Yes! We're #1!

You said the US uses Beretta, I proved we bought Glocks...and sent them to Iraq, case proved, nothing more to say on this.

Please explain what you mean by this, so far every fact posted has shown you to be wrong, who is self immolating?

The 200,000 is the number of weapons we have handed out that we cannot account for, not merely that we do not know who has them now, in many cases we cannot even prove who we gave them to when they left US control. The other numbers are the ones that are turning up in various criminal investigations. Surely you know that most guns going into the black market are not getting picked up.

Think of it this way, 200 illegal workers were recently arrested in a local meat processing plant. By your (il)logic, that means we only have

Snip

I have provided more than you ever do when asked...If you want more facts to discredit your views, please search them out yourself. If you begin looking objectively at the stuff you spew, you might have to review some of the support you give so mindlessly.

Unless you can provide citations and evidence to contradict that these weapons, which are traced to US purchases, are not lost US weapons when they appear on the Black market I consider it proven conclusively.

Stuart

That stereotying is something you share with George Bush. Take it from us, Myal, it will only lead you to make foolish mistakes.

Regarding superior cultures, Rifleman seems to favor the Arabs. Maybe you guys should take your holidays among them. Just remember to keep your left hand to yourself, and don't look at the women unless you want your balls turned into a between-meals snack.

"They why" of it is indeed a mystery. Why you find it entertaining to make depreciatory remarks about others opens the question of how your life could degenerate to such a pathetic state. You really should find something more useful to do with yourself, Myal.

-- Ed Huntress

Like the Chinese, and their low grade crap?

Stopping the suppression of influenza would unite the world against a common enemy. Unification is a requirement for peace. . .

Stopping the suppression of influenza would unite the world against a common enemy. Unification is a requirement for peace. . .

By your illogic, you are claiming that all workers are illgal, based on finding 200.

Gunner

Actually its derived from the hindu arabic alphabet, and originated in the Saxony area of what is now Germany. Modern British English is the language of global commerce with over 1.3 billion people using it as a first language, and their is a dumbed down form developed for a nation that could not manage the grasp the fully developed version, they call it American English with many of the words simplified so the lower intelect found in that nation can at least communicate at a basic level with the rest of the world. IE most English speakers will write Colour, but americans write Color, the dumbed down version nicely relects the simple culture that uses it.

Only to be expected from people like you, perfectly normal in fact, its people like you are your mum who helped other folks like Osama Bin Laden when he was fighting the Russians, You must be really proud of your mum helping the IRA, they trained in the same camps in Libya and Sudan and Kasmir as the Afghans fighting the Russians did, your money probably helped Osama a great deal, I bet she was gutted when those three Irish trawlers loaded with Libyan and Afghan AK 47s and RPGs , paid for with american dollars was siezed by the Brits, but no doubt more of her money managed to reach the right people. Hey I know as a nice treat for your mum if you do a google search for Crossmaglen, Warrenpoint, or Enniskillin etc you can find some lovely pictures of dead and dying women and children blown up on buses or in shopping malls or at veterans rememberance services by IRA bombers that she so proudly helped fund, nearly 3000 civilians died in Ulster at the hand of the IRA and its offshoots, in the 30 yars of conflict, all those dead women and kids must make her proud. Still you can always send money to the Mujahadin in Afghanistan again. Rest assured your American dollars have and continue to fund terrorists across the world, may what you wished upon others is returned to you a thousandfold.

In article , "Ed Huntress" wrote: [snip]

Ed -- please stop feeding the trolls. It's the only way to make them go away. They're just like rats: keep setting food out for them, they keep coming back. Stop setting the food out, and they'll look for it somewhere else.

Odd but Myal has expressed displeasure with "white man's law," not just USA policy. Too bad.

They did - fraudulently. And then they suffered the inevitable bank runs. So we established the Fed to drown bank runs with ever more money, instead of doing away with the cause of bank runs, fractional reserve banking.

There is no reason whatsoever to have a "deflationary spiral" under a fully convertible gold standard. During the time we had a dollar which could be freely exchanged for gold coin at a fixed price, we had no such deflationary spiral. Prices gradually decreased over the decades, even as wages gradually increased. (Hint -- We were becoming richer, not poorer.)

As usual, "almost all (modern) economists" are mistaken.

Gee, NO country has had a true 100% convertible gold standard in modern times. But if one did, why would it have any reason to fear a speculative attack on its gold reserves? After all, its gold reserves would merely be the gold it held as backing for its gold certificates (along with a little in government savings -- not likely to be much, given the tendency of politicians to spend pretty much everything they can get their hands on). Why should a government care whether it held that gold as backing for its gold certificates, or paid out that gold in exchange for its gold certificates? Given the costs of storing gold, it should prefer to pay out the gold rather than to store it.

Except for during and shortly after the War Between the States, the U.S. was officially on some sort of metallic standard or another from the adoption of the Constitution until 1933. And even after that one could exchange one's dollars for silver coins. Foreigners could still exchange their dollars for gold, until Nixon reneged on our obligations in 1971. The real inflation started after that, when there was no longer any restraint on dollar creation at all.

Unions? In the U.S. unions now have virtually no influence other than in government employment. Unions certainly have no influence over monetary matters.

At the cost of the slow but inevitable destruction of the value of the dollar, which will eventually result in hyper-inflation, which will result in the collapse of the economy and general society in the U.S. Not a Good Trade, if you ask me...

You are, perhaps, falling for the most common logical fallacy of all -- post hoc ergo propter hoc. The inflation of the currency does not cause economic growth. It actually makes it less vigorous than it would otherwise be, because of the necessary drag of procuring inflation hedges. And when we eventually get around to that hyper-inflation that collapses the value of the dollar and collapses the U.S. economy, you'll see that the "benign" moderate inflation you assume is the trade-off for economic growth -- isn't. But then it'll be too late.

"those finance guys" are everyone in modern finance, including, and especially, the ones running the Fed. That "leash" would be a gold standard, or better yet a truly free market in capital, specifically excluding fiat money, that would prevent them from doing the sorts of dumb-assed things they have done lately.

So they were right, and they'll be even more right, and we'll be a very sorry lot, as hyper-inflation takes hold, as it inevitably/eventually will.

I won't, for now. But I have a high degree of certainty that the U.S. one dollar note will, at some time in the future (probably long after I'm dead, seeing as how I'm already OLD), be so worthless that it won't matter at all whether one lights one's cigar with one or not. Matches may very well be more valuable. Of course, one will still have to light the dollar note, so...

Just as there were similar, if not even more startling, economic improvements in the 20th century.

And then we had the aircraft revolution, and the automobile revolution, and the communications revolution, and the computer revolution, and ... your point being?

No, I wouldn't think of doing so, just as I wouldn't think of connecting the imposition of fiat money with the various economic improvements of the 20th century.

We're getting quite a dose of "stability" right now, and it just might get a whole lot more, uh, interesting...

I find it amusing that you're willing to disregard the effects (if any) of metallic money standards on the economic improvements of the 19th century, while seemingly suggesting that fiat money caused the economic improvements of the 20th century. A much better conclusion is that the form the money takes mainly affects the stability of the value of the money itself, but little else -- until the fiat money's issuers give up and descend into hyper-inflation -- at which time the virtues of hard money become evident once again.

-- Robert Sturgeon Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms should be a convenience store, not a government agency.

Pfhht. No cigar. It had *no* alphabet for a long while. Read your own Oxford linguist, David Crystal.

If you don't pronounce the "u," why in the hell do you leave it in there? There's one more example of British aplomb that contributed to your loss of empire. d8-)

Crystal, in one of his books (I forget which) notes that Noah Webster rationalized English spelling so it made more sense. 'Too bad about that aplomb, you could have used his tips and suggestions.

