OT: Smarter people do exist

[Bill Vermillion]

On Tue, Dec 28 18:46 , Bill Campbell, showing utter disregard for 
spell-checkers gave us this: 

> On Tue, Dec 28, 2004, Bill Vermillion wrote:
> >Bill Campbell, the prominent pundit, on Tue, Dec 28 13:53  while half 
> >mumbling half-witicized: 
> >
> >
> >> On Tue, Dec 28, 2004, Kenneth Brody wrote:
> >> >Walter Vaughan wrote:
> ...
> >> Back on the printer topic, I saw something recently that
> >> pointed that all the color laser printers sold today print
> >> the printer's manufacturer and serial number on every page
> >> using yellow dota that are basically invisible if one doesn't
> >> know to look for them. Presumably this is to prevent amateurs
> >> from counterfeiting money (only the Federal Reserve and other
> >> Central Banks are allowed to do that).

> >Which brings up the question, why would the government have
> >to counterfeit money in the first place?

> Basically the politicians wanted to get around the U.S. Constitution's
> requirements which were written at a time when the U.S. economy was in
> chaos because of worthless paper money.

> For a detailled explanation see the book ``The Creature from
> Jekyll Island'', or perhaps Murray N. Rothbard's books,
> ``History of Money and Banking in the United States'', ``Panic
> of 1819'', and ``America's Great Depression''.

And technically what the government prints is not 'money' but
'currency'.

'money' has an intrinsic value. When we had sliver in the US
coinage, the government pegged silver at about 91 cents and ounce
and gold at $32 ounce. The dollar bills which had a blue sticker
on them were called 'silver certificates' and those could be
exchanged for a silver dollar. When the gold and silver were
taken off fixed prices there was also a fixed period of time when
silver certificates could be redeemed for the real metal.  After
they they were just piece of paper that represented some implied
value.

The silver coins had 90% silver content.  'money' being anything
with intrinsic value, and is used as a medium of exchange. It would
typically be something that is non-descrutible but in old
barter type economies a cow, pig, or other livestock could
be considered as 'money'.

And currency is just a medium of exchange whose worth is implied
by government notes, bonds, property etc, and it will be worth
something until the collapse of the government which issued them.
then they become worthlless pieces of paper.  See pictures of the
inflated mark in Germany where it took a wheelbarrow of paper money
to buy a loaf of bread.  The same thing occured in China when
the communist government took over the original government
and Chiang Kai-scheck moved the Nationalist Chinese government to
Taiwan and left Mao Tse Tung running the mainland.

And Gresham's law comes into play also.  The coinage stopped having
silver content and was replaced with such things as clad quarters,
and silver was taken out of all the coins.  Thus the coinage
with intrinsic value was taken out of circulation and a lot of it
was melted down - particularly when the silver prices hit
about $50/oz.

What this has to do with filePro I don't know.

Bill

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com