money Archives - Page 3 of 3 - Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Sometimes, the proper response to legislation is just “Huh?”

Too often, though, our incredulity reaches the shivering heights of repulsion. In those cases, we should challenge the legislators who proposed, promoted, and voted for the law. The challenge might as well be in the form of a question: “Don’t you feel creepy for sponsoring that kind of thing?”

I would have felt creepy even contemplating a vote on Louisiana’s HB 125, which, in the cause of preventing transfer of stolen property, prohibits people from buying stuff at Goodwill and similar secondhand stores with cash.

Yes, you read that right: CASH. Greenbacks. Federal Reserve Notes. “Legal tender.”

I’ve always associated such kinds of prohibitions — not allowing cash to leave the country, for example — with poor and/or socialist countries. Real backwaters. The Second or Third World.

But here it is, in Louisiana. A fully recognized state of the union (at least by everyone but FEMA).

The law passed — indeed, in the words of one report, “flew . . . under the radar” — so quickly that “most businesses don’t even know about it.”

Besides non-profit resellers like Goodwill, and garage sales, the language of the bill encompasses stores like the Pioneer Trading Post and flea markets.

Lawyer Thad Ackel Jr. feels the passage of this bill begins a slippery slope for economic freedom in the state.

“The government is placing a significant restriction on individuals transacting in their own private property,” says Ackel.

Somewhat inexplicably, pawn shops are exempted from the prohibition.

What a sorry state.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Going After the Gold

What does gold have to do with medical care? Ingested, it’s a poison. It’s not often used in treatment.

So why did the Obama administration place a provision further regulating the buying and selling of gold into the Democrats’ medical reform legislation?

Economist Thomas Sowell explains, in a recent column, why politicians are obsessed with the yellow metal. Before FDR, gold provided a check against politicians’ desire to spend the money government could “just print.” Because, in those long-ago days, paper dollars were backed by gold, Americans would cash the paper in for gold when it looked like the Treasury had gone on a printing spree. So inflation (the increase of the supply of money, and the consequent diminishing of its value, leading to increasing prices) was checked.

In 1933, FDR confiscated most of America’s circulating (and hoarded) gold, and Nixon took us off the gold standard completely in the ’70s, morphing our monetary system into a pure fiat (inflationary) standard.

Also in Nixon’s time, it became legal, again, for Americans to own gold.

So why make it harder, now, to trade in gold — when gold is not money?

Because investors, in times of inflation and crisis, turn to gold as a hedge. Against politicians, basically. And, says Sowell, “the Obama administration sees people’s freedom to buy and sell gold as something that can limit what the government can do.”

Gold, like freedom, “cramps the government’s style.”

That speaks volumes about gold . . . and “Obamacare.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.