Damn funny money, anyway

By David Bond              September 13, 2005 www.silverminers.com

We were chatting up Robert Hopper last Friday on his daily Mining and Money radio broadcast on KWAL-AM in Wallace - Silver Dollar Radio, they call it - albeit such claim is hollow in the midst of a silver country where paper Fednotes are still accepted as legal tender, the Constitution notwithstanding.

Mr. Hopper, who owns the Bunker Hill silver, lead and zinc mine - biggest such mine on the planet, and historically its most productive, thank you very much - is the Neocon/Federal ReserveBank/Addle-Pated/Liberal/Greenie Conspiracy's worst nightmare, their biggest danger, for the simple reason that he thinks and reasons clearly. Hopper gets us to thinking five days a week with his broadcast on 620 KWAL, but never so more than on Fridays, when we get to join his repartee.

Mr. Hopper has the purest of intellects, but has not trifled himself to learn the effete part of it, which means he can set down his Shakespeare and work up a curse sufficient to make a piss-ditch blush and crawl up a raise faster than the rats can get out of his way. We know - thankfully not first-hand - that he is capable of picking up an EPA bureaucrat or a claim-jumper (which is worse, or is there a difference?) by the belt-loop and the scruff of the neck and air-mailing said offender from the porches of the Bunker Hill engineers' office across the dump to the motor barn, said distance measuring an easy 200 yards.

These attributes make him especially dangerous to the government of the United Snakes and its lackeys in the Kellogg, Idaho city government, the latter of whom would rather cut off his water than shake his hand.

Needless to say, the friendship of a man the caliber of Robert Hopper is a singular pleasure, and though we live now 2,800 miles apart, he is as close to us as Wilson Wilson is to Tim Allen. And our Friday broadcasts cement the deal.

We were ranting about the price of gasoline Friday last. Post-Katrina, gas had rolled over the $3 mark and we needed to pass a pair of double-sawbucks - $40 to you children - to make the Mercury tank's vig. Whilst screeching about such outrageous prices, we were compelled to revisit a bit of our personal history, to wit:

We escaped college in 1973 and by 1975 had secured a job, night-managing a bar in Salem, Oregon, or reporting-up as the rock and roll critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, either for the princely sum of $250 per week. Back then, playwright Neil Simon said that all wealth proceeded from that $250 per week; anything above this was gravy. Gasoline in Oregon was in 1974 a hefty $0.30 per gallon. Thirty cents - and if we recall correctly we bitched about how much it cost back then. When upon our arrival in Idaho in 1978 various Jimmy Carter-induced pressures had forced gasoline up to 0 cents a gallon, we sold our automobile, preferring to bicycle and walk until rational forces re-took the marketplace.

Now, $3 per gallon divided by 30 cents makes for some easy math. Since 1975, gas has gone up 10-fold. But we were also paying a mere $95 per month to a splendid used-car dealer named Palmer ("Yep, yep you betcha, it's a beautiful day!")Williams for rent of a four-bedroom, three-storey house with a fine green front lawn, some car carcasses in the back, and an R2-D2 gas furnace in the basement.

But it dawns on us that if we bought gas at 30 cents from a $250/week salary back then, and lived to bitch about it, then if you buy into the Fed Bank's argument that all is relative during inflation, our salary should nowadays be $2,500 per week, $10,000 per month, or about $120,000 per year. Which it clearly is not. That handful of our cohort from the Willamette University Class of 1973 busting 6 figures of annual income are either physicians or barristers, still paying off their college loans (and paying down the credit tickets run up by their fat Nordstrom wives - which arguably isn't a component of inflation, but amusing to view neverthless) .

We have digressed. The nut of this rant is that our daily labour doesn't buy nearly the cool stuff that it used to, whether we are talking fuel or cars or rent or shelter or Coca-Colas, milk, tuna, bread or digital clock-radios or even Bedini stereos. Not even close! Somewhere, somehow, and by some whom, we wuz robbed!

Who robbed us of our ability to live as well at 50 as we did at 19, or 25? Who took away our dignity, our pride, our place in the pantheon of the progressive? Why are we and our friends scrambling in double-income families to furnish (Hollywood fantasies notwithstanding) the basics that Donna Reed's husband single-handedly supplied in 1958?

This is the pernicious consequence of fiat money, of Fednotes. The federal man gets to tell you what your labours are worth, and he pays you in company scrip, promissory IOUs, except you, not he, is the lender; he is the market's only buyer and the market's only seller. You plays and you pays and you pays, from the sweat of your brow and the pain of your bones until the organs finally give out.

So don't go whining to me about $3 gas. Thirty cents, fifty cents, two bucks, three bucks, at least the stuff works when I put it in the tank and gets me where I need to go.

Value received.

It's the $20 an hour that I am giving up to Greenspan that pisses me off - especially when Alan and his greenie whore at the network use it to mess with guys like Bob Hopper, or discounted working stiffs like me.