I hope you get to be as elderly as you want to be!

Before the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the US had hardly any inflation, under 3% to be exact. After that, from 1913 to 1971 (when we were taken off the gold standard), inflation was a regular 10-15%, after 1971, inflation accounting for everything was at least 15% or more.

Got a website for you to look at: http://mwhodges.home.att.net/ particularly this link: http://mwhodges.home.att.net/inflation.htm

A point that was well made by Robert Heinlein, in his novel "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", is that more than 90% of the money in the world is nothing more than bookkeeping.

If the government needs more money, it just adds some zeroes in a computer somewhere, and Voila!

It could start up the printing presses, but that actually costs money ...

Who says we can't?
It's not easy and the resulting chaos would be probably be worse than a revolution, which in a way it will be.
I mean, if we stop buying stuff and go directly to the farmer again for food, we could cut out the corporations, which in turn would go bankrupt, which in turn will stop them from backing politicians. Also, the politicians will see the taxes drop and either change their ways or be replaced. Note that I never said it would be nice.

Hahahhaaa. Gotta love the muppet version of bookstore dog. ;)

What scares me the most is that the money supply isn't even really under the control of governments anymore. Some back has $10 million in their vaults, but loans out $100 million... poof! $90 million magically comes into existence!

no bank has 10 million in their vault except for private banks, they usually only have about 300 thousand dollars in their vault, the money is wired to them through the conglomeration of money of all the banks of that branch together. the federal reserve bank though is what actually loans the money to banks, which the banks pay a .007 percent interest rate on, the fucked up part is that they pay an interest rate of almost zero and we pay up to ten percent!!! the government is only JUST cracking down on it too.

They can print money.. but if I did it I would go to jail. Love the double standards.

ah but you CAN print your own money, as long as you don't try and pass it off a government currency.
and if you can get someone to accept it in exchange, than it's as valid as anything else out there
you are not counterfeiting government currency you should be good to go
think of it as a certificate what is it backed by? i like to back mine with Chocolate!
meahahahahahah
--Rick

I wonder how that would apply to an automated money changer.

one wat yo look at it is with the second life "Linden Dollar" the only virtual currency to be listed on the international currency exchange
(as of this posting the exchange rate was: $249.77 lindens to the USD)
it all depends on what you back your currency with. if someone sees value in it and accepts it as payment it's a valid form of payment
--Rick

If you want a real giggle, check out Canadian Tire Money:

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

When I visited Canada a few years back, my host paid for damned near everything with it, since it was accepted by pretty much everyone, and worth more than real Canadian money in the shops.

thanks Colbalt!
that's a perfect example of what i was talking about!
if they can do you why not us?
--Rick

my god your angry now lol I can't immagine how angry youll be as an old person, but just because money is based in faith and Fiat can print it at will, doesn't mean they do it, Fiat's corporate heads have said alot of fuck yous to the presidents over the years who tried to buy votes by distributing printed money to the people, also it is a very complicated set of rules and factors that determine the subjective values of currencies around the world, if it was just faith based then whichever country was the greedyest and most money loving would have the highest valued money: so that can't be true because we Americans don't have the most valuable dollar lol.
Even people who make $1.5 million only pay 54 (or 59) cents on the dollar in income taxes, and that is from the newly passed bill increasing people-in-that-tax-bracket's income taxes. the IRS howevercan go fuck its self because income taxes really don't go to anything we taxpayers care about, healthcare and schooling is payed for by our property and consumer taxes, and road systems taxes are payed for by tolls and property tax also, basically everything is payed for by our property tax, and our income taxes line government pockets but 80 cents on the dollar is only for people who have plenty of money to burn, also Obama's new spending bill to increase jobs with work oprojects only went to unemployment benefefits and welfare for those unemployed who are under 65!!! only about nine percent of it went to creating jobs!!! and here's the fucking kicker... they say the reason is that they are waiting for the jobs to appear for them to spend on... Its a JOB CREATION bill, these assholes in the government.
No politician has ever been more of a liar than corzine though, he promised to not increase any tax over the coarse of his term, he increased every goddamn tax he could within the FIRST MONTH!!!!!!!!!!!! its the reason I'm a moderate who votes republican, even my police friends (dont worry their the cool kind of cops who care about the law in the sense of morals, common sense, and what they believe is right) I'm not a cop but they all want Chris Christy for governor, he put away over a jundred corrupted asshole politicians and i respect that, and the prosecuter stopped the case because there were so many cases in that same scandal that his brother was involved in that fell through because the persons couldn't be tied to actually breaking a law that the judge and prosecuter aggreed that it would waste to much time and taxpayer money to puursue it further, it was unrelated to the case that the no-bid contract happened and it also happened long before the actual scandal was set to go to court. this is some good stuff by the way for your next article or too if you want, because of all that corzine did he is trailing in the poles despite the fact he's in a mega blue state (New Jersey, but you know that right) that bastard can die in a fire for all I care. sorry for my lack of paragraphing.

