iTulip endorses the Fair Treatment for Precious Metals Investors Act

[DSpencer]

Re: iTulip endorses the Fair Treatment for Precious Metals Investors Act

What I am proposing is simply an exercise to remove a large quantity of almost worthless paper assets from the existing FIRE economy, (they will evaporate anyway due to their poor quality), and place them, as equity capital and working capital, back into productive use to create new jobs. Yes, under a system you find very difficult to understand - Free Enterprise

Chris,

While the first part of this paragraph is vague, it strongly implies some kind of statist, centrally-planned, anti-free enterprise government action that takes someone's assets and gives them to somebody else. If I'm wrong, please clarify. If not, how can you possibly follow that sentence with one about how others don't understand free enterprise?

This sounds like a George "abandon free market principles to save the free market" Bush plan: centrally plan the economy to make free enterprise work.

You're arguing with rogermexico as if he made any kind of anti-free enterprise comment. I don't want to speak for others, but I believe he's laying out a plan that would accomplish the same goals that you desire. Here's my version that's probably very close to his:

1. For a variety of reasons the government has structured the laws so that investment capital flows into the FIRE economy and away from the productive economy and in particular away from small businesses.
2. The government has also structured the laws so that large, politically connected corporations have a competitive advantage over small, honest businesses. This further enhances the effect of #1.
3. The result is that, compared to a more free economy, more capital is invested in the FIRE economy compared to the rest of the economy.

The problem is NOT:

1. Lack of investment capital
2. Lack of proper investment funds, trusts etc.
3. Fundamental lack of investor desire to invest in small productive businesses

The solution therefore is not to forcefully direct funds into one area or another of the economy.

The solution is to actually have a free market/free enterprise by removing the government interventions that led to the FIRE bubble. To truly understand free enterprise means that you understand that it will automatically develop a near optimal solution to the allocation of capital.

As someone with even a modest amount of capital to invest, it's absolutely infuriating to live through this time period. The government tries like hell to force you into investing in it's partner, big business. If you manage to get lucky with their investments, they tax your money again. If you stomp your feet and insist on trying to just sit this time out with gold/silver then they tax you even higher.

Trust me - people have money and desperately want to invest it in real productive businesses. It's just extremely challenging in a world where government decides who wins and who loses. Who's going to invest in a U.S. small business knowing that all it takes is for one stroke of a government pen to close it down? Interstate commerce clause modern interpretation = government controls all commerce.

[Chris Coles]

Re: iTulip endorses the Fair Treatment for Precious Metals Investors Act

That is the part that makes no sense to me. How can a voluntary private sector program possible compete with armed to the teeth money printing, favor granting government-sponsored FIRE ? Compete in any legal and truly effective fashion, I mean. Not some quixotic demonstration project. For real.

You forget your own history. What I am proposing was implemented by the United States at the end of WW2, it was called the Marshall Plan.

Belgian economic historian Herman Van der Wee concludes the Marshall Plan was a "great success":

"It gave a new impetus to reconstruction in Western Europe and made a decisive contribution to the renewal of the transport system, the modernization of industrial and agricultural equipment, the resumption of normal production, the raising of productivity, and the facilitating of intra-European trade."^[8]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan

What all of you forget is the FIRE economy is driven by trading in companies. Those of us determined not to be traded as though slaves to be bought and sold at the local market cannot get access to capital. The very thing you all claim to rail against, the FIRE economy, is exactly what you are all carried away in doing every day; trading stock.

You gave Germany the economy it enjoys where everyone that could create a business was given the capital to create one.

Since the 1970's there are millions of us that have consistently refused to be treated as slaves. PERIOD. Millions of us. But you have closed your eyes to the reality and constantly invoked the claim that there is plenty of capital available while millions of your citizens live desperate lives below the waterline. The reason being they do not have access to capital. They refused to accept the poor product on offer; slavery!

Buying and selling companies is the root cause of ALL the FIRE economy problems.

What I am proposing is simply an exercise to remove a large quantity of almost worthless paper assets from the existing FIRE economy, (they will evaporate anyway due to their poor quality), and place them, as equity capital and working capital, back into productive use to create new jobs. Yes, under a system you find very difficult to understand - Free Enterprise, where the manager of the business owns the business. Where their company cannot be sold out from under them as soon as it becomes profitable, where multi-national companies cannot buy them to cover up their own mistakes; where the owner takes full responsibility for their local community to employ their people, not some cheap labour in another nation.

