The mind-blowing idiocy of Todd Akin’s statements on rape and pregnancy — no, he didn’t “misspeak,” he repeated a routine wingnut talking point — was compounded by the fact that he has a seat on a House science committee. But he’s hardly alone. Timothy Egan looks at a number of other ignorant crackpots who sit on powerful committees.
On matters of basic science and peer-reviewed knowledge, from evolution to climate change to elementary fiscal math, many Republicans in power cling to a level of ignorance that would get their ears boxed even in a medieval classroom. Congress incubates and insulates these knuckle-draggers.
Let’s take a quick tour of the crazies in the House. Their war on critical thinking explains a lot about why the United States is laughed at on the global stage, and why no real solutions to our problems emerge from that broken legislative body.
We’re currently experiencing the worst drought in 60 years, a siege of wildfires, and the hottest temperatures since records were kept. But to Republicans in Congress, it’s all a big hoax. The chairman of a subcommittee that oversees issues related to climate change, Representative John Shimkus of Illinois is — you guessed it — a climate-change denier.
At a 2009 hearing, Shimkus said not to worry about a fatally dyspeptic planet: the biblical signs have yet to properly align. “The earth will end only when God declares it to be over,” he said, and then he went on to quote Genesis at some length. It’s worth repeating: This guy is the chairman.
On the same committee is an oil-company tool and 27-year veteran of Congress, Representative Joe L. Barton of Texas. You may remember Barton as the politician who apologized to the head of BP in 2010 after the government dared to insist that the company pay for those whose livelihoods were ruined by the gulf oil spill.
Barton cited the Almighty in questioning energy from wind turbines. Careful, he warned, “wind is God’s way of balancing heat.” Clean energy, he said, “would slow the winds down” and thus could make it hotter. You never know.
“You can’t regulate God!” Barton barked at the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, in the midst of discussion on measures to curb global warming…
The Catholic Church long ago made its peace with evolution, but the same cannot be said of House Republicans. Jack Kingston of Georgia, a 20-year veteran of the House, is an evolution denier, apparently because he can’t see the indent where his ancestors’ monkey tail used to be. “Where’s the missing link?” he said in 2011. “I just want to know what it is.” He serves on a committee that oversees education…
Another Georgia congressman, Paul Broun, introduced the so-called personhood legislation in the House — backed by Akin and Representative Paul Ryan — that would have given a fertilized egg the same constitutional protections as a fully developed human being.
Broun is on the same science, space and technology committee that Akin is. Yes, science is part of their purview.
And he hasn’t even mentioned Michele Bachmann and Steve King, who have significant influence and who are, to be blunt, dumber than dirt. The dominant theme of the last few years is the degree to which the Republican party has mainstreamed the crazy and the stupid.
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slc1
August 28, 2012 at 1:55 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Moronic asshole Kingston should be aware that humans (and the other great apes) have the genes that produce tails in their DNA. They are usually inoperative but, occasionally, a human baby is born with a prehensile tail.
Raging Bee
August 28, 2012 at 2:05 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Isn’t Ron Paul also a high-ranking member of a committee dealing with economic policy issues? Oh yeah, here it is, from Wikipedia:
With the election of the 112th Congress, and a resulting GOP majority in the House, Paul became the chairman of the Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology starting in January 2011.
A guy who still advocates the gold standard, with absolutely no empirical proof that it gets better results anywhere, is chairman of a subcommittee dealing with monetary policy. That rounds out the backward loony caucus rather well, doesn’t it?
A+ Hermit
August 28, 2012 at 2:06 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I made the mistake of looking at the comments…here’s th efirst one that came up…
Words fail….
daved
August 28, 2012 at 2:14 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Kingston was on Bill Maher’s show last Friday. He’s the typical southern conservative pol: sounds so calm and reasonable in conversation, at least until you get a full dose of the kind of nuttiness he promotes.
d cwilson
August 28, 2012 at 2:17 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
A+Hermit:
This is just further proof is support of my belief that creationists do not understand the scientific method at all. They think it’s all about making up a story that sounds plausible.
naturalcynic
August 28, 2012 at 2:21 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@ slc1: Tails: yes. Prehensile: no. We’re old world primates.
d cwilson
August 28, 2012 at 2:27 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Well. . .
Nah, too easy.
eamick
August 28, 2012 at 2:34 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
More appalling still, Broun is an M.D. (and yes, it’s from a real med school).
