Jack Heald

(Fred Reed served as my inspiration for this piece. Credit to him.)

Who do I vote for? More to the point, who can I vote for? The candidates all want things I don’t want, and don’t want things I do want.

I want a government limited by the constitution. None of them want that. (Except Ron Paul.)

I want to end the empire, shut down our foreign military bases, and bring our troops home. None of them want that. (Except Ron Paul.)

I want money I can count on instead of this funny stuff that the Federal Reserve creates out of thin air. None of them want that. (Except Ron Paul.)

I want to end the police state, eliminate the TSA, repeal the Patriot Act and shut down the DEA. None of them want that. (Except Ron Paul.)

I want the government to quit protecting the criminals who have bankrupted us. I speak of the CEOs of Citibank, BofA, Goldman Sachs, MF Global, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, AIG and the like. None of them want that. (Except Ron Paul.)

I want the IRS eliminated. I can live with a national sales tax in exchange for losing the income tax. None of them want that. (Except Ron Paul.)

I want the government out of my bedroom, out of my kitchen, out of education and out of healthcare. None of them want that. (Except Ron Paul.)

Obama is exactly what I thought he would be: more of the same. More war. More debt. More government. Less freedom. Less openness. Less honesty.

So I’d like to hear from you, my loyal reader. Who do I vote for?

Because stuff like this seems to just keep happening.

And the reason I think it is important is because the people who are committing these frauds ALSO want to circumscribe our lives and tell us what we can eat, where we can live and how we can spend our own money.  (I inherited my mother’s radical independence and my father’s stubbornness and persistence. I think it’s a pretty useful combination.)

Lacking an understanding what money is and does, you cannot begin to understand why gold is historically the best money. The qualities that all good money will ideally posses are:

1. Durability – does it rust? rot? corrode? melt?
2. Divisibility – does its value change when divided into smaller units? Two halves of one cow is not nearly as valuable as one whole cow.
3. Portability – Can it be easily transported?
4. Non-counterfeit-ability – the reason for this attribute should be obvious
5. Homogeneity – are different units of the same size essentially identical? Not all oranges are identical, nor are all cows. OTOH, gold is gold is gold is gold.

Gold has been the preferred form of money for 5000 years because it is a commodity that possesses all of these qualities.

All fiat currencies are portable, homogenous and divisible. But they are easily counterfeit-able, (just crank up the printing press and make more!), and not remotely durable.

Look at the list of hard commodities traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and you will see things that have been used as money over the millenia. They all have drawbacks of one sort or another, except for gold.

Silver is closest, but it has industrial as well as monetary uses. This dilutes its value as money. Platinum is similar to silver, but much rarer than gold. In fact, all the industrial and rare-earth metals share gold’s qualities, but they all have significant industrial use. Gold is nearly useless as an industrial metal. Strangely, that lack of industrial value actually increases its usefulness as money.

Oil is very close as well. It doesn’t degrade over time, is very easily divisible, and impossible to counterfeit. But because it is a liquid, it tends to be difficult to transport. And of course, like silver, it also has great industrial use.

Salt used to be money, but it lacks durability. Get a good rainstorm or flood and your money literally dissolves before your eyes. Livestock and agricultural commodities have also been used as money, but they all lack one or more of the qualities that gold possesses.
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Commodity-based monies impose fiscal discipline on governments. If a government wants to run a deficit, they have to come up with a way to collect actual money. They can take it from the people by force, but they cannot create it out of thin air.

Imagination-based monies, (fiat), impose no such discipline. With a fiat money, government is free to run up huge debts, and then pay them off with money they create out themselves. This makes it much easier to do incredibly stupid things, like start crazy wars, support military bases in 159 countries around the globe, and bail out giant banks that make crazy, risky bets and lose.

Hope this helps.

Export to Excel video 1

“Spontaneous order” - That’s what us anarcho-capitalists believe occurs when the tin-pot dictators, regulators, bureaucrats and government planners get out of the way.

…”spontaneous order” is typically used to describe the emergence of various kinds of social orders from a combination of self-interested individuals who are not intentionally trying to create order through planning.

Those state worshippers tell us that  spontaneous order is a fantasy, that it takes planners and regulators and organizers and overseers to get anything done.

Bullshit.

The Date: September 11, 2001

The Place: The Waterfront on Lower Manhattan

The Event: The largest boatlift in the history of mankind – 500,000 people evacuated in less than 9 hours

Planning Time: Zero

They just did it. Watch and learn and believe in the power of spontaneous organization.

Boatlift

…is that whatever it is you are believing in is not – in the final analysis – provable.

That’s kinda the whole point, of course; the whole reason anyone ever needs faith is because if you have proof you don’t need faith, and if you can’t have proof then all you are left with is faith.