So what is YOUR difficulty with that idea?

You claim to live in a free nation yet remain wedded to the idea that no one may own their own destiny.

The utter stupidity that we cannot be both free and successful.

You need to take a walk through some of the most disadvantaged cities in your nation and look at what your FIRE economic model has brought your fellow citizens.

Wake up and smell the coffee; your product stinks and is almost unsellable. Your economic model has collapsed and it is someone else's problem, - nothing to do with me Gov, it fell of the back of someone else's lorry.

Bah! Humbug!

[rogermexico]

Re: iTulip endorses the Fair Treatment for Precious Metals Investors Act

"Reigning in the ability to create unlimited credit..."

It seems even Mervyn King, head of the BOE, thinks this might be at the root of the problem as well.

From this link at zero hedge:

As the BBC noted last week:

Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, has tonight made a big intervention into the debate on banking reform. In a speech at Buttonwood, New York, he[listed] much more radical proposals.

1. Forcing the riskiest banks to hold capital "several times the magnitude" of requirements at present.
2. The Volcker rule-style enforced breakup of banks into speculative and non-speculative arms.
3. The "Kotlikoff proposal", which forces banks to match each pool of risks with a requisite amount of capital, preventing losses in one spilling over into another.
4. Stunningly, Mervyn King imagines the "abolition of fractional reserve banking":

"Eliminating fractional reserve banking explicitly recognises that the pretence that risk-free deposits can be supported by risky assets is alchemy. If there is a need for genuinely safe deposits the only way they can be provided, while ensuring costs and benefits are fully aligned, is to insist such deposits do not co-exist with risky assets."

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/ban...eserve-banking

Bernanke's UK counterpart entertains the ideas of Von Mises and Rothbard?

There may be a shred of hope after all.

[flintlock]

Re: iTulip endorses the Fair Treatment for Precious Metals Investors Act

To make job creation attractive requires sound money (implies sound fiscal policy), a rock solid stable and extremely minimal regulatory environment, and at least predictable if not de minimus, tax rates. We have none of these now. That is all we need. No government "help" other than getting the hell out of the way and enforcing laws prohibiting fraud and theft is required.

Exactly. And why so many don't get this is a mystery to me. You don't need a thousand bureaucracies in order to enforce the law. Just the will to do so.

[rogermexico]

Re: iTulip endorses the Fair Treatment for Precious Metals Investors Act

And I must add, my proposals for The Capital Spillway Trust do not in any way involve the use of government, funding or input. The entire exercise must be driven from the private sector.

That is the part that makes no sense to me. How can a voluntary private sector program possible compete with armed to the teeth money printing, favor granting government-sponsored FIRE ? Compete in any legal and truly effective fashion, I mean. Not some quixotic demonstration project. For real.

[rogermexico]

Re: iTulip endorses the Fair Treatment for Precious Metals Investors Act

You need to return to your initial paragraph. You used the words "reign in".

Yes, I said reign in. Reigning in to be accomplished by stopping subsidizing, but also a definitely reigning in the ability to create unlimited credit, and the securitization that comes from that that we both decry.

The true function of a marketplace is not constraint upon the existing function, but instead to unconstrain the function. You have listed a whole set of things to be done to the existing FIRE economy. What I am saying is we need to entirely concentrate upon what will improve the under performing private sector.

The marketplace cannot function with constant credit inflation due to the privileging of banking over the real economy. The constraint on proper capital allocation is distortion of the markets by governments and those privileged by government. What you propose is useless with the siren call of fiat money and unconstrained credit unsilenced.

If we turn to the best performing national economy in Europe, Germany, we see a massive difference in that most of the SME's are family owned businesses. The family owns them, not the financial institutions. In which case, they cannot be bought and sold by the institutions. Again, their drive is towards internal investment back into their own local communities.

germany is paradigmatic for you ? are you serious? have you noticed the structural unemployment there?

