Andrew Sullivan, the Cicero of the republic of gay, finally observes that the empire of transqueer means to abolish him . . . and biological sex for everyone

From his essay here:

 

[Judith] Butler and the TQ+ movement are trapped by their logic into being homophobic: they have to deny that gay men can exist at all, because men cannot exist at all, unless they include women in the definition of man. 

 

That’s why the Trevor Project, the massively-funded TQ+ organization, now tells troubled young gay kids that a gay man is defined as someone who has sex with biological women as well as with men. A gay man is not attracted to the same “sex” but to the same “gender” and that now includes biological women. Trevor has abolished homosexuality! ...

 

In the postmodern world where we invent reality hour by hour, depending on how we feel, being gay now includes heterosexual sex — and by far the biggest group in the “LGBTQIA+” umbrella are bisexual women in relationships with straight men. At some point, gay men will wake up and realize that they have abolished their own identity — indeed merged it into its opposite. ...

 

queer theory’s core pioneers — Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin, and Patrick Califia — all once defended adults fucking kids. Foucault defended sex with infants. This is not extraneous to queer theory; it is intrinsic to it. The point of queer theory is that there are no limiting principles. Defending the integrity, dignity and safety of children makes you un-queer. It’s a label I will gladly wear. ...

 

The truth is: we have come a long way in understanding and respecting the unique human experience of being transgender. In the US, trans people are protected by the gold standard of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They are everywhere in our popular culture. An entire generation has even been told that being trans is the most glamorous thing you could possibly be. But none of this is sufficient for the transqueers. What they want is an abolition of biological sex for everyone; the end of men and of women as separate categories; the sex reassignment of children on demand; the destruction of the nuclear family; an end to the Hippocratic Oath; the abolition of homosexuality; the presence of male bodies in women’s showers, prisons and shelter; the creation of fantastical post-everything genders and pronouns; and the criminalization of anyone who would ever question this cultural revolution. 

 

Revolutions always come for their most ardent supporters eventually.

 

Think Leon Trotsky, Thomas Paine, and now Andrew Sullivan. 

The percentage holding full-time jobs through September 2022 held above 50%, disappointing the ubiquitous advocates of a Fed interest rate pivot

 Full time as a percentage of civilian population in September was 50.3%, and for 2022 through September averaged 50.15%.

Not bad, considering.

The Fed will see little evidence in this figure that its interest rate increase policy is harming employment.

Stocks on Friday collapsed after a head fake to start the week to within 1.5% of the 52-week lows set a week ago.

Long term investment grade bonds and US Treasury securities also revisited lows from 9/27/22, coming within pennies of those benchmarks.

30-year yield for UST is back up to 3.86%. It was 3.87% on 9/27. At the beginning of 2022, yield was a paltry 2.01% by comparison.

UK gilts are experiencing the same action despite the Bank of England intervening to buy bonds. 

The bond crisis is not over.

With yields soaring across the board no one wants to own the lower paying outstanding issues, which are legion, destroying their value.

But everything in the global economy is based on those, piled up in earnest after The Great Financial Crisis of 2008, and in orgiastic frenzy afterwards during the late pandemic.

Bond yields in 2022 are telling you that they are overvalued by 92%.

Stock market valuation is telling you a similar thing.

From 1938 through 2019 the median ratio of the S&P 500 to GDP is 81. In 2020 we averaged 154, or 90% overvalued.

This is the major deflationary headwind facing the world, the other side of the COVID-19 inflationary shock coin.

Push here, it comes out over there.

Modern central banking cannot escape this conundrum any more than the gold standard could.

The only thing the individual can do in this situation is to owe nothing and save everything, preferably in your hands.

Good luck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

America and its people have added over $12 trillion to their total credit market debt outstanding just since 2019, but that has done little but stall the decline of debt growth

The $90 trillion millstone: We did it to ourselves.

We are now in the future we tapped in the past for the prosperity of "debt draws forward prosperity", and there's little here to be found.

From 1946 to 2008 when we hit the debt growth iceberg, real GDP grew at a compound annual rate of 3.324%. Since then it has fallen 49%, to 1.68%.

