since prices move faster than wages. A wage earner will find themselves with a larger paycheck but with roughly the same purchasing power as before. They will use their higher wages to buy products that cost more.
@Cynickal: Ok, the BEP which is part of the treasury is the actual govt agency that prints and designs the actual bills. However, the Fed is the one that is in control over increasing/decreasing the money supply.
@Pecunium: You completely missed my point. The point was that congress can peg gold to the dollar in a way that helps keep inflation low and allows the money supply to never outpace the amount of gold on hand.
Also, even when we were on the gold standard, we weren’t limited to just gold. We had silver certificates as well. We could also include other precious metals as well as precious stones. There is enough tangible wealth in the world (or the US itself) to cover the money supply.
The idea is to make the dollar’s value tangible and not just a piece of paper that rises and falls on the “full faith and credit” of the government.
@Brandon:
1-2%? Really? That’s quite a bit lower than average inflation since ww2. I just don’t think what you are saying is borne out historically. The time since roughly the mid 80s has been a time of low inflation, yet real wages declined. Real wages increased relative to inflation since ww2 until the early 70s-a time of higher overall inflation, I believe. Again, hyperinflation is definitely a bad thing, but inflation rates higher than those we have now would definitely be a good thing for debtors and probably wouldn’t be all that bad for wage earners if accompanied by robust growth and decreased unemployment. Those are really what’s wrong withe economy right now: high unemployment and anemic growth. Inflation is way, way down our list of concerns right now.
Part of the reason that we haven’t had a repeat of The Great Depression is because we’ve been off the gold standard. With fiat currency the Fed has the flexibility to help stabilize through monetary intervention.
You alluded to WWII as the cause of the end of the Great Depression. That’s true, and it’s due largely to massive goverment spending on the war effort-which did indeed lead to higher inflation but also to higher overall prosperity.
Another question: How effectively can you peg currency to gold? You can rule that you can cash in X dollars for Y amount of gold at the treasury, but you can’t force private individuals to buy or sell Y amount of gold for X dollars.
Sociopaths aren’t necessarily delusional, psychosis and psychopathy aren’t the same thing, and not every person with funky neurology is a danger to others.
What makes a precious metal/stone “precious”? Do you believe this is some sort of inherent characteristic?
There is not enough precious metals and jewels in the world to cover the US economy, or even the economy of the state of California. Pecunium’s point still stands:
Psychosis and anti-social personality disorders, such as sociopathy, are not the same and are often considered mutually exclusive diagnosistically (the WHO also excludes any behavioral disorders when issuing a diagnosis of anti-social personality disorders). These are not only not the same thing, they are in many ways opposites. People with psychosis have ordinary sorts of motivations regarding others, they can care about other’s feelings and well being, try to do the right thing, etc. Psychosis is not correlated with violence. Psychotics often act very reasonably towards events as they perceive them, they may not however always properly perceive certain events due to a delusional event. This is not the case for sociopaths, who have an understanding of the facts of the situation and, by definition, are perfectly capable of understanding theory of mind issues-that is, they know that action X causes person Y pain or sadness, but don’t care-they often use this knowledge to be manipulative of others. Sociopathy is not a mental illness, it is a personality disorder, these are somewhat distinct issues.
Brandon: You ignored my point, completely.
Where are you going to find the 7.6 million l pounds of gold needed to keep the money supply even to the increase in GDP for one quarter of an underproducing economy (with a valuation of $500USD per troy oz)?
What about next quarter.
If we assume that increase to be average, that’s a needed increase of 30 million lbs (troy) of gold per annum. in ten years thats’s 330 million lbs of gold (aprox, since a troy oz is 1.097142857. avoirdupois, which is why a lb of gold weighs more than a lb of feathers).
So what does that mean… well the total estimate of mined gold in the world is 158,000 tons.
158,000 * 2 = 316,000 lbs =not quite ten percent of the world’s entire gold supply.
That’s just one quarter, for just the US.
Why, one wonders, if a “gold standard” is the key to financial success has every country (including Switzerland) abandoned it?
