“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.
Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
The Mandatory Coin
Thought of something in the nick of time. (This will probably post a few minutes late.)
One of the products of the California Gold Rush was the twenty dollar gold piece. I’ve talked about those a few times. But there was another, lesser known item, the one dollar gold piece.
These were tiny! Imagine that a 20 dollar gold piece was somewhat smaller than a silver dollar (but much heavier). A twentieth of that…well, that would have to be less than half the size of a dime! And indeed it was. (Now, it wasn’t less than half the width of a dime, but rather, less than half the volume of a dime. If the proportions were the same, it would have to be less than 4/5ths the diameter and less than 4/5th of the thickness to be less than half the volume of a dime. But even that looks tiny.)
There were three major varieties of these coins. From 1849-1849 was what we call today Type I.
Type I $1 gold piece. In 1849 there were three different variations, open and close wreath (this looks open to me) and somewhere on some of the close wreath coins James Longacre’s initial L appears very small, This was continued into 1854.
Type I was 13 millimeters across, making it barely half the width of a quarter.
My apologies for how wretched and worn that coin looks, but it seems to be rather difficult to find a picture with both sides of the coin in it and I’m pressed for time!
Type II is by far the hardest and most expensive to collect, it ran from 1854-1856, and is also known as the Indian Princess. They made the coin thinner so they could make it wider, it’s now 15mm across.
I said it was called the Indian Princess…but no Indian Princess ever wore an ostrich feather headdress. (Yes, those are ostrich feathers.)
This final coin is of course the easiest to locate, and there’s only about $100 worth of gold in it, so most here can probably manage to find one.
These were very popular as Christmas gifts. When it was discontinued in 1889, that job fell to the quarter eagle (i.e., the $2 1/2 gold piece).
During this entire period of time the US was also issuing silver dollars or trade dollars (special heavier dollars made for trade with China). In 1873, in fact, all three types of coins were minted as that was the year the Liberty Seated dollar was dropped and the Trade Dollar begun, also for a while in the late 1870s and early 1880s both Trade and Morgan silver dollars were being made.
So yet another way to have a dollar in your pocket that maybe some of you were unaware of!
Important Reminder
To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!
Remember Hong Kong!!!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0%3F
I hope this guy isn’t rotting in the laogai somewhere!
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
By all accounts (I’ve watched very little of it) the Republican National Convention administered an ass kicking to the Democrat party. So, no way I can top it or even capture it. And since I’m perilously close to my data limit (and it doesn’t renew until two Mondays from now)…I’m not going to try. I might not be around too much, either.
But I remain as convinced as ever that the Dems cannot win without massive fraud. I’m slightly less convinced that the good guys have anticipated and blocked enough of it. (We think we know what they plan to do, but the name of the game is to hit the opponent with something unexpected, and we’d be fools to assume that we know everything that they’ve got up their sleeves.)
As for the house and senate races, there the fraud is at the retail level, and I expect a lot of places will be “safe” for Dems. Certainly those places where the Republicans didn’t even bother fielding someone. And then there are the offices that aren’t even up this time. Will the Trump tide still be strong in 2022 when my state’s executive offices (as well as those of all counties) are up? I hope so, but lately even the Secretary of State office has been taken by the Dems, and that’s the one that runs elections.
A Reminder Of Today’s Big Issue.
Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.
Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump
Needs to happen, soon.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
Please note that our menu has changed, please listen to all of the options.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Political correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. The first rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government take your guns. 5. The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Be sure of your target and what is behind it. 9. Social Justice Warriors, ANTIFA pukes, BLM hypocrites, and other assorted varieties of Marxists can go copulate with themselves, or if insufficiently limber, may substitute a rusty wire brush suitable for cleaning the bore of a twelve or ten gauge.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Coin of The Day
Unless I think of something later today that won’t chew up bandwidth doing an image search, there won’t be a coin of the day. If you’re reading this sentence, I didn’t think of anything.
But there is something related on my mind.
I belong to a couple of coin clubs and we finally held a Zoom meeting for the first time since the Covidiocy began. There’s one guy in the club who will jump on you if you refer to our lowly copper-plated zinc plasticky-feeling one cent piece (or any of its more honorable predecessors) as a “penny.”
Technically, he’s correct. A “penny” is a British denomination, originally in silver, that was one twelfth of a shilling, which in turn was one twentieth of a pound, so 240 pennies made up a pound. And “pound” of course is sometimes called “pound sterling” and it was, once, literally, one pound of sterling silver (that hasn’t been true for many centuries; it began to be debased around 1300). One troy pound of 12 troy ounces, or 5760 grains. (And sterling silver is 0.925 or 37/40ths pure.) A troy grain is the same as an avoirdupois grain, which is what you use to measure powder and bullets. 24 grains, by the way, makes up a “pennyweight” and is 1/240th of a troy pound. (Those 16 and 8 penny nails at Home Depot or Lowes are a reference to the weight, not the price. And if you ever wonder why they abbreviate it “16d” instead of “16p” it’s because the penny ultimately derived from the Roman denarius.)
Whereas our cent is 100th of our dollar, and our dollar was originally a silver coin with 371 1/4 grains of silver in it. (Our silver dollars continued to have this much silver in them through 1935, excepting, of course, the Trade Dollar of the 1870s and 1880s.)
By the time the US was founded, the pound had been debased to the point where it was worth roughly five dollars, so as it happens, a shilling was worth about the same as a quarter. Which means the penny was a bit over two cents. (The penny could be subdivided into half pennies and farthings, so a farthing was roughly equal to one of our half cents.)
So why do we call our one cent piece a “penny”? And why does it irritate my friend?
It’s not entirely because it’s an unofficial term. He has no problem with calling the five cent piece a “nickel” even though it’s not an official name. (“Dime” is official–look at the coin, it says “One Dime” on it, not “Ten Cents.” That name goes all the way back to the original Federal coinage act of 1792, though it did not begin to appear on coins consistently until the 1830s.)
He’s irritated because “penny” also has another meaning, referring to a different country’s coinage.
But he’s wasting his time fighting it, because unfortunately the word “penny” has a distinct use.
If someone says “fifty cents” to you, it means something distinctly different from “fifty pennies” even if you both understand you’re talking about US money. “Fifty cents” means an amount of money, and it could be made of two quarters, five dimes, ten nickels, some combination, or it could be fifty pennies. Whoops, I telegraphed it! “Fifty pennies” specifically means 50 of those little copper-coated pieces of zinc. And that’s the distinction between “cent” (which is an amount of money) and “penny” (as used in the US), which is the physical object that represents one cent. Technically, of course, you could describe that object as the “one cent piece” and talk about “50 one cent pieces” but people are lazy and that will be cut down in size to some more convenient phrase like “50 pennies.”
[Now if you’re talking to a coin dealer and want to look at the one cent pieces in stock, you could say “Could I look over your cents” and that will be understood, but that’s a special case. But no one would do this, because the dealer will want you to be more specific before he hands you a box full of coins, for example whether you mean Indian head cents, Lincoln cents with the wheat ears (“wheaties,” no relation to Wheatietoo), and so on. And there is a big dividing line between large cents (pre 1857) and small cents (1857 to date), too, so someone might ask for “large cents.”]
So this turns out to be another chapter in the endless wrangle between prescriptivists (who describe what language ought to be) and the descriptivists (who describe what language actually is). And since “penny” is used in a way that makes a distinction from “cent,” it’s never going away, unless some celebrity comes up with an alternative and manages to popularize it. Personally, I’ve been known to call them “zinkys” but I’m no celebrity, and besides that can’t apply to the plentitude of pre-1982 pieces still circulating.)
PS: Even “nickel” is problematic. Because the first small cents that came out in 1857 were twelve percent nickel, they immediately got nicknamed “nicks.” Then in 1865 came the three cent nickel piece which lasted until 1889. This got named the “nickel” to distinguish it from the three cent silver piece which had disappeared from circulation thanks to the Civil War. And finally in 1866 came the five cent nickel piece we know today. When silver finally started trickling back into circulation, the half dime was simply discontinued because the (five cent) nickel had completely taken over the job. And (oh by the way) these “nickels” are only 25 percent nickel, the rest is copper.
Obligatory PSA/Reminder
Just one more thing, my standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!
Remember Hong Kong!!! And remember the tens of millions who died under the “Great Helmsman” Chairman Mao.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0%3F
I hope this guy isn’t rotting in the laogai somewhere!
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
For my money the Great Helmsman is Hikaru Sulu (even if the actor is a dingbat).
I guess I should stop and think about that. Hmm…well my response is still:
Bring it on!!! We’re not tired of winning. Far from it:
We haven’t even begun to win!
Time for some long overdue winning on the Justice Front!!!
Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.
Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
A Cautionary Tale, in Lieu of the Mandatory Coin
Now it wouldn’t be one of my posts without a coin, would it?
Well, I guess this must not be one of my posts, then, because this is not a coin.
This is the climax of the worst inflation the world has ever seen.
Lately, Zimbabwe has been famous for its One Hundred Trillion Dollar notes, that were never worth anything in foreign exchange (yet are worth a score or two of US dollars in the collector’s market). I once got to see a display of something like twelve different denominations in the series, the uppermost were 10, 20, 50, and 100 trillion dollar notes.