We should have stayed with capitalism in the post-war, where one risks actual savings instead of future notional tax, income, and fiat money "revenues". But capitalism went out the window a long time ago, bringing with it the end of the gold standard, the creation of the Fed, and the introduction of the income tax, among other horribles.

Payback is a bitch, and what can't be paid back won't. The rest comes out of your hide.

 

 

 

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina sinks confirmation of Thomas Farr to US District Court in this congress, but cocaine Mitch may have another plan

Sen. Tim Scott announces opposition to judicial nominee Thomas Farr, effectively dooming confirmation:

South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott announced Thursday he will oppose embattled judicial nominee Thomas Farr, in a reversal of his position a day earlier that seemingly ends the nominee's chances for now amid fierce criticism by civil rights groups. ...

Farr was first nominated to the federal court in the Eastern District of North Carolina by former President George W. Bush in 2006, but never received a confirmation vote. ...

Prominent Democrats immediately applauded Scott's decision Thursday to oppose Farr, and attacked President Trump for doubling down on Bush's nomination. ...

Top Republicans had also stood behind Farr this week. It remains unclear whether the Senate's GOP leadership will try to reconsider Farr when the new 53-47 Republican majority -- sans Flake -- is seated in January.

“The American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary -- a body that's frequently been held up by my Democratic colleagues as the ‘gold standard’ -- has awarded Mr. Farr its highest possible rating: unanimously well qualified,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Nathan Lewis thinks pretty highly of Judy Shelton's book on the gold standard

Here:

Today, the Federal Reserve, with the blessing of Congress, large banks, and many others, has embarked on an open-ended policy of printing money on a daily basis, basically to fund the Federal government's budget deficit although no one may speak such things in name. These situations tend to end badly, and are soon followed -- as was the case with the United States in 1789, immediately after the Continental Dollar hyperinflation of the 1780s -- by a rigorous gold standard system, more along the lines of the other four proposals that Shelton identifies.

The biggest gold standard advocates are those who lived through a hyperinflation. It is easy to forget that the hard money advocates of 1789 -- Hamilton, Jefferson, et. al -- were actually the same people that were printing money to finance Federal budget deficits in the 1780s, in the guise of the Continental Congress. Oops. More recently, people like Ludwig von Mises, who lived through the Austrian hyperinflation of the 1920s, became the biggest gold standard advocates of the 20th century.

Larry Kudlow likes her a lot, too, and had her on his show yesterday. You can listen to the podcast about an hour and twenty in at wabcradio.com: Go to the Saturday schedule and scroll down for the podcast.

Commerce Secretary in April 2016 can't understand Hillary's flip-flop on TPP

Here:

PENNY PRITZKER: I don't understand that conclusion. Because frankly, having looked at this agreement, studied this agreement, it is the Gold Standard. It is the toughest trade agreement out there in the world.

Hillary's lyin' again: "This TPP sets the gold standard in free trade agreements"

In 2012, here.

9/26/16:

DONALD TRUMP

You called it the gold standard. You call it the gold standard of trade deals.

HILLARY CLINTON

You know what --

DONALD TRUMP

You said it’s the finest deal you’ve ever seen.

HILLARY CLINTON

No.

Richard Duncan gets creditism wrong three ways

Richard Duncan gets creditism wrong three ways here for The Daily Reckoning last July in "Creditism and the Threat of a New Depression".

The most egregious error occurs right in the opening paragraph:

"Once we broke the link between dollars and gold, all the constraints on how much credit could be created were removed."

This is simply untrue, for two reasons.

One: Total credit market debt outstanding (TCMDO) has been doubling like clockwork in the post-war every six to eleven years, both prior to 1971 and after. The doubling of TCMDO occurred at its fastest pace -- two episodes of six year doubling times -- under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, five years after the close of the gold window in 1971. Otherwise the doubling has never taken as much as twelve years, whether before 1971 or after.

And two: 1971 is irrelevant. It was not the end of the gold standard. The gold standard ended under Roosevelt. In fact, the close of the gold window under Nixon was the first patriotic act with respect to gold by an American president since Roosevelt. With the stroke of a pen, Nixon single-handedly stanched the outflow of America's gold reserves, which had dwindled under Democrat and Republican presidents alike from 20 tonnes to 8,134 tonnes.