The German economy is characterized first and foremost by around 3.6 million small and medium-sized enterprises as well as the self-employed and the independent professions. Some 99.7 percent of all companies are small and medium-sized enterprises. These are firms with annual sales of below EUR 50 million and a payroll of less than 500. Around 70 percent of all those in employment work in this type of company. 48.9 percent of all SMEs operate as service providers, 31.4 percent in manufacturing, and around 19.7 percent in commerce. Most SMEs are managed by the owners themselves, meaning that the majority shareholder and management of the company are frequently one and the same. Companies are often handed down from one generation to the next. Around 95 percent of German companies are family-owned and almost every third company now has a woman at its head. http://www.tatsachen-ueber-deutschla...my.html?type=1

Yes, it is true to say I do keep on about the matter of ownership. My reasoning is simple; it is the ownership of the business that controls the long term development of the entire sector. If you leave things as they are today, with the ownership not in the hands of the founders, you have the entire sector driven by the outside influences of the institutions that own the companies. That the ONLY way to suppress M&A is to place the ownership of the business into the hands of the founders.

Now turn to the creation of all those new businesses we need to create all those new jobs. Where is the money to found them going to come from? It is simply not there at the grass roots of society anywhere in the Western FIRE economy. PERIOD.

Wrong - there is plenty of money to start businesses. I have some of it myself. I'll bet "Jeff likes to rant" and EJ and many others have plenty more of it. The problems are those I have already described. The idea that there is not enough money is a ridiculous myth. There is in fact too much money.

You might not have noticed that in Spain there is 25% unemployment among the under 25's. We simply cannot continue along the road you see ahead. Your own business has closed. So what I am saying is that the only road that works is to place the new jobs under the complete control of the founders and then we need to devise a method that will drive the funding for the creation of millions of new jobs.

The road I see ahead? Huh? The unemployment rate is caused by misallocation of capital into real estate and other unproductive uses due to the factors I have described. When the bubble bursts, those workers trained for what we never needed in the first place are now unemployed. It takes time to find them new jobs in the ossified euro economy with its rules and regulatory burdens. What is the unemployment rate in singapore and hong kong - those jusrisdictions having the least interference with markets?

I don't understand. You claim I am constraining capitalism and job creation by constraining FIRE, yet you are proposing what? That we "place the new jobs under the complete control of the founders and then we need to devise a method that will drive the funding for the creation of millions of new jobs" that is done how? By force? How do you force founders to not partner or sell shares in their businesses? Why on earth will that create jobs, unless you force them to hire people they don't need? What makes you think there are not adequate methods of funding? If the jobs and enterprises are legitimate and likely to be productive, entrepreneurs IN A PREDICTABLE ENVIRONMENT ADEQUATELY FREE OF REGULATORY AND FINANCIAL UNCERTAINTY will fund them. I will fund them. The money is there. It is not a question of enough money. In fact, a surfeit of money in the form of credit money is what has distorted the markets and led to the unemployment that you decry.

What gives you the right to tell me or any entrepreneur whether I sell or close or open a business who I sell it to or how I capitalize it? Are you a central planner?

[SIZE=2]If we make those jobs more prosperous than any within the tax eating FIRE economy, then they will drive the new economy forward without any changes to the existing economy. Forget the past and look to the future. A bit like during a war you forget about the failed and broken equipment, bulldoze it off the road and get on with the job of succeeding. Later you go back to clear up the mess. But if all you do is concentrate upon the existing problems, you divert your attention away from the most important aspect, new business and new job creation. THAT is the primary target.

Excuse me, but I think this is delusion. You are arguing for a subsidy on the productive economy, designed by you, to counter the effect of the ongoing subsidy to FIRE. That is not going to work for two reasons: 1) It is just more central planning and will have unintended consequnces and 2) FIRE is subsidized by the PC economy. Who will we tax to subsidize the PC economy? Who is adding more constraints, me or you?

Ending the subsidy and free reign given to FIRE and not incidentally, to governments that support FIRE, is the only thing I need and the only thing the productive economy needs if it is to be genuinely competitive an productive.

Rather than some unworkable naloxone to counter the opiates of FIRE subsidies, why not stop all pharmacotherapy?

You can't "make" jobs prosperous just by deciding they should be so, any more than you can print your way to wealth for everyone.

[Chris Coles]

Re: iTulip endorses the Fair Treatment for Precious Metals Investors Act

And I must add, my proposals for The Capital Spillway Trust do not in any way involve the use of government, funding or input. The entire exercise must be driven from the private sector.

[Chris Coles]

Re: iTulip endorses the Fair Treatment for Precious Metals Investors Act

You need to return to your initial paragraph. You used the words "reign in".