Inflation is not an increase in prices. That’s a symptom. It’s an increase in the money supply. If the increase happens to be faster than actual economic growth, then money becomes less valuable (a widget is now worth more units of money), which since we think of money as the measuring rod, looks like an increase in prices, when the real issue is that our “ruler” is shrinking.
OK, so I showed you a Hungarian note from just after World War II, and said it was worse than 100 trillion (Zimbabwe used toilet paper) dollars.
The note says it’s a “milliard b-pengős.” Well if you don’t happen to know a few things I am about to explain, you might imagine, well, “milliard” is just a foreign word for “million” and a B pengő is maybe a different pengő from an A pengő. So how is a million of something worse than a hundred trillion of something else?
Because it isn’t, actually, a million of something.
Most people are unaware that there are two distinct ways of reckoning large numbers. There’s the “short scale” and the “long scale.” In the United States, we use the short scale. On continental Europe and all of their former colonies (except Brazil), they use the long scale. The United Kingdom formerly used the long scale, but they were increasingly using the short scale in speech (thanks to Yankee cultural influence, most likely) and in 1974 their government finally gave in and formally adopted the short scale.
The short scale and the long scale both have the same definition of a thousand, 1,000, and a million, 1,000,000. The short scale goes on: 1,000,000,000 is a billion, 1,000,000,000,000 is a trillion. Add three zeros, move up one more Latin prefix before “-llion”: quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, and so on. If someone tells you the Earth’s mass is 13 septillion pounds, and you’re wondering how many zeros that is, translate “septi” into 7, add one to it (8) and multiply by 3, to get 24 zeros. 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
But you’d better be sure they’re operating on the short scale, because the long scale is quite different. On the long scale, 1,000,000 is a million also, but then 1,000,000,000 is called either a thousand million or a milliard. Only after you add another three zeros, 1,000,000,000,000, do you bring out the word “billion.” Add three more zeros, 1,000,000,000,000,000 and you have, believe it or not, a billiard. Then a trillion, then a trilliard, and so on. In a way, you can think of it as using groups of six zeros, not three zeros. How many zeros in a trillion (long scale)? Turn “tri” into 3, multiply by six, done: 18 zeros. So an old-school Brit might claim the Earth’s mass is 13 quadrillion pounds, which after all is 6 x 4 = 24 zeros. (In many ways, this is cleaner and makes more sense than our short scale, but the short system is what we’ve got, and I’ll use it.)
Anyhow, you probably already see part of the answer to the mystery of the 1 milliard B-pengő note, I telegraphed it pretty strongly. It’s not a million, it’s a billion, which they called a milliard, B-pengős. Milliard isn’t just some weird Hungarian word for million. (Leaving aside the issue of whether any Hungarian word will ever seem normal to a speaker of any Indo-European language, and vice versa.)
And looking around a bit, you will see that Germany issued milliarden mark notes during its inflation in the 1920s, those too are nine zeros, what we call a billion. Germany is on the European continent and uses the long scale. (Apparently Russia uses the short scale. And so does Zimbabwe.)
If you ever listened to the G. Gordon Liddy show, he regularly used “thousand million” for nine zeros (short billion), and “million million” for twelve zeros (short trillion, long billion). That is unambiguous, no matter which system you’re used to, and it can also be clear to the innumerate who think a billion is “what, maybe two million?” (No, I’m not kidding.)
OK, getting back to that Hungarian note: You may be thinking, “ok so it was a billion b. pengős; that’s nine zeros, still a lot less than a hundred trillion, which is fourteen zeros!”
But the B, it turns out, stands for “billion.” A B pengő is not some new improved A pengő, it’s a billion pengős. Their billion, with twelve zeros, not our puny little nine-zero billion.
So a milliard B pengős was 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pengős. Twenty one zeros.
Now there are places that have inflated their money just about as much. Yugoslavia devalued its currency multiple times between World War II and the late 80s, if you stack that up, and look at the 500 billion (our billion) notes at the end, yeah, they were up to twenty five or twenty six zeros of their original dinar. But that took decades.
Hungary went from three to 21 zeros in just over a year, and that’s just their paper money. As we’ll see below, the exchange rate against the dollar tacked on 28 zeros in almost exactly a year. This utterly annihilates what Germany went through in the 1920s, and we’ve all heard those stories, wheelbarrows full of money, people being paid at noon and the end of the workday so they could immediately spend their pay before it became worthless.
Pengő derives from peng, an onomatopoeic word for the sound of ringing, as in the sound silver coins make. The pengő was adopted in 1927 as the Hungarian currency, it consisted of 100 fillér, and replaced the…um…korona (crown). But it wasn’t until after World War II ended that the pengő jumped into the toilet, reached out of the bowl, and pulled down on the handle.
In order to cut down on zeros, the milpengő was introduced. This allowed them to use the same paper money designs again, then the b. pengő after the milpengő became as valueless as the pengő was when the milpengő had been introduced. Note the the paper money above has a colored background with a B cut out of it, and pengő is replaced by B. pengő.
Here are the regular milliard, and milliard milpengő notes to compare.
Milliard milpengő note (let’s see now…that’s, um, 15 zeros). Date is June 3, 1946
Notice that they are essentially the same, they just had to change the text in the middle. And of course running it off in a different color is as simple as changing the ink on the press. They didn’t even have to change the value in the “counter” on the left.
(Did you ever wonder why they always put the numbers inside fancy spirograph-like patterns on paper money, known as counters? It’s to make it harder for some unscrupulous schmuck to change the number. He can’t just scrape a one off and put a five in its place without leaving obvious holes in the pattern. (The ink on paper money rests on the surface of the paper and can be scraped off, anything left over can be bleached.) This was quite an issue in the early 1800s when banks issued their own notes and the designs rarely were standardized. Some guy in Gasoline Alley, Michigan might not know that the ten dollar bill from the First Bank of Outer Slobbovia, Delaware, was really a one dollar bill “raised” to a ten by a counterfeiter, because in Gasoline Alley, no one knew what Outer Slobbovia bank notes were supposed to look like. This lesson [put your denominations in counters] was learned the hard way in the early 1800s. And later, banknotes became standardized so they all had the same design with different lettering, and under strict government oversight.)
Anyhow, note that both the milliard milpengő and the milliard b-pengő were issued–or at the very least, authorized legally–in June of 1946, on the same day, the third. Two notes, one worth a million of the other, issued the same day! The implication is that they already expected that money would drop in value by a factor of a million in short order. Can you imagine that hundred dollar bill in your wallet on June 1 being worth 1/100th of a cent at the end of the month? Or imagine a “strap” (banker’s bundle) of one hundred, one hundred dollar bills on June 1st not being worth picking up off the ground at the end of the month, because it’s only worth what a Lincoln head cent was on the first of the month.
Of course we can’t really know from this issue date alone that it took a month to drop to a millionth of its prior value.
Maybe it was even faster.
Taking a look at the exchange rates allows us to fill things in. On the first of January 1927, when the pengő was introduced, the US dollar was worth 5.26 pengős. On the 31st of March, 1941, it was 5.06 pengős (the pengő had gone up, unsurprising because the dollar had been devalued by Roosevelt when he confiscated the gold). By the 30th of June, 1944 it was 33.51 to the dollar. Not too bad for an Axis country losing the war. At the end of August, 1945, it had slipped to 1320. So in a bit over a year, it had become worth about 1/40th what it was worth the year before. Bad for anyone who had pengős stuffed in his mattress because he didn’t trust banks, but people could adapt to this if they had to.
But Hungary was allied with Germany, and had lost the war. The Soviets demanded huge reparations, and were plundering Hungarian industry. (Communists rarely produce anything; they subsist by looting others. See any downtown Democrat-run city for evidence that this continues to be true today.) The US actually had custody of Hungary’s gold reserves; the puppet communist government the Soviets were setting up couldn’t use that.
Three months later at the end of November, however, it took 108,000 pengős to buy a dollar. Yowza, almost a hundred fold loss in three months. But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. And that’s what the pengő was now worth: nothing! By the end of March, 1946, 1,750,000 pengös to the dollar. One month later–one month later— it was 59 billion pengős to the dollar, 59 followed by nine zeros. A month after that it was 42 quadrillion pengős, 42 followed by fifteen zeros. (And yes these are all short scale, “Murrican” numbers.)
The next datapoint on Wikipoo is 10 July 1946. 460 octillion pengős to the dollar. That’s 27 zeros after the 460, or 28 after the 46. In forty days, May 30 to July 10, not a million, but more than a ten trillionfold (thirteen zero) loss in value had occurred, from 15 zeros after a 42, to 28 zeros after a 46. That’s equivalent to a dollar becoming worth a dime in three days, and then the cycle repeating itself twelve more times. A millionfold loss in a month? Ha, ha, ha! What an unicorn-fart-sniffing optimist I was!
That note I started this off with had 21 zeros built into it. It would have taken 460 million of these notes to equal one dollar. But there weren’t 460 million of them. Hungary, after all, doesn’t have all that many people in it, so why produce so many notes of one denomination?
It turns out these notes were produced but never issued–the 100 million b. pengő, one tenth the nominal value, was the highest note actually issued. I suspect by the time they were made they had already been overcome by events and become worthless, so why bother?
At the very end, every single paper pengő in existence, put together, was worth less than a tenth of a US cent. Now all of the pengős put together had become…nothing.
