Somewhat related, Planet Money did a story a few years ago about attending a sort of libertarian summer camp. There’s this thing where the libertarians all gather in the woods and live out their dream for a while. One of the rules is, no fiat money. So they all trade at the food stalls and such with gold. Very tiny pieces of gold. It immediately collapses of course, because chunks of gold are a terrible form of barter. Nobody knows quite what it’s worth, you have to weigh it constantly, and the tiniest piece is still way too much to buy a sandwich. It’s a hilarious shitshow but the attendees are ignorant to how silly it all is.
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It’s only going to get weirder and weirder seeing this woman pull her shenanigans at conservative gatherings when her ex-husband and Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom inevitably runs for President in 2028.
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Libertarian summer camp. Wow. I don’t even know where to start. But we’re the ones doing the grooming and indoctrination?
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If you think pig-farming duty in Bartertown is bad just wait until you see all the poor bastards toiling away in Immortan Joe’s crypto-mines.
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CPAC is always ridiculous, but this year has been particularly laughable. CNN was pointing out the individual lies from every speaker and lies were not just deceptive, they were ridiculously easy to debunk – if you were anywhere except sitting inside that building.
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My GF and I have a recurring joke when gold or silver is mentioned.
“In these uncertain times…”
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It seems to me the obvious question is always “if gold is so great, why are these people offering to swap my soon to be worthless fiat currency for their inflation-secure, inherently valuable gold?”
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Oh, silly human, you think there’s actually gold involved? It’s theoretical gold, theoretically being held for you in a theoretical vault, and will theoretically be sold and the profits theoretically given to you. In reality the money goes straight to personal bank accounts and PACs, laundered to make political hay, and siphoned off in a grand Ponzi scheme until the inevitable crash and burn.
There is no gold, or If for some reason they actually do buy gold, they’ll just borrow money against it and use new customer “investments” to pay off those who insist on pulling out prematurely. I doubt their business could survive even a cursory audit, and that their political connections will ensure that they never face one until all the wealth has been sucked out and been improperly distributed to parties unknown.
It’s always a scam, and even thought the above is theoretical, I bet we find out eventually that the money was somehow lost and any gold is for display only.
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I suspect their ‘gold’ might turn out to be… something else:
“needs must when the devil vomits into your kettle”
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In some ways even weirder than the strength of their belief in gold as the platonic ideal of abstract value stores is the (often more implied than spelled out, perhaps because it’s not desperately coherent) is the thinking around how societies actually relate to abstract value stores; and how brittle various institutions are or aren’t.
Even if you concede for argument that gold is god’s own abstract value store; it’s a bit tricky to come up with a societal collapse hypothesis that manages to be mild enough that everyone’s totally up for a slightly rustic but fairly liquid market economy where the limits of barter and various nonmarket distribution mechanisms have already forced people into using currency; but extreme enough that it isn’t just a relatively brief scramble for emergency relief supplies followed by a somewhat more squalid resumption of the status quo.
That’s not a literally inconceivable scenario; but it’s far from an easy one to put together; and (while in some people it’s a more straightforwardly pitiable fear response) there’s also a really offputting element of petty financial power fantasy about it: The Collapse will, conveniently, make the big, complex, Capital that you neither understand nor possess disappear in a nice purifying poof; but your wise investments in what someone too poor for finance and too temporarily-dispossessed-millionaire to fully appreciate nonmarket social relationships thinks wealth looks like will set you above the common rabble of the post-apocalypse as survivor gentry.
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They don’t care anymore. They are forcing though genocidal laws based on pseudoscience and their interpretation of the Bible, then claiming it isn’t genocide based on bad etymology (genocide was defined when genes were just a hypothesis, before we actually knew what a gene was). It doesn’t matter if it is lies if it allows them to do atrocities.
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It is morally wrong to leave morons in possession of their money.
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That’s right on the money (pardon the pun) and very well put. The idea that gold has some intrinsic value apart from governments is hilariously misguided. It’s a pretty useless metal. It only has value because governments decided it did.
If society collapses to the point where the US dollar ceases to have value, nobody is going to give a flying fuck about gold either. The currency will be coffee beans and canned goods.
We don’t even have to speculate about this. We have plenty of real world examples of huge natural disasters decimating the institutions and infrastructure of various places. We know what happens. People come together, they trade, and they barter. Marketplaces appear virtually instantly.
This is the thing that apocalyptic power fantasies like Walking Dead always get wrong- they imagine commerce would vanish or that trade is somehow difficult and only comes along once you rebuild civilization. The opposite is true. Humans are built to trade. It’s fundamental to us. When an apocalypse happens, if anything we trade more because money stops working.
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You can have paper money that’s not fiat currency, though. Fractional reserve banking with a gold standard worked pretty well for a long time. Not sure you can readily set up such a system during the time constraints of a summer camp, but there’s nothing non-libertarian about it.
Have you met any libertarians? They’re not a fan of gold-backed government currency either. The whole point is to eliminate government, except for contract enforcement.
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Doesn’t need to be government scrip.
On a somewhat related note, I love this visualization of all the world’s gold ever produced:
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“…diversity [sic] YOUR portfolio. You’ve gotta have a diversified portfolio, everybody knows that.”
Clueless Mark One: “She’s right… but what’s a diversified portfolio?”
Clueless Mark Two: “I don’t know. Maybe she’ll be selling one of those too. Let’s keep watching.”
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I think you need to re-read what @fuzzyfungus posted above, because he said it better. The idea that there’s some “half collapsed” form of civilization that isn’t modern fiat currency but still demands a gold standard is ridiculous. I don’t know what this “gold standard that isn’t government scrip” that you’re imagining is, but I don’t believe it exists for all the reasons stated upthread.
Gold only has value because thousands of years of governments said it did. It’s pretty and has some useful electrical properties in certain niches, but is otherwise useless. It has no intrinsic value.
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