Comments by "Edward McLaughlin" (@edwardmclaughlin7935) on "Richard J Murphy"
channel.
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
Quite apart from the Bitcoin discussion, there seems to be an inordinate faith in, and a slavish - quite literally - devotion to the operation of fiat currencies here. 'Stick with fiat currency because it will be of value, come what may'? OK. Let's look at how our hallowed Pound has kept its value over the past 25 years.
One ounce of gold bought on this date in 2000, would have required handing over £189. Imagine then, if you had bought that one ounce and simply held on to it until today. To buy an ounce of gold today would require payment of £2232. Other investments might have proved more lucrative but that is how gold and the Pound have fared.
Alternatively, we could have taken Professor Murphy's advice and stuck with the fiat currency, dutifully leaving it in our bank. During that time our £189 would have earned interest so that it now stands at the princely sum of £324. So fiat currency has performed dreadfully.
In a quarter of a century, our deposit in the bank has been effectively whittled away. Our trusty fiat currency has done what fiat currencies will always do: been used as a tool to rob people of the buying power of their wages, their savings and their pensions.
Please explain, Professor, the basis of your enthusiasm for staying in a scheme which performs so poorly.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, Governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.
Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of Society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."
Taken from John Maynard Keynes' "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" (1919)
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
All schools should make sure that young people are made aware of the legal status of bank balances. In the interest of making that an aim, I am fully on-board with the general line in this video.
I would take issue with the statement toward the end, that "...there is no such thing as money in the world these days." There actually is money in this world, and it is gold. That is why it does us no good at all when we talk of money, to fail to distinguish between the notes and coins we use daily - which are actually units of currency - and money, which is gold.
Because our pounds have existed in the form they have - as fiat currency (backed with nothing tangible and only of value because the authorities deem it to be so) - for all of our lives and those of our parents, we have formed the mistaken idea that this is how it has always been and there are no alternatives. Up until 1913 there was an alternative system which was backed by tangible wealth: gold.
This subject is especially crucial at this juncture, as the fiat, debt-driven system we know, is coming to the end of its usefulness and will be replaced by another way of doing things, the details of which we don't yet know. We can only look on what is happening in the world and surmise the possibilities. When we watch the flailings of so many central banks in the West, presiding over their, at best moribund economies; and we compare that with the steady progress of those countries outside the West, this would suggest that the levers of power are changing hands. Given that so many of the latter have been assiduously acquiring and laying-down stores of gold for some time now, it would be prudent to assume that any new system will be based at least in part, on a return to the use of gold as a tangible basis for measuring wealth and trading exchange.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
Not the old "...could be underwater in the next 30 years" line again? Could be, why? Due to what precisely?
It's always the same with these people, it's become their religious guiding light: they issue their periodic dread forecasts that somehow get forgotten so that new dread warnings can be put in their place when the old ones don't show up. Meanwhile, anyone can go to the place on the coast that they visited fifty years ago, to find that everything is just as it was. Rivers flood, as they always have, onto predictable places, flat, low plains - that's why they were named in history: "flood plains". This can be exacerbated if waterways are no longer dredged due to either regulations or budget cuts; both of which have been a factor in recent flooding episodes.
The 'climate change' movement is a political move to hamper certain countries while others are left to do as they see fit. Why, for instance, if carbon emissions were the catastrophic factor they are made out to be, is the UK so harried to restrict output when it produces less than 1% of the global output; at the same time as China produces a new coal-fired power station every week? India shows a similar disregard for the concerns that have the UK's industries in tethers. Would it not make sense to focus on the most egregious offenders?
Our entire economy is being torn down, made ineffective, on no more evidence than the aggregated "could be" ism of so many who are not looking at the hard evidence.
1
-
1
-
1
-
That's exactly how banks create currency, not money. Gold is money, and to insist there are no distinctive qualities that separate the two, is to play the fiat game that is robbing people blind.
One of the fundamental qualities of a viable system of trading is that it is rested on a means of exchange which provides in addition, facility as a store of wealth. Fiat currency can be a reliable store of wealth in certain conditions - we happen to be living during a stage of our fiat currency in which it has lost its ability to store wealth. It is being steadily debauched such that every pound in our wages/savings/pensions can no longer buy what it could last year; in another year's time it will buy even less. The stealthiest tax of all. Put another way, the ordinary person is being relieved of his wealth by immaculately-suited pirates while he/she stands dutifully to attention, pipes them on board and hands them the key to the ship's safe.
If gold has no inherent value, why are the treasury departments of so many countries buying it by the ton? Well, because it is indeed security that a debt will be paid; and the countries buying gold look at a global reserve currency system that severed all ties to such security on August 15th 1971 and, since being unleashed, has gone through its debauchery phases, as the man said, 'slowly at first...' and now we are approaching its '...and then all at once' phase.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1