Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Oh, yes, things where so much better back in colonial times, when every 
> state, or even county, and sometimes cities, printed their own money, 
> and you never knew if the next place you landed in would accept it..

Um, no. Every bank printed its own money, and gold worked everywhere. 
Why do you think there were gold rushes?

Now we have only one bank printing money, and the only reason it's 
accepted everywhere is because we have lots of gund. See Iceland for a 
counterexample. Why again is this good?

> At one time, that was a gold standard, and some countries still, sort 
> of, operate off it.

You know, it worked between countries a thousand years ago. The only 
reason to get *off* of a gold standard is if you *want* to counterfeit 
money. It's perfectly possible to devalue money without leaving a 
hard-metal standard - how many pounds of sterling silver can you buy 
with a British Pound Sterling today?

> But there just isn't enough fracking gold in the 
> world to support, never mind back, the number of transactions that 
> actually take place in the modern world. 

Bull. You don't need the actual gold. You just need your money to be 
worth something universal and impossible to counterfeit.  What does it 
matter if an ounce of gold is worth $100,000?

I'm not suggesting that carrying around gold is a good way to do 
business. I'm merely pointing out that the Great Depression happened a 
decade or more after people stopped backing money with gold.

> Moving away from that as a 
> standard, to currency itself being the standard, **helped** growth. 

Perhaps. Until people stop believing in money. Then you get the Great 
Depression.

> when we should have been paying attention to the fact that the rest of 
> the world figured out 20 years ago that small, efficient and 
> streamlined, was the future.

Except the Japanese like to buy big gas-guzzling Ford pickup trucks too. 
:-) Plus, CAFE helped there a whole bunch.

> 2) anti-intellectualism. 

Yep.

> The modern US thinks we are #1, while simultaneously thinking that being 
> smart, knowledgeable, logical, or just prone to use a lot of big words, 
> makes you a pariah and untrustworthy. 

In many ways, yes.  Altho I'm not sure what this has to do with monetary 
policy. :-)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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