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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: long-gone who wrote (82857)	3/4/2002 8:42:17 AM
From: IngotWeTrust	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116811

interesting read but NO mention of gold and/or barter as bankless alternative. Why? Another mini-grub...2 pair, 6 kicker :)

To: long-gone who wrote (82857)	3/4/2002 9:03:10 AM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 116811

Can you trust your banker? Your government? Well it depends on who your banker is and your government. In Canada the banks are all co-opted by being large and monolithic organizations. Their managers are all little people taking orders, co-opted by the system, which is dictated by the powers that be. The system of bankers credit was thought to be side step-able by public share funding of new business ventures in part. This fails because too many people are crooked who work in that business and the new businesses all try to get too few doors at once. There is only one banking system and it operates to feed itself. There is one brokerage system and they all stick together. No use trying to trade shares against the brokers, they won't even tell you when the last transaction was made in that stock and at what price, and what is the next offer or bid for 5 minutes until they can make the next one. Real time quotes? In your imagination maybe. There is no allowable distributed form of financing. You cannot seek investors legally privately and brokers will not do it for you. Brokerages are not it. Bankers are too stupid or corrupt to know how to judge business for loans. Governments are all about pork barrels and graft. When Europe's banks and finances were devastated after the war from the restrictive Marshall plan and war repayments, some people realized the average man had cash flow problems for making payments and they started cheque cashing and payment facilities for workers. These facilities flourished in post war Austria. They were transaction fee basedand issued cheques and accounts. Because the government regulations had restrictions on the amount they could charge, (they had no central facilities and loans were restricted - they had no depositary insurance or banking charters) they could not grow and compete with the new banks emerging. What they amounted to were credit unions. If depositary banking and loan people were all limited to the regulations of credit unions, there would be no big banks. I know a Swiss citizen who started such a bank/transaction system in the early 60's in Europe and it did well for a while. Later when banks became more accessible to the common person these systems could not compete as the government would not let them. If you say free up the banking system, then they point to the S and L failures of the 80's. Astonishing corruption. How could it have been so pervasive so fast? How could so many managers have lent so much bad debt? One wonders. Who set it up, and what sort of graft played a hand? Would regulation have made it any better? Much of the credit system, the ATM transaction system, the movement to plastic credit and reviewed transactions is because people in government want it that way. The entire Internet was built by the same thinking. It tracks what people say to each other. Try to get them to use a cryptographic mail system and they can't be bothered. They say they have no secrets. Well people in government want it that way. Which people? It may surprise you to know it does not matter. Whomsoever gets into the job may be hampered by a lack of wisdom or not, but they all play to excessive abuse of power and paranoia. Orwell predicted that government would become that corrupt and all overseeing. He foresaw that if control could be implemented it would be. That people were brainwashable and would go along with the system instead of rebelling against it. In a way cheque cashing places are a rebelling against banks. We all rebel against opressive systems. But individually we have limited ability. The questions that are really being asked is how much surveillance is too much and how much regulation is too much. If it isn't the international drug cartels, it Osama Bin Laden or killer bees as an excuse why your banker cannot allow you ten thousand or more cash in hand or must report every transaction. We are a society moving toward ever more surveillance and control. Ever more paranoia and restriction. Common people who visited here from the Soviet Union noted to me 25 years ago, that there was more personal freedom as a matter of course there than there was here. We can afford nig government. They could not. A former presidential guard from Venazuela told me that in his experience there were only 5 repressive police states that tracked everybody and everything and they were the USSR, Canada, Israel, the US, and Germany. I think he left out a few. You could add Great Britain with its restrictions on receiver radios and pay TV. Every time you ask that government get its foot off the necks of people the authoritarians in government point to bogeyman issues. Bin Laden, Hitler, organized crime, druglords, crime in the streets. If we let go on our monolithic control of society and the media, then it will all go to hell. What will? It's like saying hell will go to hell. In many ways for many people living in a corrupt, heartless, evil eye society is like being in hell, its just who is running it that bugs them. Perhaps not in our lifetime, but in not too long many of the western governments will implode. Their societies are propped up by a thin veneer of social authority, like the 1984 of Orwell's vision. When individual initiative perishes within this grey controlled state it will become prey to it own worst enemy, a society's tendency to social insolvency. The social solvency of Russia collapsed in 40 short years. It's citizens would no longer participate in its charade of authority. It is still not well and may never again be. Dare we say that we have all our problems solved? Are we in danger of becoming irrelevant? A Brazil of the world? Argentina? No production and no status? It may be that the nation that is most free is the most secure. If this is true then whatever hampers our freedom to act as honest individuals hampers our security. Whatever restricts us purely to feed the power of authority is what does us evil. Then the only power we need restrict is not the individual's power but the power excercised of governments. That is the only power that may get away from the control of man to the point where it may be too late by the time we see there is something to object to. EC<:-}