The pengő was replaced by the forint (also of 100 filler) on August 1st 1946. One forint was worth 400 octillion pengős. But that is a fictitious exchange rate since every pengő in circulation put together was worth one thousandth of a forint. No one was going to buy so much as a single forint with pengős. I remember seeing pictures of littered streets in Budapest…the gutters strewn with what had once been money. I looked just now and found this:
When money becomes garbage, because it was never really anything else in the first place
But the forint, at least was comparable to a dollar (460 octillion pengős).
The government had learned its lesson and the forint was relatively stable. In 1992 eighty forints were roughly worth a dollar. Which is not as good as it sounds, because the dollar had itself inflated quite a bit since 1946, but still a far, far cry from what happened in 1946.
There was just one more problem left for Hungary. They had used up so much good quality security paper printing pengős that they had trouble finding any to make the new forint. But this problem could be solved.
Zimbabwe was so badly off when it ran out of paper, it had to stop printing money. No one would sell them any more. And just like that the Zimbabwean inflation stopped.
Could this happen here?
Yes. If we don’t get government spending under control, something will break. Either we default on our debt or we print money to cover it, or our government really tightens its belt.
I suspect I will live long enough to hear people talking about quadrillion dollar federal debts, deficits and budgets. We’ve gone from a trillion dollar debt to almost 27 trillion in about 40 years, that’s a 27 fold increase and one more of those puts us at 729 trillion bucks, almost a quadrillion. Bush and Obola both doubled the debt. Trump will likely do the same (sorry, but that’s the truth, and yes, it is partially his fault), making it eight times as large as it was just 24 years ago. One projection says 78 trillion in 2028. Sigh.
All debts are paid. Either by the person who owes the money…or by the person who lent it. Or if the government cranks up the printing presses someday, it will be paid by third parties who have no choice in the matter. Inflation is theft.
Maybe it wouldn’t be 1946-Hungary-bad if our government took the inflation route…but it would be bad. I heard the stories of suffering in Russia during its much-less-severe inflation after the Soviet Union collapsed; many many people were on a fixed income. Hmm, $5000 a month won’t sound so hot when every dollar in existence put together won’t buy you a dust bunny.
I don’t know much about this alleged monetary shift some people talk about being imminent, but I hope it’s nothing like this, because, folks:
We don’t want this.
Disclaimer: Neither these, nor any other coins or paper money I post, are mine. With older coins, I’m going to find the best pic of one on the internet, so even if I should happen to have one, it’s not the nicest one on earth and I’ll show another…and some coins are worth more than my net worth so I certainly won’t have those!
PS: Precious metals closings, 21 August 2020 (all values are Kitco Ask):
Gold $1943.40 (it has bounced around a lot this week but was fairly steady on Friday), Silver $26.92, Platinum $926 (on sale!), Palladium $2219, Rhodium $12,200.
Remember that gold was once $20.67 by definition, and look at today’s price, and see what has happened to the dollar…it’s worth barely a 1913 cent. In fact gold actually hit $2067.20 one day not too long ago. Inflation walks among us, mostly unnoticed, but piling up as time goes on.
Another PS: You might wonder what the Hungarians used if they never issued the milliard b pengő note, and clearly they’d need huge denominations, T pengős, Q pengős, and so on. Well they had created an adópengő, literally “tax pengő” for budget planning purposes, but it became a real piece of money in July, worth 2 of those bills I started with apiece. It was supposed to hold its value. It didn’t but it fell much less rapidly than the regular pengő. When the 100 million b. pengő note became worthless, the adópengő took over…for the rest of the month.
Important Reminder
To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!
Remember Hong Kong!!!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0%3F
I hope this guy isn’t rotting in the laogai somewhere!
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
Perhaps the Clinesmith thing will turn out–at long last!! to be the fatal crack in the damned dam.
As for that fraudster Sundance…it sounds like he’s delaying now. His bluff has been called. Well, putting it that way assumes Barr is actually paying attention to the pipsqueak.
We need to get going on Justice.
A Reminder Of Today’s Issues.
Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.
Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump
Needs to happen, soon.
Musical Interlude
When I was in exile in the People’s Respublik of Kalifornia (PRK), I came to associate this bit of music with my beloved home state of Colorado. No obvious reason for it but to at least one friend of mine at the time it made perfect sense.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
Please note that our menu has changed, please listen to all of the options.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Political correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. The first rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government take your guns. 5. The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Be sure of your target and what is behind it. 9. Social Justice Warriors, ANTIFA pukes, BLM hypocrites, and other assorted varieties of Marxists can go copulate with themselves, or if insufficiently limber, may substitute a rusty wire brush suitable for cleaning the bore of a twelve or ten gauge.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Coin of The Day
As a coin collector, I have a superpower.
I can make change for a cent. Not that I ever would, not this way.
Yes, there is such a thing as a half cent. And it weighed in at 84 grains (yes, the same grains as bullets and powder), pure copper. Our current cent, before mid-1982 when it suffered the ignominy and debasement of being made out of zinc with a copper coating on it, weighed 48 grains, making the half cent 1.75 times as massive as the old “small cent.”
So if you own two of these, you can break a cent, but you’d be ill-advised unless the cent is a very valuable one.
Before 1857, the United States had what collectors now call “Large Cents” (in contrast to the current “Small Cent”) and these half cents. Many collectors specialize in these coins, especially the large cents, to the point where there’s even a sizeable club (Early American Coppers) dedicated to collecting them. They’ll collect them not only by date, but by variety–every die that was used to make these had minor (and sometimes not so minor) differences, and people have studied those for at least a hundred and fifty years. And if you think those people surely have no lives, how about the ones who specialize in one die pair and try to collect coins from when that die was new versus when it was falling apart and had to be retired?
Collectors consider large cents to be totally different from small cents. A reference book on US coins, which is typically divided into chapters by denomination, will of course distinguish between the silver dollar and the gold dollar as well (and the silver three cent piece, and nickel three cent piece, and the half dime and the copper-nickel “nickel”). But even though large cents and small cents are (er…dammit until 1982) largely made of copper, they get separate chapters.
Half cents are not collected as avidly as large cents, and are thus considerably less expensive even though there are many fewer of them out there. (Should there suddenly be a great interest in them, their values will climb, quite a bit.)
The problem that these coins faced when they were current, was their weight. 168 grains for a large cent is more than midway between the weight of a (silver) quarter and a (silver) half dollar, yet the bugger was only worth one cent. They saw little use outside of major cities, but even that demand was enough that the mint cranked them out, every year between 1793 and 1857, except for 1815 when no copper was available. People didn’t care for the weight, but they really had no alternative.
The half cent was also bulky for its value, but the denomination itself was nearly useless, so the mint made them only sporadically. Consider the time spans of the different designs: Liberty Cap (1793-1797) to Draped Bust (1800-1808) to Classic Head (1809-1836) to Braided Hair (1840-1857). There are gaps between all but two of these designs when no half cents were made. None were made from 1812-1824. And the first ten years of Braided Hair half cents were only proof specimens made for collectors, none for general use.
One technological change partway through the series was that in 1831, the mint started using a new press that would actually put the coin in a collar while being struck, instead of letting the thing squeeze out between the dies while being struck.
The mint only made operating profit by making cents and half cents. Silver and gold coinage was specified to be of full intrinsic value, but the copper in a large cent, at least initially, was worth less than a cent. But as the 19th century proceeded, that profit became smaller and smaller, and eventually it was decided to do something different.
And now for the rest of the story…
Midway through 1857, the small cent was introduced, and the old coppers, both of them, discontinued, but it wasn’t quite the small cent you knew as a child. It was considerably thicker, and was 12% nickel. That nickel additive had the effect of making it much more difficult for the cent to tarnish; even today they are all a light tan color. However the metal was harder, meaning it was more difficult to strike into coins. The cent weighed in at 72 grains (an extra 50% in weight compared to the pre-1982 cents we grew up with), and bore a flying eagle on its face.
They were instantly popular with the public, and ironically coin collecting got a considerable boost (almost nobody collected coins before that date) as nostalgia for the large cent and half cent increased and people decided to save them.
That was changed in 1859 to an Indian head, the reverse wreath changed the next year, and finally, in 1864 the cent was made thinner and the nickel was removed from the alloy, bringing it to its “modern” spec of 48 grams of copper (with a small admixture of zinc and, usually, tin). The cent stayed in that form with two major design changes until 1982. (In 1909 Lincoln replaced the Indian and wheat ears replaced the old wreath on the reverse, and in 1959 the Lincoln Memorial replaced the wheat ears, both events in celebration of major anniversaries of Lincoln’s birth in 1809). There was one exception; in 1943 the cent was made of galvanized steel to save copper for the war effort (unfortunately, it was too easily confused with a dime in that color).
The lowly cent, disregarded and now suffering the shame of being made out of a metal regarded as the very epitome of “cheap,” indeed has a long and honorable past, even including a time when it had a lesser sibling, the half cent.
Standard disclaimer: Neither these, nor any other coins I show here, are ones I own. In some cases (but by no means all or even most of them) I own a similar coin or coins. But even when I do, it’s not as nice as the pictures I find on the internet.
Obligatory PSA/Reminder
Just one more thing, my standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!