Secondly, because Duncan doesn't understand just how often TCMDO has been doubling in the post-war, he completely misses its needed and now missing rate of growth, and the accompanying fact that under normal circumstances of creditism in the United States, TCMDO ought to be at least $81 trillion by now instead of $59 trillion:

'But at this point, the question is will credit ever begin to grow again enough to drive the economy? We now have such a large base, 59 trillion dollars. If we assume that the inflation rate is two percent, then we need total credit to grow by four percent so that total credit, adjusted for inflation, will hit this “two percent recession threshold”.'

The last time TCMDO doubled in the post-war was in 2007, at $50 trillion. At the slowest pace of its actual growth in the post-war, it should hit $100 trillion by 2018. We aren't going to make it. It is shocking that a former head of equity research for Salomon Brothers is so completely unfamiliar with the Rule of 72. When something doubles in six years, the implied annual rate is between 11% and 12%. When something doubles in eleven years, the implied annual rate is 6%. 4% isn't going to cut it, buddy, and the current rate between 1% and 2% is truly catastrophic by all historical norms.

Thirdly, because Duncan hasn't properly imagined our past, the future also eludes him:

"If you look at all the big sectors of the economy, there are just a few of them. You can see that none of them are going to expand their debt enough to make total credit grow by two percent."

That's right in its way. There is no sector currently capable of driving credit expansion as it did in the past. And the reason is because it was mostly housing in the past which drove the borrowing, and housing is effectively dead for such purposes now because of the way greedy Baby Boomers, whether as homeowners or bankers, fiddled with it to plunder the equity stored there or drive securitization. The effect has been to gut the basis of Americans' wealth and poison the balance sheets of the banking system.

The way out of this mess is so filled with trouble that it is little wonder neither John McCain, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama have made fixing it a priority. It is the glaring need of our time, a Goliath with no fear of a David anywhere. It is why the economic meltdown remains the leading story of our time. It is why our other over-commitments will be our undoing. Until we settle it upon a firmer foundation as was done in the 1930s, or find a different, surer basis for economic growth, many decades of economic shrinkage await, not just one or two:

"If this collapses now, we’re going to have an equally protracted crash, and it’s not going to be a matter of taking a pain for a couple of years. The consequences of it would, I think, be a replay of the 1930′s and the 1940′s, but this time with nuclear weapons involved."

Gold bug Ralph Benko thinks Richard Nixon had to resign over the closing of the gold window!

I like Ralph Benko. Ralph Benko often makes important arguments on behalf of the gold standard. But when he tries to force everything in the universe to be interpreted through the lens of it you know you have met an ideologue who has become unhinged from reality. Which is why Forbes is a good place for him.

His latest screed here is a mere flight of fantasy, imagining Richard Nixon was forced to resign over the closing of the gold window in 1971. Had he presented it as such, it would have entertained and illumined, even pleased. Instead, its talk of correlation only annoys, the way a chart reader plots two things on a graph and yells 'See! See! They both go up together!' Against Benko, Pat Buchanan may be forgiven for ignoring what didn't exist, just as Nixon's enemies ignored it, except in the fever camps of utopianism.

Benko makes Thomas Paine's opinions about gold a prophecy reaching 200 years into the future where gold becomes Nemesis and the end of Bretton Woods Hubris. Covering up Watergate? Well, simply an instrumental little detail:

"The House Judiciary Committee’s charges and the Connally indictment uncannily fulfill a prophecy by Tom Paine. ... Connally was acquitted on the charges of graft and perjury.  Later he underwent bankruptcy before dying in semi-disgrace.  Nixon resigned rather than undergoing impeachment, also living out his life in disgraced political exile.   The spirit of Paine’s declaration was fulfilled in both cases. Connally and Nixon engineered this violation, abandoning the good, precious-metal, money contemplated by the Constitution. Nemesis followed hubris. The closing of the 'gold window' was based, by Connolly, on deeply wrong premises.  It was sold to the public, by Nixon, on deeply false promises."

Methinks Tom Paine himself would be a little embarrassed at the almost religious regard with which some of his present day followers come to what he has left behind for us on paper.

He'd probably call them Burkeans.

