It is not that it started when Richard Nixon took the US off of the Gold Standard.  Our problems actually began when Carter failed to put us on the Zinc Standard.  Alan Greenspan spent his career trying to destroy the government’s system of finance, while sending the message out to followers of Ayn Rand playing out their John Galt fever fantasies to float their life-boats to the commodities of Gold and Zinc.  He then got out while the going was good, leaving Henry Paulson holding the bag to storm into Congress with a gun and demand $700 Billion.  They didn’t do so, and thus we now look forward to a future shovelling huge barrels of money about to purchase pencils off of street corners to attempt to sell at a mark-up to other pencil sellers.

None of this would have happened if Carter had put us on the Zinc Standard and tied the value of currency to the value of Zinc.

The one thing I can say about the defeat of the Big Bill is that it was that wonderous coalition of the liberal fringe and the conservative fringe of the Congress, along with the bloc of Vulnerable Congress-critters, against the Establishment “Leadership” Center.  These things are always bubbling to the surface, but they never quite materialize.  The Center did not hold; the Center could not hold; the Center fell.

I look at the front page of the paper today.  It is that stock genre of photograph you see from time to time.  A close up of a few investors on the floor of the Stock Market Exchange at the front of a sea of investors flocking every which way, looking up at the numbers, their hands on their faces, slack-jawed faces of Dread.  Or, from a news clip, “Whatever your level of Investment — whether you’re a [blank] or a [blank], you were SLAUGHTERED today.”

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