historycircus

I would just like to add one more thing - if it was not made clear in my earlier posts.

The trade in gold and silver, as we do it, is really no different - in principle - than the exchange of paper. Gold or paper - its all the same. It is an exchange item; it is an avenue to accumulating wealth.

Consider Native American societies before the anthropological concept of "articulation" altered their economies, and before Euro-American political domination (an example made valid by recent discussion of the "Lakota bank"). Leaders in these societies were considered so because they plunged themselves into poverty so that their people had clothes or food. Being a leader meant being the poorest (in the capitalist sense) person in the community. Leadership was about material sacrifice, and often, some of the poorest men in Indian communities were the most honored, and the most powerful.

Currency - whether it is paper, gold, or energy itself - must be exchanged fairly, and not without profit. When exchanges are anything but equal, someone suffers; anyone who trades anything with the express goal of profit, they are siphoning the energy of their fellow men and women.

We must find another way. Gold is not the answer. If we turn our paper into gold, but treat that gold just like we did the paper, what has really changed? Nothing. And are we not all here to build a better future, not perpetuate the same old economic "truisms" of our failed past?

Just some thoughts, and I hope to get many responses.