Since 1967 The US Dollar Currency Index Average Is 97.76, But 120 Remains The Gold Standard Benchmark

The US Dollar Currency Index benchmark is really 120 since that is the level which prevailed before the closing of the gold window in 1971, after which the index declined to average 97.76 to date.

How A Good Central Banker Is Supposed To Behave

not like this under Greenspan and Bernanke

David Merkel, here:

A good central bank fights the politics of the nation of which it is a part and tries to preserve purchasing power, ignoring labor unemployment. It tries to be a paper "gold standard." That has not been the Fed for 25+ years.

Inflation Year Over Year April Is 1.06%: Bob Brinker Thinks That's Great!

Here's a news flash for you: At 1% inflation it will take about 69 years to halve the value of your money. I said halve it. To many people like Bob Brinker on his radio program "Money Talk" today it is more than acceptable that after 69 years go by your dollar will be then worth 50 cents. That's what the rule of 72 teaches, but our contemporaries couldn't care less about rules, especially involving MATH!

Back in the good old days of the gold standard when you couldn't pull a fast one on the average Joe without getting a bullet in your chest, a dollar from 1774 lost nearly NOTHING of its value by 1899, when you needed an extra 3 cents to buy what $1 bought 125 years prior.

But things have completely collapsed in this country in the 113 years since 1899. Compared to then, in 2012 you needed $28.60 to buy what your $1.03 could buy two years before the close of the 19th century. What would you choose? A loss of 3 cents over 125 years, or a loss of $27.57 over 113 years, for every dollar you own?

The founders of our country would find today's relatively very low rate of inflation an outrage and a cause for taking up arms against the government because the government of the United States is robbing its own people blind as a matter of policy.

None dare call it tyranny.

Louis Woodhill: Gold As Money Is Inevitably Deflationary In Terms Of Its Supply

So says Louis Woodhill for Forbes, here:

"The most fundamental issue that determines the workability of a gold standard is whether it attempts to use gold as money.  Any gold standard system where the size of the monetary base is determined by the physical supply of gold will eventually suffer a deflationary collapse.  The economic catastrophe that occurred in 1930 was inevitable, given the design of the gold standard system in use at the time. ...

"The use of gold as base money would quickly become the biggest single source of demand for gold, just as was the case during the years prior to the Great Depression.  Sooner or later, this new demand for gold would cause the real price of gold to start rising.  This would automatically cause the real value of the dollar to rise, precipitating a financial and economic crisis.

"Our highly leveraged financial system simply cannot tolerate monetary deflation.  During a financial crisis, everyone tries to become more liquid at the same time.  That is, everyone tries to increase their holdings of money, because the possession of money itself is the only thing that can guarantee that you will be able to pay your debts.

"If gold is money, and money is gold, this means that, once a liquidity crisis started, the demand for gold would increase.  This would drive up gold’s real value even farther, intensifying the crisis.  A destructive feedback loop would develop, leading to a complete meltdown of the financial system and the real economy.  This is exactly what happened in 1930."

It should be added that a monetarist system, by way of contrast, cannot tolerate credit deflation, but that is exactly what the United States is now facing with total credit market debt outstanding slowing to a crawl of $1.17 trillion added per year between 2007 and 2012. At the very slowest it should be growing at a rate of $4.33 trillion per year by historical measures, and at its fastest by $8.31 trillion per year.

The United States at present is in the throes of a deflationary collapse of monetarist making, not of dollar currency but of credit money, and it is the principal reason for the collapse of GDP. One of the largest sources of the "currency" of credit money in recent years has been mortgages, which are now effectively unacceptable as collateral because of the rot permeating the system in the form of defaults and underwaters.

Federal Reserve policy has actually been removing such collateral from circulation, along with US Treasuries, by placing it on its balance sheet. But since there is nothing "real" behind the dollars the Fed replaces this collateral with, there is no corresponding expansion of credit in size to match the former vigor of the process.

So perhaps the Fed should QE gold instead of MBS and Treasuries to provide something real behind the money created which would give that money a surer basis in collateral.

Central banks around the world have been buying gold in quantities not seen in 30 years in order to fill the collateral gap. The Fed should join them.

Barry Ritholtz Is Against The World Religion Of Gold

Barry Ritholtz here recently had some fun with the goldbugs, whom he ridicules as devotees of a "religious cult".