Bronze Dog
August 28, 2012 at 2:56 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I hate to risk a derail, but I’m still unfamiliar with that particular issue, though I’ve heard some of the arguments. I’m aware of plenty of nutjobs who advocate a gold standard because they seem to think gold is metaphysically intrinsically valuable, and somehow fiat money is a lie because it lacks that magic value, even though both commodities derive value from human desire for media of exchange.
However, I did once hear from someone who made the reasonable-seeming argument that gold-backed money is more stable because it serves the definition of currency better than fiat money because it’s a better store of value. If I put a gold ingot under my mattress for a decade, it’d arguably still have much the same buying power, since there’s only so much gold to go around, whereas fiat dollars tend to suffer inflation as their number increases.
Thinking about it, though, I’m not as confident about the old style of gold-backed money because IIRC, a dollar represented a “dollar” of gold, not a fixed mass of gold, which I would think subjects it to the same problems asserted about fiat money.
Quodlibet
August 28, 2012 at 3:02 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“…legislation in the House — backed by Akin and Representative Paul Ryan — that would have given a fertilized egg the same constitutional protections as a fully developed human being.”
So. I would love to be a fly on the wall in the home of any of these people if their wife, daughter, aunt, neice… had an ectopic pregnancy. Would they stand by and watch a woman die an excruciating death because of a few-days-old fertilized egg?
My guess is that they would get the emergency abortion to save the life of the woman they love, but would keep it very quiet.
Info on recent trends in ectopic pregnancy:
http://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/2011/04000/Trends_in_Ectopic_Pregnancy_Mortality_in_the.11.aspx
Interesting data on racial factors.
Years ago, a woman with whom I worked had an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured. She was just a few weeks pregnant, and in fact did not know that she was pregnant. An emergency abortion saved her life and enabled her to live to take care of her other children. I was with her in the office when the rupture occurred– it was frightening and horrible painful and she almost died. I will never forget it. She was lucky that the place where we worked was a hospital library, and she was in surgery within minutes.
And that’s just ONE reason why abortion needs to be safe, legal, and accessible.
oranje
August 28, 2012 at 3:12 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I have some Republican friends, but they almost have to apologize when they say it. They’re older school Republicans, the type with whom you can have an intelligent conversation about economic and foreign policy and have a cordial disagreement. They don’t recognize these people with (R) after their name, either.
Anyone with more experience on who now represents them? Have the inmates now completely taken the asylum now that the Olympia Snowe’s of the world are going away?
Raging Bee
August 28, 2012 at 3:19 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Bronze Dog: first, non-gold-based currency like the dollar or euro is not “fiat money.” Ron Paul and his moronic chums are deliberately misusing that term. “Fiat money” means money whose official value is set, day by day, by a government “fiat.” The only examples I can think of are the currencies of the former USSR and Eastern Europe, where the discrepancy between the official value and the actual market value gave rise to lucrative and violent underground currency-exchange markets not seen in the capitalist West. That’s not the same as the dollar or yen, which are “hard currency” (even though they’re not based on metals) that the USSR (and China today) try very hard to get because it’s much better for international trade than their own commie-cash. (Marx was really down on the whole idea of money that had value in and of itself, because he hated the idea of people making a living trading money instead of working and producing things.)
Second, you’re right about the delusion of gold being intrinsically more stable — in the mind of a paranoid who doesn’t trust society to stay real from one day to the next, and who is easikly dazzled by shiny things. RP has been pandering to that sort of paranoia since the ’70s, when fear of apocalyptic collapse and chaos was all over the pop culture and inflation was (paradoxically) seen as the most horrible bugaboo ever imagined.
busterggi
August 28, 2012 at 3:25 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Is it me or does ignorance in general increase the deeper one travels into the Bible Belt? Its as if religion promotes deliberate stupidity.
Raging Bee
August 28, 2012 at 3:25 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
However, I did once hear from someone who made the reasonable-seeming argument that gold-backed money is more stable because it serves the definition of currency better…
The problem with this attitude is that unless your whole society is in total collapse, and the money has no worth on the market, you’re just giving up a huge range of economic opportunities by keeping your wealth in the most dead and immobile form possible. And even in that extreme case, the price of gold would be sky-high, and you’d be better off spending your money on material necessities, not useless shiny inert metal.