Remember Hong Kong!!! And remember the tens of millions who died under the “Great Helmsman” Chairman Mao.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0%3F
I hope this guy isn’t rotting in the laogai somewhere!
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
For my money the Great Helmsman is Hikaru Sulu (even if the actor is a dingbat).
Trump advancing (not retreating) to a forward command post. He says we won’t be seeing him for a while. Whirlpool. And so on, covered thoroughly by you all on Friday.
I dunno, I’ve been disappointed so many times in the past…but this might really be IT.
You all have been analyzing and speculating on this quite a bit, so I’ll just add an editorial statement:
Bring it on!!! We’re not tired of winning. Far from it:
We haven’t even begun to win!
And so we could well, this very weekend and upcoming week, begin to see THIS last big item finally be addressed.
Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.
Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. The gun is always loaded. 4a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 5. Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 6. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 7. Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Mandatory Coin
Now it wouldn’t be one of my posts without a coin, would it?
But first I’m going to address the current situation with precious metals–the best basis ever found for real money. Well, maybe I will, somewhere in the ramble you’re about to read or skip.
I am involved in coin collecting, and there is a branch of the hobby that concerns itself with “primitive” money, except that’s not PC, so it’s now called other things, including “traditional” money. I’m talking about things people used for money before coins were invented (or before they had become aware of coins), such as cowrie shells, beads, obsidian, wampum, elephant tails (really!), Yapstones, and on and on.
Before there was money there was barter. I could trade you two chickens that I had raised for an arrowhead that you had made. The problem was getting both you and me to agree that an arrowhead was worth two chickens. Actually, it had to be worth less than two chickens to you (or you’d not want to give up your arrowhead for two chickens) and more than two chickens to me (or I’d not want to give up my chickens for an arrowhead).
What if we both think it’s more appropriate to trade one and a half chickens for an arrowhead? So basically a chicken is worth about 2/3rds of an arrowhead?
Then we’re stuck, because two thirds of a physical arrowhead isn’t worth a damn thing to anyone, neither is half a chicken to you if you want to use it for laying eggs, and even if you want to eat it, you’re going to have to eat that half a chicken tonight, and I’ll have to eat my half tonight too, rather than feeding it until next week.
If there were something we could use to represent half a chicken, I could pay you a chicken and that item, and we’d be square. You could come back to me later–next week, a month from now, and cash in two of those tokens for half a chicken each, and get a whole chicken.
That’s the function money serves. And, honestly, anything that serves that function is money. Gold and silver in pre-sized lumps can do it. Gold and silver not in convenient standard lumps can do it too. A “talent” of gold, or silver, in the Bible is not a coin–coins hadn’t been invented yet by the time of the Old Testament–but a talent was roughly seventy pounds, so the Bible was talking about a very substantial weight of gold or silver. But so can cowrie shells and wampum under the right circumstances. Our colonial forebears even resorted to using tobacco leaves since Mama England didn’t want us to have coins. And of course that elaborately printed paper in our wallets, backed by nothing other than the willingness of the government to accept it as a tax payment, is also money.
Here’s a definition of money, from one of those books on primitive traditional money (improving on a definition put forth by none other than Alan Greenspan): Anything used to make a payment that the recipient trusts can be reused to make another payment.
Using this, you may think you paid an arrowhead for two chickens, but if I am thinking I can’t buy something with this arrowhead, but I accepted it because I think I will find it useful, then the arrowhead is not money.
But then the Scythians, in the seventh to fifth century BCE, seem to have actually used arrowheads for money. Other cultures used ax heads, both stone and metal.
Metal works well as money, because it can be broken up into smaller and smaller pieces, which can be readily valuated (by weighing them). It will last a long time in storage, and it can’t just be produced without limit, especially if it’s gold, silver, or copper (or in ancient times…tin–very scarce, available in only a few places far from civilization, and absolutely essential to make bronze). And metals have uses in their own right, so they are valuable on their own. So it tends to hold its value.
The kingdom of Lydia took the next step at about the time Scythians were making arrowheads, making standardized metal lumps and stamping them; people could be assured that those lumps had a specific amount of gold and silver in them because they had the king’s emblem on them, and were interchangeable. That was the birth of coinage and modern money that came in denominations.
And those first coins were made of a mixture of gold and silver (electrum), though later on there were gold issues, and silver issues.
http://www.dmudd.net/hist697/images/slide3or.jpg
The reverse isn’t a real design, it’s actually an inset of a punch, used to hold the silver in place while it was being struck. Some of the Greek city states had the same sort of thing on their coinage. MUCH larger than actual size.
The Lydian coins are available today, but it was Athens in the 400s BCE that really took this and ran with it, producing drachm coinage, most famously the four drachma piece, the tetradrachm. (Collectors of ancient money in the US pronounce drachm “dram” but it’s likely more like drakh-m, where the kh is like the ch in Bach. But we’re lazy and don’t pronounce the ch.)
Athens became incredibly rich as a result of owning a silver mine in Attica, and also collecting tribute from the Athenian League. This started out as a defensive alliance against the Persians–member city-states could contribute either ships (with crews) or money for their upkeep. But it turned into an empire when those ships were turned against city states that decided to quit paying.
A stunning example of an Athenian tetradrachm. I know (from having seen ones made with Athena’s head off center) that the die for the obverse includes a large crest on her helmet. The reverse is Athena also, in the form of an owl. The letters to the right read A TH E, for Athens, or perhaps for Athena.
Centuries passed, empires rose and fell, and during the Renaissance, bankers started accumulating vast amounts of coinage in silver (heavy) and gold (very heavy, more so than lead). They’d have to make payments to each other, and have to ship heavy, valuable crates of coins at great expense and risk, but…if they trusted each other, they could do things on paper. The paper came to represent the coins, in particular the metal in the coins, and this eventually developed into paper money. Which, if honest, can be good stuff…silver certificates being one example of an honest paper money.
The Chinese actually had paper money first…on arrival in China, you had to deposit your silver, you got a paper certificate that stood for the silver, and could be spent as though it were silver. You could get your silver back, when you left China. The system worked well, as long as you could trust the government not to just print up certificates in excess of the silver. And that is a hazard with bank notes (actually issued by banks) too, where they are supposed to be backed by something valuable (assets of the bank, be they coinage or loans), but might not be.
The United States, in the days of the gold standard, had paper money and actual coins (known as “specie”); before 1862 the paper money was issued and backed (or not!) by banks, after 1862, it was a combination of banks (heavily supervised and regulated) and the US government. As for the money–a gold coin was unadulterated money. Because a certain weight of gold was by definition a dollar. At the mint, even before the design had been stamped on, say, a $5 gold piece, it wasn’t just worth five dollars, it was five dollars. Great care was taken to ensure the proper weight of each individual piece. A room full of workers (women, because they were believed to have better attention to detail) would handle each blank coin, weigh it, and spin the edge against a file if it was overweight, or reject it if it were underweight–back to the melting pot. They got to be so good they could tell if the piece were over or underweight before they weighed it. Some tolerance was allowed–a little extra or a little under was OK, the government would treat it as being exact. Bags of coins were adjusted with the slightly under or overweight finished coins so the bag would average out precisely (and too much correction needed would condemn the whole bag). The precision of the scales that had to weigh heavy bags of coins was remarkable, the weight of a single scrap of paper could throw them off. (Very precise mechanical engineering and craftsmanship like this is becoming a lost art.)
The silver in, say, a dime, wasn’t worth as much as ten cents; it didn’t become ten cents until it was stamped. (After 1853, that is.)
Which finally, and most circuitously, brings me to the price of gold.
Between 1834 and 1933 the gold coinage was such that a troy ounce of gold either equaled (before we went on a full gold standard) or was $20.67. And a couple of days ago, when I looked at the price of gold, it was $2067.10 per ounce…a hundred times higher.
I’ve heard in the past, statements that gold holds its value, with the implication that gold is of constant value.
Bullshit. At least with regard to the constant part.
It’s just as subject to supply and demand as eggs, beef, cars, and beanie babies. In 1979-1980, gold skyrocketed from the low $300s to $850 in a few weeks, and most of that happening in the last few days (it went up sixty bucks in one day), and then it dropped again, just about as quickly as it had gone up.
Are you going to tell me that what was happening was that the dollar was plummeting (which I could and did believe)…but then it turned around and zoomed back upwards? Come on, this was the Carter administration; the dollar was in no way capable of skyrocketing under his (mis)management!
So no, gold is not of constant value, but it will always have great value, and the long-term average is fairly–though not perfectly–stable. A $20 gold piece would buy you a nice suit in the 1920s. Today, it still will, though today you’d certainly get change.
And even in the days of the gold standard, of specie being regarded as “real” money, gold could rise and fall, and so could silver, and they could rise and fall relative to each other. In the 1700s silver slipped from being 1/14th as valuable as gold, to 1/15; it slipped some more during the early 1800s and messed up our money supply; we had to remove some gold from the gold coinage in 1834 to compensate. Then gold was found in California, and it dropped relative to silver, silver started disappearing from commerce…until in 1853 we lessened the weight of silver coins (and from that point forward, silver coinage became worth less than face value, and was strictly controlled in quantity, since it was freely exchangeable for gold, which was worth its face value). Not a month ago, there was a day when it took 100 ounces of silver to equal an ounce of gold; and I remember that happening a couple of times in the late 90s too. Silver lately has gone up faster than gold, so it’s worth well over 1/100th as much as gold today. In fact, right now: Gold 2,017.70 and silver 27.58, ratio 73.158+ to 1. (Imagine if we had a bimetallic standard this last month, what chaos there would be as people dumped their gold dollars for silver dollars, or vice versa; you’d be going into shops and be offered a discount for paying in gold instead of silver, or vice versa, depending.)
