I know that you intended that post as ironic, but the true irony is that Feudal Europe actually was relatively peaceful, particularly when compared against the nature of warfare (in Europe and elsewhere) since the industrial revolution.  Even the 100 years war was mostly a cold one; with long spans of calm delimited by short periods of actual conflict.

For that matter, the "Wild West" wasn't so wild either.  Even the Lincoln County War is only considered a war in the context, because only a couple hundred people were involved and only a few dozen casualties resulted.  This is the kind of 'warfare' that was most common during following the collapse of the Roman Empire and prior to the Renaissance, and is the most common form of "tribal" warfare across the buld of early human history.

I think that it's sad that an elementary school teacher neglects to use proper punctuation online.

And yes, a public school district employee does qualify as a government contractor in my view.  The point being, it's hard to convince anyone of the truth when his/her paycheck depends upon him/her not understanding.  Any attempt to convince you of anything that doesn't fit the official story is futile, but nor should you have any credibility regarding any subject, and especially one that you "teach" to small children.  (with the possible exception of mathmatics)

That's exactly what I mean.  Money (and currency, not quite the same thing) is an abstraction of wealth, but not wealth itself.  As noted by others, thinking of cash/gold as wealth is a common error.  Think about what the "old money" of the North-Eastern US does.  They certainly don't sit on billions of dollars, or even billions of dollars worth of gold; they buy assets and/or commodities.  That's investing, but it's also savings.  They may simply be buying equities in corporations, but that is still an abstraction of what real savings is.  The corporate capital is the savings, and the stock certificate is simply a deed to a small part of that.  The monetary price to aquire said stock certificate is only relevant to when it's bought or sold, the rest of the time it's irrelevent.  In the novel Cryptocromicon, a wealthy character describes it like this, "Gold is not wealth, gold is the corpse of wealth; I can show you how to make  wealth."

Credit cannot exist without someone first saving the capital to support the extension of said credit.  There is no way around the fact that savings, in some form, must exist.  However, savings isn't necessarily in any fomr normally associated with the concept.  Savings can be food storage or the like.  Take this example...

Before the industrial revolution, most economies were agriculturally based, the United States included.  The new colony in the wilderness needed to establish farms quickly, in order to produce food for the families.  If the farms did well overall, the community could commit resources towards other endeavors than food production, such as craftmanship, artistry or public works; but none of this can come before the surplus food production even if there was some rich dude with gobs of gold able to lend out for credit (lacking a greater society to trade resources with).  Gold or not, if the colony couldn't produce enough food for it's own population, the young people who might otherwise study blacksmithing, advanced carpentry, masonry or any form of art would have to spend their time hunting or gardening in order to make up the difference.  That would be what we call 'subsistance farming' today, where the methods used require all of the labor time of the community to maintain an even keel, and leave no surplus gain.  In this context, any surplus gain (for the individual farmer, or the community at large) is the savings.

If you really want to learn something about this, I recommend the Uncle Eric Series starting with Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?  They are great, short primers on economics and praxeology.

EDIT:  The above example should provide a hint as to why both gold and Bitcoin, while great forms of independent currencies, are not capital in the proper sense.  Both are an abstraction of capital, because so long as a trade market exists, both gold or Bitcoin could be traded fro true capital.  Capital is the means of production; i.e. to the farmer, the tractor is capital; to the ditchdigger, the shovel (and backhoe) are capital; and to the programmer the computer is capital; but to the recreational gamer, the computer is a toy.

EDIT2:  And when I say that we've been eating through our capital for decades, I mean this literally.  In our modern world, oil is the primary input commodity for just about everything, including industrial fertalizers.  In a world where such protrolem inputs become significantly more expensive, less valuable uses get priced out; while everything that currently utilize cheap oil as an input becomes more expensive, as production shifts to more expensive methods and inputs.  Industrial food production is no exception, and a greater number of the population must become involed in their own food production (via backyard gardens, hunting, fishing, etcetera) in order to provide enough cost-cutting|savings|production|whatever to support the entire family.  Youth unemployment might be very high for some time, but they better be reading gardening books from the library whether or not dear old dad still has a job or not.