Seriously, the gold standard is a primitive idea that makes primitive sense to primitive minds that don’t understand how money and trade work in a modern economy. Yes, it would be good in a nuclear war, but gold or no gold, you’d have muich bigger problems to deal with then.
Chiroptera
August 28, 2012 at 3:36 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Bronze Dog, #9: However, I did once hear from someone who made the reasonable-seeming argument that gold-backed money is more stable because it serves the definition of currency better than fiat money because it’s a better store of value.
This is false. Depressions, recessions, and inflationary crises were no less common during the 19th century when the US was on the gold standard.
In fact, by not tying the value of the currency to a fixed quantity of a commodity, the central bank has a lot more flexibility in handling economic situations to prevent, or at least ameliorate the worst effect of, recessions and inflations.
Didaktylos
August 28, 2012 at 3:40 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
If you have a gold-backed currency, introducing too much new gold too quickly will fuel inflation, as happened to the Spanish when they plundered the New World. (Atuhualpa’s Revenge?)
Reginald Selkirk
August 28, 2012 at 3:43 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Find that person again, and ask them to explain to you why the value of gold is not “fiat.”
umlud
August 28, 2012 at 3:46 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The commentary over at the NYTimes isn’t much better than the crazy spouted by the highlighted GOP lawmakers. This one is just so messed up with the “vaccines aren’t necessarily good,” the “evolution is only a theory,” and the “this current messed up weather pattern isn’t in any way related to climate change”… and it’s one of the more innocuous on its face:
iknklast
August 28, 2012 at 3:50 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“So. I would love to be a fly on the wall in the home of any of these people if their wife, daughter, aunt, neice… had an ectopic pregnancy. Would they stand by and watch a woman die an excruciating death because of a few-days-old fertilized egg?”
An egg which won’t live anyway. That’s what gets me – they’re OK with the fetus dying, as long as the woman dies, too. But “pro-life” does not extend to the one life you might be able to save, because that’s almost always the life of the living, breathing woman, who clearly isn’t worth saving if she can’t even bring a baby to term. After all, that’s the only reason you have a wife, right? Not because you like having her around…because you want a baby oven.
d cwilson
August 28, 2012 at 4:04 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
In reality, gold-back money is less stable because fixes the currency to the fluctuating value of a commodity. Say a major new find of gold is discovered. The price of gold drops and overnight, your money is worth less than it was before. Conversely, a nation like China could inflict economic damage on the US by hoarding large quantities of gold and then releasing it at selected times, causing the value of our currency to fluctuate wildly.
Pseudo-libertarians like Ron Paul like the gold standard because it sounds like a “common sense” and simple approach that takes away the power of the Fed to manage inflation/deflation. Paul has a long history of distrusting the Fed, as it interferes in what he sees as the “purity” of the market.
raven
August 28, 2012 at 4:05 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It does. It’s just a fact.
Fundies score lower in IQ and lower in education than normal people. Dennett cites 43 studies in his books on this.
The most backward states are the fundie states, Mississippi, Louisiana etc..
My theory is that fundie xianity causes cognitive impairment. There is a lot of data supporting it.
Just look at Michele Bachmann. Two college degrees, passed the law bar, and now incapable of crossing a street by herself. Or just look at fundie internet trolls. They always seem really stupid and that is not a coincidence. They are stupid.
Raging Bee
August 28, 2012 at 4:06 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
didaktylos: the worse danger with gold-based currency is that the supply of gold won’t grow fast ENOUGH to allow an economy to grow, which means economic growth would be choked by the limits of the gold supply. And if we import our gold from elsewhere, that means those countries get to control how fast our economy gets to grow — or not grow. That was the problem when Rep. Jack Kemp advocated a return to the gold standard in the 1980s: back then most of our gold came from South Africa (which was still under the apartheid regime) and the USSR, and no one wanted those regimes controlling our money supply.
raven
August 28, 2012 at 4:09 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The gold standard is just pseudoscience.
We were on the gold standard for a long time. There were Panics and recessions and depressions just like now. It didn’t fix anything.
We went off it during the Great Depression. Because with the gold standard the feds couldn’t do anything to pull us out of the Great Depression.
Holding gold in case the Apocalypse comes is sort of silly. In that case, one would be better off holding…food. You can always use or trade food and you can’t live long without it.
