'gigi' wrote in another thread:

: was gold by any chance also not only stored by the
: commonly known power elite but perhaps pooled for
: economical / political purposes by other groups
: (arabs/russian/asians?)

: for sure the gold pricing is a difficult undertaking
: but i would also buy gold.

I think that's "yes" to both points - HOWEVER, I realize we're looking at the issue upside-down and must be missing some key points. :) Let's expand our context.

"Money" (not currency) is the thing that comes into existence when the fulfilling of an exchange of value will take some time.

This requires that one "something of value" has already been made or otherwise has become present, and has been transferred from one live human being to another; and that the giver of the thing of value expects in this instance to acquire something of equal value in return. (He could have chosen to 'gift' it to the other person, expecting nothing in return.)

Let's say I do some work for you, and you want to give me something of equal value in exchange - but you don't have anything, right now, that I would hold to be of equal value, so we agree to complete our exchange, sometime later. As a "token" of our agreement and promise, you scribble an IOU onto a piece of paper, which I accept.

There - we just created money. :) But the piece of paper, the IOU, is not the money. It's the currency, which is representing the money. The _actual_ money is your promise to eventually give to me some thing that is of measureable and mutually-agreeable "equal value".

A "dollar" is not a commodity or thing in itself. Instead, it is a UNIT OF MEASURE - originally, "a dollar's worth of gold or silver". We could've called it "a spendweight" if we'd wanted to, but we called it a "dollar" instead. "How much does it cost?" "For you, only 4 Spendweights!" If we spoke of it that way, we'd remember easily that it's a _measure_, not a thing in itself.

So - if you had a sandwich you were willing to sell, and I said to you, "I'll give you 4 in exchange for that sandwich," you'd rightly ask me, "Uh - 4 what?" If I answered, "Four milligrams," you'd still ask, "But, 4 milligrams...of what?"

We _should_ be asking each other those same questions, if the offer were, "Four dollars"; we should be asking, "Four dollars...of what?" But we don't, usually. It's because we've been _invited_ to think of dollars as "a store of value" in and of themselves - when, in fact, they are not, and never have been; and they have been even further removed from "real value" since they were disconnected from "the gold standard".

Now, today, we're talking about "buying gold" - but this is the reverse of what the reality is. We're thinking, "Gold is likely to rise in value." That's true enough, but what it means is, "The value of dollars and euros may be coming down." Why? Because _gold_ is a store of value, a Thing against which national currencies can be measured in the first place.

The currencies are what is relative. The gold remains what it is, essentially. (We could raise an argument that the value of gold also varies, but that's not so important right now. Likewise, we could raise an argument to say the value of dollars and euros has more to do with the market costs of various goods; there would be truth in that, too, but it's not the point we're interested in seeing right now.)

What seems almost certainly occurring right now, is that the peoples of the world have begun to remember this is really how it is, and are beginning to gravitate toward a return to "gold as money". Several features of Internet are making this possible - we have access to information about how money works, and we have a global mechanism now that would allow it to operate.

Thus we have "e-gold". It's not a market in which to buy gold - it's an exchange system that _uses_ gold as money. Because we're accustomed to thinking about this in an upside-down fashion, we don't get that point at first - but that's the point. We're not going to "buy gold"; we're going to "stop using free-floating dollars that don't measure anything" and use gold (or perhaps new gold-based currencies) in our transactions instead. One would "own" this gold in the same way that one would "own" dollars or euros or lira - we might want to keep a bunch of it on hand "for a rainy day", but we'd also expect to "spend" it for our immediate needs.

Also coming, perhaps by the end of 2001 (if possible): www.GoldMoney.com, a variation of the same idea as 'e-gold'.

As this idea grows, national currencies will fluctuate downward - but I think perhaps it's an idea whose time has come, and cannot be stopped.

If that's so, then "the elites" will already be positioning themselves to take advantage of it, rather than to stop it.

BUT the question is, "Have they been left in good position at this point in the unfolding of the world, so that they are _able_ to take advantage of it?" The answer may be, "No, actually - someone else has beat them to the punch." (Fac2-&-Fac3 together, perhaps; I don't really know. If Truth and Reconciliation Courts are actually coming, and the ne'er-do-wells will be allowed to live comfortably but modestly, their hoards of riches may not be left in their possession; perhaps those riches will re-enter the global economy through "good deeds and reparation programs". We'll have to wait and see, I guess.)

To accumulate power-through-money, all you have to do is cleverly pull a few strings and "work the float" - dollars increase or decrease in value, as they move around; if you understand how that works and have a few connections, you can increase your seeming wealth, without doing any productive work. This is of course intrinsically flawed - money arises only when a thing of value is transferred from one live human being to another, and no other way. You don't really "make money" solely by increasing the number of units-of-measure (dollars) in your control.

So the folks who have accumulated seeming wealth through non-productive methods necessarily have in some sense "stolen" it from someone else - it's just that we don't usually have a way to _observe_ the theft; it's buried under layers of economic persiflage, and we're left with an idea that "Costs always go up; it's a Law of Nature" - when what we really mean is, "Hunh - the value of my paycheck went down between the time they handed it to me and the time I arrived at the store..."

But why did it go down? Because someone has "stolen" its value from you, by clever playing of money markets and working the float, which affects _all_ the currency's worth, since the currency isn't pegged to anything of real-world value. We call it "inflation" (or "deflation") and, having given it a name, imagine we know what the heck we're talking about. :)

Gold, however, is proof against such shenanigans. To acquire more gold, you have to literally acquire more physical gold, paying whatever quantity of dollars or euros might be required (for the time being). Eventually we'd set aside the dollars and euros, and _think_ in terms of gold whenever we talk about "money".

Today, though, "gold as money" is a hard thought to hold onto for more than a few seconds. It's useful to remember, "How much does gold cost?" is not the right question. Rather it's, "How much gold does this dollar/euro/lira represent?"

To open a no-obligation e-gold account and/or 'spend' a contribution to the "Glad Tidings :)" e-gold account for Rayelan/RuMills:

http://www.e-gold.com/e-gold.asp?cid=217694

Also, interesting reading below at the GoldMoney future site - see the comparison "price of oil" charts a little more than halfway down the page: