money & guns

As is fitting, my first post here will relate to both money AND guns.  But first some administrative notes.

I chose the domain moneyandguns.com because it was available and not lame and didn’t really care whether anything I ever wrote here had anything to do with either.  Everything else I’d thought of in the preceding weeks was either parked on or stupid.  In the time since, however, I realized that everything can be connected to either money or guns anyway–and usually both (though this isn’t very surprising)–so I won’t even have to worry about that in the future when retrospection kicks in.  (Incidentally, the idea for the domain name came to me with no pretext in the half-dreaming interphase between sleep and waking up one morning.  I have no idea where it came from.)

Read the about page if you have no idea who I am.

Just about the time I registered this domain, the Colombian military bombed a FARC encampment in Ecuador nearly sparking a continental war, Viktor Bout was arrested in Thailand in a DEA sting on charges of conspiring to aid a terrorist organization (nothing to do with drugs), the price of diesel skyrocketed, and I thought of something really profound that I’ve since forgotten.  I’ll write about these things some day, but Rick Falkvinge of Sweden’s Pirate Party posted an article on his blog today (actually yesterday at this point) called ‘Why the US is collapsing’ which I thought worthy of highlighting here.

For those of you who’ve spent the last year out of radio contact with the rest of the world, the US dollar has been plummeting in value for the past several months (years) and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.   Compare the value of the US dollar against gold, euros, pounds, or german cars for example.  Falkvinge believes this is the beginning of the end of the US as a global superpower and the artificially inflated standards of living that we enjoy.  Interesting facts brought to light are that the EU’s economy has been larger than the US economy since at least as far back as 2005, and that some small exchanges in Europe are no longer accepting US Dollars.  The US Dollar is no longer a universal international trade medium.  Its place might have been taken by the Euro for now, or perhaps the Pound, but there is no reason to suspect that in 20 years it might not be the RMB.  Your grandkids will speak Mandarin.  (As one commenter put it: “I look forward to an marked improvement in the quality of Chinese food around here.”)

Another eye opener (for me at least since I have been in partial radio isolation from the world recently) is that:

Oil is currently - mostly - traded in dollars per barrel, which creates a defacto dollar-based economy. A few years back, one prominent oil producer switched to trading in euros per barrel.

This threatened the entire stability of the dollar as a world currency, and by extension, the US’ economic bubble. After some chaos and turmoil involving the bubble-funded US military, that particular country is now exporting oil by the dollar again, thus once again contributing to the dollar bubble.

That country was Iraq.

Iran and Venezuela have also begun selling their oil in Euros.

As foreign holders of US currency continue selling it off in search of greener pastures, fueling the cycle of devaluation, its plummeting value won’t level off any time soon.  Falkvinge relates the (probably apocryphal) advice from a US economist that we all stock up on precious metals such as, “gold, silver, and copper-jacketed lead.”  I’m on it.

As part of the Coalition of Anarchists for Bush, at the 2000 Republican National Convention (if you click that link, take a moment to reflect on what the web looked like 8 years ago) in Philidelphia, I and a group of about 10 other scraggly kids shouted the following slogan at Ben Stein as he walked into the studio where they were filming a special episode of The Daily Show:

Society’s crumbling, let’s give it a push, why not vote for George Bush?

Ben Stein raised his fist to us in solidarity.  I hope Ben Stein had the foresight to invest some of his money in foreign markets and is still on my side when society takes the big crunch.

Update (3/28/2008):  Warren Buffet agrees.