Dollars And Sense, And Other Things March 11, 2010
Posted by lizp4 in Uncategorized.trackback
Just how much should that dollar you have be worth? A dollar should have a Constitutional worth of 371.75 grains of pure silver. But, DOES it?? See here: A Constitutional Dollar. Long, but very educational.
And, just so you don’t think I’ve been neglecting your science lessons, I give you this: Antarctica’s INTERESTING Secret
I found this as a part of a much longer discussion that was all pretty interesting:
After the Constitution was adopted, Alexander Hamilton made his Report on the Subject of a
Mint. He recommended that the dollar be the money unit and that it contain 371.25 grains of fine
silver. The Coinage Act of 1792 stated that “the money of account of the United States shall be
expressed in dollars or units.” It defined the “DOLLARS or UNITS [as] of the value of a Spanish
milled dollar as the same as is now current, and to contain three hundred and seventy-one grains
and four sixteenth parts of a grain of pure…silver.”
Vieira makes a subtle point (p. 194) about the dollar. Before the time and by the time that the
Constitution was enacted, the framers and past Congresses already recognized the Spanish dollar
as money. They did not make it into money or authorize its use as money. The market already
had been using it for decades. The market already recognized the value in the Spanish dollar due
to its silver content. The framers did not create a value by assigning the name dollar to an
arbitrary coin made of base metal. They decided that U.S. dollar coins would have a certain
weight of silver so that they would match the existing value of a Spanish milled dollar. That
made such a coin and weight into an official U.S. unit of account. The Coinage Act of 1792 is a
statute or legislative enactment that defines the statutory dollar of 1792 as “the value of a Spanish
milled dollar as the same as is now current,” and the latter is the value of a constitutional dollar.
The 1792 statute does not make the dollar into money by labeling the coin as a dollar, but by
identifying it with, as nearly as they could, the same fixed weight of silver that gave value to the
Spanish milled dollar of the time. This means that the dollar designated in the Constitution
existed before the 1792 Act and, as we have seen, before the Constitution was even adopted.
The silver certificates were valid money because they were redeemable for real silver. The fiat money we have today is in fact worthless paper, good only if you take the word of the US government which fewer people are willing to do every day. And with very good reason. When you watch what the clowns in DC are doing, it is quite clear that they want to make that paper worth more for its fuel value, that is when burned in your stove, than the face value printed on it. They care absolutely nothing for the fact that the life savings of most Americans, and many other people around the world, are locked up in the value of those pieces of paper. To them, it is just a game of power and oneupsmanship. Rarely, if ever, have more evil people come together in one place than we have in Washington, DC, today.
When I was a small boy, I recall my Dad telling me that the typical lifetime earnings for most men was around $100,000. Today, there are very many people who receive that (I wont say earn) in far less than one year of employment. This is not to say that the value of their work is so much greater, but rather it says that the value of the dollar has declined to pennies on the dollar of 60 to 70 years ago.
Just as one of the primary functions of government is to defend the citizenry, an equal function of government is to defend the property of the citizens. Much of the property of the citizenry is in the value of their savings, and the government effectively robs them when it allows the value of the money to be diminished. The US government has freely and without compunction robbed its citizens of most of their cash wealth over the past 50 years, even though the numbers in their checking accounts remained unchanged. The government simply inflated the money and thereby robbed us blind, thieves that they are at heart.
“The US government has freely and without compunction robbed its citizens of most of their cash wealth over the past 50 years…” Yep, and now it’s been raised to a “fine art.” It’s going to be an INTERESTING couple of years. Got silver? :o)
I think it harks back to the days of the silver certificate, or the history of the US silver standard. At any rate, I think they might have been referring to it as “more Constitutional” than the FRN currently current as currency. That would be my guess.
As for the science stuff, isn’t that spectacular? I found that link on aceofspades.com, one of my usual morning stops. Generally, he isn’t much for stuff like this, but the red ice caught his attention, just as it did ours. I would put this right up there with the giant gypsum crystals in that cave in Mexico and the giant tubeworms inhabiting the “black smokers” in the deep ocean trenches. Weird and wonderful.
For all the talk in that article about a “constitutional dollar,” I don’t remember a word in the Constitution about any such being defined. It seems unlikely to me that the drafters of the Constitution would have bothered with such minutiae. The article even says that this “constitutional dollar” was established by an act in the early 19th century, so it is not clear to me why they call it a “constitutional dollar.” That said, it looks to me like the whole think is an illusion, a chimera.
As for the “science lesson,” where do you find this stuff, Liz? That is just plain weird. And now that I know it, I don’t know what to do with it. Wonderful.