In any case, sometimes people trying to buy some gold buy it in the form of old $20 gold pieces. These contain almost an ounce of gold. Some of them are common enough (especially in slightly circulated condition) that their price is basically today’s price of gold plus a small constant. Nevertheless, there are people who collect them, and they’re seeing the prices go up and up, not because they’re becoming rare, but because gold is becoming pricier.
Of course some gold coins are genuine rarities (or in top condition) and will sell for quite a bit more than the gold that’s in them–those prices aren’t affected much by the price of gold.
If memory serves, I’ve shown you both of the major designs of $20 gold pieces in the past. But why not a repeat? (You got your coin of the week twice over with the stater and the tetradrachm.)
Liberty Head, 1850-1907. The reverse shield style changed in 1866 when “In God We Trust” was placed within the circle of stars. Now I said 1850, but this is an 1849. This is the one and only 1849, produced as a “proof of concept” rather than for issue, and it’s now in the Smithsonian.
The St. Gaudens (named so because the artist who did the design was Augustus St. Gaudens, a very famous sculptor from the end of the era when fine art was still…art. (Not the greatest picture ever, but at least it is not subject to copyright issues.) In 1908 “In God We Trust” was added above the sun on the reverse. Also, in 1907 the first few thousand of these were struck in a much higher relief, a variant regularly called America’s Most Beautiful Coin.
OK…well, I’m not done yet. You’ll get a third coin today, in honor of Shitstorm Saturday.
What about platinum?
You can buy, today, platinum “eagles” in ounce, half ounce, quarter ounce, and tenth ounce sizes, just as you can with gold. This is what we call non-circulating legal tender (NCLT) because even though there’s a face value and the coin is legal tender, you’d have to be an idiot to spend an ounce of gold or platinum at the face value given on the coins ($50 and $100, respectively). There’s generally very little collector value in such coins; their value is tied to their content, much like in the good old days.
In the past, gold and silver were used as money, straight across, at face value, close to intrinsic or “melt” value. Was platinum ever used as money?
The answer, just barely, is “Yes.”
Platinum wasn’t even known to Europeans until close to 1700, when it was found during gold panning on the Rio del Pinto in South America. Gold panning exploits the density of gold to separate it from the other bits of sand in stream beds. Platinum, being slightly denser than gold, even, would also pan out, and since no one really understood what it was, and no one considered it valuable, the platinum particles had to be painstakingly separated from the gold. It was a nuisance! It was called “Pinto silver” for a while, and even today the name “platinum,” or especially the slightly older “platina” is cognate with “plata”–silver in Spanish.
(No one went screaming “Platinum! I’m rich!!!” It was more like “What the hell is this caca blanca doing in my oro?”)
Eventually some industrial uses–like sulfuric acid boiler tanks–were found for the stuff, even though we couldn’t build a furnace to melt it, and it became more valuable than silver, and less so than gold. [Any other metal besides gold would dissolve in the acid, gold was way too expensive and soft, and glass tended to shatter under pressure, which when dealing with sulfuric acid was really, really bad–shards of glass flying everywhere, with boiling sulfuric acid spraying with it to boot.]
Another deposit was discovered in the Ural mountains in Russia. Peasants had been finding the nuggets for years and using them for shot (!!!), blasting what today would be hundreds of dollars’ worth of platinum into waterfowl for dinner. Miners moved in, and started producing the metal, as well as the other allied platinum-group metals (rhodium, palladium, osmium, and iridium–ruthenium had not been discovered yet).
Russia’s monetary system was a bit of a mess. There were paper rubles, backed by the full faith and credit of the Tsar’s government…but they traded at four paper rubles to the silver ruble. In 1826, Nicholas I, newly on the throne, decided to do something about this. Part of this was to temporarily produce high denomination silver, but a silver five ruble piece would be unwieldy. But the Demidov family, a powerful family, owned the platinum mines, platinum was worth a bit more than silver so…the three ruble platinum coin was born. It was the size of a quarter ruble piece…but weighed twice as much. It was made out of platinum sponge (we still couldn’t melt the stuff)–in itself the coin is a technical acheivement. They tended to look kind of ugly because of it being sponge platinum…but some DID circulate.
Just a bit smaller than a quarter–and weighed almost as much as a half dollar. The inscription reads (in the center) “3 rubles in silver” and around the edge, “2 zol. 41 dol. [a weight in traditional Russian units] of pure Urals platinum” (It wasn’t. Pure, I mean–plenty of iron and iridium and since it was sponge the coin was probably about 5 percent air, too.)
The coins were guaranteed convertible into silver at face value, so they could take the place of paper money in “small” denominations (a ruble was a lot of money back then).
The same search I used to find this also showed images of ones that are worn and have undoubtedly been used in commerce. So yes, these DID circulate, a bit.
That coin appeared in 1828. It saw just enough use to encourage the Russian government to come out with a six ruble piece in 1829 and a 12 ruble piece in 1830, but those never got any traction. Russia would send them out to settle trade accounts and eventually get them right back again, so they just piled up in the treasury. (I guess you could say that outside of Russia, they were not money.)
The whole series was discontinued in 1845. Paper money was now on par with silver, so there was no need for these coins–and besides, they contained somewhat less than their face value in platinum, so they were targets for counterfeiters. The coins in the treasury were then sold for scrap, in fact the entire world demand for platinum was satisfied for years by these scrapped coins. Today, the 6 and 12 ruble pieces are all rarities, some excruciatingly so. Three ruble coins are expensive, but at least they’re much less than half as expensive as the six ruble pieces.
Platinum itself was eventually found to have many, many better uses than sulfuric acid boilers, and industrial demand made it more valuable, ounce per ounce, than gold by the early 20th century–at which point, then people wanted it for jewelry. Even today, it’s rarer. All the platinum ever mined would fit in a 26 foot cube–my house could handle it–while all the gold ever mined would need a 60 foot cube. But as of today, it’s less valuable. Supply and demand.
[End note: As much as counterfeiters are loathed, they did function back then to keep governments honest about the money they issued. Issue an undervalued coin, and it will be counterfeited. If it’s actually worth what it says its worth in precious metal, the counterfeiters have no reason to bother–unless they can fake the metal itself, which they did try to do…sometimes with the use of platinum, but that’s a very interesting story for another day.]
Disclaimer: Neither these, nor any other coins I post, are mine. With older coins, I’m going to find the best pic of one on the internet, so even if I should happen to have one, it’s not the nicest one on earth and I’ll show another…and some coins are worth more than my net worth so I certainly won’t have those!
Important Reminder
To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!
Remember Hong Kong!!!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0%3F
I hope this guy isn’t rotting in the laogai somewhere!
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
I keep hoping to be able to describe the day as “Shitstorm Saturday” but it hasn’t quite happened yet.
Which saves me from the dilemma of trying to decide whether I should call it a “fecal tornado” to be more polite.
Edit to add: Colorado Statehood Day
Just realized today is Colorado’s Statehood Day. August first 1876, we became the 38th state. And Old Glory had 38 stars on it for the next thirteen years (nearly a record at the time, though the interval between Missouri and Arkansas being admitted with 16 years, and we stuck with the 15 star flag for a lot longer than we should have–long enough for it to be “the flag [that] was still there”). And we picked up one of our nicknames, “Centennial State.”
So we’ve now been giving 144 years of service to Californians and Texans as a place to go to when they realize their mistake. Though at least Texans usually go home after tourist season ends. Californians inflict their bad political choices on us.
A Reminder Of Today’s Issues.
Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.
Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump
Needs to happen, soon.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
Please note that our menu has changed, please listen to all of the options.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Political correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. The gun is always loaded. 4a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 5. Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 6. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 7. Be sure of your target and what is behind it. 8. Social Justice Warriors, ANTIFA pukes, BLM hypocrites, and other assorted varieties of Marxists can go copulate with themselves, or if insufficiently limber, may substitute a rusty wire brush suitable for cleaning the bore of a twelve or ten gauge.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Coin of The Day
I realized today that the dollar is five hundred years old this year.
We didn’t invent dollars, the Bohemians did. There was a major silver strike in the town of Joachimsthal in the early 1500s, and the only way, politically, to export that silver was to make it into big coins–about the size and weight of the silver dollar, and this became a joachimsthaler. This got shortened to thaler in due course, or even taler. (Pronounced like “taller” not “tailor” or “tailer,” that last being Slick Willie’s only possible interest in it.) The Dutch, who traded with the 13 colonies, especially during the French and Indian War (a/k/a the Seven Years War, which really was the first true world war with fighting on at least three continents), called coins this size daalers, and they had a lot of them, from trading with Spain. There the denomination was the eight reales, hence the piece of eight, and a reale we called a “bit” (so now the origin of the slang “two bits” for a quarter is clear).
