I spent a lot time trying to figure out what that whole Ron Paul “I can buy a gallon of gas for a silver dime” thing was about. It turns out that a silver dime was 2.5 grams and at a price of $42.36 per troy ounce, 2.5 grams (the weight of a silver dime) of silver is worth $3.40, almost exactly the $3.50 gallon of gas price of gas they kept throwing around.
He may be nuts, but he’s better with numbers than Megan McArdle.
Zifnab
Thank goodness for small favors.
That said, pegging the dollar to silver wouldn’t peg the dollar to the price of gas. So it’s a rather hollow statement.
Of course, this does beg the question, “Why not peg the dollar to a barrel of oil?” We’ll just set $1 equal to 1 gallon, and make gasoline the new standard currency. Then no one will be able to complain about the rising price of gas ever again, right?
Problem solved!
The Raven
The hard-currency guys usually know prices. Problem is, they think prices are as real as weights and lengths, despite all evidence to the contrary.
trollhattan
Silver dime ain’t all silver (90%) so there’s that to factor in. But as to the McGargle thing, my dog does better maths so Rep Paul likely has the edge there.
Wag
@Zifnab:
Regular or high octane?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
This is an attempt to return to a gold standard. Then, as The Raven said, you can measure the price of something in volume. If, that is, prices were controlled by something other than human greed and need.
Silver
Zifnab, you’re a goddamn genius.
With the first post too, you bastard :) Nicely done.
Zifnab
@Wag: I… I… I…
*head explodes*
jacy
That bar is so low, cockroaches can’t limbo under it.
I maintain that Ron Paul is an escaped Underpants Gnome.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Zifnab: If we create an oil standard, then the rich would have an incentive not to burn it all off.
maya
Say what? Rockerfella is giving away free gas? What streetcorner is he on? Does it come in gallon bottles? With a rag plug? Mo betta yet for the pending revoluncheon.
Jewish Steel
And after the silver and gold barons have withdrawn all their money from the banks, you will be getting paid in dimes thanks to deflation.
(Uh, I think. Still not sure I ‘get’ the gold standard)
Wag
…or base whether to use regular of high octane on your ability to be a job creator. If you are a Galtian overlord, high octane.
Small business owner, mid grade.
the rest of us-regular.
pragmatism
however livin better now. coogi sweater now. drop top BM’s ron paul’s the man girlfriend.
i wonder if ron has a coogi sweater.
i miss biggie.
Walker
Goldbugs know these things off the top of their head. My father was a goldbug and made these arguments in the 80s.
Woodrowfan
@jacy:
or the Verruca Gnome…
Woodrowfan
@Jewish Steel:
A goldbug once told me that gold was “nature’s money” which is weird on a whole lotta levels..
Sentient Puddle
I’m pretty sure the implication he’s trying to make here is that he can magically turn a price tag of #3.50 into $0.10. Mathematically speaking, I’m not sure that’s any better than being off by a few orders of magnitude.
Zam
Sweet, maybe one day everything will be like World of Warcraft.
Shlemizel - was Alwhite
Thats a maybe but you can bet the minimum wage would be less than 2 silver dimes an hour. He also does not admit that the growth of our economy would be throttled by the production of gold (primarily Russia and South Africa) and silver (Peru, Mexico and China) so there is a good chance that we couldn’t be sure of the meager resources being available. Plus with the demand for $14 Trillion in gold & silver that dime is going to be worth a couple of thousand dollars pretty quickly.
Social outcast
It’s hard to get worked up about anything Ron Paul says. He has no chance of getting elected, and the only impact he’s had on our political system is getting a lot of 20-somethings on the internet excited about explaining about how Ron Paul is awesome.
trollhattan
I jess cain’t wait ’til my merchants replace their card readers and cash registers with little scales, and we swap our wallets for gold dust pokes, by cracky.
kindness
How much is an old silver dime worth as a collectors coin?
Southern Beale
What’s a gallon of gas, asks the Nissan Leaf driver?
{ ducks }
Sorry, my smug quotient has raised drastically since I went EV.
trollhattan
@Social outcast:
He’s there for them the minute they finish “The Fountainhead.”
clone12
The goldbug’s supposed “gotcha” moment came when St Ron Paul asked Bernanke whether or not gold is “money” and Bernanke hedged on that.
Question for you goldbugs, when was the last time you actually bought food with gold coins?