I think that’s the reason the Apostle Paul talked about “the gift of faith”. Those who are able to believe and not struggle are gifted every bit as much as those who effortlessly create great music or effortlessly dance or effortlessly grok calculus. For the rest of us, it’s work. Sometimes not very rewarding or satisfying work either, lemme tell you.

There’s a hymn I learned growing up called “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing“; it’s one of my favorites partly because of the music, (I think it’s an old Welsh tune), but mostly because of this line:

Prone to wander, Lord I feel it / Prone to leave the God I love

That’s me. And I guess it isn’t just me because someone else wrote that line, so there’s at least two of us. And I also think about a Larry Norman song I learned a zillion years ago called Song for a Small Circle of Friends. There’s a line there where Norman, speaking to his friend Randy Stonehill, says

…you’re crazy but you know it and I love you as we both crawl towards the lamp.

That’s me, too. Crazy and I know, but still crawling towards the lamp.

Most people really have no desire to be free — they only want to be taken care of, and will give up almost any freedom in exchange for the promise of security.

I’m one of those people who would rather be hungry and free than a full-bellied slave. There are fewer of us than there are those with the opposite preference.

Democratic government is a majority of people imposing their will on the minority. (Or, as someone famously commented, two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.) Since those who prefer freedom to security are in the minority, democratic government inevitably becomes tyrannical. Those who profess to believe that “democracy” and “freedom” mean the same thing are either ignorant and deluded – most people fall into this category – or else they are disingenuous. Those who seek power fall into the latter category. (You can recognize these people quickly – they’re the ones who are always telling someone else what to do.)

Etiene de La Boitie famously observed in the 16th century that a tyrant is able to maintain his power because the people he enslaves allow it. I don’t think people have changed much in five centuries, do you.

Here in the united States, we have a government that:

• takes money from the poor so that rich bankers don’t have to suffer
• sexually assaults us at airports
• tells us what we may or may not put in our own bodies
• reads our mail
• taps our phones
• imprisons us on a whim

…and a myriad of other offenses.

And why do we have that sort of government? Isn’t ours a democratic process?

The prosecution rests.

Doug got hired right after I did this year, and within a month of being hired, was in the hospital with a heart attack, or a bad liver or something screwed up on the inside. Nice guy – I remember him from class. Chicago, tall, older kids like me. See his name on emails every now and then, but that’s about it.

I thought last week was bad. Caroline had emergency surgery on Monday. Pop came down with shingles later in the week. I sprained my back on Friday and had to cancel a training trip to NJ because the chiro told me the worst possible thing I could do was sit. (Ever try to go through a whole day without sitting? I did it for 3 straight days.)

So I thought my week sucked, then I got an email this morning that Doug’s 20 year old son collapsed yesterday while playing basketball and never regained consciousness.

Life just begs for metaphors, because the reality is too big to comprehend. We gotta turn it into a metaphor so we can handle it. “Curve balls”, “raging flood”, “terrible storm”, “hurricane”, “speed bump”. None of those convey the intensity of the experiences real life brings. I’ve been through divorce, and that is as close to death as I want to come without actually dying. Losing a child must be worse. My mind is numb at the sheer size of the reality.

Anyone who reads me enough knows I oscillate between faith and doubt pretty regularly. Sometimes my faith is strong and certain. Sometimes it is all but gone entirely. After a lifetime of this sort of back and forth, I think I have found some sort of solid place to stand. It barely looks like faith to me, and I doubt it would qualify as faith for most people, but I have to be true to myself and the way I am wired this weak, frayed, shadow of faith is the best I can do.

Life is absurd. Twenty year old sons dying playing basketball is simply absurd. And yet — it happens. Shit happens. It is enough to make you think there is no God, or at least not one who cares enough to do anything worthwhile for his poor creatures.  But there is something inside me that I do not control that still believes. I would love to NOT believe. It seems as if NOT believing makes far more sense. But I can’t not believe.

Maybe that’s God. Maybe that something inside me that refuses to stop believing, that certainly isn’t me – maybe that’s God. I hope so.

Requiescat in pace, young master G.

I thought by the time I was this age I would finally have it all figured out. By “it” I mean “Life”.  ”How to do it.” The “Big Questions” finally answered. But no.

I thought that by this age:

• I’d be financially set. Wrong!
• I’d still be married. Wrong!
• I’d have lots of really good friends. Wrong!
• I’d have work that was deeply satisfying and made a difference. Wrong!
• I’d be surrounded by happy family. Wrong!
• I’d have put down roots and be well known and respected in my community. Wrong!
• All my questions about life, God, love, happiness, success would be mostly answered. Wrong! 
• I would no longer feel like I was making it up every single day. Wrong!

Literally nothing in my life has worked out the way I imagined. Nothing. Not one blessed thing. And life just keeps throwing me curve balls at me. And I keep swinging and missing.

Apparently, I’m not doing something right.

I wonder what it is.