Yoink! an excellent comment

Firstly, welcome to the new server, hopefully the only difference is it’s a little bit faster, I believe I’m now hosted in Holland somewhere.

Now with that aside I’d just like to share a rather excellent comment that I’ve stolen fair and square from Captain Ranty as it’s really rather good.

“Dan said…

Basically what I reckon we’re seeing right now is the last few gasps of a dying system. Fiat money is the poison; combine this with giving politicians the sole responsibility for administering the financial system and you have a recipe for a disaster.

Politicians, you see, are only any good at being politicians (yeah, stating the stark bleeding obvious here, but bear with me). Politicians exist to do great works, make great decisions and to spend money extravagantly to woo voters. Unfortunately 99% of the time nowadays we don’t actually need politicians; the bulk of the time what we actually need are barely sentient bureaucrats. 99% of the administration of the country is dry as dust, boring as infinity.

Politicians aren’t good at boring; indeed boring is the very antithesis to politics. Thus it is that politicians seem to go out of their way to make interesting that which ought to be flat, boring and uneventful. Running a country and a financial system should be boring and utterly uneventful, and really ought to be mostly machine-run. Non-sentient machines don’t get bored, and don’t ask for wages or pensions.

Instead what we’re seeing is a never-ending series of manufactured events and catastrophes, which require more and more money to fix, which politicians have to get from somewhere. They’ve sold much of our gold, flogged off the nation’s infrastructure and try now to tax everything that moves and are hitting the Laffer Curve bigtime now, so the only way politicians can increase the tax-take is to hit the one class of voters who have no voice at all: future ones.

This is the folly of permitting politicians control of a monetary system: they borrow hugely then create more money to induce inflation and inflate away these debts. This then robs everyone who holds fiat money as the interest rates fail to meet inflation. Right now buying gold and silver is the best policy as fiat currency is dying on its feet.”

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