Here is why the Gold Standard Doesn’t Work
The stability caused by the gold standard is also the biggest drawback in having one. Exchange rates are not allowed to respond to changing circumstances in countries. A gold standard severely limits the stabilization policies the Federal Reserve can use. Because of these factors, countries with gold standards tend to have severe economic shocks. Economist Michael D. Bordo explains:
“Because economies under the gold standard were so vulnerable to real and monetary shocks, prices were highly unstable in the short run. A measure of short-term price instability is the coefficient of variation, which is the ratio of the standard deviation of annual percentage changes in the price level to the average annual percentage change. The higher the coefficient of variation, the greater the short-term instability. For the United States between 1879 and 1913, the coefficient was 17.0, which is quite high. Between 1946 and 1990 it was only 0.8.
Moreover, because the gold standard gives government very little discretion to use monetary policy, economies on the gold standard are less able to avoid or offset either monetary or real shocks. Real output, therefore, is more variable under the gold standard. The coefficient of variation for real output was 3.5 between 1879 and 1913, and only 1.5 between 1946 and 1990. Not coincidentally, since the government could not have discretion over monetary policy, unemployment was higher during the gold standard. It averaged 6.8 percent in the United States between 1879 and 1913 versus 5.6 percent between 1946 and 1990.”
Why did Nixon repeal the last vestiges of the Gold Standard?
Because foreign countries were demanding specie, in lieu of dollars.
And
More on the Gold Standard
It is important to recognize that the gold standard was a historically-specific institution. The cornerstone of the gold standard was the commitment by all industrial-economy governments and central banks to maintaining convertibility of their currency. The pressure that twentieth-century-democratic-governments would feel to abandon currency convertibility and the stable exchange rate peg in order to boot employment or attain other economic objectives was simply absent. The credibility of the government’s commitment to the gold standard rested on the denial of the franchise to the working class. As long as the right to vote was still limited to middle and upper-class males, those rendered unemployed when the central bank raised is discount rate and tightened monetary policy had little voice in politics. As long as union movements remained relatively weak, the flexibility of wages and prices that would allow the gold-standard system to quickly readjust to equilibrium was present.
Later on these two preconditions for the functioning of the gold standard would erode, and the gold standard would cease to be a politically and economically-feasible institution.
At the periphery of the world economy, the gold standard functioned with less success. Primary product-producing econmies were subject to large economic shocks as the prices of their exports rose and fell. Countries at the periphery were also subject to large shocks as British investors’ willingness to loan capital abroad went through its own less-than-rationally-based cycles. Latin countries were repeated forced off of the gold standard and into devaluation by financial crises.
So if you are rich, and other countries aren’t in a position to turn their stuff into your gold, then the gold standard will work, tolerably well, if everyone plays along.
Even at that, the depressions which happened under a gold standard were worse (esp. with the inadequate [when compared to today's less than perfect] social safety nets).
Back of the envelope: all the gold ever produced = 10 billion oz, which equals 5 trillion dollars (at $500USD per oz).
The rough costs of the personnel costs in the 2010 DoD budget for the Army (262,463,998,000). That’s just the Army, not the Navy, the Marines, or the Air Force, it leaves out procurement, R&D, and new weapons development. It’s pay, food, and retirement/medicare contributions. That total does include those same costs for Reserve and Guard Personnel, because that’s where the DoD put’s those costs.
Total Gold in the world (at 500USD per oz) - Most of the cost of the Army, for one year.
5,000,000,000,000-262,463,998,000 = 4,737,536,002,000
Roughly five percent of the world total of gold is spent on the US Army payroll every year. In twenty years that’s means all the gold in the world moves through the Army’s hands.
Add in the Navy and the Air Force and it’s probably more like 15 years.
Add in retirement pensions, and disability compensation, and the costs of procurement, facilities management, R&D, and it gets to somewhere between five and ten years.
Let’s call it 10 years. Every 10 years all the money in the world goes through US DoD*.
What does the rest of the world economy do for money, what with 10 percent tied up in the US military?
*that’s, perhaps, a trifle conservative; the GPS system was the equivalent of all the world’s new gold output for one year; and it assumes the costs of the DoD don’t really change, since the actual output of new gold, relative to the whole isn’t that great.
@Voip: What makes something “precious” is the same thing that makes anything valuable: if the demand is more than the supply. Precious metals are more valuable than plastic because there is far more plastic in the world (and it is easily made) than gold, silver, platinum, etc… Because it is in shorter supply, gold will be more expensive. The fact that it is in shorter supply also fuels supply and demand because people “want what they can’t have”. Rarity increases prices. Even if the product itself isn’t very useful.
