How a Silver Dollar Can Liberate You from Past and Future Inflation
Gold is not just another commodity, as they say in the Chicago trading pits, in typical Wall Street fashion. “Yeah, gold is just another commodity. It moves up and down and so on.”
But it’s not just another commodity, it’s money. It served as the foundation of the gold standard and silver standard as well. Gold and silver have been money for centuries. And so even today, it is held by central banks, and central banks are largely accumulating gold.
Now some of it may have been sold off recently, but both China and Russia are increasing their gold position because they know that the monetary system that we built up over the years, since Bretton Woods, is built on a foundation of sand – fiat money. And we were only experimenting now with a pure fiat money system, and it’s created quite a bit of instability.
And there’s a great deal of concern with our fractional reserve banking system, that eventually people might lose confidence. Our whole system, our monetary system is based on confidence that we accept a piece of paper that is – I always carry with me a piece of paper, and we have all these little pieces of paper in our pockets that we carry all the time. And it’s just paper. It has no obligation whatsoever. It says Federal Reserve Note, and it doesn’t even pay interest. So it’s a note that doesn’t pay interest. It’s just printed with a little piece of paper on it, and of course, they don’t allow counterfeiting. Otherwise, we’d all be very rich, right, because if you print more money, then that’s supposed to stimulate the economy. Well, maybe we should legalize counterfeiting because that would stimulate the economy.
But then I’m afraid that we would live up to Ludwig von Mises’ favorite statement that he said, government is the only agency that can take a valuable commodity like paper, slap some ink on it and make it totally worthless. And so the Austrians really understand that more than anybody.
I also keep in my pocket a silver dollar. And in 1960, these [the dollar and silver] were both worth the same. They circulated together. One ounce of silver or a silver dollar – Morgan silver – a Peace silver dollar and the one dollar. And they were both equal value. They were exchanged for equal, 1960. Well, what’s happened since 1960? They’ve printed up a lot of those pieces of paper, because the dollar has lost 95% of its value.
These silver dollars coins cost like $30.00 each. And in real terms, are worth three or four times what the paper money is. So this [silver dollar] has been a great investment, and this [paper dollar] has been worthless.
Liberate yourself from the inflation of the past and the future, and put a lot of faith in gold and silver.
Mark Skousen
for The Daily Reckoning
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