Comments on: U.S. used to have awesome money

By: AirPillo

AirPillo — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 19:44:00 +0000

Bring back? I’ve got a few $2 bills as change in recent years. They’re still in print!

By: Kaleberg

Kaleberg — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 16:13:00 +0000

Everyone ripped off someone. Newton flat out admitted it with his “shoulders of giants” reference.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 04:35:00 +0000

good thing its 2011

By: Anthony

Anthony — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 04:34:00 +0000

They still do all the work by hand. Look up the videos on youtube.

By: Mark McKenna

Mark McKenna — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 03:20:00 +0000

I think (without certainty) that the reason the world uses a fiat currency right now is because we set up a delegation system whereby the US set its currency against gold, and everyone else set theirs against the US. Then the US switched to a fiat system, taking the rest of the world with it.

Support: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_currency

By: pjcamp

pjcamp — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 23:11:00 +0000

Well, that explains the feet.

What about the boobies?

By: Finnagain

Finnagain — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 23:04:00 +0000

At least you could burn the bills to stay warm, ward off the wolves and zombies. How do you use gold, assuming zombies are pursuing you?

By: Finnagain

Finnagain — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 22:45:00 +0000

Shiny lumps of very heavy metal. Just what I need when I’m on the run from the zombies. No, the post-apocaconomy will be cans of beans and shotgun shells.

By: John Cucka

John Cucka — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 22:35:00 +0000

There’s no profit in love, so it had to be slaughtered on the altar of capitalism.

By: Skipdallas

Skipdallas — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 22:12:00 +0000

Had her socks shocked off!

By: dutchs

dutchs — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 21:58:00 +0000

Bryan was actually a social reformer for 1896. By 1926, the year of the Scopes Trial, he had become a bit of a fossil himself. Nonetheless he was still widely respected for his Presidential runs, and a lot of people who even sympathized with Scopes thought Darrow’s grilling of Bryan on the stand (something that would never be tolerated today) was over the line.

By: Matty Sarro

Matty Sarro — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 20:15:00 +0000

Why Jobs? Put someone on who actually influenced computers, not someone that ripped off other engineers and marketed his theft really well. Maybe some of the scientists from PARC or DEC or Intel?

By: AnthonyC

AnthonyC — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 12:24:00 +0000

True, but their value as industrial metals is nowhere near the value they have on the market. And if we tried to lock up the supplies of gold to use as money, the price would rise to the point that we would find other materials to substitute for industrial uses.

By: Phil Fot

Phil Fot — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 09:54:00 +0000

Hate America? How on earth did you ever come up with that twisted idea? I spent many years in uniform going where I was told and doing what was asked.

I’m very much a supporter of my country. Unfortunately, my country is in the possession of a pile of self-serving elected trash that should be sucking sea water at the bottom of the ocean.

Full faith and credit. Amazing.

By: AirPillo

AirPillo — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 06:25:00 +0000

That is some badass money right there.

By: cdh1971

cdh1971 — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 05:55:00 +0000

I prefer my bunk.

(the outhouse odour ruins the mood.)

By: GnomeChomsky

GnomeChomsky — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 04:11:00 +0000

The original version of the Constitution also defined a certain group of people as only counting as three-fifths of a person, yet that rule no longer apples. Times change. Economies change.

The old silver/gold standards are a thing of the past. The only ones who wish to bring them back are the moneyed interests who possess large portions of the wealth and their loyal – but totally misinformed – supporters who believe that fiat currency is hurting them. Tying our monetary policy / economy to a commodity that has no real value beyond its historic appeal and use in electronics is a recipe for disaster that would make the economic downturn of the last decade look like the Roaring 20s.

If you want to see breadlines and soup kitchens spring up like daisies, then support a gold standard.

By: John Butler

John Butler — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 02:44:00 +0000

Back in ye olde day, 1964, to be exact, I was a Cub Scout. Our pack was selling candy, and the premium to us cubs was a shiny new 1964 Kennedy half dollar per case sold. I sold four cases; I still have the coins. One kid’s dad (a skycap at the old Kansas City downtown airport), brought his son to work and moved a lot of product — the kid got some 350+ Kennedy halves. I still remember the sight of those rolls of coins. I’ve always wondered what the kid did with the money.

By: Doc_S

Doc_S — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 02:18:00 +0000

The reverse design of the current $2 bill isn’t all that old. It was created for the 1976 Bicentennial celebration. My great uncle was actually one of the engravers.

The previous design, which was produced from 1929-1966, had an engraving of Jefferson’s Monticello home.

By: autonym

autonym — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 02:03:00 +0000

You see, this is why we can’t have nice things. Pictures of lovely currency and you get dribblers foaming about how only prettyshiny things have value.

By: pjcamp

pjcamp — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 02:00:00 +0000

Why is electricity naked?

By: Harold Combs

Harold Combs — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 01:30:00 +0000

Sorry, but both Silver & gold are very valuable industrial metals and have intrinsic value so they can never be worth nothing like our fiat currency can (and will soon be)

By: Harold Combs

Harold Combs — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 01:29:00 +0000

Not only beautiful but REAL money backed by SILVER. Not like the nearly worthless paper we use now devalued by run-away government spending and a corrupt Federal Reserve.

By: AnthonyC

AnthonyC — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 01:23:00 +0000

Exactly, but it only has those properties because we, as a group, agree to believe that it does. The lump of metal has no intrinsic utility.

Any series of events leading to the collapse of the current fiat money that serves those three functions would involve apocalyptic-scale breakdown of society. In that world, grain, petroleum, and tools are much more useful stores of value than gold, because they actually *have* value.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 01:07:00 +0000

Though gold and silver are indeed a “…barbarous relic” ; (quotation stolen from Keynes), they are considered an asset since as a raw material they can be converted into something precious. Gold and silver are mined and there is certain vanity and scarcity attached to that.

Amethysts used to be considered precious gems along with diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, rubies. Until someone found the motherload and they became effectively worthless. Scarcity is not always reliable in the long term.

By: David

David — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:13:00 +0000

Money is money, whether it is a physical thing like a coin, or an abstract concept such as the ones and zeroes the bank keeps track of on your behalf. In fact, the whole idea of money is abstract. Perhaps that’s why the teatards have a hard time wrapping their tiny little brains around the fact that as long as a nation keeps control of how much money is out there, it doesn’t matter if it’s backed by gold or baseball cards or just the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government, which is still worth something in spite of their misguided attempts to undermine it.

So the question I have for you is, why do you hate America so?

By: toyg

toyg — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:10:00 +0000

What a marvellous time… if you were in the 10% who actually knew what the heck that lady was supposed to represent. If you were in the other 90%, though, good luck: no education, no social security, no cheap food, no cheap medicines, no cheap housing, lots of casual and/or organized crime, very little help from authority… more or less like today, only worse.

By: David

David — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:05:00 +0000

I never thought I’d see the day when people would complain about “high inflation” in the 3%-4% range. I still remember car ads with promotional rates around 12%, and houses for sale in which sellers pledged to eat up to a third of the then-prevailing 18% 30-year mortgage rate just to get rid of them. 3.8% is “high” inflation? What are you, 15?

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:01:00 +0000

Because they can take that shinny lump of metal and buy other stuff with it – one of three basic functions of money: medium of exchange, a measure of value and a store of value.

Metal doesn’t break down (unlike food), it has normalized characteristics (unlike man-made object like chairs or tools), and it is easily measured and counted.

By: Sco Jo

Sco Jo — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:01:00 +0000

Maybe money doesn’t look like this anymore because our modern age leaves us less time to draw.

I’ll be here all week folks!