MattR
@trollhattan: I already visit “merchants” who use little scales :)
jacy
@trollhattan:
It helps, too, if you imagine Ron Paul in a dusty slouch hat, a flannel shirt, dungarees, and suspenders, doing a little jig in front of the local assessor’s office, before heading down to the saloon for some rotgut.
dmsilev
Clever Hans was better with numbers than Megan McArdle.
Zam
@Social outcast: Ugh, I can’t believe I used to let them get away with the “Ron Paul is a serious person” routine.
licensed to kill time
Goldbugs sounds kinda cute and harmless.
They ought to be called Goldcranks or Goldnuts or RetroGolders or GoldOldies or maybe GoldTimers o.O
Comrade Dread
So maybe I’m not quite that well versed on this, but if we set the dollar to the price of gold, under the current scenario, wouldn’t that essentially devalue our dollar by a ratio of 1900:1?
Southern Beale
@clone12:
I love these people who use “Liberty Dollars…”
trollhattan
@MattR:
Spices can be soooooo expensive!
Southern Beale
So I know John covered this earlier this week but here’s my radical plan for the U.S. Postal Service.
Southern Beale
I think we should go back to the wampum standard. The Founders would have wanted it that way.
trollhattan
@jacy:
Ha! Too bad he didn’t have a couple of pops before the debate. Maybe he would have introduced Perry’s schnoz to his freedom fists: “Ayn” and “Rand”
CA Doc
Somebody in town has put decal letters on the tailgate of their nice new truck: RON PAUL 2012
Why would anybody ruin a paint job for that loonie? What a waste!
Cat Lady
The entire 4 years of the next Republican administration will be spent trying to figure out what the fuck any of them are talking about.
cckids
@Social outcast: Christ, yes. I’ve got 2 teenagers, they each have one friend who is like, TOTALLY, into Ron Paul. Whenever anyone who is actually tuned into reality tries to get them to logically defend his/their positions, they get quite angry. It is funny & sad at the same time.
ETA: that being said, I can at least somewhat understand the teenagers who are into utopic & imaginary-reality magical thinking. Anyone past the age of 24 still there? You are either very, very rich, and so, insulated from the real world, or just kind of slow.
El Cid
Yeah, but troy ounces are from Old Europe, and Greece spent itself into bankruptcy, therefore silver dimes would be worth nothing, because, Obama, and also shut up.
Amir Khalid
@licensed to kill time:
… or maybe Goldmembers.
JGabriel
Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I’ve never understood why people who oppose putting the dollar on a global currency standard insist on proposing … a global currency standard.
It makes no fucking sense.
.
licensed to kill time
@Amir Khalid: GoldDickers?
cleek
saw my first 2012 yard sign today: “Ron Paul 2012” !
made a mental note: there lives a dimwit.
jeffreyw
@licensed to kill time: OldenGoldies
Nutella
@JGabriel:
You’re asking for consistency? Consistency? Heh.
b-psycho
Technically speaking, pegging a dollar to = a certain amount of gold is the same as price-fixing gold (think about it in reverse…). So a true gold standard, or, really, any metal based standard, would be even less of a market standard, ironically considering who tends to endorse it. I’ve heard Paul more wants competition in currency than an actual gold standard, though references like the above blur.
That said, the ideal alternative currency system IMO would involve some kind of clear link to labor productivity, basically money that would declare the labor theory of value as a fact. Considering the current monetary system amounts to endless cock-fondling for high finance, it’s no shock that people who otherwise wouldn’t have a use for Ron Paul style economics still like the End the Fed talk.
jl
So, by making the money more expensive, we will be able to make the goods they buy cheaper in real terms?
Will Paul promise that I get my salary in the same number of silver dimes as I currently do in the crummy and bogus copper and nickel dimes?
As some commenters said above, the sound money people know all about how to calculate prices, but have no clue about what those prices mean.
licensed to kill time
@jeffreyw: The possibilities are endless…
Fwiffo
With the increasing price of silver, there is a hobby of searching for old silver coins still in circulation. You go to the bank, buy several hundred dollars worth of coins, dig through it for the silver ones, and then return them to a different bank. A box of dimes (50 rolls) typically yields 1-2 silver dimes.
You also have people doing it with pennies, hoarding all those prior to 1982, which were solid copper instead of copper plated zinc. They have about 3 cents worth of copper in them, although it’s currently illegal to melt them down. You can get machines on eBay that let you automatically sort pennies by the millions.
Coin collectors have been doing this for a while to search for older and rare coins and errors and such, but with the price of metals up, coin roll hunting has gotten huge with the Y2K bunker, gold-bug crowd.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
What Ron Paul doesn’t say in the Libertarian Creator Paradise America of the Future(tm) such oppressive statest devices as mileage standards will be no more so auto makers will be free to make cars that get five miles to the gallon. So we will still be spending $40 a fill up.
