In Jim Cook's Archive

PAST THE POINT OF NO RETURN

Last week I sold an antique car that I owned (and never looked at) for $18,000 and bought over 500 ounces of silver with the proceeds.  Two weeks prior I bought 400 ounces.  I still think silver is the best asset you can own.  Now I’m trying to sell an old Chis Craft wood boat that I never got around to putting in the water.  When it sells I’m going to buy more silver.

Silver analyst Theodore Butler has thoroughly conveyed all the bullish reasons to buy silver.  However, he doesn’t talk about the disastrous policies that are wrecking our economy.  He doesn’t talk about the debt and the inflating that promise financial ruin and the death of the dollar.  He doesn’t talk about the fact that the socialists are on the march threatening to overturn capitalism and destroy our way of life.  Those are the reasons I want to own silver.  We’re going down in flames and I don’t know if my side is going to win.

A huge gulf exists between the left and right that cannot be bridged.  You would have to go back to the Civil War to find the kind of intensity, hatred and emotion that exists today.  The great uniter we elected has become the great divider.  By inciting class warfare he has brought the overriding issue of our time to the boiling point.

Will the liberal agenda prevail?  We have embraced a great deal of socialism over the past eighty years.  It has managed to plunge us deep into debt, debase our currency through inflation, empower government unions, over-regulate, and diminish our freedoms while creating a huge federal bureaucracy that lavishly rewards its employees at the expense of us all.  It has created a large and growing population of subsidized citizens who lobby and vote for more money while failing to recognize their dangerous behavioral collapse.  For ninety years the left has continuously raised taxes until it has sapped the workers and entrepreneurs of half the rewards of their labor.  Then it has managed to spend half again as much like the out of control statist monstrosity that it is.

Our government was originally established to keep the peace, protect us from criminals and maintain a level playing field.  Instead of doing a few things well our government insists on doing so many things it does them all badly.

Now the liberals, Socialist and Marxists are on the march.  They want more of the same medicine that’s ruining us.  They want to raise taxes, increase government spending, pass out more subsidies and regulate us into the ground.  They want to replace capitalism with some half-baked socialist utopia that has ruined the economy of every country that’s fiddled with it.  They want no part of free markets and a merit system.

If they prevail (which appears likely) they will plunge us into a new dark age.  This is the philosophy that converted Cuba from a prosperous country into a third-world hell-hole.  This is a philosophy that praises leftists like Senn Penn for embracing Hugo Chavez and regards the murderous thug Che Guevara as its hero.  This is the philosophy that at its extreme murdered one hundred million people in the last century.  This is the philosophy that masquerades as social justice by rewarding people for reasons other than hard work and diligence.

We can see it failing now in Greece.  The 35 hour work weeks, piggish government unions, frequent holidays and long vacations, youthful retirement and useless bureaucracies are killing Europe.  In response they run up more debt, inflate, demonstrate, march, riot, and kill a few people. It won’t change things.  Europe bought into socialism and there’s no way out but down.

In many ways the U.S. has set itself up for the same kind of failure.  Now when the chickens are coming home to roost a desperate government resorts to the cheap trick of debasing its money and cheating the thrifty.  Inflation and socialism feed off one another.  Money printing and debt monetization are the left wing’s solution to every economic problem.  They have the upper hand and they are ruining us.

Now we are at an inflexion point in our economic history.  Capitalism is under total assault because a small contingent of fat cats got greased by Uncle Sam.  That’s what happens when you create money out of thin air.  The big banks get the new money first.  That’s the left’s excuse to shove more socialism down our throat. I ask you what chance is there for balanced budgets, limited government, sound money, low taxes, minimal regulation and free markets?  Not in my lifetime.

So why wouldn’t I put my money into tangible assets that the government can’t ruin?  Especially why not an asset that has survived while a thousand paper currencies have come and gone.  Why not an asset that is in short supply, is enormously useful and that people have turned to for exchange and to store value for as long as history has been recorded?

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