The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

Re:The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of go... by imtringued on Sunday April 17, 2022 @03:26PM (#31063548)

Let's assume 50% of the population is retired and has saved money. The other 50% is working full time. A deadly virus wiped out 50% of the working population. All products are now twice as expensive.

>. At least in the US inflation is the result of decoupling dollars from gold and the direct theft of gold and silver from the citizens by the government.

No, it is caused by ignoring the fact that labor cannot be stored. Gold is just a token, it is like an entry in a balance sheet but harder to forge. It doesn't actually store anything other than itself. You can't store labor by turning it into gold. Gold was already in the ground and was dug out by labor. There is no way to get that labor back. People age. They can't be stored like gold. The inherent mismatch between gold and people is what causes inflation. The only difference is that due to its limited supply gold then swings back to deflation and then inflation again but simply introducing a gold standard doesn't solve the inflation problem, it is the origin of the inflation problem. Fiat currency is just a stretched gold standard. They are still tokens, they are easier to forge and more importantly fiat money doesn't age either. So inflation must still happen as a consequence.

> It is, however, an obscured tax on savers, a transfer of wealth from borrowers to debtors.

By this logic aging is a tax on savers. Defaulting on debt is also a tax on savers. Savers deceiving themselves is a tax on savers.

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Re:The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of go... by jonhohle on Sunday April 17, 2022 @08:09PM (#31065827)

Sure, gold can be used as a token to represent work, but it has utility beyond just that. The only way to inflate gold is by actual labor. Fiat is inflated by whim and has no value except as a store of work/time. Any hyper-inflationary story from the last 100 years makes it reasonably obvious how fiat can go to zero value while gold held from the same period has approximately the same value in trade (100oz of gold could buy you a car in 1950; 25oz of gold could do the same today, 400oz for a house vs 200 today, etc.).

The US literally stole gold from the population in 1933. A $20 bill was literally a certificate for an ounce of gold.

I’m not advocating a gold standard or any other monetary peg, just saying that removing a peg and moving to fiat is never in the benefit of those holding the fiat and always in the benefit of those printing.

I’m not sure I follow the last sentence. Inflation requires time, so sure, aging and holding fiat results in lost value. Borrowers are on the positive side of inflation, so except for the literal tax that may be incurred by debt forgiveness the repossession of property by the lender is approximately neutral. That’s really the point of fiat currency, the printer is the borrower of real property and the note is a promise of repayment, ultimately in real property, securities, or labor.

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