There is a difference between the size and wealth of the US economy vs the amount of money floating in circulation. The US economy is roughly worth 12-15 trillion dollars, but there isn’t that much money in circulation to cover it. In fact
We don’t need enough gold or other valuables to cover the entire economy, just the money supply. If the economy grows by 3% in a quarter, that doesn’t mean the Fed increased the money supply by 3%. A static money supply can still generate economic growth because increasing/decreasing the money supply causes uncertainty that the dollar might sink/rise in value.
In the end, the main problem is fiat money. Money that only derives it’s value from some intangible abstraction like “full faith and credit” is a poor way to handle monetary policy. This is why gold prices are increasing. More and more people have “less faith” in the US govt and how it manages it’s money and finances. So people are trying to maintain their purchasing power by being long gold and other metals.
@Pecunium: You are forgetting that not every single employee of the DoD is going to exchange their paycheck for gold. Sure, if every year, every employee exchanged their paychecks for gold we would run out. Then DoD employees would have all the gold. But what are they going to do with it? Spend it! They are going to pay their bills and buy what they want. Thus the gold transfers from them to businesses and their employees. Then the cycle continues. The gold will be spread out through out the economy (just like paper money does now)
Then the government would tax the consumer and businesses on the items bought or the businesses profits. Thus earning enough revenue to pay the DoD employee’s again.
Also, the $500 per troy ounce was just an example. The government could peg gold to $1000 or $10000 per troy ounce. The government could set any arbitrary number so that the gold supply is always more than the money in circulation.
Brandon: The gap between gold and a growing economy is similar to the gap between our floating money circulation and the amount of wealth of the US. The wealth of the US is much higher than the actual money that is floating. In fact, unless you want to kill the economy, you can’t have more dollars floating that are worth more than the wealth of a country.
So… the dollar has to have a fixed value… That means, should an economy increase, the dollar has to change in relative value to something. The way it gets done now (which stabilised the economy, until certain sorts of regulation on speculation were repealed) is that more money is printed.
Your way does it how? What happens to make it possible to keep money in circulation?
What happens if, as a lot of businesses are doing, capital is being sequestered? Those dollars would be a larger piece of the pie than they are now (and it’s pretty plain that is having a deadening effect on the economy.
As to the point about servicemembers not redeeming their checks for gold, you missed the point. 10 percent of the total gold supply of the world is represented in the use of dollars to pay salaries. That doesn’t take into account R&D, infrastructure support (i.e. maintaining bases), equipment maintenance, training costs, etc.
That reduces the money available for everything else. Having a commodity based currency constrains the economy.
And Weimar doesn’t work as an example of why non-commodity based currencies don’t work. If Weimar had used one, it would have been worse. The reparations the Allied Powers imposed would have taken every bit of currency they had, and; because they had no more gold to expand the money supply, there would have been no money to spend on anything. The economy would have collapsed to barter and they would still have been unable to pay their bills.
Also, the $500 per troy ounce was just an example. The government could peg gold to $1000 or $10000 per troy ounce. The government could set any arbitrary number so that the gold supply is always more than the money in circulation.
This has been tried. It’s what the USSR did to keep the ruble as a gold backed currency, which it was, for the entire time there was a USSR.
Oddly, this didn’t seem to have much of a stabilising influence on the economy.
I’d give some input on the whole gold debate but, well:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w&w=420&h=315%5D
(Argh. Women, know your html!)
Bagelsan: For some reason, the HTML code YouTube gives doesn’t work here. It sometimes works to paste the address straight from the url. Frex:
(Yay! Thanks Kathleen.)
spearhafoc
Sorry to come late to this, but I strongly disagree that the Yorkie campaign can fairly be called misogynist. To me, it was clearly tongue-in-cheek, trading on the British love of sarcasm (which permeates a great many successful British ad campaigns) by deliberately mocking a then-current tendency for very successful brands - and Yorkie is one of the larger British chocolate brands - to be remarketed in a fluffier, overtly “girlier” format, something that I find far more patronizing than anything that Yorkie’s brand managers did. It also implicitly mocked the popular image of the bluff, straight-talking Yorkshireman (the name ‘Yorkie’ comes from the city of York) and his resolute belief in traditional gender roles.
