I'll Buy That For A Confederate Gold Piece!

I cannot wait to get the fuck out of South Carolina, so that I may freely spend my worthless Federal cash money without the inbreds in power trying to ban it.

So yes, take away our "paper with ink on it" and give us our shiny rocks. I can't wait to spend my Confederate gold on a tank of gas and drive the fuck out of this swampy, bass ackwards motherfucker.

Well, it fits with the relentless advertising of gold by Beck, Limbaugh, O'Reilly et al.

I'm sorry Rep. Pitts, but this will never catch on in DC, or the elite East Coast for that matter. You simply cannot snort blow through a gold coin.

Well it's a good thing I sent all my jewelry to Goldline. Wait a minute.

hahahaha! yes! because that is what is driving inflation! it's certainly not the hundreds of trillions of non-existant dollars that your fucktarded economic policies allowed Wall Street to create out of thin air!

Just out of curiosity, is there even enough gold to go around, to replace all the non-existent dollars? If not, what exactly are we supposed to do with what little gold there is?

I'm going to start painting rocks, because I'm pretty sure no one down here will be able to tell the difference. Maybe I'll even be able to afford my own plantation!

No, there isn't enough gold to go around. That's one of the reasons why no one has used an actual gold specie standard in ages. Even a gold-backed currency, like we used to have, uses fractional reserves.

Gold and silver coins also fall victim to all sorts of adulteration, counterfeiting, and what-have-you. They're really not such a good idea.

Sick is absolutely right. Gold and silver coins often suffered "clipping," during which a coin would be shaved of some of its weight in order to make more coin. The debasement of coin was a big 18th century concern.

I'm really, really overwhelmed that a state representative is operating without any working knowledge of how a general equivalent is constructed, so I can't post any more right now. I thought we all realized gold had no intrinsic value a year or hundred ago.

May I recommend an alternative use for those rocks? This one involves putting the rocks in a sock and applying them in a swinging motion towards certain political heads.

Hi. Article 1, Section 8. Look it up.

This is about the wastingest of wastes of time.

I think people fail to realize that pure gold and silver are actually soft metals and easily manipulated.

In order to use gold and silver as currency, they would have to be mixed with other metals that would create strength in order to make the currency usable and give it a life expectancy of longer than a month before it loses shape. Let's face it, people beat the shit out of money.

So if i were to make a purchase of.....
~two gallons of milk
~ a carton of Pall Mall non-filters
~3- 40's of Grape Maddog 20/20
~3-cans of compressed air (purely for cleaning computer keyboards)
~a 12-pack of Magnum Trojans (yes i need the big ones)
~some lube for the fistin' ladiiez
~an Astro's hat
....in my local South Carolina shop and it came to $100.00 + taxi would only need about a half pound of pure silver or a little more than a quarter pound of pure gold.

If the gold and silver are mixed with another metal to make it more durable, you're probably looking at a pound of non-pure silver and a half pound of non-pure gold. Have fun getting that in your wallet. Have fun purchasing something over $1,000 and carrying your five pounds of silver around.

That's why you use Platinum pieces or Astral Diamonds for bigger purchases, obviously.

Or just get a Bag of Holding to keep all of the extra GP you're lugging around.

Um it does cost more to make a penny than it's worth, same as a nickel

http://www.wisegeek.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-penny.htm

You can prove him wrong next time.

So . . . does this polidiot not see the logical inconsistency of his position? Correct me if I am wrong, but a standard Republican/Conservative/Libertarian standpoint is that we should cut taxes because people should keep more of what they earn, and be in more control of how their money is spent, yes? And yet, if we were to switch over to gold/silver/metal standard, every single person would lose money that they had worked for and can spend, even if that money only exists as electronic ones and zeros on a computer somewhere. The ultra-rich (you know, Bush's favorite charity) would lose more than anyone, effectively shutting down every business in the country.

Then nobody would get paid.

i'm not an economist by any sense, but if the dollar actually does tank and the country goes to absolute shit, does anyone think that gold will be worth anything?

if you're really worried about the american financial system falling completely apart, why not invest in non-perishable food items, water purifying systems, guns and ammunition?

is that right exclusive to Congress?

Congress doesn't have rights - they have enumerated powers delegated to them by the people who reserve the right to alter those powers at the time of their choosing through amendment. Governments do not ever have "rights" - Only individuals have rights, which is why they form governments as an instrument used to secure those very rights.

Section 10 more so than 8 of article 1 is the pertinent section regarding the restriction of individual State's powers to coin their own monies.

This proposed idea is no solution. The solution is to disband the Federal Reserve and nationalize it as a publicly controlled agency that issues debt free notes and conducts all of its business in the public eye, rather than the unconstitutional, private, for profit, secretive monstrosity that currently exists.

I applaud those that seek an alternative to the counterfeit system in place now, but this South Carolina version is a lemon.

Since monetary value is based on a social agreement, does it really matter what we use?

No.

Then why does anyone give care if our money is shiny yellow rocks or numerals on a computer screen? They have the same spending power (although one is easier to carry).

The arguments for commodity based currency, particularly ones linked to precious commodities such as gold, is that by the very nature of its own scarcity it is difficult to inflate which builds stability into an economy so long as that money continues to circulate. One of the major problems with this kind of a system is that the money supply ("new gold") frequently grows at a rate slower than population growth. It also doesn't allow for mass mobilization and direct allocation in the case of wars, disasters, major economic expansion, new endeavors, etc... That is why commodity currencies have failed in the face of crisis or modernization and are subject to recessions and depressions when any part of the economy requires more money to exist to function. It is also why, as Sick mentioned, little tricks get played to stretch the money, thus negating the stability that such a system is supposed to provide in theory.

The system of an elastic fiat unit is quite helpful, such as the one we have now where toggling interest rates up or down to give an economy the gas or put the brakes on speculation/inflation or encourage saving to influence consumer behaviour.

The major problem that exists within our system is that it is not truly publicly controlled and it uses compounding debt repayment as a quasi commodity as its medium. Eventually more is owed than exists and the value of all debts exceeds all values of assets and labor if allowed to continue upon a long enough time line.

We can issue debt free notes instead of bleeding a significant portion of our productivity to the criminal international banking syndicate that has our popular bodies bent over the barrel.

here we go with the "OMFG! THE MINT LOSES 300 GABILLION DOLLARS A YEAR ON THE PENNY!" argument.

Yes, if you look directly at the penny and the nickel, they cost more to manufacture than they are worth. But for the sake of the argument, we'll go ahead and ignore the dime and the quarter and blame the Mint for being a big wasteful government agency.

yep. the debt from market derivatives alone is "worth", at the lowest estimates i've seen recently, $104.6k per person on the planet. the highest estimates put it at $224.1k per.

vermicious_knid said it. though unless there were a massive overhaul of the laws regulating the stock market--not just in the US, but globally--i'm pretty sure our current situation could have evolved even if every country on the planet used direct gold-based currency. basically, the guys who are want to go back to the gold standard don't know what the fuck they're talking about. it wouldn't solve any of our current problems, and it would create a lot of new ones. they have this stupid idea that the main driver of inflation is the government "printing more money", completely ignoring that corporate trade practices "print money" in quantities that are several orders of magnitude larger than our entire GDP. as of 2010, government spending is equal to about half of our GDP.