Trying to find a good image of one of these coins is a bit of a challenge, and the best one I could find was tiny, so here goes:
Russia didn’t have large silver coins at the time. The ruble was a bookkeeping unit only, consisting of two hundred dengas, but there was an attempt in the 1650s to introduce a ruble coin. It was seriously underweight (weighed less than 200 dengas), so it didn’t go over too well, and the Russians were in any case trying to use an outdated (even then) technology to strike them.
I bring this up because those coins were known as yefimoks…because instead of dropping the first part of the word joachimsthaler, they dropped the last part, and Yefim is the Russian equivalent of Joachim (Jonathan). Russia went through many rounds of inflation in the 1700s, to the point where the proper weight of a ruble was now less than a thaler, not more, and they tried to introduce a “heavy ruble” to combat inflation, and also issued 1.4 and 1.5 ruble coins periodically, about the right weight to match a thaler.
The English “Crown” of five shillings was also considered roughly the same, in fact large silver coins about the weight of a dollar are often called crowns as a generic class by people who collect foreign coins–some even specialize in the size, collecting coins of that size (but very different denominations) from countries all over the world. (Pesos, rubles, crowns, thalers, dollars, yen, guilders, florins, five mark pieces…those large silver coins turned out to be pretty popular.) The man most famous for popularizing that line of collecting was named John S. Davenport.
Of course NONE of these units of money are worth what they used to be; the US Dollar has probably eroded less than the others, certainly less than the yen, ruble, and peso, but it has still eroded quite a bit.
But returning to Joachmisthal.
When the Curies were doing their investigations of the radioactivity present in uranium ore even after the uranium had been removed, they got their ore from a place called Jachymov, in Bohemia. Ultimately that line of research led to people discovering atomic fission, and thence to the Bomb. And when the Nazis tried to pursue their own version of the Manhattan Project, their source of uranium was Jachymov, which after all was in the Sudentenland, which they had seized in 1938.
What does that have to do with Joachimsthal? Jachymov is merely the Czech name (and thus the current best name) for the town once known as Joachimsthal.
So it turns out the Dollar and the Bomb both came from the same place.
Standard disclaimer: Neither these, nor any other coins I show here, are ones I own. In some cases I own a similar coin or coins, but by no means all or even most of them. [At least one place didn’t appreciate me linking to their images a couple of weeks ago. We’ll see how this one goes.]
Obligatory PSA/Reminder
Just one more thing, my standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!
Remember Hong Kong!!! And remember the tens of millions who died under the “Great Helmsman” Chairman Mao.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0%3F
I hope this guy isn’t rotting in the laogai somewhere!
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
For my money the Great Helmsman is Hikaru Sulu (even if the actor is a dingbat).
I imagine that our anti-vaccine folks are starting to feel as confused as a chameleon in a bag of Skittles, just as the Left (which would be opposed to oxygen if Trump were to explicitly endorse it) is. Because PDJT is obviously pushing hard for a vaccine. And similarly for the very anti-mask amongst us, as Trump appears to have endorsed face masks as well, at least in certain contexts.
I think it’s all part of the effort to ensure we are able to physically (and safely) go to the polls in November, an effort to force the Left to concede that it’s safe to do so–after all, the Left claims masks work and the Left loves vaccines uncritically.
It does matter, greatly, what sort of vaccine it is too, as Wolfm00n pointed out yesterday. The Gates vaccine? No fricking way, and I am by no means anti-vaccine as a general rule. But those who approve of any vaccine, qua vaccine, will be forced to accept the Trump-approved vaccine or admit that sometimes a vaccine is a bad idea. Unless they truly can engage in Orwellian doublethink: the ability to simultaneously accept two obviously contradictory ideas as true.
Orwell was very good, not just at pointing out the value to a dictatorship of having a monopoly on the media and the historic record, but also the sorts of thought processes such a dictatorship would want its mid-level people to have. Doublethink is essential for the low-level people to remain loyal to the movement, otherwise they could be redpilled if the media monopoly cracks.
Reminder of the Most Important Thing about the MAGA Movement
Yes, I am going to harp on this, because it is the most important thing President Donald J. Trump has to do, and he hasn’t really gotten started on it yet.
Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.
Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. The gun is always loaded. 4a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 5. Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 6. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 7. Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Mandatory Coin
Now it wouldn’t be one of my posts without a coin, would it?
In honor of the fact that gold has been skyrocketing…well, let me point out that silver has been skyrocketing even more. It was in the eighteen dollar range while gold was in the upper $1700s, and now it is in the twenty two dollar range now that gold has just poked over $1900. In other words, silver is climbing relative to gold, and gold is climbing against the dollar.
The Krugerrand, which was a thing before bullion coins were fashionable. For some reason, Krugerrands tend to look browner, even a dull bronze color, than most gold coins, which tend to be an orangish-yellow.
There was a time, not too long ago, that if you wanted gold in a coin form, and didn’t want to pay extra for collector value, the South African Krugerrand was it. Actually, it wasn’t all that long before that, when it was illegal for US citizens to hold gold bullion at all. Exceptions were made for coins with collector value, because their primary value wasn’t the gold in them.
(Much of our then-common gold went overseas to Europe after FDR tried to confiscate it, and has been gradually repatriating to the US market ever since it became legal again in the 1970s.)
Once gold became re-legalized here, bars and Krugerrands were the main options; then other countries got into the act, including Canada, Austrilia, the then-Soviet Union, Red China, and of course the USA. At this point, apparently, the USA is the market leader! (My avatar is a picture of the reverse of the US series.)
The US coinage actually has favorable tax treatment (unless something changed in the Trump tax cuts). Coins and coin collections are always taxed at the sort term capital gains rate of 28% even if you’ve held onto them for more than two years…except for the US silver, gold, platinum and palladium eagles, which drop to the long term rate after two years.
Should one run off and buy gold, since it’s going up so quickly? Not so fast. It’s going up too quickly. This shows the signs of being a speculative spike or bubble, and therefore, only if you have nerves of steel and are willing and able to cut out just when it seems as if you should stay in, can you go in and hope to get out before it collapses. For the rest of us mortals (including me), it’s too likely you’ll be burned. More likely it’s a good time to sell.
But people who bought gold twenty or so years ago when it was under $300 an ounce are sitting pretty.
Disclaimer: Neither this, nor any other coin I post, is mine. With older coins, I’m going to find the best pic of one on the internet, so even if I happen to have one, it’s not the nicest one on earth…and some coins are worth more than my net worth so I certainly won’t have those! As far as Krugerrands go, I’d rather own the US gold eagles, if nothing else because of the favorable tax treatment, and besides the brown color of the Krugerrand is ugly.
Important Reminder
Just one more thing, my standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!
Remember Hong Kong!!!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0%3F
I hope this guy isn’t rotting in the laogai somewhere!
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
Well, it worked last time. I said there wasn’t much happening and the Wayfair story broke, bigtime.
So let’s see.
(Well, it’s worth a shot!)
Truth to tell, I’ve been so dang busy I haven’t been able to keep up here, so for all I know the entire Deep State (and its Derp State affiliate, for people like Maxine Waters) got arrested.
A Reminder Of Today’s Issues.
Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.
Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump
Needs to happen, soon.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Political correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. The gun is always loaded. 4a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 5. Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 6. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 7. Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Coin of The Day
Funny thing happened to me the other day.
I got a Susan B. Anthony dollar in my change. The high school/college age cashier mistook it for a quarter, but I saw that undecagonal inner edge, looked again, saw it was Susie B. with the Apollo 11 patch design on the reverse, and handed it back, telling her it was a dollar. She eventually believed me, I think, but was going to forget to give me the quarter she still owed me until I reminded her.
But no, I’m not going to tell the story of the “Carter Quarter” (which should be called the Carter/Clinton quarter as they were issued again in 1999). But I will show you a picture, just to remind you (and educate your kids/grandkids).
Susan B. Anthony dollar, 1999 P. These were made, apparently, because the huge number made in 1979 had finally run out, and the “Golden Dollar” wasn’t due to start until the next year.
I’m going to tell the story of another failure, the worst.
You see, back in the 1870s someone thought we needed a twenty cent piece. Apparently, in the west, no one bothered with half dimes or nickels (and no, they’re not the same thing–the half dime was a silver coin half the weight of a dime; as you can imagine it was tiny). So if you bought a ten cent item, and paid a quarter for it, you got a dime back as change. Not fifteen cents, ten cents. (There was this old residual habit of thinking in terms of “bits” as in “two bits” being a quarter; a holdover from the Spanish milled “dollar” or piece of eight. Until the 1850s, those were still used when US coinage wasn’t available. Of course we didn’t have a twelve and a half cent piece, but until 1857 it was doable with dimes, half dimes, cents, and half cents.)
Someone with a large stake in the silver industry, still smarting from the 1873 coinage reform which many called “the crime of ’73” came up with the bright idea that putting twenty cent pieces into circulation would somehow solve the problem.
So we have the “double dime,” issued from 1875-1878. Like the Suzie B, a bunch were made in the first year. San Francisco made 1,155,000 of them in 1875, Philly made 38,500, and Carson City made 133,290, a sensible distribution for coins that were aimed at the Western United States. But then, the next year, Philly made 14,750 of them and Carson City made 10,000. San Francisco? ZERO. In 1877 and 1878, collector speciments, known as proof coins, were made in Philadelphia only, 1,110 pieces total for those two years. That sounds like a huge rarity, and it would be if they were business strike (“regular” coins), which would have been used, worn, and have a low survival rate, but proofs tend to have a relatively high survival rate since they are sold to people who save them not spend them, and these last two years’ coins can be had for four figures.