The piece is regrettably inflammatory. Doesn't he know he's writing off the whole world as a bunch of religious kooks in this temper tantrum? That's pretty much what ideologues do when reality won't cooperate with their theories, but surely he must know that sovereigns and central banks the world over continue to build their hoardes of gold year upon year, now approaching 32,000 tonnes and 20% of all the stuff ever pulled out of the ground. That's quite the foundation for the edifice of the worldwide church of gold.

In fact, many of the central banks in particular have been on a tear recently, acquiring the stuff in quantities not seen in 30 years. Evidently they are to a man possessed by the Oracle of Au (pronounced "Ow"). But try as they may to acquire new gold reserves, no one of them yet even comes close to the chief priest bowing and scraping before the barbarous relic, namely the USA, the number one holder of gold in reserve to the tune of 8,134 tonnes (not to be confused with tons). 

That even the USA with all its fiat money still considers this gold to be the most sublime of all currencies can be seen in its own gold issues. Gold Eagles, in one ounce sizes down to tenth ounce, are denominated from $50 down to $5. It says so right on the coins. (I understand if you don't believe me because you haven't seen one. They are expensive these days.) I myself haven't seen one of these things in my change at Walmart recently, or anywhere else, but theoretically you could. In various places around the country they are in fact found in Salvation Army kettles from time to time, usually around the time of a holiday formerly known as "Christmas".

There is a reason for what appears on a Gold Eagle: The US government has decreed that gold is money, and that the price of gold cannot fall. It has fixed the price at $42.22 per troy ounce since 1973, and it hasn't fallen since. The one ounce $50 Gold Eagle thus closely approximates this valuation, as it should if America wants to maintain its credibility as the leader of the free world and the spokesman for truth, justice and the, well, American way. The excess, in case you were wondering, is simply a small bonus in exchange for providing the world with both its security and its reserve currency, both of which are quite costly to the inhabitants of the land of the free.

Over our long history, the price of gold has indeed risen despite the best efforts of "manipulators" to stop it from doing so. For a long time the price of gold had been ruthlessly kept down at $20.67, from the War Between the States to FDR, but suddenly became $35 when the greatest Democrat ever saved us from the bad old ways. Not to be outdone, however, the great Republican Richard Nixon managed to make gold higher still, at $42.22, where it has stood ever since.

See, the price of gold hasn't ever fallen in America, it's only risen, just like Jesus. It's God's will. It is our manifest destiny.

That said, more people these days do need to come to accept the reality of this defacto gold standard to which our benevolent government all too secretly adheres. Younger generations of mockers actually have arisen among us who need to repent of their intemperate outbursts against gold and believe in the Gold Gospel once again. Instead of denying the reality of this kingdom of gold, which is really present here and now in the sacramental dollar, they need to wake up and consider the future possibilities of our great civilization and its gold religion.

Perhaps then there would be more public support for all these central bankers who print funny money to drive gold prices higher, especially for our own Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve who far excells all others at this. What he really needs most right now is more public encouragement to use that funny money like our competitors do in the world. Like them, we need to start augmenting our gold reserves once again using funny dollars to buy gold just as they are doing using, say, funny yuans. After all, this is actually a divinely sanctioned practice, what the Bible calls making use of "unrighteous mammon". You can look it up, it's right in there. Ben really needs to get on this right away. It should be a matter of his monetary policy to drive up the price of gold by hoarding it. Who knows, maybe we can even get our tonnage back up where it used to be after WWII, around 20,000 tonnes, and just think, all it will cost us is some paper and ink.

Meanwhile gold continues to work for us in season and out of season, in good times and in bad. Our reserves have seen us through thick and thin, whether it's been the boom times under Reagan/Bush/Clinton or the misery index years of Jimmy Carter or the new depression years of Barack Obama. Our gold is still there, just like the flag. It hasn't rusted, shrunk in the rain, or even tarnished. Good as gold as they say. Things might be even better if we had more of it, but you've got to be thankful for your blessings, thankful for what you do have.

The truth is, even in the very worst of circumstances imaginable gold has performed miracles for people. A few well-placed gold coins not that long ago meant the difference between some of our fellow countrymen coming here or going to the gas chambers. Ask them and their progeny if escaping an apocalypse wasn't "just fine", even if they were penniless afterward.