Subtract Hominem
August 28, 2012 at 4:19 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I think The Onion has this covered pretty well.
raven
August 28, 2012 at 4:21 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
From wikipedia, from 1830′s, the start of the modern banking era, to 1933, there were 25 or so recessions, panics, or depressions including the Great Depression.
We went off the gold standard in 1933 mostly and Nixon finished it off in 1971.
Whatever the supposed advantages of the gold standard, it doesn’t prevent economic crises.
d cwilson
August 28, 2012 at 4:25 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
And inbreeding.
otrame
August 28, 2012 at 5:17 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I had an ectopic pregnancy when I was nineteen.
I’d been having some abdominal pain for a couple of days. Not horrible, but bad enough to make me worry a little about appendicitis or something. We went to a nearby city for a day at the park and suddenly I was vomiting and the pain got bad enough that I went to the nearest hospital. When the doctor took my history, I mentioned that my last period had been so late that I had feared that I might be pregnant (this was long before the at-home pregnancy tests). I was told that I had “gastroenteritis,” basically what we general call “stomach flu” and was sent home. The pain continued for another day. That night I woke at 2 in the morning screaming. The pain was horrific. My then-husband got me to the nearest hospital, a different one. This little hospital was hardly more than a cliinic, though they did have about 20 beds and an emergency room. When I got there my blood pressure was 60/40. I don’t remember a lot after that. They loaded me up with as much fluids and blood as they could to try to get the blood pressure up and then did the surgery. My heart stopped twice during the surgery.
Obviously I survived.
Years later I read in a medical textbook (paraphrased, but a very close approximation): “If a sexually active woman presents with abdominal pain and you do not rule out ectopic pregnancy, you are guilty of malpractice.” I brought this to my husband’s attention and he said, “Yeah. I didn’t mention it at the time, because I didn’t want you to be any more freaked out than you were.”
I said, “What.”
He said, “The first place was a Catholic hospital.”
When I could speak again I said, “They sent me home knowing I had and ectopic pregnancy?”
“No. They didn’t know, but they also very deliberately didn’t do what they were supposed to do to find out. They didn’t want to know. They wanted us out of there before they had to deal with a difficult ethical situation.”
“Difficult?”
“Difficult for them.”
No. That is not why I am an atheist. I had been an atheist for three years at that point. But it was the first time I really understood just how much damage religious dogma can do to a society.
tommykey
August 28, 2012 at 5:27 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
And that’s just ONE reason why abortion needs to be safe, legal, and accessible.
THIS!
Clinton’s “Safe, legal and rare” statement was another example of his triangulation when he added “rare” to the mix.
carlbenson
August 28, 2012 at 5:58 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Everyone seems to have overlooked one of the absolute worst offenders, Senator James Inhofe, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, who said the following:
“Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that “as long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.” My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”
Inhofe, per ThinkProgress, has taken over $1.3Million from the Oil & Gas lobbies, including over $90k from Koch Industries.
slc1
August 28, 2012 at 6:12 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Re tommykey @ #28
Actually, I think it was Hillary Clinton who said that.
Dalillama, Schmott Guy
August 28, 2012 at 6:45 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@Raging Bee #12
Every definition of Fiat money which I have ever encountered includes the U.S. dollar, and all currencies not backed by commodities. It is fiat money because the reason that U.S. dollars are currency is that the U.S. government says they are.
steve oberski
August 28, 2012 at 7:14 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@Raging Bee Yes, it would be good in a nuclear war, but gold or no gold, you’d have muich bigger problems to deal with then.
Well you could use it to line your underground bunker, with an atomic weight of 197 gold is almost as effective as lead (207) for stopping high energy particles.
And it melts at a much higher temperature than lead (1064 C versus 327 C) which could be another useful attribute in a nuclear war.
Raging Bee
August 28, 2012 at 7:28 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Schmott Guy: that’s not the definition I heard. The Dollar, yen, euro, etc. are not fiat money because their value fluctuates with market forces, instead of being officially set by regular government rulings. Governments can and do sometimes devalue their currencies, but that’s not the only force affecting the value of the money, and governments don’t set the money prices of goods. That’s what makes “hard currency” different from commie cash, which is at least loosely based on Marx’s ideal concept of money as nothing more than an accounting unit, with no intrinsic market value of its own.
