Used to be able to grow your own trout in streams in different places. You could feed them corn and fatten them up good. With training they could be coaxed to jump into your boat when you got hungry. Can't do that anymore. No water that will support fish.
Gold mining killed all that.
Used to be an easy world to get buy in. Apples grew on trees everywhere, there was a dime in just about every coin return. If you had a 100 dollars you could drink beer for two weeks without missing a day drunk.
Reagonomics killed all that.
For the life of me I cannot figure out why gold is not 2,000 dollars an ounce. One day in Victoria I went to the Supermarket to buy food. I think it was 1971. Now I spent about an hour in the market. There was no tax then so it was dead simple to figure out what everything came to by adding it up in your head as you bought it. I pushed it all to the checkout, and paid the 23 dollars for the groceries. Now came the hard part. I had walked to the store from my apartment. I got the clerk to put the food in several carboard boxes. I shared my predicament with the clerk. "I gave you everything I had so I cannot afford a taxi, now how am I going to get all these groceries home? I certainly can't carry them", I said. She agreed with me, "well, you could use a shoppingcart or something, but all those boxes won't fit in a cart, even if we did let the customers use them."
23 dollars in food. It could last me about two weeks or more. In the mid 1960's you could feed a family of 6 on 60 dollars a week and eat like Kings. My family did that and we ate better than most.
Since about that time I noticed some things. Every summer for about 5 years the price of groceries would climb dramatically so that you noticed it every time you went to the store. Gas prices started climbing, and so did the gold price. By 1974 everything had become unhinged and gold was released to float. I believe that is called inflation.
The cost of living in real terms was starting to rise as it became apparent that the petroleum economy would not last and peace in the world surrounding that economy was also tenuous. Gold shook out as the whole fools paradise of a fixed gold with a ballooning paper economy was in tatters and people wanted certainty of exchange. Arabic oil producers, notably Saudi Arabia, began to demand payment in gold. It began to benefit the United States to have a higher gold price in that case and that convinced Nixon to let it float. The US had lots of gold, and if they had to pay for oil with gold, it could be done, at higher gold prices. How to do it, so the Arabs and the monetarists did not blow a fuse? Nixon was the master of the lie. He said he had unhinged gold, thinking it would go down. He knew better.
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