If you took all these images you're making, and made them into a short graphic novel... I'd buy it in a heartbeat. O_O

Actually, Money's only value is as a medium of exchange. It's the reason we don't need to carry cows and chickens on ourselves to buy stuff at the market anymore.

Exactly. Money always has and always will be worth what people Think it's worth. Gold and Silver have some industrial uses, but historicly they've only had Monetary value because they are rare and shiny

I carry a copy of the Cow and Chicken DVD wherever to go to barter with it. Does that count?

I don't really understand the part about transfer of money to those who don't have it to those who don't need it... unless you explain in more I'm gonna have to say they DO need it, but they shouldn't if people higher up were un-corruptable or at least knew the right way to run programs. As for the last panel... Hah, it reminds me of what someone told me as they held up a bag of shredded dollar bills. Apparently you can get them from places that are allowed to destroy currency, but when I asked why don't people just make their own if they want it so bad, they said you can't 'cause authorities will come after you. I always dreamed if I became rich I'd burn a whole lot of money, just so everyone else's money would be worth more - which is exactly why they don't want you to do it. By controlling how many bills are in the system, the gov't can effectively create inflation by printing many more bills (since it's just paper). So when food costs more... it's not that the value has increased, it's that our dollar is worth less. That or supplies are short, but you get the idea XD

mind you, silver and gold have no value either. The value is an agreement of worth (and agreements can change in an instant!)

This is why nobody with power worries about the national debt.

Print more money = interest rates go up = debt drops = people are screwed out of life savings.

I still say everyone should draw all over the bills.

Everyone I know turns "ONE" into "BONER."

hehe, I love these comics...

Makes me feel slightly less mad at things :)

note that I am reffering to being less mad due to seeing some people have a similar view, rather than anything else ;)

Well, there IS one other difference between money and toilet paper - money can go through the washer/dryer without crumbling apart, whereas toilet-paper and kleenex... well, suffice it to say that it's a bitch to clean out.

Good comics though :)

Reminds me of the underground comics like Last Gasp.

I remember reading about back when they had the gold standard, or money based on the fact that it was supposed to represent gold. Back then technicaly you could walk into any bank that had gold deposites, offer up your paper money, and get that back in it's equivical value in gold. Well they stopped that because people kept trying to yank all their funds from banks during economic downturns, which just made things worse. Also it made money too volitile as gold changes value often. It also had a bunch of other problems but it did also have the effect that it made the dollar worth something literaly. Now at days they dont have that, I think Nixon was the last president to take the dollar off the gold standard.

As for Newt, even as a Middle-ground-leaning republican, I think he is definately full of shit. I never liked him since the first time I saw him, even before I knew anything about him, much the same way I hated Clinton, just something about their smiles and faces that just set off warning bells in my head.

If I ever got into some kind of power to make decisions in government, the first thing I would do would be to change the priorities of government think tanks. We have labs and such all over the place that the government pays to come up with new tech for our armed forces and such. The problem is that everything they come out with is big and works well, but is expensive as hell. If I had a say, I'd take almost all the reaserches and sit them down and say 'Ok, stop thinking up new bigger and better weapons and equipment, and instead find ways to make the stuff we already have cheaper and easyer to make without losing any quality. Would'int it be nice if the government only had to spend a million or so on a state of the art jet fighter, instead of 100+ million for each one? Or maybe smart bombs that cost only 5k instead of 250k to 500k. That would definately reduce costs of the military which is where a lot of the money goes.

You hate Newt? Try having to make calls for him at a call center, especially when you know everything he's having you call for is a bunch of bullshit. But there's no way you can do any other calls because that's the ONLY work in the call center. I wasn't too displeased with the fact that they fired me for low performance, but it was a Christian call center, and I've learned things there that make me despise a lot of the organizations the poor saps who work for call centers have to call for.

Well what do you expect working for a call center like that? If you work for any politician or political party under most sitations other then the nice big shot positions, you are going to get fucked.

I remember one time my mother tried to volenteer to help a Democrat upstate with an election. You know what they asked of her? They wanted her to manage 800 to 1000 people as 'walkers' or people who go door to door to stir up awareness about their cannidate, working 7 days a week, 20 to 22 hour shifts. Now, it would take my mother at least an hour and a half to drive out to the HQ, another hour 30 to drive back... so they wanted her to not get any sleep 7 seven days a week for the entire length of the campaign. Fuck that noise, I said. Of course she tried it for 3 days before she could not physicaly continue.

Oh no no. I mean piss poor scripting, then once we actually started doing good on a program, the company would take it from our call center, and give the work to another call center, leaving the one I was at pretty much scrambling for work.