No, the only suckers when it comes to gold have been those who let theirs go when misguided government came looking for it. Some of those babies confiscated in 1933 now fetch $300,000. The rest appreciated in value in their melted down form in the government's vault, but only 6600%. You could go to Harvard today with just 120 of those ounces. In the present banks and governments across the globe are finding the collateral gold provides rather more reliable than US Treasuries in a pinch, which is why they keep acquiring it. Evidently we haven't yet understood the message that this sends. 

It's true in a sense that gold is a rejection of government control, but only in the sense of its opposite, self-control, which is what in America is the unique basis of our form of government. It was an idea bequeathed to us by Protestantism, and also by Plato, both of which are unhappily out of favor. But seeking to control your own destiny, which is what many foreigners are doing by acquiring gold, is actually the sincerest form of flattery of what the United States used to stand for. Free from the control of a reserve currency, there's no telling what others in the world may accomplish without us. But under a universal currency, there's no telling what we could still accomplish together. 

Forbes: The Fed Is The Most Hypocritical, Thieving, Incompetent Bank In The Country

Richard Salsman for Forbes here savages the thieving, incompetent US Federal Reserve for its utter hypocrisy in keeping comparatively well-capitalized big banks from paying out dividends when its own balance sheet is the most under-capitalized of all and pays out 100% of what it makes.

Not news, but it bears repeating as often as possible, especially when it's stated so well:

'[I]n the century prior to the Fed’s founding in 1913, U.S. commercial banks were far more liquid and far better capitalized; in the century since 1913, however, and especially since the FDIC was established in 1934, the banks’ liquidity and capital adequacy measures have steadily deteriorated. This artificial, policy-induced financial precariousness has been used routinely as a pretext to justify onerous regulations – which, it’s easy to notice, have never quite adequately curbed all the excessive risk-taking and hence periodic banking crises. Bank executives often oppose the onerous regulations, but not the government subsidies which invite them. ...

'What about the Fed? It’s now got the biggest balance sheet of all the major banks in the U.S. – $3.1 trillion in total assets (versus $2.2 trillion at Bank of America, the largest private-sector bank in the U.S.) – and yet the Fed also has only $55.1 billion in capital (versus $160.3 billion at Bank of America). That means the Fed’s capital/assets ratio is a mere 1.8%, less than a quarter of the average capital ratio for the top eighteen banks subject to CCAR (8.0%) and of the three banks recently deemed inadequate (8.2%). The Fed’s capital ratio is only 15% of the ratio of BB&T (11.5%), the most-capitalized of the top private banks. Moreover, the Fed’s dividend payout ratio is hardly conservative or capital-preserving (like 10-33%); it is a 100% payout, since the Fed pays all its income (mainly from Treasury bonds, notes and bills), none of which is taxed, straight to the Treasury. Whereas the Fed is leveraged 56:1 (liabilities/capital), the top eighteen banks are leveraged by just 12:1 (average), while the three censured banks are leveraged by only 10:1 (average). ...

'This is the same Fed which, over the past century, has debased the dollar to such a degree that it’s now worth only 5% of its initial real purchasing power in 1913 (whereas the dollar in 1913 was approximately as valuable as it was in 1813, because it was anchored by the gold standard, not by a flimsy Fed standard). This is the same Fed that Alan Greenspan touted in a 1996 speech as “the ultimate guardian of the purchasing power of our money.” Is it truly a “guardian” – or instead an incompetent, or perhaps a thief – who presides over a loss of 95%? This is the same Fed which now censures private banks for having capital levels many times greater than the Fed’s own capital level. Isn’t it high time we ended the hypocrisy whereby the politically-financially reckless among us rule the day?'

The big banks' off-balance-sheet assets make their capital ratios much worse than stated above, but that just makes them more like the Fed in that respect. Salsman points out that before 1913 when we still had true, private banking, capital ratios averaged 20%+, whereas today 8% is about as good as it gets. 

Consumer Prices Up 8.4% Under Four Years Of Obama

The Consumer Price Index is up 8.4% under four years of Obama (November 2008 to November 2012).

Similarly measured, the CPI rose 10.05% in the first term of George W. Bush, 11.15% in the second term.

