Guest Post: War Costs Much Silver

From AGXIIK:
'War costs much silver', said Sun Tsu. He was right 2,500 years ago. His words echo down through the centuries, as true today as then.
And in a FIAT failure, real precious metal assets came back to their original preeminence as money and do so every time.
To say 'this time is different' is to deny the historical truth of silver and gold as real money.


I'm a ground pounder in the Silver Revolution. At the risk of being told I am crazy, it's my belief that gold and silver are real money. This is shared by every member of every culture, society, civilization and sovereignty in the history of humankind.
In the last year or so, clay pots containing the payroll of the Roman Legions that occupied Britain have been found, buried and safe for 20 centuries. The gold and silver coins were as an exciting a find to day as they were most likely exciting to the legionnaire who received them as his pay at the time of Christ.

PMs are scarce, hard to mine, easy to transport and divide into smaller units and, having the quality of a defined value over time; even to the rulers who embrace it.

FIAT currency has always failed eventually and spectacularly, ruining the empire, dethroning the emperor and thrown the common folks into penury.
PM debased by the empires and rulers have also failed, but not due to their original and intrinsic values. They were simply diluted with base metal until valueless. This was done because the Roman emperors had not adopted paper money, like the Chinese in their experiment in FIAT. Yet they still had to finance their imperialist advances.
One observation is that collectively people can be pretty sheep-like. Individually, they can be very smart and for survival purposes, are quick to see the real value of precious metals over the debased values of paper money
It can take decades for this realization to sink in until inflation is undeniable and quickly creates damage to the peoples income and wealth.
Once embedded in the public consciousness, the group think of silver and gold as a storehouse of value will take place in a very short time; much shorter than the period of FIAT debasement.
Every nation that failed due to the devaluing their currency has ultimately rebooted by resorting back to gold and silver in order to stabilize their monetary system, even if only to back another round of paper money
The US was under this system for nearly 200 years, using silver coins as real money and backing the dollar with the world's largest stockpile of gold, estimated at 16,000 tons. Debasing currency was a capital offense as well.
To the extent that the largest empire in the world, the USA, saw this as vital to its strength and its status as the world dominating reserve currency, so be it.

And we proceeded merrily along, until that evil bastard Nixon started the snowball of currency debasement by taking us off the gold standard in 1971, here we are today, furtively looking to gold and silver as our salvation and our way back from the brink. Debating the issues of whether these two metals have any value at all seems circular at best.

The Chinese empire and their money, like that of all empires attempting to monetize wars, conquests and social programs, failed at all turns.
We are doing exactly the same thing as every empire. We have a failing currency due to our imperialistic over reach.

'War costs much silver', said Sun Tsu. He was right 2,500 years ago. His words echo down through the centuries, as true today as then.
And in a FIAT failure, real precious metal assets came back to their original preeminence as money and do so every time.
To say 'this time is different' is to deny the historical truth of silver and gold as real money. You do not hear this debate in China or India, incidentally.

Maybe our notion that silver and gold are real money is a delusion; an attempt by the average person to attach some value to an item which helps the person gain a sense of real worth in an unreal world; a world filed with illusions and lies told to them by the rulers, presidents, prime ministers and overlords.

But if gold and silver's value is an illusion, then stay with it. It's shared universally by nearly everyone on this planet and has been for millenniums. As an illusion it still has some semblance of real worth.
And debate seems moot at this time.