The true function of a marketplace is not constraint upon the existing function, but instead to unconstrain the function. You have listed a whole set of things to be done to the existing FIRE economy. What I am saying is we need to entirely concentrate upon what will improve the under performing private sector.

If we turn to the best performing national economy in Europe, Germany, we see a massive difference in that most of the SME's are family owned businesses. The family owns them, not the financial institutions. In which case, they cannot be bought and sold by the institutions. Again, their drive is towards internal investment back into their own local communities.

The German economy is characterized first and foremost by around 3.6 million small and medium-sized enterprises as well as the self-employed and the independent professions. Some 99.7 percent of all companies are small and medium-sized enterprises. These are firms with annual sales of below EUR 50 million and a payroll of less than 500. Around 70 percent of all those in employment work in this type of company. 48.9 percent of all SMEs operate as service providers, 31.4 percent in manufacturing, and around 19.7 percent in commerce. Most SMEs are managed by the owners themselves, meaning that the majority shareholder and management of the company are frequently one and the same. Companies are often handed down from one generation to the next. Around 95 percent of German companies are family-owned and almost every third company now has a woman at its head. http://www.tatsachen-ueber-deutschla...my.html?type=1

Yes, it is true to say I do keep on about the matter of ownership. My reasoning is simple; it is the ownership of the business that controls the long term development of the entire sector. If you leave things as they are today, with the ownership not in the hands of the founders, you have the entire sector driven by the outside influences of the institutions that own the companies. That the ONLY way to suppress M&A is to place the ownership of the business into the hands of the founders.

Now turn to the creation of all those new businesses we need to create all those new jobs. Where is the money to found them going to come from? It is simply not there at the grass roots of society anywhere in the Western FIRE economy. PERIOD.

You might not have noticed that in Spain there is 25% unemployment among the under 25's. We simply cannot continue along the road you see ahead. Your own business has closed. So what I am saying is that the only road that works is to place the new jobs under the complete control of the founders and then we need to devise a method that will drive the funding for the creation of millions of new jobs.

If we make those jobs more prosperous than any within the tax eating FIRE economy, then they will drive the new economy forward without any changes to the existing economy. Forget the past and look to the future. A bit like during a war you forget about the failed and broken equipment, bulldoze it off the road and get on with the job of succeeding. Later you go back to clear up the mess. But if all you do is concentrate upon the existing problems, you divert your attention away from the most important aspect, new business and new job creation. THAT is the primary target.

[rogermexico]

Re: iTulip endorses the Fair Treatment for Precious Metals Investors Act

I am in general agreement with everything you say except this single sentence.

The overall problem IMHO is caused by the FIRE economic model creating conditions whereby it is a better career choice to join the tax-eaters, rather than try and become a part of what one might describe as the free enterprise, private, industrial economy.

What you have said just here is in no disagreement at all with what I said - the welfare state (for both rich and poor) and the centrally planned economy with essentially unlimited reserve banking (fraud) and unrestrained credit based money creation must be changed.

I favor minarchist government that serves to secure the borders and protect the commons (limited pollution control - co2 is not a pollutant) and has no imperial mandate, a welfare state severely stripped down - to the prevention of starvation and disaster relief - and complete removal of the government from all markets - including the market for money. The incentives and ability for the "barbell" of tax eaters to vote for those who will steal from others to subsidize them - whether rich or poor - must somehow be removed. Fundamental reform - probably elimination of the fed with RADICAL tax reform and balanced budget requirements on a paygo basis -are required

The choice of money supply should be set the by the market with no government regulation except prohibtion of fraud - NO fractional reserve lending with mismatched duration would be allowed - no setting of interest rates by the government - no backstopping or bailouts. Over time, gold backed digital money ( or some other stable source of exchange) would become preferred. There would be no capital gains taxes on anything, ever. Without government money pumping and backstopped credit creation, capital gains would be either a speculative accident or the result of your hard work to leverage your investment - why should the government get either?

Those of us with direct experience will attest that the variables involved with creating a new job creating business, outside of a tax-eating economic model are far and away more daunting than modern government realise. They live in a cushioned world where any problem can be instantly overcome by passing a law against it. Whereas, in the alternative world of free enterprise job creation; no one has all the answers and everyone has to work within a framework that has to involve a little give and take and a lot of risk. They make a mistake and they get promotion; we make a mistake and we are bankrupt.

