But, so long as there are gullible MAGAs who still believe the idiocy, we’ll keep writing about it..
His instigation of massive import duties and simultaneously claiming to combat inflation is senseless. Announcing that Ukraine started the war with Russia is nutty and based on a blatant lie. So is the claim that Jan 6 was a typical tourist day, not a riot and that the election was stolen.
Hiring Elon Musk to mass fire thousands of government workers without considering their contribution to our economy falls into the thoughtless, cruel, and senseless territory.
There are too many in that vein to list here, but I feel compelled to address one because it’s so stupid as to be humorous.
Musk Signals Looking Into Gold at Fort Knox—Here’s What to Know.
Auditing Fort Knox gold reserves is “several decades overdue,” says a sound money advocacy group executive.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk indicated that Fort Knox, the Kentucky-based facility famous for storing U.S. gold reserves, could be investigated.“Looking for the gold at Fort Knox,” Musk wrote on social media platform X on Feb. 18. “This gold is the property of the American people. I sure hope it’s still there!”“Who is confirming that gold wasn’t stolen from Fort Knox? Maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not,” Musk wrote. Last week, Musk was encouraged by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to review Fort Knox’s gold reserves. .
During a Feb. 17 interview with “FOX & Friends,” Paul revealed that he has been trying to obtain greater transparency for the last decade “to make sure it’s all there.”
That’s why we don’t get rid of it. We’ve got it. .
The IMF has it, the World Bank has it. Most central banks worldwide have gold, and it’s an implicit trust that the dollar still has some backing,” Paul told host Lawrence Jones.
Then there’s the question, what is a gold bar? There are many different purity levels in the government’s bars, ranging from 99.99% all the way down to 90% pure..
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Now let’s get to basics; Gold is not money. And gold does not back the U.S. dollar. Gold is nothing more than a metal. It is desired because it is pretty, fairly rare, a good conductor of electricity, and easily malleable. Iron, silver, and numerous other substances are far more helpful. .
> Gold doesn’t back the dollar, simply because the price varies wildly, and the federal government can, and often has, adjusted the exchange value of gold for dollars. .
If gold backed the dollar, a $20 gold coin would be worth $20. But it isn’t. A $20 gold coin is worth close to $3,000 at current gold prices, and a different amount to coin collectors. .
So, how can one reasonably claim that the U.S. dollar is “backed” by gold? It isn’t and never has been. There could be an argument that the U.S. dollar once was backed by silver, in that the government offered to buy and sell silver at $35 per ounce. .
However, that silver “backing” no longer exists, and no such buy/sell agreement exists for gold. .
The government also stores silver at various locations, including the West Point Mint in New York and the Denver Mint in Colorado. Will the Musk gang also measure our silver holdings? .
So, what backs the U.S. dollar if not silver or gold? Answer: The full faith and credit of the U.S. government. Click the link to read more about “full faith and credit. .
Finally, the Musk jaunt is asinine for yet another reason. Gold represents only a minuscule fraction of federal government assets. .
Compare that to M1 Abrams Tanks: We have about 4,650 of those tanks, with a unit value of $14.5 million. In total, our tanks are worth about $67 Billion. Think about that. All the gold owned by the federal government is worth just one-sixth of our M1 Abrams Tanks. .
Just one aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, is worth $16 Billion. Our B2 Stealth bombers are worth $15 Billion. Is Musk going to forget about tanks, carriers, bombers, and all other military hardware that totals Trillions of dollars, but focus on inventorying gold? .
And then, there are all the other federal assets: The federal government owns approximately 640 million acres of land, about 28% of the total land area in the United States. Will Musk inspect those to see how they are being used? The U.S. federal government owns and operates approximately 5,399 dams. Should Musk look into them, too? .
The U.S. government stores various strategic and precious metals, including copper, nickel, palladium, uranium, and platinum; I don’t know how much of each, but each one is more useful than gold and perhaps monetarily more valuable. Do they deserve a Musk visit? .
THE BOTTOM LINE .