I suspect that some goldbuggers and libertarians have changed their definition of the phrase “fiat money” after the abolition of the USSR’s money system.
steve: are you sure about the melting temperature of gold? I thought that gold’s relative inertness WRT other metals (which is one reason it’s so valuable and useful as money) made it easier to melt.
steve oberski
August 28, 2012 at 7:50 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@Raging Bee
Mr. google seems pretty sure about the melting point of gold.
And 1,000 C is not really that high a temperature when you compare it to say tungsten (3,422 C).
Mr. google also told me that even though the atomic weights of lead and gold are close, gold has almost 2 times the density of lead, which probably means that gold is actually much more effective than lead at stopping high energy particles than previously indicated.
pinkboi
August 28, 2012 at 8:56 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
This is a line I hear a lot that flabbergasts me. No one is claiming the world will end. They are just claiming it’s going to suck. Or rather, that we’re better off trying to stop it than not.
pinkboi
August 28, 2012 at 9:02 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Gold has the advantage of tying regulators’ hands with regard to the monetary supply.
Gold has the disadvantage of tying regulators’ hands with regard to the monetary supply.
I hope Ron Paul doesn’t get his way and us go back to the gold standard (but that’s not going to happen anyway). I hope he does get his way and the limits that do exist for competing currencies are removed. Of course in a Rothbardian like Paul’s mind, that freedom will be used to buy and sell in digital gold but in the 21st century, I think we can come up with something better than gold.
Michael Heath
August 28, 2012 at 9:20 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The GOP’s 2012 platform was published today in PDF form. I went through it searching for the words “warming” and “climate”. The only reference to the biggest threat humanity currently faces is one mention of climate change in scare quotes, where it’s framed as a hoax. Everything else in the platform has the GOP entirely committed to doing the opposite of what a sane species with hopes of flourishing would do, including an explicit commitment to coal.
katkinkate
August 28, 2012 at 9:38 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I agree that the world’s economies have developed too far to go back to the gold standard now. It would be economic disaster. Yet I bought gold several years ago when it was around $600 and more than doubled my money over the last few years.
Dalillama, Schmott Guy
August 28, 2012 at 10:04 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@Raging Bee
I know Wiki isn’t totally authoritative, but this is the only definition of fiat currency I’ve ever seen anyone use:
mithrandir
August 28, 2012 at 10:05 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
pinkboi:
Two words: company scrip.
If you’ve never heard of that, look it up. If you have, and you can think of a way to regulate “competing currencies” that won’t allow the abuses that company scrip caused, I’m all ears.
laurentweppe
August 28, 2012 at 10:37 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Of course they would not let their wife/daughter/relative die an excruciating death: in Akin, Ryan & co’s world, rules are meant for keeping the plebs under control, not for being obeyed by those who make them.
jakc
August 28, 2012 at 10:49 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@katkinkate
The price of gold has doubled largely due to the speculative bubble caused by the “gold is real money” people. The current price exceeds the value of gold for a lot of applications and is maintained by people who have wildly unrealistic ideas about gold. Many of these people believe we’re heading for a crash (think of some of the wilder Y2K predictions) and are stockpiling gold for when the government crashes and zombies roam the streets.
democommie
August 28, 2012 at 11:04 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The GOP convention in Tampa reminds me of the movie, “King of Hearts” without Alan Bates and without as happy an ending.
Raging Bee
August 28, 2012 at 11:30 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
…gold is actually much more effective than lead at stopping high energy particles than previously indicated.
So Goldline can sell a whole new line of gold hoodies and underpants to protect the fashion-conscious survivalist from radiation after that nuclear race war they’ve been hankering for since 1980.
…but this is the only definition of fiat currency I’ve ever seen anyone use…
Okay, but I think I’ll just stick to my definition, at least for now, because it admits the important distinction between commie-cash and “hard” or “floating-exchange-rate” currency. The former’s official value is dictated ENTIRELY by government fiat (with the black-market consequences I mentioned earlier), while the latter’s value is not forced to conflict with its market value. The two are significantly different, and it’s foolish and dishonest to give them the same label.
The price of gold has doubled largely due to the speculative bubble caused by the “gold is real money” people. The current price exceeds the value of gold for a lot of applications and is maintained by people who have wildly unrealistic ideas about gold.