I have direct experience as a self -employed capitalist since the age of 13 - in a variety of businesses. I just recently closed a $2M plus (annual revenues) business that was put to death by the depression created by our government and the governments response to same.

The answer lies in making the rewards fit the risk. But that is exactly where the FIRE economic model has failed. Over a long period, many decades, the FIRE economy has been instrumental in making the tax-eating economy much more attractive to the average Joe. In which case, the answer is to make the rewards for success in setting out to create new employment; much greater than at present. And that leads me to my favourite soapbox.... free enterprise.

Can't disagree with that as a general statement.

The FIRE economic model is entirely centred upon the idea that you cannot gain access to investment of capital, particularly equity capital; without giving up your ownership of the business, (you wish to found), to the FIRE economy. It is that rule that underpins the FIRE economy and Mergers & Acquisition, M&A. It was the need for more and ever more funding to fuel M&A that drove the leverage of the money supply to provide the funds they needed to both lend more and more to the tax-eating economy and at the same moment to fund the M&A. Huge sums were raised, beyond the limits of the bond markets, if they stayed at the 1970 levels, by leveraging the money created by selling phony mortgages.

I have read this thesis of yours before, and I must respectfully disagree. Yo are proposing that financing be provided wihtou giving up eqiuity? I think they call that the bond market and your neighborhood bank.

I think you have the cart way before the horse here. The federal reserve easing and progressive removal of reserve requirements are the CAUSE not the effect of the mortgage crisis.

If interest rates were market-based with a constrained money supply and reserve requirements - no subprime market would ever have been possible. Can you imaging trying to qualify the poor to borrow money at say, 15% rather than 5% on their houses? That is what subprime rates would have been absent greenspan. Human greed is always waiting in the wings to exploit market inefficiencies - the mortgage fiasco was just a big arb opportunity created by the goverment's policies of low rates and backstopping of banks.

The government should be 100% neutral to whether you finance with debt or equity, and you should be allowed the freedom to mortgage what you own and bear the risk 100% on your own accordingly. If real interest rates are set by the market, and fraud is punishable as theft, there is no need to favor debt over equity by policy - in fact they already do quite heavily via the tax code. In the absence of fiat money creation and artificially low interest rates, there would be no hypertrophied FIRE economy. I agree with EJ that the capital and insurance markets are legitimate, just that they should be about a quarter of their current size, and not sucking the life out of the productive economy.

The answer is very simple indeed and I am convinced that it is in almost everyone's interest to follow this line of thought. And when I say almost everyone, (I particularly include what one might describe as the shadow banking industry now deeply embedded in the international bond markets). We must ASAP, make the creation of new employment via private business creation in the industrial economy.... much more attractive to the founder of those new job creating businesses.

The only way out of this mess is to make any form of tax-eating economy much much less attractive to follow as any form of career choice. We must create a new free enterprise economy based upon risk and reward being properly matched.

To make job creation attractive requires sound money (implies sound fiscal policy), a rock solid stable and extremely minimal regulatory environment, and at least predictable if not de minimus, tax rates. We have none of these now. That is all we need. No government "help" other than getting the hell out of the way and enforcing laws prohibiting fraud and theft is required.

[Chris Coles]

Re: iTulip endorses the Fair Treatment for Precious Metals Investors Act

The solution is to reign in all the tax-eaters -those who get more from the government than they give, whether they are on welfare or whether they work at Goldman Sachs.

I am in general agreement with everything you say except this single sentence.

The overall problem IMHO is caused by the FIRE economic model creating conditions whereby it is a better career choice to join the tax-eaters, rather than try and become a part of what one might describe as the free enterprise, private, industrial economy.

Those of us with direct experience will attest that the variables involved with creating a new job creating business, outside of a tax-eating economic model are far and away more daunting than modern government realise. They live in a cushioned world where any problem can be instantly overcome by passing a law against it. Whereas, in the alternative world of free enterprise job creation; no one has all the answers and everyone has to work within a framework that has to involve a little give and take and a lot of risk. They make a mistake and they get promotion; we make a mistake and we are bankrupt.

The answer lies in making the rewards fit the risk. But that is exactly where the FIRE economic model has failed. Over a long period, many decades, the FIRE economy has been instrumental in making the tax-eating economy much more attractive to the average Joe. In which case, the answer is to make the rewards for success in setting out to create new employment; much greater than at present. And that leads me to my favourite soapbox.... free enterprise.