MattR
@cleek: Don’t let your kids trick or treat there.
SFPoet
@jacy:
1. Silver Dime + Gasoline= 1 Gallon of Fuel in Car
2. ???
3. Profit!
Good lord you’re right, Ron Paul is an underpants gnome!
jl
@b-psycho:
Demand a free currency for a free people!
Dayton Bank Note from Smithsonian Am Hist Museum.
http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=232
Free Bank Free Banking Freedom Note!
SF Fed Western Expansion Bank Notes
http://www.frbsf.org/currency/expansion/show.html
A free unregulated market in free unregulated currency of free unregulated whoever the F wants to print some up, will create exciting drama of booms panics and crashes, thus serving the useful social function of making the right people with the right money very rich, and separate out the quick from the dead, just like it says in the Bible.
QED
Bill Arnold
I’m not sure I understand the gold/silver bug reasoning.
Along the lines of Zifnab’s first comment,
in 1963, 1 dime (made of silver) would get you 2 7/8 ounce Hershey Bars.
That’s 1.75 ounces of Hershey Bar per silver dime.
Now, the silver in that dime ($3.40*0.9) will get you about 3+ 1.5 ounce Hershey Bars (4.6 ounces). (I’m trusting the Hershey Bar index which suggests a current price of about $1.00).
4.25/1.75 is roughly 2.6.
So chocolate has inflated a factor of nearly three since the early 1960s relative to silver. Gasoline vs silver is similar. One dime would get you maybe a third of a gallon of gas in the early 1960s. Now it will get you a full gallon.
Zifnab
You know, call me a crazy nutter, but I wouldn’t mind seeing currency pegged to a commodity. The problem with the gold standard is that gold really isn’t useful for anything. So I can trade my paper money for lumps of shiny metal? So what?
By contrast, I wouldn’t mind seeing a currency that was pegged to something much more fluid – like Watts of electricity. This would be something valuable that people could use, something pretty much anyone with a high school physics education could conceivably produce, and something renewable at a high enough volume that we’d never “run out”.
I don’t particularly like how the Fed can dump unlimited amounts of money on a select few insiders, and I do consider this a serious flaw in our monetary policy. Making dollars equivalent to something tangible and producible could be a good thing.
jefft452
“It turns out that a silver dime was 2.5 grams and at a price of $42.36 per troy ounce, 2.5 grams (the weight of a silver dime) of silver is worth $3.40 … he’s better with numbers than Megan McArdle”
Yeah?
A silver dime is worth $0.10
To test this, try filling tour tank, and then hand the attendant 20 silver dimes
see if the station owner calls the cops or not
Catsy
@Southern Beale:
Hell, even us Prius drivers have our share of justifiable smugness going around. It’s a hybrid, not a true EV, but there are trips where the difference between the two can be measured in pennies.
Jager
To have a gold standard wouldn’t we have to know just about how much gold there is in the world? I wouldn’t put it past those sneaky Russkies to start mining gold like crazy once the standard was set and then drop the value like a mining camp whore’s undies.
MikeJ
So if gas goes from $3.50/gal to .10, doesn’t it make sense that a $35,000pa salary is going to be $1000?
Anoniminous
@licensed to kill time:
I’ve got a good label in mind. Unfortunately “dumbfucks” is already taken.
@Comrade Dread:
What would happen is the Chinese, who have about $1 trillion in US paper instruments, would cash them in for the gold we would owe them (roughly 18,296 metric tonnes of it – which would get “interesting” since the total US gold holdings is around 4,577 metric tonnes) and then ship the gold to Beijing. In Ron Paul’s world that is (roughly) 85 years worth of total US gasoline consumption.
Anoniminous
@Jager:
Somewhere around 160,000 metric tonnes of gold has been mined. The estimated the holdings are:
Jewellery 52%
Central banks 18%
Investment (bars, coins) 16%
Industrial 12%
Unaccounted 2%
Frank
A mercury dime is 90% silver, has 0.07234 ounces. At current spot price of $42.26/oz this is only worth $3.06, not $3.50. Paul must have started using this line back when silver price got to $50.
Of course, you can’t actually sell a dime for this price but if you have a bag of 2500 pf them ($250 face value) you can get close to the spot price from a reputable dealer.