OK, these coins suffered from the get-go. Here’s a picture of a quarter from about that time:
All US silver at the time (other than the silver three cent piece, now that’s tiny) had this basic design. The dime and half dime (which had just been discontinued in 1873 since the nickel we know today had been invented in 1866, and it had circulated in the post civil war era while silver coinage was still being hoarded everywhere but in the West) had a wreath on the reverse, not an eagle, but the quarter, half dollar and dollar all had this eagle, and all five denominations had “Liberty Seated” on the obverse. The notion of different designs on different denominations was only beginning to dawn on people; our silver would finally get there in 1916.
The obverse is virtually identical–the word LIBERTY on the ribbon crossing the shield has raised letters, rather than recessed (incuse) letters; other than that, no real difference.
The eagle is at least a bit different; the eagle on the quarter, half, and dollar was basically the same design as was introduced in 1807 (!); this was something new–sort of. We had started creating a “Trade Dollar” in 1873, with extra silver in it, that had an eagle similar to this.
Now if you think about it, you’ll realize that not only is the design very similar, the coin has to have been nearly the same size; in fact, if the proportions were kept the same, it’d be only 7.2% smaller in diameter than a quarter. Not enough to notice.
Just as the Suzie B tried to look like it had 11 sizes (but it was the inside of the rim, not the shape of the coin itself), there was one other difference–this coin had a smooth edge, rather than reeding.
It wasn’t enough. This coin was a pain in the ass; and no one actually thought there was a point to the exercise other than silver lobbyists and their friends in Congress. Hence, the coin got canned the next year for all practical purposes, and the stake was completely driven through its heart at the end of 1878 when even proofs stopped being made.
Now if our coinage system had started with a twenty cent piece instead of a 25 cent piece, and someone had tried to introduce a quarter in 1875, the quarter would have flopped–there’s nothing God given about quarters versus double dimes. Only if the mint had said “we won’t make the old coin any more, you need to use the new denomination instead, from now on” and stuck to its guns, would the coin have succeeded–especially if banks were requested to send their old stock to the mint so that the mint could recoin it. But we were still a free country then, and that would have been too drastic a measure for no good reason.
So there’s nothing new under the sun; and we don’t learn from history. We’ll try to put out a new coin without thinking about it, and the same thing will happen as the last time.
Standard disclaimer: Neither these, nor any other coins I show here, are ones I own. In some cases I own a similar coin or coins, but by no means all or even most of them.
Obligatory PSA/Reminder
Just one more thing, my standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!
Remember Hong Kong!!! And remember the tens of millions who died under the “Great Helmsman” Chairman Mao.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0%3F
I hope this guy isn’t rotting in the laogai somewhere!
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
For my money the Great Helmsman is Hikaru Sulu (even if the actor is a dingbat).
I don’t have much to say tonight, on the “current events” front. It’s about 1 PM here in Colorado and it’s pretty quiet at the moment–and I might not have the opportunity to update this if something big does break.
Let’s see. Sullivan still being an ass, exculpatory information still coming out in fairly large buckets (I can see why some think he’s drawing this out with the knowledge and approval of people on our side). Still got Leftists of various different types running around loose in our urban areas.
And rumors that Durham is simply going to drop his work. I sure hope not.
Reminder of the Most Important Thing about the MAGA Movement
Yes, I am going to harp on this, because it is the most important thing President Donald J. Trump has to do, and he hasn’t really gotten started on it yet.
Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.
Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. The gun is always loaded. 4a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 5. Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 6. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 7. Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Mandatory Coin
Now it wouldn’t be one of my posts without a coin, would it?
What we have here is one of the rarest coins on Earth, and it’s a “legit” coin. It was intended to be used as money, was released as money, was issued legally, isn’t a pattern, a restrike or a fantasy piece. Many of the more famous rarities (1804 dollars, 1913 Liberty Head Nickels, for instance) fall into one of these later categories–they weren’t made to be used, and may have been illegally produced.
To my knowledge the lowest legitimate mintage for a coin was 24 dimes made in San Francisco in 1894. Ten are still known to exist. In this case, though, 17,796 half eagles (i.e., five dollar gold pieces) were made in 1822. But unless someone kicks over a rock and finds a stash of these things (not impossible), there are three of them today. And the Smithsonian has two of the three. So that leaves one in private hands. Apparently it sold in 1982 for $600,000, and was up for sale in 2016 in an auction but I can’t find any indication as to whether it sold and for how much, so I assume it did NOT sell–the owner was asking too much. (Surely there are people who would pay well into seven figures.)
Why so rare? I don’t know the complete answer to that, but any gold from before 1834 is tough to find. (There are relatively common dates, for instance this particular design, if you do find one for sale, will most likely be an 1813, which at least costs less than a new car even in the lower uncirculated grades.)
But I do know a large part of the reason for this is that although our original laws specified that gold and silver were to be minted at a 15:1 ratio, this had become out of date. What does that mean? That means if you took a pound of silver to the mint, you’d get a certain amount of coins back in return (this was a free service by the US mint, provided you were willing to wait for them to actually make the coins from your silver; if you wanted your coins immediately, there was a 1% charge). If you took a pound of gold in, you’d get back coins worth fifteen times as much. A pound of gold was legally worth fifteen pounds of silver. The problem was, this ratio had been slowly dropping since ancient times. In ancient Egypt, silver was actually worth more than gold; in the mid 1700s the ratio had shifted from 14:1 to 14.5:1. It was pretty much an unbroken trend, and lately the ratio is near 100:1 (sometimes over depending on the specific day).
[Note: as of 13:13 Colorado time, gold is at $1799/ozt, silver is at $18.75/ozt, for a ratio of 95.946666…:1.]
What happened when silver dropped relative to gold? The gold became over-valued. One could accumulate ten dollars of silver coinage, exchange it for ten dollars in gold (as two half eagles, most likely, as eagles weren’t being made then)…and the gold would actually be worth more. So you could melt it and sell it for more than ten dollars’ worth of silver.
So most of that old gold coinage is long gone, much of it now likely in Fort Knox or the gold “eagles” being produced today. Or in your wedding band.
Some people hung onto some pieces, and sometimes the mint or treasury had retained a small group in a vault somewhere, often all of the same date, which is why some dates are still obtainable, and others aren’t. Apparently no one happened to hang onto a stash of 1822 half eagles.
This page: https://www.pcgs.com/coinfacts/coin/1822-5/8130 discusses this coin, and has a picture of the two Smithsonian specimens as well. So now you’ve seen them all. They show prices below, but those can only be educated guesses when the coin, and I do mean the coin, as there’s only one outside of museums, hasn’t appeared on the market in 38 years.
The weight of gold was reduced in mid-1834, with a design change to go with it so you could tell the coins apart, and the problem was solved, for a while.
In the early 1850s, with the economy being flooded by gold coming out of California, the shoe was on the other foot for a change and silver became scarce. The problem was solved by deliberately reducing the silver in coinage (other than silver dollars) so much that now the silver in a coin was worth considerably less than face value, and that was the end of free coinage of silver. (This was in 1853, and the change was denoted by placing little arrowheads on either side of the date.) No more dropping your silver off at the mint to be made into coins, because they could only issue as much silver as there was gold to back it. For the rest of the century, whether or not silver should be freely coined was a huge political issue, and a large part of William Jennings Bryan’s support was from people who wanted free coinage of silver (and then, probably would have complained about the resulting inflation).
This sort of thing is why I don’t believe that we should switch to a bi-metallic monetary system…the ratios of values of the coins shift constant. Unless we set up two different, parallel denominations (silver dollars and gold ducats for instance) and let them float against each other, we’d have all sorts of problems. But there’s no reason we couldn’t go to a single-metallic system.
For some reason, my comment about you getting to look at all of the 1822 half eagles reminded me of a very old joke…from about 1980. You can update it as needed. Pedro and Luis run into each other in Mexico City. They hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years. After getting caught up on happenings in their lives, Pedro says, “Did you know that the US debt is now up to a trillion dollars?” Luis, thinking that sounds like a big number, asks, “How much is that in pesos?” Pedro answers, “All of them.”
And yes, that joke is woefully out of date, especially since our previous two presidents each doubled the national debt. Another advertisement for either a gold or a silver standard, but not both.
Disclaimer: Neither this, nor any other coin I post, is mine. [In this case: DUH!!!] With older coins, I’m going to find the best pic of one on the internet, so even if I happen to have one, it’s not the nicest one on earth…and some coins are worth more than my net worth so I certainly won’t have those!
Important Reminder
Just one more thing, my standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!
Remember Hong Kong!!!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0%3F
I hope this guy isn’t rotting in the laogai somewhere!
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
My comments
A lot of us like to highlight the following:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Declaration of Independence
I even have a hat, which has on it the Betsy Ross flag, and those words are incused onto the stripes. Very politically incorrect! And not coincidentally, very historically correct.
But as much as I like those words, to me, that’s not the most important part of the Declaration.
It’s not just that we have rights. That alone doesn’t justify replacing one government with another. And explaining why our Founders were doing that was the point of the document.
