'Money' A Political Construct

I heard a fascinating phrase on a radio program this morning in relation to a quite separate issue - and that was 'political construct.'

The issue being talked about was whether carbon credits were anything other than political constructs at the moment. A fair enough point.

It's snowing in New South Wales right now,
very heavily.

But it drew me to thinking about the present Euro-zone disturbances in the general harmony in terms of the euro currency being a political construct. There is no advantage in arguing about the relative practical usefulness of the euro as money - it is an adequate kind of money for quite a number of purposes, even though it is terribly and possibly terminally flawed.

And then again, yesterday, there was Peter Schiff on an RT panel talking about the gold standard and if it might ever again be adopted somewhere. 

Today, in 2015, what does any Western or developed government really need to buy? Only the support of, and protection from, its own citizens. It doesn't need to go out to some far flung foreign land and buy anything it needs. America owns effective supply of oil and energy via its military hegemony, and China supplies everything else and doesn't need to buy anything for the welfare or wealth and lifestyle of its people. Thus, anything will do as a general government currency because there is no actual trade or mercantile-ism.

We individuals, however, are not governments and we have no means of exerting equivalent power to those bastions of institutional power in the world today - there are no principles by which such bastions are guided which empower the individual. And that is why we, the individuals, need gold. It's for ourselves and our own trading, especially any individualistic, exotic, trading.

What does the messenger carry?

There will never be a day when governments enforce a law against private ownership of gold, and people fail to perceive that when it was attempted in the USA in the past, there was a massive, one again, political construct going on, that the wider population bought into that permitted the restriction, to do with freedom and liberty against European colonial essays or otherwise, various fascist tyrannies and ideologies. 

The world is entirely too wide now, for that kind of thing to be successful anymore.

A lot of the discussion over precious metals is very misleading. It might occasionally be a good investment but that is not the main point of owning them. Buffett tried to compare owership of gold with ownership of some productive financial asset - showing once again, that he is not his mentor Benjamin Graham. The insane risks being invited upon today's investor, to buy into Microsoft or Walmart or Uber-lite or some other fanciful financialised idea presented as a business, are way beyond what is rational. Despite the appearances of high gains, these investments are diabolical. They do not compare in any way with what small individual money can buy or trade on an old-school merchant basis, and make a profit on.