Do you live in the same world that I live in?  I am of one of the two older generations that you speak of, and your statement couldn't be further from the truth.  Do you draw a paycheck from a government contractor, by any chance?

Savings must come before consumption on the aggregate.  Nothing else is possible.  We've been eating through the accumulation of savings of our predecessors for 30+ years.  By definition, that which is not sustainable cannot continue forever.  The only difference between savings & hoarding is the perspectives of the observer.

That is good news.  The longer Bitcoin can grow and mature without these guys' interference, the stronger it will be in the long run.  Let them fawn over whether or not the Federal Reserve will 'taper' or not.

I wonder if he ever learned who the Commander in Chief is.

I don't mind the interest, because I agreed to those terms when I bought the house.  I could have chosen to not buy a house, and then I wouldn't have a mortgage.  There is no negotiation with inflation.


By artificial inflation, I mean inflation that isn't the result of fluctuation in the market, nor changes in the business cycle, but due to the deliberate expansion of the money supply.  In any other context, that would be market manipulation, or even fraud.  It's just that we've been conditioned to believe that the market for money is special.  It's not, it responds to supply and demand like any other.


Getting rid of interest will not get rid of the kinds of inflation that I am concerned with, and I think that you know that already.  Some portion of the interest rate is a market response to the demand for credit, some of it is a response to the perception of loss due to inflation, some of it is due to other factors.  So you can't get rid of interest in a market economy, it arises naturally.  It might be called something different, but the cost & risk of credit will be paid somehow, or credit will not exist.  Without a working money market (credit industry) the economy becomes very inflexible in the sense that it's not quick to resond to changes in the market conditions.  Credit & interest have their place, so long as they don't become the majority of the marketplace, which is what we've seen occur to fiat currencies since WW2.

Speaking for myself, this point has never been relevant.  It doesn't matter that there are things that the average, or even anyone, could do to mitigate the effects upon personal buying power by artificial causes of inflation.  The only thing that matters is that they are artifical.  If some hacker (who knows superman, perhaps) steals only a penny from each of the paychecks of every person at the company that he works for, is it not theft?  Who does he steal it from, the company or the employees?  Is it okay, just because each victim is harmed very little; or may not even be aware of the theft?

http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/forecast-2014-burning-down-the-house/

This man is insightful, even if he has his own biases.  (We all do, though)

Well, I had a rainy day fund that was over $30K only a few months ago.  One car smashed on a crowded, snowy freeway in November; another had an engine block freeze up and crack; a $5K furnace replacement; a $1500 refrigerator stolen off the back porch of my unsold house that has been on the market for nearly a year, because the workmen put it out there to fix the floor and didn't consider that it might be valuable enough to steal (that's what they told me, anyway; I'm still suspicious) and paying two mortgages for the last 8 months.  So I know that I've had more than my fair share of rainy days during 2013.

Nothing so complicated.  Just something around the size of smooth rock that the chick in the link photo is holding.  I want it smooth like that, egg shaped is fine, about the size of a full adult palm; that I can then grab with an adult tube sock and wrap up.  It's a practial device, not an artpiece, so the color doesn't matter so much, but it must be real soapstone.  I want several of them, so if you're into soapstone carving anyway, just some of your scrap pieces that can be cut down to that size is fine.  What I'm doing is trying to come up with a way to keep my youngest child warmer at night, so I'm going to take one of these and heat it up on my woodstove, then wrap it into a tube sock, then put that into a teddy bear for her to cuddle with.  Much like one of those teddy bear hot water bottles, but without the risk of leak induced scalding of an infant.  She has those infant sized sleeping bags with arms that she uses, but we can't keep blankets on her and she gets too cold sometimes, but if the teddy bear is warmed by the happy rock, she can choose to cuddle with it or push it away if it's uncomfortable.  I'd like a quote on one at a time, though.  Depending upon how it works out, I might order more for my other children, my wife, and my sister.