Yeah, that’s the point of all that goldbuggery: it’s all a scam that has nothing at all to do with more stable currency or more secure money. It’s a crappy investment because you have to buy gold in the good times (when there’s no panic driving prices up), and then SELL it when everyone is scared. Which means that you give up good investment opportunities in the good times to buy inert dead weight instead, then you have to hold onto it, while it does absolutely nothing but sit and look shiny (no actual return on investment or wealth-creation), until times are bad and people get scared enough to buy it.
democommie
August 28, 2012 at 11:30 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Gold is a wonderful material for many uses, coinage being one of them.
The smallest gold coin in current use is probably worth a lot more than a loaf of bread or a flagon of wine, so making change might prove impractical.
Unless you have a private security force you might have some trouble holding onto your cold in a crisis.
That’s only two problems one might have to deal with; I’m sure that there are others.
Raging Bee
August 28, 2012 at 11:36 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I hope he does get his way and the limits that do exist for competing currencies are removed.
COMPETING currencies?! Are you fucking kidding me?! Can you think of even one instance — preferably in recent history — where that did any good? America certainly didn’t need it to become the economic powerhouse it became after WW-II.
Seriously, where does that idea even come from, and why would anyone think it was a good one?
M Groesbeck
August 28, 2012 at 11:51 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Implying that there is (or could ever be) a difference between value and market price denies the absolute reality of capitalist principles, and is thus socialist. And we all know that’s a bad thing!
dingojack
August 29, 2012 at 1:18 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@ 101325Pa
Gold melt: 1337.33 K; boil: 3129 K. Density 19300 Kg/(m^3)
Lead melt: 600.61 K; boil: 2022 K. Density 11340 Kg/(m^3)
[Tungstan melt: 3695 K; boil: 5828 K*]
Hope that helps.
Dingo
—–
* Effective temperature of the solar photosphere 5778 K
PS: All those thinking about the gold standard should research ‘The Bronze Age Collapse’. The world’s first metal bubble.
Dalillama, Schmott Guy
August 29, 2012 at 2:14 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@Raging Bee:
You can continue to use your definition if you wish, but your ability to discuss economics with others will be severely stunted, because AFAICT everyone else on earth uses one or a combination of the following:
slc1
August 29, 2012 at 7:23 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Re Michael Heath @ #37
The fascination of the Rethuglican leadership with coal, aside from the issue of global climate change, doesn’t even make any economic sense. Given the steep reduction in the price of natural gas due to a massive surplus because of new advanced technologies, it is now no more expensive to produce electricity from gas then it is from coal, especially given the expense of using scrubbers to clean up sulfur emissions from burning coal. Of course, if the Rethuglicans regain the Senate and the Presidency in the upcoming election, they will probably eliminate emission regulations of coal burning power plants.
KG
August 29, 2012 at 7:27 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Mostly silver, in fact.
/history pedant
democommie
August 29, 2012 at 8:21 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I know a jeweler who is sitting on a lot of gold that he’s bought over the last few years and he worries about it losing its “value”. His business happens to involve USING gold, so he has some basis for his actions.
Am I correct in thinking that most of the new “gold” that people are being enticed into buying is actually in the form of certificates of ownership rather than actual heaps of shiny gold bars?
d cwilson
August 29, 2012 at 8:54 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Actually, what Goldline pushes the most is the sale of antique gold coins, usually at highly inflated prices that make it nearly impossible that the
suckerspurchasers will ever recoup their losses.d cwilson
August 29, 2012 at 9:03 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
And I find that utterly hilarious.
Do they think they can bribe the zombies?
In all seriousness, if we ever do go the way of the Road Warrior, gold is going to be just about worthless. It’s heavy and difficult to transport. You can’t make weapons or plows out of it. People are going to be more interested in stealing your food and fuel than your gold.
KG
August 29, 2012 at 10:12 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I doubt that. It doesn’t rot or rust, and enough people would probably still think it’s valuable, for it to be valuable per unit weight (and even more so, per unit volume).
dingojack
August 29, 2012 at 10:32 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
KB – f you want maximum price/kg go with diamonds, beats heavy, clumsy old gold every time.
Dingo
kermit.
August 29, 2012 at 10:57 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
slc1: The fascination of the Rethuglican leadership with coal, aside from the issue of global climate change, doesn’t even make any economic sense.
What does that have anything to do with their behavior? They’re all on the payroll of Massey Energy or the Koch brothers. Romney, Ryan, Inhofe, King, et al do not make decisions based on what’s good for the economy, or even the company they may be CEO of. Instead they make decisions based on how much they personally will profit from it. This type of rape and plunder CEO is supported by a board of directors who are CEOs in other companies, or want to be. The customers, the workers, and even the shareholders are not part of the equation.