-- Ed Huntress

It's true, and it's a weakness. But they're so easy; it's like frying schmoos. They just keep jumping in the pan.

-- Ed Huntress

As I said, this is really too complicated to discuss here. You might have a hard time explaining the attacks on gold *even when it was 100% convertible*, in France and England over a century ago. Both had to shut down conversion to keep from being depleted. There are short-term arbitrage issues involved that can wipe out a treasury almost overnight, particularly when the official exchange rate on a fully-backed currency overvalues the paper. If the gold really is worth more than the government says, it's going to fly out the door. And it has. Today, with electronic trading and instant communication, it could happen between the time you put cream in your coffee and the time you sit down at your desk.

You're in a tiny minority among economists with your conclusions about deflation, Robert, as I'm sure you're aware. There's the Austrian school and some libertarians, and that's about it. To conclude from events of the Second Industrial Revolution that the gold standard somehow improved the economy is to be deeply entrenched in philosophical dogma. You gloss over, for example, the tremendous growth that resulted from innovation and the newly-built infrastructure; the Panic of 1873; the degree to which deflation led to labor unrest, and the beginnings of unions; the extreme disparities in income that resulted from money *holders* positioning themselves to benefit from deflation; and half a dozen other things.

There is no legitimate, modern economist that I've ever read who believes that deflation is a good thing, despite the fact that we got lucky a few times and it didn't precipitate a spiral. The danger is not that it always spirals, but that there is no known way to end a deflationary spiral once one starts. Inflation, on the other hand, can be wrung out of an economy, albeit with some pain.

You say, "As usual, "almost all (modern) economists" are mistaken." I'm sorry, but I don't have confidence in your conclusions, especially when you use loaded words like "fraud" to describe fractional-reserve banking. You have an ideological view of it all and your recounting of economic history tells me that you select the evidence that suits you. Few legitimate economists today believe that the benefits of a gold standard outweight its weaknesses, which range from vulnerability to speculators and arbitrageurs, to a weakening of an economy's ability to recover from recessions.

So, believe what you want. Your evidence from the 19th century is not convincing, partly because it's incomplete and partly because there are too many confounding factors in that late-Industrial Revolution period to draw any conclusions about the effects of a gold standard.

Have fun, I have work to do.

-- Ed Huntress

snip

I don't want it, buy yes I do fear it.

I've been reading extensively about the Great Depression. Lots of theories why and how it happened; who did what and was it right or wrong. Despite all that, the similarities between then and now are both extremely numerous and the parallels are almost exact.

They were sure it couldn't happen 'today' too. It seems to be a truism of bubbles in general that those in it think their circumstances are unique and old lessons don't apply to their new and very special conditions. So far they have always been wrong.

He and his contemporaries would never allow themselves to get this deep in the hole. The economy of his day would not allow it if he wanted to.

But the whole list is aspects of the economy in general. There are natural forces that should limit how big the problems can get, but, the system we have now is so artificial that they can not work. They are often prevented from operating by design.

Fix the underlying economy and most of these problems will either correct themselves or at least be small in magnitude.

Well, yeah, that's kinda the problem -- they just keep jumping, but they never realize they've been fried. They keep coming back.

The only way to get them to quit coming back is to quit feeding them.

Aside from a few ideologues, there aren't many economists who would agree the economy is "broken." It's functioning quite well. There is nothing that will make everything nice-nice. Any system has its vulnerabilities, but take note that we haven't had a real depression in nearly 70 years. The rest of American history doesn't stand up to that very well by comparison.

Without knowing what you're reading about the Great Depression, it's hard to comment. If you want to see the consensus opinion among the most respected economists, there was a lecture given by Bernanke a few years back at my son's college that summarizes the core opinion. Let's see...

There is an endless supply of crank opinion, half-baked opinion, and dogmatic opinion on the Web. You may choose to believe something else, but Bernanke's summary is what the mainstream economists have to say.

-- Ed Huntress

OK, I'll lay off. I think we're almost done, anyway.

-- Ed Huntress