For that you need to understand what a government is for. And that is explained in the very next “self evident” truth. (Yes, the list of “self evident” truths continues after the commonly quoted part, there are more of them.)
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
Declaration of Independence
If this is the proper purpose of a government, and indeed it is, then it follows that a government that no longer does so–say, one that steps on people’s necks for the benefit of others–has failed in its only legitimate purpose and should be replaced. And indeed, that’s the very next, and last, “self evident” truth.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness
Declaration of Independence.
The document then goes on to make it clear that this should be done with great caution, and when all other options are exhausted. Then it goes on to argue that, indeed, all other options had been exhausted, so it was now time to go that route. (It’s all very neatly laid out in a logical progression, which is why it isn’t a “ramble” in the way that some of my less-carefully-crafted posts are.)
The Declaration does not mention violent overthrow, but it was clear just from looking around, during those early summer days of 1776, that the rampant, over-reaching government they were complaining about was prepared to fight to maintain its authority and its alleged “right” to be what it was. And if King George was willing to do that, then he was certainly not going to be happy to be told, “not only should you not do those things, you shouldn’t do anything here at all.”
The replacement government would, indeed, contain many mechanisms to contain it, and mechanisms to peacefully reform it, because the Founders really didn’t like having to go to war to protect their rights, even if they recognized the necessity. They did what they could to avoid it being necessary ever again.
(A monarchy claiming divine sanction cannot be reformed from within; it must either come to the realization it has no divine sanction, or undergo some other change of conscience, or be forced to reform from the outside, or be destroyed. That second-to-last one is problematic, since the monarchy is left in a position to try to regain what it had lost, and it will want to do so.)
But let’s get back to the “self evident” truths (see, this is a ramble, but I’ll get there eventually). They are, in summation, an exposition of the enlightenment-era theory of rights and government. God made us in such a way that rights are a part of our nature; governments should protect those rights, not interfere with them. If a government does interfere with the rights, it’s violating the rights it is supposed to be protecting, therefore it’s not a proper government and its victims have the right to alter or abolish it.
I can certainly get along with those who argue this way (assuming that they have a proper notion of “rights,” a rather involved subject which the Declaration doesn’t take up, no doubt due to space limitations).
But there are a couple of things that stand out to me.
I’ve been putting “self evident” in scare quotes. That’s because it’s quite clear, based on prior history, that these truths are anything but self-evident. Many, maybe even most, people don’t believe them. And the Founders were certainly aware of that, they didn’t say, “These truths are self-evident,” but rather that “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” They were self-evident to them. But not to many others.
Indeed, if the truths were self-evident, we’d never have to rise up against government, because the government would restrain itself as a matter of due course. The events of July 4, 1776 (and the war that was ongoing on that date) would have been unnecessary and this would just be another early summer day here in North America, a proud Commonwealth country.
Of course there’s another issue, too. How does one know God wanted people to have these rights? That’s the starting assumption with the Founders’ theory of rights. The Christians and Deists both believed God wants us to have rights, and that was why we have them to begin with. But it is a pretty specific statement, involving two highly abstract concepts (rights and God), and therefore it’s one which ought not to be taken as axiomatic.
So, how do you know God wants you to have these rights? Have you examined this? Now, I’m the village atheist here, so my response to the question is that it’s a non-sequitur, but most of you reading this aren’t atheists, so I actually ask in all earnest whether you have examined this issue. Because I really hope you have an answer for it that satisfies you even if it cannot satisfy me.
It’s an important point for you to be clear on, because from what I have seen, many of those who believe there is a God do not have an answer for it and thus do not believe rights come from God. In other words, they come to the same end conclusion an atheist does (“rights do not come from God”), even if for a very different reason.
So wouldn’t it be useful to have some argument for rights that gets to the correct conclusion in some totally different way? To use on both of these groups of people? Even if there weren’t a single atheist on Earth, and even if everyone on earth were Christian, it’d be a good thing to be able to prove inalienable rights exist, without referencing God.
Why? Because so much of Leftism is based on the perspective that since rights don’t come from God, they don’t actually exist. Or at the very least, they’re just a societal convention or “construct” that we simply implement through our government. It serves the Left, therefore, to put forth the notion that if rights don’t come from God, then they don’t really exist in any meaningful sense since a right granted by government can clearly be alienated at the government’s whim. So it’s not really a right.
It’s actually a false choice. Rights can exist, even if they do not come from God. But the Left just loves it when people fail to see that it’s a false choice; it delivers many Christians and almost every atheist into their camp. And anyone on our side who insists that those are the only two alternatives is therefore actually helping the Left. Because people are much more likely to align their politics with their religious convictions, than to change their religious convictions to match their politics. So if you browbeat someone into accepting that there are only two choices: 1) adopt my religion or a similar one or 2) stop believing there is such a thing as rights…they’ll usually pick number 2. Now I know that you’d much rather they pick door number 1, but realistically, by setting their desire for rights to exist against their deepest convictions, you’re much more likely to goad them into picking door number 2.
So I hope I’ve convinced you of the political utility of a non-religiously-based argument for the existence of rights, even if you yourself have no need of it.
And if you do a bit of logical deduction, you’ll realize that I believe there is one. Because A) I can’t possibly believe the religious argument and B) I’m here even so, not going off helping to demolish statues.
So what is this non-religious argument? Well…it’s long. I’m actually going to point you to an article by Craig Biddle of the Objective Standard. In that article, he summarizes Ayn Rand’s theory of rights. But he doesn’t just do that, he has to discuss her theory of morality before he can cover rights, because, it turns out, rights aren’t a political concept, but a moral/ethical one! (Rand uses those two words interchangeably, which drives the Left nuts.) That’s why a theory of politics can’t deny them, because they exist before you even start talking about politics.
“Wait,” you say, “you can’t have morals without God!” Well, wrong, but thank you for helping the Left by trying to herd all non-believers their way.
Understanding what rights are needed for, gives you a proper definition of rights (rather than a short list of examples), and you then have to tools to assess whether some alleged right really is one.
Not everyone will agree with this (Ayn Rand’s morality is hard for some to stomach, largely because she deliberately uses words with some bad connotations to describe it), nor will everyone or agree it’s the best possible defense of “rights” but, the point is, it can be done. You do not have to buy into the Left’s assertion that anyone (believer or non-believer) who does not believe God grants rights has no logical alternative but to become a Leftist, an assertion that serves the Left, not us.
A Reminder Of Today’s Issues.
Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.
Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Political correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. The gun is always loaded. 4a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 5. Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 6. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 7. Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Coin of The Day
I could point you to the Bicentennial quarter, half dollar and dollar for this. And you can fairly readily obtain proofs of these coins for a fairly low price. (They don’t turn up in circulation. Even the quarter is under-represented in circulation once one corrects for its age and its mintage; people apparently keep them when they get them.)
1794 silver dollar, the first to be minted by the United States under our Constitution.
Once the Mint had hired bonded officers, it was able to start producing silver and gold coinage, starting in 1794. A small number of these coins 1758 of them to be exact, called the “Flowing Hair Dollar” was produced in 1794, a much larger number, 160,295 in 1795. (In 1796 the portrait of Liberty was changed greatly, and the eagle was changed more subtly.) Today, best estimates are that about 4,000 to 7,500 of them still exist, with maybe 150-250 in uncirculated condition. Even the rattiest uncirculated example is going to cost around $60,000; in Extra Fine condition, it drops to a mere $12,000. But those are prices for a 1795, not a 1794. For a 1794, expect to pay an even million dollars for a ratty uncirculated coin, and $300,000 for an extra fine.
The most ever paid for a rare coin was $10,000,000, and it was for a 1794 dollar (named the “Contursi Specimen” after one of its former owners) that, under detailed examination has to be one of the first made, probably the first one made of those that still survive. (We know this because the dies that stamp out the coins themselves degrade with use; one can tell the difference between coins struck from fresh dies versus ones from dies that were getting tired, and if you’re really good at that sort of thing, you can tell new from almost, almost new, and so on.)
The Contursi Specimen 1794 dollar. Is this the very first dollar the US Mint ever made?
The coin has a silver plug (you can see part of its outline below the eagle’s beak), possibly to bring the silver content up to standard, but it also has “adjustment marks” (file marks across the surface, you can see them at 2 and 8-10 o’clock on the obverse, and 5-8 o’clock on the reverse) used to reduce the weight of the coin. Many claim that that coin was the very first US dollar made, and their argument is strong but (to me) not really conclusive. In any case a company named Legend Numismatics won the thing in an auction for over $7 million and then asked to have their bid increased to ten million. Just for bragging rights! (Legend, by the way, is a table worth stopping by at coin shows–they have absolutely killer, high grade stuff. [Just try not to drool.] I really want to go through their dumpster someday; their rejects would look fantastic in my collection. Come to think of it, I did get a coin in one of their auctions, once; it was definitely not one of their finer offerings.)
Standard disclaimer: Neither this, nor any other coin I show here, is one I own. In some cases I own a similar coin, but by no means all or even most of them. I certainly couldn’t afford to even think about paying ten million dollars for any coin.
Obligatory PSA/Reminder
Just one more thing, my standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0%3F
I hope this guy isn’t rotting in the laogai somewhere!
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