If the GOP is elected this time around, the hemorrhage of money from the middle class to the 0.01% will become an unstoppable gusher.
frog
August 29, 2012 at 11:31 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Some Republican dimwit said: The earth will end only when God declares it to be over.
And all I could think was, “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?” Methinks brother Bluto was smarter and more knowledgable than most of the modern Republican party. And he at least could entertain by crushing beer cans on his head.
re: gold
The price of gold is currently higher than the price of platinum. Considering that (a) there’s a lot more gold on the planet, (b) platinum has more common industrial uses, and (c) the primary uses of platinum destroy it, whereas the primary industrial uses of gold allow it to be recycled, I gotta go with “gold prices are a bubble driven by hype, not actual value.”
d cwilson
August 29, 2012 at 12:00 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
KG:
I’m not convinced. In a non-technological society, gold useful only if you can trade it for something else, like food or shelter. The maurading bands of zombies/mutants are not going to be coming around for trade, but for raping and pillaging. And even if they do want to haul off your gold, that just makes it more of a liability than a benefit.
Raging Bee
August 29, 2012 at 4:41 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
You can continue to use your definition if you wish, but your ability to discuss economics with others will be severely stunted…
I haven’t had a problem with it so far. Everyone I’ve talked to understood the difference between “floating-exchange-rate” currency and “fiat money” — except for libertarians, which is kinda puzzling, since they’re the ones who should be most eager to point out all the reasons why capitalism is better than communism, and hard capitalist currency is one such reason.
democommie
August 29, 2012 at 4:53 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“Actually, what Goldline pushes the most is the sale of antique gold coins, usually at highly inflated prices that make it nearly impossible that the suckers purchasers will ever recoup their losses.”
Than these idiots are even dumber than I already thought they were.
Raging Bee
August 29, 2012 at 11:10 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I hope he does get his way and the limits that do exist for competing currencies are removed.
I’m sorry for the double-take here, but this idea is so stupid it takes time to fully digest. Who on Earth could possibly think it’s a good idea to let the people who gave us credit-default swaps, mortgage-backed securities, subprime loans, Deepwater Horizon, and the Enron fiasco create their own money and monetary policy? This sounds like something Newt Gingrich pulled out of his ass to keep up his “ideas guy” cred. I can’t even find the words to describe how intelligent this idea isn’t.
Also, Dalillama, I had a look at your definitions of “fiat money,” and they’re utter crap:
…any money declared by a government to be legal tender.[5]
state-issued money which is neither convertible by law to any other thing, nor fixed in value in terms of any objective standard.[6] money without intrinsic value.[7][8]
The first of these applies to ALL currencies, including gold-based currencies, since all currencies are, by definition, legal tender. The second clearly does NOT apply to hard/floating-exchange-rate currencies, since they’re convertible on international markets. It does apply to commie-cash, which was not traded on international markets. And if people choose to use a currency as a medium of exchange, then that gives the currency intrinsic value.
Who writes this stuff? Did you even read what you quoted before trying to dispute my word usage?
dingojack
August 30, 2012 at 12:00 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Collins Dictoionary* defines it like so:
Food stamps or healthcare vouchers might be considered ‘fiat money’.
Hope that helps,
Dingo
—–
* Yes, not the most authoritive source for economic definitions I grant you
dingojack
August 30, 2012 at 12:15 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Mirriam Webster online:
fiat money noun
Definition of FIAT MONEY
: money (as paper currency) not convertible into coin or specie of equivalent value
First Known Use of FIAT MONEY
1876.
Dingo
Raging Bee
August 30, 2012 at 8:11 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
First Known Use of FIAT MONEY: 1876.
…back when America’s upper class were rigidly resisting ANY attempt to expand the money supply by de-linking the dollar from gold (mostly by adding silver to the value-basis), and trying to portray any non-gold-based currency as “not real.” We’ve moved on from those times, and our word-usage should too.
democommie
August 30, 2012 at 9:17 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Fiat money is that which is not spent on the Porsche.
Raging Bee
August 30, 2012 at 11:27 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Food stamps or healthcare vouchers might be considered ‘fiat money’.
Actually, those are more like scrip, which is a way of paying people while restricting their leeway to spend what you give them as they wish. That’s in the same ballpark as fiat money, but not quite the same.