The Dems imply alot of things. Remember when they implied they’d end the war?

CNBC host Jim Cramer says that financial terrorism could have been behind Monday’s stock market crash as part of a conspiracy to “bring down capitalism,” as the SEC this morning announced a ban on short-selling in an effort to fight market manipulation.

It would have been cool if Ron Paul had taught people like this a thing or two.

Quote from: G.E. on September 18, 2008, 05:16:38 AM
I just watched this show with my new PrisonPlanet.tv account.

Although it raises some important problems with the Fed, for the most part, this documentary is dead wrong

I think it’s dead right.

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and 100% against what Ron Paul stands for.

That alone does not justify dismissing an idea out of hand. Ron Paul is a great man, and easily the most honorable politician in Washington (which is why I voted for him in the primary), but he’s not God.

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Worst of all is the insidious association of Lincoln with Jefferson. Lincoln HATED Jefferson and Jeffersonianism. Jefferson was against paper money and central banks, period. The movie makes it sound like he shared Lincoln’s evil view that the government should directly operate a central bank issuing fiat money. Jefferson was for gold!

Jefferson, while great in his own right, was not God, either. What matters is whether the reform in question can stand on its own merits, not whether this or that political figure endorsed it or not.

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This movie champions Lincoln’s printing of the greenbacks

And I applaud it for doing so.

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totally unconstitutional

Not if the appropriate amendment were enacted.

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and completely ignores the havoc caused in the wake of the ensuing inflation…

Now you’re just spouting Austrian School propaganda. Allow me to provide a brief history lesson:

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Thanks to over a century of relentless propaganda, the image of the Greenbacks comes down to us as worthless paper money. But upon more careful examination, on balance they were probably the best money system America has ever had….Demonstrating how far monetary history has been distorted, readers may be surprised to learn that every Greenback printed was ultimately as valuable as its gold equivalent, and became redeemable for gold coinage at full value. Today the Greenback supporters are erroneously presented as merely being pro-inflation or against sound money. What they really wanted was a more honest money system, controlled by government, instead of banks….

They [Greenbacks] were receivable for all dues and taxes to the U.S., except import duties, which still had to be paid in coin. The Greenbacks were payable for all claims against the U.S. except interest on bonds which was still payable in coin. The Greenbacks were declared a legal tender for all other debts, public and private….

Greenback critics argue that they were inflationary and mistakenly measure the inflation against gold, starting at equal to a gold dollar in early 1862, and falling to 36 cents against a gold dollar by mid 1864. So one gold dollar exchanged for nearly $2.50 in Greenbacks. That is often the whole of their analysis and it is very misleading. Actually the Greenbacks did drop against gold; first to 58 cents at the end of 1862, then back up to 82 cents in mid 1863 and then down to a brief low of 36 cents on July 16, 1864.

From that point they moved up steadily, averaging 39 cents for August; 45 cents for September; and 48 cents for October, 1864. They retreated to $0.44 in December, and averaged $0.68 for December 1865. From there they gradually rose to $1.00, at par with gold in December 1878. Greenbacks became freely convertible into gold, dollar for dollar, in January 1879….

Economists mistakenly argue that it was only because the Greenbacks were eventually made convertible into gold by law, that made them hold and increase their value. However, that law was a hard fought political struggle, dependent on the 1868 presidential election. The battle could have gone either way and the actual “resumption” law could not get passed by Congress until 1874, for implementation in 1879. This could not have kept the Greenback from further declines, and start moving it upward back in mid-1864.

What did occur in July 1864 was that our government put a limit of $450 million on the Greenbacks and from that month they started rising (i.e. gold began falling in terms of Greenbacks)….

While the Greenbacks lost substantial value for a period, the nation was engaged in the bloodiest war in its history, in which 13% of the population served in the armed forces and 625,000 died….Is it reasonable to expect that any government in those circumstances could completely protect its citizens from financial and other hardships?

[Economic historian Irwin] Unger has noted that:

“It is now clear that inflation would have occurred even without the Greenback issue.”

And comparing a wartime inflation under a government run money system (the Civil War) to wartime inflation under a private banker run system (WW I), Civil War historian [J.G.] Randall wrote:

“The threat of inflation was more effectively curbed during the Civil War than during the First World War.”….

The fact that the Greenbacks were not accepted for import duties may also have been an important negative factor against the currency:

“Hence it has been argued that the Greenback circulation issued in 1862 might have kept at par with gold if it, too, had been made receivable for all payments to the Government,” wrote financial historian [Davis Rich] Dewey.

Also, if interest payments on government bonds had been paid in Greenbacks instead of gold, a large part of the demand for gold would have disappeared.

– Stephen Zarlenga, The Lost Science of Money, pp. 453-65

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So the bottom line is that, contrary to popular myth, Greenbacks actually performed quite well — particularly given the extreme circumstances in which they were issued — and would have functioned even better if they had been made receivable for the payment of both import duties and interest on government bonds, and would have functioned better still if they had been issued for the production, rather than destruction, of public goods.

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or the fact that, yes, fiat money makes wars possible.

Fiat money was what funded the American Revolution, so there wouldn’t even be a U.S. Constitution if the goldbugs had had their way.

What makes unjust wars possible is the calculated process by which the elite manufacture the consent of the TV-addicted masses via the corporate-controlled “news” media.

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For the real deal, watch the Mises Institute’s video.

Sorry to have to disagree again, but the “gold standard” which the monetary flat-earthers in the Austrian School incessantly promote is not the panacea that so many misguided yet well-meaning reformers want so desperately to believe it is. On the contrary, it is a deflationary “cure” far worse than the inflationary “disease.”

The American people found this out the hard way in the late 1830s:

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[Andrew] Jackson and Van Buren removed the monetary power from the private bankers but did not re-establish it in the hands of the nation. Instead, Van Buren organized the Independent Treasury System, establishing 15 sub branches of the Treasury to handle government moneys in 1840. From December 1836 the government moved toward making and receiving all payments in coinage, or truly convertible bank notes….Once the state bank notes were no longer accepted by the government, their circulation was cut back dramatically.

This was the closest our nation has ever come to implementing a real gold/silver standard. Operating under the commodity theory of money, Van Buren, who truly cared for the Republic, helped bring on the worst depression the Nation had ever seen, starting in 1837. It was reportedly even worse than that caused by the 2nd Bank of the U.S. in 1819. Bad as the state bank notes were, they had still been functioning as money!

Those who proclaim that no gold and silver money system has ever failed should consider that whether you are a laborer, farmer, or industrialist, the money system’s success or failure is not measured by the value of a piece of metal. When your job, your farm, or factory has disappeared in a monetarily created depression, the system has failed!

That’s too bad.

I hope he’s not a Lincolnian on money, too.

I subscribed to prisonplanet.tv and watched a HORRIBLE bonus movie called “Monopoly Men.” It was actually an episode of some conspiracy theory TV show hosted by Dean Stockwell (from Quantum Leap and Battlestar Galactica) from 1999. It was full of the kind of incorrect info and bad economics that kept me blind on the Fed for about a year out of college. They actually put the monetary views of Jefferson and Lincoln side by side (like they were the same) and celebrated Lincoln’s greenbacks (similar to Freedom2Fascism). They had one moron on there who said the country was built on the protective tariff!

This wasn’t connected with Alex Jones in any way, other than he put it on his site. Jones is pretty solid, but he does support a few economic heresies from what I can tell.

Even if Bush and Cheneya ren’t impeached in the next few months, I would hope they would be proscuted once out of office. I would “hope”, but not expect, that is.

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