The FIRE economic model is entirely centred upon the idea that you cannot gain access to investment of capital, particularly equity capital; without giving up your ownership of the business, (you wish to found), to the FIRE economy. It is that rule that underpins the FIRE economy and Mergers & Acquisition, M&A. It was the need for more and ever more funding to fuel M&A that drove the leverage of the money supply to provide the funds they needed to both lend more and more to the tax-eating economy and at the same moment to fund the M&A. Huge sums were raised, beyond the limits of the bond markets, if they stayed at the 1970 levels, by leveraging the money created by selling phony mortgages.

The answer is very simple indeed and I am convinced that it is in almost everyone's interest to follow this line of thought. And when I say almost everyone, (I particularly include what one might describe as the shadow banking industry now deeply embedded in the international bond markets). We must ASAP, make the creation of new employment via private business creation in the industrial economy.... much more attractive to the founder of those new job creating businesses.

The only way out of this mess is to make any form of tax-eating economy much much less attractive to follow as any form of career choice. We must create a new free enterprise economy based upon risk and reward being properly matched.

[rogermexico]

Re: iTulip endorses the Fair Treatment for Precious Metals Investors Act

Hmm. I am not sure whether I support this or not. In principle, I agree with Dr. Hudson, and think that labor taxes should be decreased, and rentier taxes (such as capital gains) increased; this needs to be done to reverse the long running destruction of the middle and lower classes in order to increase the relative wealth of the financial elites.

Capital gains as an IRS tax category is only loosely related to what is actually a gain from capital. In Hudson's scheme, he defines rentier** as a pejorative term that refers to those who earn rents from property that is not per se productive - a particular form of non-labor income. The increase in value of real property (land and buildings) that is due to real estate values going up would be rentier income to Hudson - he considers it a "rent" that accrues only due to excess value not be appropriated by the state in the form of property taxes. (as if the money belonged to the state in the first place - he actually thinks this...)

Now even if you agree with Hudson - and many of us here do not - it in no way follows that all things the IRS calls capital gains are ill-gotten rents.

The lion's share of all capital gains (even, unrecognized by Hudson - real estate gains) is simply the increased value of things like prooerty, shares and precious metals occurring DUE TO RELENTLESS DEBASEMENT OF THE CURRENCY. In other words, the gains are not even real when actual inflation is accounted for - and far from being some kind of ill-gotten gain, if you pay any taxes at all on them, you are actually falling behind. The same with interest bearing investements - you earn 3%, inflation goes up 3% and you pay a third of the 3% as taxes, so you are actually losing money - the same is true for stocks and real estate.

It is well to remember that inflation engineered by the government is really a tax- the nominal growth in GDP, the taxation of phantom capital gains on various assets - the purpose of this is to allow your income and savings to be stolen - it is split between the bankers that have a monopoly on credit creation and the government that they own - they are in it together.

Stealing the wealth of the wealthy*** in general, many of whom, like EJ, or dare I say, me, earned what we have without being part of the FIRE economy (no one can avoid it completely, it is the sea we swim in) is simply more theft and is not the solution to the destruction of the middle class. The solution is to reign in all the tax-eaters -those who get more from the government than they give, whether they are on welfare or whether they work at Goldman Sachs.

I have not seen anyone on itulip disagree with this theory.

Mark me down as "disagreeing with this theory". Hudson's description of FIRE is fairly accurate, however, his general theoretical framework and his statist policy prescriptions are bogus and totalitarian, respectively. Hudson and Hayek cannot both be right. I choose Hayek. At least some itulipians agree. You needn't be a Marxist* to appreciate the concept of FIRE.

So, that said, are we merely trying to convince ourselves that there will be a complete failure of fiat currency, and a return to a PM standard, and this new tax measure is part of the path to that end?

We own gold to practice financial self-defense against the financial elite that are destroying productive economy. This tax measure is the next best thing to zero taxes on capital gains, which is the only fair rate given what I have explained above. In a monetary regime of fixed money supply and limited banke credit creation, capital gains would be on average small and unnecessary -

If dollars held their value over time (actually, if they increased in value due to increasing productivity) then there would be no need to own gold and in fact "investing" would be restored to its proper meaning of assuming risks for the promise of EXCESS returns, instead of financial jiu jistsu to keep the state from robbing you...

