Antiquated Software

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2006, John Esak wrote:
>>
>> move on and keep coming up with ways to believe and defend that
>> 1966 Chevy
>> will do everything and anything that 2006 Honda will. And probably with
>
>To take this thread a little less serious... If offered a 1966 Chevy or a
>Honda 2006 and both were brand new. Without a nanosecond's hesitation, I
>would take the 1966 Chevy. :-) It's 40 years closer to being an antique...
>and I actually owned a 1964 Chevy... just about the best car I ever owned.
>You could "see" the spark plugs... reach in and take them out with a simple
>spark plug ratchet. You could find the oil pan pitcock in about 3 seconds,
>and do a complete oil change in a few minutes. Change the oil filter and air
>filter in secods, etc., etc. Not too ramble too far afield, but I also owned
>lots of other cars... the biggest baddest one was a 1963 Oldsmobile
>Starfire. The engine was huge beyond belief, some crazy 4 barrel carb... and
>it went faster in physical space than anything I've ever been in from 0 to
>60... including a Ferrari my brother brought back from his stint in the army
>in the late 60's. Absolutely *nothing* on the cars back then was
>computerized... and back then, at that time... it was just fine. :-)  For
>the record, my all-time favorite car (which actually caused me no end of
>grief constantly) was a 1959 bug-ey Sprite... I bought very used and fixed
>up to perfect condition... then sold for a song to one of the players in
>RUNDMC. (serious) Back in 1965/66 when I was very into cars and especially
>little foreign one... the Srites cost $1,995 and Volkswagon Beetles wer
>$1,695... new, brand new... The most expensive Chevy you could buy was about
>$3,100, Pontiacs $3,500, Olds's $4,200 and Cadilacs about $5,200... I mean
>top of the line... and people think the computer prices have gone whacky.
>Same thing, just in the opposite direction... why????????

The really expensive cars of that day cost about $10,000.  I bought my
first real race car, a front-engine Elva Formula Jr., used in 1967 for
$750.00.  My 1967 Rambler American, 290 V8, and four speed cost about
$2,500 (and I blew the doors off a 327 'Vette with that when the American
had about 495 miles on the clock beep-beep, beep-beep :-).

Why are prices higher?  That's easy, the Federal Reserve and the hidden
tax, inflation.

The U.S. was still nominally on a gold standard in 1965, and that forced
some retraint in government spending.  Interestingly enough, Alan Greenspan
wrote a very good essay on this subject about that time which is still
available today in the book, ``Capitalism the Unknown Ideal'' by Ayn Rand.
He had another essay in the same book on monopoly and anti-trust in which
he makes the case that a monopoly can't exist without government
intervention to protect the monopoly business.

If you compare the prices of commodities that aren't high-tech or
suppressed artifically by government subsidies (e.g.  agricultural goods)
between 1965 and today, you can see the effects of inflation.

An excellent explantion of this is found in Murray N. Rothbard's book ``The
Mystery of Banking''.  This, and most of Rothbard's other works are
available in PDF files for free download from www.mises.org.  Other books
of his I've found very good are ``America's Great Depression'', and
``A History of Money and Banking in the United States''.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Systems, Inc.
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

If you want government to intervene domestially, you're a liberal.  If you
want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative.  If you want
government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate.  If you don't want
government to intervene anywhare, you're an extremist -- Joseph Sobran