The worst record in the post-war period was Carter's four years when CPI rose over 47%. In Eisenhower's first term CPI rose just 3.07%.

Measured from April 1973 (after the world went to a floating exchange rate system of currencies in the wake of the end of the gold standard in August 1971) to April 1999, 26 years, CPI raged 280% (a factor of 10.8 per year).

From April 1947 to April 1973 (CPI data not available before 1947), CPI rose a comparatively more modest 99% over 26 years (a factor of 3.8 per year).

For the 13 years since 1999, April to April, CPI has risen just 38% (a factor of 2.9 per year).

A composite of measures for the consumer bundle going back to the year 1900 at measuringworth.com here provides an interesting tool for comparison purposes.

While the dollar suffered a 446% decline for the 73 years between 1900 and 1973, a factor of 6.1 per year, in the 38 years between 1973 and 2011 the 406% decline is a factor of 10.7 per year, 75% worse per year since moving to a floating exchange rate currency system.

Viewed more broadly from the point of view of gold, from 1932 (the year of FDR's election and before his massive 69% devaluation of the gold-linked dollar in the spring of 1933) to the present day, the devaluation of the dollar has been in excess of 1500%.

From 1790 to 1932 the dollar declined just 54%.

At this hour, gold is $1,656.80 the ounce, $1,636.13 the ounce higher than it was in 1932, the last year of its fixed price at $20.67 the ounce, just another way of expressing the devaluation of the dollar.

Returning To The Gold Standard, But At What Price?

John Tamny argues here for the ten year average price of about $800 the ounce, against Nathan Lewis who would prefer something closer to the current market price, $1,500 the ounce.

The 1933 US ten dollar gold coin pictured is worth about $300,000.00 in a recent valuation.

Gold's Gift: Stable, Long-Term, Low Interest Rates

In Great Britain thanks to John Locke and William of Orange, as discussed here by Nathan Lewis.

The gold standard: The sine qua non for prosperity, greatness, and liberty.

NY Times Paints Loughner and Hard Money Libertarianism as Right Wing Extreme

The leftist ridicule offensive continues, designed to preoccupy the opposition and get the right fighting amongst themselves over who belongs and who doesn't, while the left presses on for new gun control measures and suppression of free speech.

Notice the elision going on in the first passage here:

He became an echo chamber for stray ideas, amplifying, for example, certain grandiose tenets of a number of extremist right-wing groups — including the need for a new money system and the government’s mind-manipulation of the masses through language.

Libertarians generally hold to hard money ideas, but that hardly makes them right wing, witness the long war of traditionalists like Russell Kirk against what he called "the chirping sectaries." The hard money idea is subtly paired with mind-manipulation conspiracy theory by the Times, whatever that means, without support and simply by assertion. Having been a fairly well-informed conservative since the late 70s, one is hard-pressed to know what the Times is even talking about. There you go again, one of our own might say now. We've had our Truthers and our Birthers. Now we've got our Minders, I guess.

One suspects the Times knows full well its only plausible case is in the Libertarian hard money ideology, as here:

A few days later, during a meeting with a school administrator, Mr. Loughner said that he had paid for his courses illegally because, “I did not pay with gold and silver” — a standard position among right-wing extremist groups. With Mr. Loughner’s consent, that same administrator then arranged to meet with the student and his mother to discuss the creation of a “behavioral contract” for him, after which the official noted: “Throughout the meeting, Jared held himself very rigidly and smiled overtly at inappropriate times.”

Notice the effort to paint gold and silver backed money as "a standard position" on the right. It isn't, and it hasn't been as long as conservatism has been resurgent since the 60s and Milton Friedman style monetarism and devotion to a strong dollar captured people's imaginations.

Clear-headed thinkers on the right, like George Will, have well noted the Federal Reserve's failure to maintain a sound currency partly because its mandate was divided in 1978 to include maintaining full employment. Instead, hard money ideology has been an enthusiasm prevalent on the fringe, among Libertarians, in the post-war era in view of the fact that the monetarist consensus has been breaking down due to its failures, and because the gold standard used to be, well, the law of the land, all the way up until . . . FDR.

The dishonesty of the presentation coheres with the view of the Times that, for most of its history, America has been a veritable right-wing nuthouse. They ought to know.