It so happens we live in a time when gold is useful to protect our wealth, through absolutely no fault of our own..

Or are we all being greedy, and desperately trying to hold on the remaining wealth we have before it is confiscated by the government through tax?

If you think being entitled to what you have earned and saved and not wanting it to be stolen is greedy, then yes.

I for one am "greedy" by holding gold. My gold is greedy in the same way keeping an HK USP 40 around for folks who might want to cart off my 58" panasonic plasma TV is "greedy". Some people are not greedy in that way either.

*Marx was correct in many ways as well Hudson - mainly in their critiques of financial versus industrial capitalism

** Far from referring just to rich fat-cats - rentier just means you earn income from rent. 10 years ago, an old lady with a few hundred thousand dollars could live on interest from bank CDs. That made her a "rentier".

***
Here defined just as "one who has accumulated some wealth"

[brent217]

Re: iTulip endorses the Fair Treatment for Precious Metals Investors Act

Hmm. I am not sure whether I support this or not. In principle, I agree with Dr. Hudson, and think that labor taxes should be decreased, and rentier taxes (such as capital gains) increased; this needs to be done to reverse the long running destruction of the middle and lower classes in order to increase the relative wealth of the financial elites. I have not seen anyone on itulip disagree with this theory.

So, that said, are we merely trying to convince ourselves that there will be a complete failure of fiat currency, and a return to a PM standard, and this new tax measure is part of the path to that end? Or are we all being greedy, and desperately trying to hold on the remaining wealth we have before it is confiscated by the government through tax?

Disclaimer: I own gold.

[FRED]

Re: iTulip endorses the Fair Treatment for Precious Metals Investors Act

I want to address this. I have been trying to buy a good chunk of gold here in France for a couple of weeks. I am running into lots of trouble with storage companies, gold dealers and banks. I read gold bug web sites in vain for suggestions on exactly how to buy, transport, store and sell gold. There are no in depth discussions of these things extant. My conclusion is that all of these men and women ( are any of them women?) are lying. They don't have any significant amounts of gold. The dirty secret is that all these gun toting, bearded uni-bomber types are telling us to do something that they themselves would not consider doing. It makes me wonder if I am doing the right thing.

Incidentally the tax on gold held for very long term ( greater than 12 years ) is essentially zero in France.

http://www.loretlargent.info/guides/...es-pieces-dor/

http://translate.google.com/translat...n&hl=&ie=UTF-8

We forwarded this appeal to Mish, Jesse, DollarCollapse, and all of the major sites that cover precious metals. Of them only Jesse and DollarCollapse linked to it. The explanation that the proprietors of the the sites that are not supporting the legislation simply don't own enough gold for the law to matter is entirely plausible.

[den111]

Re: iTulip endorses the Fair Treatment for Precious Metals Investors Act

Looked through and Bookmarked the PaNu website. Looks good. Been working towards the Paleo diet since seeing on LewRockwell.com.

[Sharky]

Re: iTulip endorses the Fair Treatment for Precious Metals Investors Act

I have been trying to buy a good chunk of gold here in France for a couple of weeks. I am running into lots of trouble with storage companies, gold dealers and banks. I read gold bug web sites in vain for suggestions on exactly how to buy, transport, store and sell gold. There are no in depth discussions of these things extant.

The banking/purchase side can be a pain; the approach varies considerably from one dealer to another. There is often a level of trust that's required on both sides. As such, if you're anticipating a large transaction, you may find it easier if you first develop that trust over time, through several smaller transactions.

For transport/delivery, the usual approach is to either buy a little at a time, shipped using standard carriers such as FedEx or UPS -- or, for larger purchases, to contract with an armored courier service such as Brinks. The service will pick up the PMs from the source, and bring them to a location that you specify. The larger services can also handle international shipment. Most of those carriers have at least two people who are with the package at all times. Any large dealer should be able to recommend a reliable courier service.

Another approach is to use a vaulted storage service with allocated purchases, such as BullionVault. BV will also let you pick up metal from them (they have a vault in Switzerland), although it's financially usually not a good idea, because once Good Delivery bars leave their control, they stop being Good Delivery bars, and therefore lose some of their value.

Incidentally the tax on gold held for very long term ( greater than 12 years ) is essentially zero in France.

There are no capital gains taxes in New Zealand, including for PMs.