I've also learned how sneaky these religious and right wing organizations are. One group I know is totally nuts is Concerned Women for America. Simply check out their website. And televangelists are the worst. The way they scam money from people is by selling stuff to them. It's basically an order line and you tell them exactly "FOR ANY DONATION AMOUNT" and these people are so deluded by the people on tv, they will donate much more than the item is worth for the little pamplet sized book or a cd.

Eh, both sides are guilty of it, not just the right... though you hear more about the right, because the news loves to rip on them. I dont recall the media making a big stink about Air America when they made attempts to keep themselves on the airwaves by embezeling money away from charity organizations they had ties to. But like I said, both sides are gulty of it.

http://ava7.com/images/funny-toilet.....liet-paper.jpg

Goes back to how do you establish that $1 worth of gold is worth $1? Where do you get the value for gold? The gold itself is not the standard of exchange. What you can buy with the gold is the standard of exchange. The gold is merely a standardized proxy for the value of goods and services. It allows trading of dissimilar items, with an agreed-upon exchange rate (1 gold coin=1 chicken, 1 gold coin = 2 loaves bread, 1 gold coin=1 barrel, so you don't have to carry a chicken to the baker, who may not NEED a chicken, but the cooper might need a chicken, whereas you already have all the barrels you need, and so on). The coins could be (and HAVE been) iron, bronze, copper, silver, tin and anything else people thought had some intrinsic value.

Gold itself is not the value (for one thing, you can't eat it, so it's worth less to a starving man than a loaf of bread). The value is merely a concept (wasn't it always?) established by exchange of goods and services. Knowing that, why use gold as your proxy for value at all? Use the goods and services themselves as the value of currency (one of those goods happens to BE gold, about which there is nothing any more special than any other commodity), and come up with an exchange note (difficult to fake, preferably!) that allows uniform valuation and convenient trade (instead of carrying a chicken around the NYSE looking for a buyer). That's the principle, at least. The word "stock" is still used as a synonym for inventory, though now the value of a corporation is not how many gizmos they have in their warehouses this minute, but how much revenue they can generate over time.

The value comes from the usually founded belief that because the currency has the will of the government, culture, or a major corporation behind it, that currency can be traded for real goods. Examples being modern paper money, company scrip, or found items like beads or shells.

In the ideal case, there is a national bank that closely monitors the currency, compares it to the estimated value of items being regularly traded, and either destroys or creates currency to keep the estimated value and the total cash floating around in balance. Under this ideal, hording of value is done in terms of real goods.

A second take on the ideal case is that the balance is struck between the amount of cash, and the gross wages paid out, making the currency unit backed by promise of labor.

Unfortunately the current case is that we have a private institution dominated by wealthy entities such as the Rothschilds, Rockerfellers, and a few note worthy banks both in America and outside America. The Federal Reserve Note(the US dollar's more proper name) is worse than a simple fiat currency backed by government will. It is a debt taken on by the US government, a debt with interest attached. This is worse than it sounds, because unlike a personal debt, there are no outside sources to use to acquire money to pay that debt. Instead, more debt has to be taken on, leading to more money. In contrast, the total value in the US is dropping, as housing and commercial real estate fail. More money as a result is chasing less value, with the net result being that an increase of dollars required to buy a hypothetical unit of value.

There are other complications such as interest rates, complex investments, etc, but for those there are open source information sources that have spent years learning the full details that can be found on youtube and other web sites.

Fiat money and fractional-reserve banking are tools. They're being severely abused, but like any technology, it's how you use them, it's not something in the nature of the tool itself. This argument should be familiar from Second Amendment discussions.

nice Dr. Seuss style on the money/toilet paper character

That's drawn by Mark Tucker, co-creator of this rant. If you think I'm seething, you should talk to Ol' Mark!

Heh, I've seen the money illusion thing before counting down a till at work. After a while, it just looks like green pieces of paper.

It's weird though, we use our money to represent several different currencies at once....it's more of a concurrency, ya know?

I saw that at Anthrocon, money was being used as a currency for specific art exchange there - it was basically allowing people to be a lot more fluid with their art than just by doing trades, and allowing the people who didn't art to collectively pay the artists to be there making art, and feed them, even if they didn't realize that's what they were doing.

As opposed to the money we consider from our job for our rent and utility bills, which is a different type of earning and spending, could be a different currency, but we use the same stuff for doing it.

And it's used to measure faith in repayment for loans, and investment strategies, even though that has absolutely nothing to do with people buying food or paying their rent.

I've told coworkers plenty of times that the nutritional value of a $10 bill is roughly the same as that of a $1 bill :)

The statement comparing paper currency to religion had me nodding my head enthusiastically.

Of course. Money is just a convention, like time... To organize ourselves. We come to new levels of abstraction with money, but even the value of silver and gold is just a convention.
Set yourself on a deserted island and you'll be happier to find something you can eat :/ I mean, cliché but illustrative, as it shows money is only useful when a society grows to certain proportions.