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Police Seizures of Property

Section 1.

Congress shall make no law that authorizes any agents of justice to seize the property of persons accused of wrong doing unless said property is deemed to be evidence regarding the wrong doing.

Section 2.

In all cases the property deemed evidence shall be returned to the owner or personal representative at the conclusion of the court trial or upon dismissal of charges.Peter Namtvedt

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OPINIONS & LETTERS:

HUMOR:   Jump to jokes

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JOKES:
"Nothing important happened today."
On July 4th, 1776, King George III wrote this in his diary.

At a press conference, President Bush blasted Congress for not allowing oil exploration in the Alaskan Wildlife Reserve. Democrats said it wouldn't do any good, because it wouldn't produce oil for 10 years. You know, the same thing they said 10 years ago.
Jay Leno, June 24, 2008

Is Money a Problem?

We are getting signals that the dollar is in trouble. What is the problem with our money? We are certainly not hoarding it. Are we spending it too fast? Are we borrowing too much of it? The consumers are hardly strong enough, like government, to cause trouble with our money. Maybe not, but who is the handiest patsy?

As John Connally, a former treasury secretary, told the rest of the world in 1971: "The dollar is our currency, but it is your problem."

The equivalent, in the current situation, in 2008 (in fact, at least from 1973 and on) is that it is the U.S. government's dollar, but the problem with it belongs to the citizens.

Connally could have been speaking to us, the citizenry, from the government's view, telling us that it is the U.S. government's currency, but the dollar problem belongs to us.

It is a many-faceted problem. The value of the dollar tends to fall, real pay advances too slowly, but commodity costs jump ahead quickly, those who carry a lot of debt (including government) gain by repaying loans with cheaper dollars, but lenders lose by the constant dropping of the value of repayments of loans.

Can we pass on this inflation to other countries? You bet we can, we do, and we must. A dollar that is falling in value will change the balance of trade, making American products cheaper to other countries and make their products more expensive to us. This will urge foreign central banks to inflationary policies similar to ours. When this is not happening, our central bank may resort to jawboning to convince other central banks to follow step.

If foreign banks and governments devalue the dollar (adjust their own currency upward), the U.S. government just prints more. But we, the citizens of the U.S. face the unknown. We are not important. Although a well-running economy depends on expectations coming true, erratic behavior is certain to come when expectations are constantly foiled. Prices should be relatively stable, which means the monetary unit retains its value over time. That has not been true of the dollar. It has steadily fallen in value since about 1914. What is the dollar, anyway? Everybody knows what a dollar is. However, it has changed.

Whereas, in the Colonial Period, a dollar was denominated in weights of silver. About at the time of the founding of the United States, gold was established as the standard, with silver coins at a ratio of 16 to 1 were used for smaller denominations. Early on, the Spanish dollar was the commonest gold coin, containing 27.07 grams. How "fine", or pure the gold was, varied from about .907 to about .99. Eventually the United States created an American dollar.

A coin weighing one troy ounce or 33.931 grams gold was stamped "50 dollars". Gold coins, with silver for small denomination, turned out to be inconvenient. Banks issued notes that guaranteed redemption in gold. Through a long, gradual process, the dollar was displaced by paper dollars. At first they bore lettering promising they were redeemable in the above amount of gold. Then came the silver certificate.

In 1933, this backing of precious metals for paper dollars ended, while the world's central banks still exchanged the metals as the balance of trade required. Moreover, it became illegal for private individuals to own gold. It was confiscated. The value of gold used by central banks for clearing balance of trade exchanges was fixed at $35 an ounce. No one asked whether that price was a workable one over extended periods of time, during which the money supply and other factors altered the value of the paper dollar. It turned out over the next 38 years, that 35 paper dollars was worth quite less than an ounce of gold. Foreign central banks and their member banks came to redeem the dollars piling up for gold.

Then in 1971, seeing the balance of trade and the depreciating dollar causing gold to flee the U.S.A., President Nixon finally took the final step. Now not even central banks could use gold to settle debts. The paper dollar stood on its own. However, it was not totally lacking a foundation. It was backed by the "full faith and credit of the United States." The credit worthiness of the government maintained the value of the dollar. As long as the federal government had a good credit rating and could borrow, the dollar kept its value.

Now, credit worthiness is not possible unless there is debt. Moreover, we do not know whether the value of the dollar is what it is just because the government says "let it be" (fiat in Latin), or is determined by ability to borrow, or just simply debt. The government has, it would like us to believe, an unlimited line of credit, a credit card with no limit. In any case the dollar as money is based on debt.

Fiat money always seeks its true value = ZERO. The dollar has long been heading that way. What was one dollar in 1913 (when the Federal Reserve Act was passed) is now worth less than four cents. However, the same thing has been happening to major foreign currencies — through exportation of inflation (mostly from the U.S.). But the kicker is that the central bankers are not able to totally break the tie of money to objective commodity values, whether it be gold, silver or oil. Print dollars (otherwise increase liquidity) to increase the money supply by 10 percent and the price of key commodities will soon be up 10 percent.

This is said based on the way the major central banks have been loaning, buying and selling gold ever since they discovered that Richard Nixon's breaking the gold tie did not work. Nixon thought he liberated banking from solidly backed money in 1971. The central banks found that they had no objective basis for settling balance of trade accounts.

Whereas money as gold is very much founded on reality, debt-based money detaches both us, the people, the banks and government from reality. It is in no way a foundation that determines the value of our money, it does not help do that in the least.

When we go out into the world in the morning, we might wonder what the weather will be. We might chance it, consult the weather report, or just look out the window before deciding to don a raincoat or carry an umbrella. When it comes to quite extremely important matters, we should be able to base our choice on even weightier evidence. On the contrary, we are forced to do so with even less information.

We are asked to take the value of a dollar on blind faith.

We can readily find out what the value of a barrel of crude oil or an ounce of gold is. And we know quite a bit about how supply and demand set the price of those. But nothing as objective as that makes up the foundation of our monetary system. The money we use belongs to the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve. The fact that it is fiat money is a problem. We do not control the money. Although it flows through our hands, it is theirs.

But the problem is ours.