...Refurbished treadmill is not for everyone…

These people want to revert to an economic system in which growth was low, credit was tight, and people toiled for subsistence, not to add value. They want to return to a time when panics and depressions were as common as congressional elections, and of which the vast majority (if not all) were DEflation-related.

Yes, there is a problem with people not understanding inflation. But I’m the only one not afflicted by that problem here.

Capitalism cannot exist without the state. Adam Smith not only advocated a court system, patent office, and national defense, but also a public education system.

Murray Rothbard is not the godfather of capitalism. He is a minor league thinker. Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, etc. These are the great minds of capitalism.

How does capitalism exist without a court system, for example? It cannot. How can modern capitalism exist without patents, trademarks, and copyrights? Their absense is anti-growth.

The government’s role in the economy is to facilitate prosperity. 99.9% of the time, that means doing nothing. But prosperity is best suited by the government providing a pro-growth infrastructure. This includes courts, intllectual property, defense, and public education, as well as coining money and administering monetary policy, and providing a minimal social safety net that encourages risk taking.

John Stuart Mill said that, when the question was whether or not government should act, the default answer is always no. In order to justify action, it must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it’s action is for the greater good or prosperity. In this way, government is guilty until proven innocent.

99.9% of the time, 300 million individuals can individually create the greater good. Markets work; the wisdom of crowds work. But as any non-ideaologue or non-brainwashing victim of the Cult of Rand, Rothbard, or Mises knows, there is something in economics called “the freeloader effect.” The minimal necessary public purposes cannot be funded through “voluntary” means, because it is always in one’s rational self interest to hope that someone else does it. The minimal functions of government must be funded, and therefore, they must be funded in the least anti-growth manner as possible; the method in which the most decision-making power is still left with the crowd, and not the government, which will never be as efficient as the crowd. A tax on unimproved land is, in my opinion, probably the best method of taxation, but second to that is a tax on income. It is the least destructive to growth. We have low tax rates in America, but they could and should be much lower. I’m an advocate of the Steve Forbes flat tax at the federal level, and the elimination of most other taxes at every level. That’s a realistic, principled, pro-capitalist approach.

Ayn Rand was a novelist, not an economist or even a legitimate philosopher. Murray Rothbard and Von Mises were crackpot nobodies. IT BEGINS WITH ADAM SMITH, and libertarians would be wise to revisit The Wealth of Nations, On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, etc., not these ideaologically driven, dishonest tracts by anti-American loons.

“American Capitalism” is really a mixed-economy, quasi-facist perversion of true capitalism. An unfettered Market can best solve any problem. Taxation is an inhibition of the market and all government actions resulting from such are in direct contravention of the Market.

Central banks and governments currently hold 25% of the world’s gold – that’s 25% of all that’s ever been mined in the history of the earth. Governments hold 10 times the annual output of gold.

If Fort Knox is empty – which is not – oh well. That would be like finding out my old copy of Monopoly has no “money” in the plastic tray.

You are giving schools too much credit. I didn’t learn anything of any substance in school.

Anarchist = no. Liberal = yes and proud. Fan of central planning = absolutely not. I’m a fan of American Capitalism; of the pro-growth financial infrastructure (which includes some taxation) that has allowed us all to be richer and live better lives.

You should really go and seriously look at the work done by GATA. Fort Knox is probably empty.

All you are really doing is parrotting what you “learned” in school. You think because you have a piece of paper from a government operated indoctrination camp, that you know money. What they taught you was wrong. Imagine for a moment if that is true (it is). Like all good Keynesians, you have a selective memory and revisionist history books.

Your scramble to support and endorse central planning is amusing and sad. But at least we know where you really stand on the matter. You are a proponent of central planning and you cannot be relied upon to oppose it under any circumstance. You’re just a liberal that doesn’t like taxes, in other words. And a poor example of an anarchist.

The causal link between gold and the problems you outlined is nil. You are also wrong about total wealth. June Cleaver doesn’t exist anymore because people have to run faster on the inflation treadmill. The cost of the goods is the same or lower, it’s the dollar that has depreciated. Explain why I can take a $1 silver dollar, melt it into a lump so that it has no numismatic value and then sell that lump for $10. I can buy 4 gallons of gasoline with $10. When that silver dollar was minted it would likely buy… (drumroll) 4 gallons of gasoline, because gasoline when priced in dollars was 25 cents.

You might make a great libertarian one day, but I will have to consider staging an intervention in order to affectuate the process. Maybe I’ll start a website that people can contribute to. The money will go towards sending you to the Ludwig Von Mises Instittue to debate these issues with Lew Rockwell and Walter Block. Have you read Murray Rothbards “What has government done to our money”? Read it.

Governments continue to horde gold. Why? Because if they let it loose on the open market, the value would plummet. Gold is a welfare-subsidized ornament. It is worthless beyond its shine.

The Fed has a board of governors + the OMO committee, all appointed by the president with senate approval. They do not require appropriations from the government, and they engage in a minute percentage of Treasury transactions. They decide how much to charge member banks on overnight loans – loans that are RARELY taken out. And they determine the reserve requirement, which hasn’t been changed since 1988. There are Fed banks all throughout the country, the member banks are in virtually every city. Where is the centralization?

The Fed is extremely HEAVY centralization of money.