Shlemizel - was Alwhite
@Bill Arnold:
Not that it changes your calculations all that much but a dime in the 60s would have gotten you a bit more that 1/2 a gallon. You are right though about the important parts.
Jager
@Anoniminous: “Has been mined” any ideas on how much hasn’t been mined? Does this mean those gold claims that have been inactive of 75 years in Colorado might be worth looking at? Nice 10 acre piece of mountain land with a couple of petered out mine shafts on it for sale for less than a 100k…wouldn’t have to squeeze much gold out of the old mines to pay it off!
Anoniminous
@Jager:
Sorry, don’t have a clue how much gold is still in the “wild.”
Re: Gold Mining
I used to mine/pan gold in Washington State as a kid. A fun hobby. Not so great as a business when calculated on hourly renumeration for work done.
Sam Clemens, who did it, wrote something to the effect, “Gold mining has put more people in the insane asylum than any other activity.”
ETA: A good way to die is to fart around in old mining tunnels. There’s a good reason these old mines are going ‘on the cheap.’ It costs more for shoring and bracing than the gold you can extract is worth.
cintibud
A couple of weeks ago I turned in a couple of class rings for the gold and took a few silver coins along for the ride. I got close to 500 bucks for the class rings (10K, Men’s HS, Woman’s College). A couple Mercury dimes fetched 2.90 apiece, 1964 Kennedy Half dollar went for close to 15 bucks apiece. Silver Dollars went somewhere between 35-38 bucks. The Coin shop owner said the silver value far outstripped the value to collectors. I did check on that before hand and had already found that to be true for the particular coins I had.
The money will come in handy.
AxelFoley
50 Cool Points for the Biggie reference in the title, Doug.
From now on, you are The Notorious D.O.U.G.J.
Walker
@Frank:
My father, who was a goldbug had several 20 pound bags of pre-63 dimes as an “investment” in the 80s. When he died, we found a silver dealer that would take them. But he wasn’t willing to buy them all at once; he sold off a little at a time and paid us as he did.
It tooks us five years to get rid of that silver.
Frank
newhavenguy
I would offer Ms. McArdle one as an alibi, but why spoil the fun?
http://www.red5.co.uk/new-gadgets/wrongulator.aspx
On a related note: interesting that there is no “Left” throwing billions a year at pretend journalism/semi intellectual/propaganda operations.
National Review, paragon of free enterprise fundamentalism never, uh, turned a profit… or even close. Reason Magazine? Hahahahaha, not THAT Randian it turns out.
(If the market spuns you, suck some Koch is the moral there.)Murdoch’s NY Post loses $30M a year. Our plutocrats aren’t dumb, this is an investment. Paying off very well, too.
Sort of proud that “we”- meaning this unruly (D) coalition such as it is- aren’t such a bunch of scummy, corrupt authoritarian assholes, but then again it sucks to get rolled by none too bright liars backed with huge green behind them over and over again. And again. And again.
I blame Obama for all of it, and want to run Glenn Greenwald to primary him.
newhavenguy
You could buy a calculator from the UK that guarantees a wrong answer to everything (sorry for trying to link, not a spammer). I would offer Ms. McArdle one as an alibi, but why spoil the fun?
On a related note: interesting that there is no “Left” throwing billions a year at pretend journalism/semi intellectual/propaganda operations. Good god, have you read The Atlantic’s “Business and Economics Editor”(sic)??? Goebbels would shit himself in shame to see such hackery.
National Review, paragon of free enterprise fundamentalism never, uh, turned a profit… or even close. Murdoch’s NY Post loses $30M a year. Reason Magazine? Hahahahaha, not THAT Randian it turns out.
If the market spurns your mediocre to terrible talents, suck some Koch is the moral apparently.
Our plutocrats aren’t dumb, this is an investment. Paying off very well, too.
Sort of proud that “we”- meaning this unruly (D) coalition such as it is- aren’t such a bunch of scummy, corrupt authoritarian assholes, but then again it sucks to get rolled by none too bright liars backed with huge green behind them over and over again. And again. And again.
I blame Obama for all of it, and want to run Glenn Greenwald to primary him.
Jewish Steel
@Woodrowfan:
You’re a kindly soul. “Totally fucking bananas” i s how I think I would characterize that.
BruinKid
@Social outcast: Oh, I see you’ve met my former neighbor. I had quite the exchange with him and one of his friends, who said Bush did NOT mess up the federal response to Katrina, because the people should’ve simply fended for themselves, and it was all local government’s fault.
russell
i’m gonna find a silver dime, take it to the gas station, and see if they’re game.