Personally, I thought the campaign was hilarious, and so did my wife - who made a point of deliberately buying Yorkies and pretending to be unable to cope with their overpowering masculinity. She was far from alone: sales rose by 30%, and this reverse psychology was assumed to have been a significant factor - especially given that the chocolate market is traditionally female-dominated.
Of course, if women had actually been banned from buying Yorkie bars, that would have been a different matter entirely. Not to mention illegal.
Oh, and the ‘Women: Know Your Limits!’ sketch that was posted while I was writing the above is a work of absolute genius, trading on exactly the same attitudes that the Yorkie campaign was exploiting.
Poking my head in quickly as a very-much-non-Keynesian libertarian lass, there are Many other reasons for free-marketeers to be careful about our traditional fondness for gold. Metals, much like war, have been the health of the State and imperialism.
Maybe in ancient times, when wars could be fought quite profitably using gold (and slaves) plundered from one’s conquests, but since the XIX century, governments-and their central bank clients/owners have always suspended payment of specie when going to war. War-and its attendent expenses and unrecoverable liabilities-is utterly incompatible with gold (or even silver). Governments and banksters know this very well! Why don’t you?
Actually, I might stand corrected even there. Ancient Rome (certainly one of the most successful and longest lasting of ancient empires) to support the Emperor, the Praetorian guard, and the armies occupying and looting the various provinces of the empire, was reduced to the ongoing clipping and debasing the gold content of coins, with resulting economic stagnation and ruin in the two centuries or so before the fall of the West in 476 AD. The discipline of gold (honest money) was thus a force for peace even then!
Meller: What nonsense:
Actually, I might stand corrected even there. Ancient Rome (certainly one of the most successful and longest lasting of ancient empires) to support the Emperor, the Praetorian guard, and the armies occupying and looting the various provinces of the empire, was reduced to the ongoing clipping and debasing the gold content of coins, with resulting economic stagnation and ruin in the two centuries or so before the fall of the West in 476 AD. The discipline of gold (honest money) was thus a force for peace even then!
The end of Elizabeth I’s reign (a time when England wasn’t engaged in any significant war, for the best part of 60 years) was a time of stagnant economy, and monetary clipping).
It was a problem a bit more than 150 years later, when clipping was a big deal in Restoration England. Take a look at modern coins, they all have edging, meant to inhibit clipping, because a skilled clipper could net a fortune.
Skip ahead to the Napoleonic wars (when “plunder” wasn’t enough to finance the campaigns. England and France, and Russia, and the US were all using gold.
The problems in Rome, dealing with the currency, weren’t because of the cost of the legions, but rather a problem of scale. The taxes weren’t quite up to the expenses, and the consolidation of the economy meant that moving money about, apart from the quite efficient, taxation, wasn’t up to the needs of the people who had money (since most people weren’t free, even when they weren’t, technically, slaves this was a smaller percentage than one might think).
But if it makes you feel better to think the magical properties of gold will fix the world; giving you one more bit of anger to cuddle to your breast and wallow in; since it (like feminism) isn’t going to change in your lifetime, go to town.
Just remember to wash your hands when you are done.
. War–and its attendent expenses and unrecoverable liabilities–is utterly incompatible with gold (or even silver). Governments and banksters know this very well! Why don’t you?
I do. But that wasn’t my point. At all. You do know that the letters in color with a line under them are a link, don’t you?
These words are a hyperlink
http://radgeek.com/gt/2011/10/04/all-that-glitters/
There’s that url.
It goes to a libertarian blog. It’s not long. Promise.
My point is this. I am familiar with the many arguments that not only you, but fellow libertarians I think the world of, or at least like, use to argue for the honesty of gold. But we need to take a long hard look at the dark side of the peaceful currency, and factor in how the hunger for precious metals has driven colonialism and slavery, and bloodied and broken the backs of our fellow human beings. All of this is a major libertarian issue that throws a wrench in our love of the metal, and we need to face it, whichever side of the gold debate we end up on.
A fellow at the booth promoting the local gold mine, told me it was only profitable right now because of all the wars going on.
See also “The Price of Gold, Human Rights Violations in Peru”
And When Silence Is Golden:
http://hub.witness.org/fr/node/3998
And more at nodirtygold.org
http://www.nodirtygold.org/home.cfm
The human rights issues surrounding gold cannot be brushed aside, or relegated to the past.