A brief response in this colour, Keith. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Keith Hudson To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, ,EDUCATION Sent: Thursday, August 04, 2011 5:34 AM Subject: [Futurework] Goodbye warfare: Welcome Gold
The future of gold as currency actually rests on one foundation -- the absence of wars. By this I mean major wars between major nations when their economies gear up to the maximum extent to produce heavy artillery and when a high proportion of their young men are conscripted into armies in order to kill other young men. Actually, both of these are relatively recent innovations from the 18th century, so we have had only three major wars as I define them -- the Napoleonic wars, WWI and WWII. Well, yes, I agree that it's unlikely that we'll have the kinds of wars that were fought in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it's difficult to conceive of prolonged periods without some form of major war -- perhaps theological, perhaps ideological, perhaps economic (trade)? The last of these major wars finished in 1945 when America and its Allies defeated Germany and Japan. Since then, during periods when tensions between the major powers rose to almost fever pitch, we might have had three other major wars. America versus Russia. China versus Russia. America versus China. That these didn't happen was fortunate because all concerned were only just recovering economically from WWII. If any of these had taken place we would probably be in a much worse economic state today than we are now because, almost certainly, the initial third party in any of them would have joined one side or the other in order to protect its own interests, and thus we would all have been involved. Wars will continue, of course. It's very much part of our human nature to fight. We might very well have future wars of major nations against medium or small nations, such as America versus Korea or Vietnam, China against Cambodia, or Russia against Chechnya in the past. Or we might have wars between medium or small countries, such as seems probable in the Middle East sometime or in South America or Africa unless the big powers jointly put a stop to them. Also, we could all put a major bet on about 30 minor wars taking place internally every year in various parts of the world, as they have for decades past. There'll be no more major wars because, quite simply, all the major nations are, in fact, already bankrupt in one way or another and, besides, young men and their mobile phones and their growing contempt for politicians are moving on culturally. They would probably refuse to be enthusiastic cannon fodder on a large scale as they were before. If there are to be any major wars between the great powers, or even by small and medium nations against big ones, then it will be cybernetic warfare which hardly costs anything at all. Even an individual hacker with an ordinary PC can bring down major defence or corporate computer systems. This why governments are becoming hysterical about them. Scores of these hackers are being expensively bought-off every year in order for our present financial and governmental systems to continue at all. More specifically, major nations can no longer go throw the gold standard over and go into massive money printing as they did during the Napoleonic wars and WWI and WWII. But, you might say, we no longer have a gold standard financial system to throw over! Oh, but we have. Advanced country governments have never entirely thrown gold out with the bathwater, despite what official spokesmen and politicians have manipulated the masses into believing. Despite saying that gold is useless as a currency, and despite America forcing the (mostly) European countries to sell a great deal of their gold, the central banks never entirely got rid of their bullion. And America has certainly hung onto its own gold! And, since the Eurozone, with its new Euro, challenged the supremacy of the American Dollar in 1999, central banks have been buying gold again. It was slow and tentative at first but, today, increasing numbers of those countries which aspire to economic growth, are now buying gold. Gold is quietly restoring itself. When its price is high enough and when the value of the Dollar, Euro and Renminbi become low enough, the gold standard will return. It will recapitulate its several thousand year-old history. About five thousand years as it graduated from being a precious status item to becoming a reliable currency for trading (Greek merchants in the Mediterranean at about 500BC). About two thousand years as it was adopted throughout the world as currency and then as it evolved to became the fulcrum of the most sophisticated financial system yet known to man in pre-1914 England. I doubt very much that there will be a revival of the gold standard. The international economy is too unstable. Single currencies or tieing currency to a particular commodity no longer makes sense, if it ever did. Countries need the latitude to not only make debilitatiing mistakes, but the ability to manoever their way out of them and not be tied down by a prescribed monetary and value system. For example, if the PIIGS were not tied to the Euro and the EU, they could try to get out of the mess their in by e.g. inflating their currencies and defaulting on some of their debt, or whatever else might work. That is, when we had absolutely no currency inflation for a century beforehand. One day -- and probably very soon -- governments will be forced back to that desirable state of affairs. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/08/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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