Quote from shorty_mcshort:
I think that we simply have different views on government. You seem to trust them because they have educations and are elected (which no FED president is elected by the public nor Treasury Secretary) These two paragrpaghs pretty much sum up my views.
So the FED president is selected by the president and CONFIRMED by your congressman. What are you complaining about? You have a clear choice: either have a QUALIFIED official choose or have millions of people you have NO reason to trust pick. YOU can't choose alone, even though because of your sore-loser tone, I can tell that's the way you would love to do it. Just let mcshort choose the the next chairman of the federal reserve or better yet, dilute the whole establisment. Anarchist. I might snatch your jesus sandals.
The idea behind a gold standard is to remove from the hands of politicians or their political appointees the discretion of determining a nation's supply of money. The opposite of a gold standard would be a fiat paper standard, whereby the monetary authorities of government have complete discretion: They can inflate or contract the money supply at will.
In the event that the supply of goods or labor decreases, the gold standard fails to address the need to be able to control money supply to control price fluctuations. Therefore they're are alot of problems with price fluctuations etc. that I summarized in my last post. You don't anything about the way the economy works compared to the PHDs that run washington.
Historically, because such situations grant enormous power to government without restricting the potential for abuse, vastly destructive abuses have, in fact, occurred. History is littered with many examples of governments printing their paper moneyâto pay for everything from elections to foreign military adventures to welfare programsâuntil it becomes utterly worthless, destroying people's savings and confidence in the economy.
You're clinically paranoid. This isn't Germany. The ability to insure your (a country's) own debt is a valuable tool. At times expenditures like welfare or military allows for future productivity when you can pay back the debt (see Reagan).
Anyone with the power can inflate and basically destroy earnings and savings of millions of people just to suit their will. Don't think it can't happen because it has happened in the past and it will happen in the future. In the 1920's Germany inflated their currency (for many reasons) that lead to insane inflation rates.
ANytime there is a war i.e. tradgedy there can be inflation. Germany's superinflation had nothing to do with a "fiat" currency. They may have even had a currency pegged to gold. I'm not a histiorian and the currency had nothing to do with the collapse of the country. It was rooted in agriculuture as are still all economies. Fool