EDIT: I also want to be able to microwave it to heat it when I'm not using the woodstove, so no finishes that can't survive the microwave, please.

Supportive, yes; but I would still advocate the correction of mistakes.  The AMA isn't a mistake, however, it's palying out better than they planned.

I'd like some soapstone "happy rocks"...

http://www.practicalprimitive.com/skillofthemonth/happyrock

But they must be smooth, and they must be real soapstone.  Alternatively, I'd be willing to buy scrap soapstone of that size so that I can carve them smooth myself.

I doubt it.  I never had any illusions that Ron Paul would be a great president.  Everyone makes mistakes, particularly doing a job like that, but the AMA was designed to fail; they said so when it was passed.  The other "they" didn't want a working compromise, "they" wanted a full on single payer healthcare industry.  "They" wanted the complete destruction of the "evil" insurance industry, under the presumption that a government bureaucracy is actually less evil than a corporate bureaucracy.  There is no evidence to assume that a monopoly on critical service is likely to be better than what we had, and much evidence to suggest that it would be worse over time.  No matter how well intended, never forget that, eventually, those people that you might believe are not out for themselves will lose power over these kinds of bureaucracies, and you enemy will be in control of your health care.  There's a good chance that will occur right about the time of your life that you actually need such care.  The AMA does, provablely, permit the establishment of "death panels"; so even if the Democrats are too nice to do such a thing to your grandmother, do you trust that the Republicans are too nice to do that to you?

"They" aren't finding ways to make Obama look bad, "they" are simply pointing them out when they occur.  What's really happening is that those for whom the ACA was supposed to help are actually harming them, and that is quite what the detractors were warning against early on.  "They" are just touting "we told you so!"

This statement is easily disprovable.  Just because some resources are economicly 'idle' doesn't mean that they are in decay, some improve with the wait for increased demand.  A great example is that of contruction quality timber, a field that I have recently aquired better than a layman's education due to a move of mine to a large piece of rural propery with a great deal of (mostly) wild woods.  While there are some things that a tree-herder could do to improve the marketable yield of a few acres of woodland, forestry does pretty well as a zero-intervention resource, happily growing without humankind.  Obviously, as those trees age and grow, they become more economicly valuable for construction timber.  I can think of several situations that an 'idle' resource is economicly best to wait.  Another is wine, for well known reasons.  Bourbon is another for similar reasons.  Even beekeeping falls into this catagory under certain conditions, since both honey and wax have no known spoiling rate while inside of a living hive and, so long as the hive has room to grow, the hive won't consume more than they need whether or not they have it.  Some hobby beekeepers have been known to let hives grow for many years before taking any honey or wax, and both can keep inside jars for centuries.

Another, more modern, example is likely one that you have not even considered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository

Yucca Mountain Repository is claimed to be designed to house spent nuclear fuel rods from US light water reactors for thousands of years, but no one who is involved with it's design actually expects them to be there that long.  The reason for this is, 1) the technology exists to recycle spent fuel and is already in service in Europe and 2) the US has no natural uranium mines.  Almost all of US fuel supplies come from Austrailia.  US law requires spent fuel to be stored; not because it can't be recycled, but because it can and storing the spent fuel just in case we (as in the US govenrment, military, etc) are cut off politically or economicly from Austrailia and can no longer buy more fuel (either commercial or military) internationally.  Such a "waste" storage facility could literally pay dividends, both by keeping hazardous materials away from geologically unstable regions with high groundwater tables (i.e. where most of the human population actually lives) in the short term, but potentially to become a primary source for uranium 235 during periods of extreme scarcity.

This forum has been here for four years.

You are both right, but I don't think that you would agree on what 'capital' actually is.