Gold is a minimally functional, lovely-to-look-at metal that comprises a miniscule amount of federal assets. It is not money, nor does it back the U.S. dollar. Those Abram tanks are worth more and do more to back the dollar than gold bars. .
Musk is visiting Fort Knox to get his face on TV, not for any practical purpose. It is just one more extremely nonsensical idea from the current administration.
The irony is that Musk is the head of the mythical Department of Government Efficiency, and he is wasting thousands of federal dollars to go on a useless, nonsensical jaunt. That’s “efficiency”?
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell Monetary Sovereignty Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell; MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell; https://www.academia.edu/……………………………………………………………………..
A Government’s Sole Purpose is to Improve and Protect The People’s Lives.
MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 
Musk and his snotty kid-crew of crypto-bros wants the Treasury to use the Fort Knox gold (marked to market) to buy a Bitcoin “reserve”. This is so the 10% of Bitcoin owners, who own 90% of all the Bitcoin, can offload their shitcoins in exchange for US dollars. That would be one of the greatest scams in human history….Oh! By the way, the “reserve” would have to be held for 20-years before being sold by the Treasury.
Nicholas Gomez
(ANG Traders)
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We should put the gold bugs and bitcoin bugs together in a room and let them battle the question about “backing.” The gold bugs falsely claim that gold backs dollars, and I have no idea what supposedly backs bitcoin. I’ll stick with the “full faith and credit of the U.S. government.” Not perfect, but it’s the best we have.
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“So, how can one reasonably claim that the U.S. dollar is “backed” by gold? It isn’t and never has been. There could be an argument that the U.S. dollar once was backed by silver, in that the government offered to buy and sell silver at $35 per ounce. However, that silver “backing” no longer exists, and no such buy/sell agreement exists for gold.”
The so-called “Gold Standard” that prevailed from 1946-1971 under Bretton Woods was NOT a true gold standard, but rather a gold definition standard with convertibility and a system of de facto fixed exchange rates of all participating currencies. And of course it no longer exists today. But prior to 1933 (when FDR suspended the gold standard and legally confiscated everyone’s gold bullion, hence all the gold in Fort Knox to this day), there actually WAS something like a true gold standard. Unfortunately, the gold standard worsened the Great Depression by rigidly tying the Fed’s hands and creating artificial scarcity of money at a time when then economy needed liquidity the most, all to artificially prop up the greatly overvalued dollar. So of course it had to be suspended, then nerfed when it was reinstated after WWII, and then ultimately abolished completely in the 1970s.
Also, I believe the $35 figure you noted was actually for gold, not silver. Yeah, that’s how artificially undervalued gold was (and how overvalued the dollar was) back then. But yes, there was a time when the dollar was backed by silver, and there was also at one time a bimetallic standard where it was back by both gold and silver prior to 1901.
Otherwise, your article is 100% spot-on correct, Rodger.
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Thanks, pm. I always enjoy reading about the dollar being “backed” by gold, silver, or horse manure. It leaves the question, “What backs to gold, silver, or manure? Golf bugs don’t seem to have an answer for that.
From Wikipedia: “The World Gold Council estimates that all the gold ever mined, and that is accounted for, totaled 190,040 metric tons in 2019, but other independent estimates vary by as much as 20%. At a price of US$1,250 per troy ounce ($40 per gram) reached on 16 August 2017, one metric ton of gold has a value of approximately $40.2 million. The total value of all gold ever mined, and that is accounted for, would exceed $7.5 trillion at that valuation and using WGC 2017 estimates.”
Ask a gold bug what would happen to the “backing” for the dollar if the U.S. and other nations grew wearing of spending millions to store, ship, and guard the stuff and started dumping it on the market? How much of a “backing” would it be, then?
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Back it with ammonium nitrate and plywood advised one wingnut in 1982: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANCAP_(commodity_standard)#Details_of_ANCAP
Sounds like an explosive idea.
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There are so many things wrong with a gold standard that even your long list of them doesn’t fully cover them all. I would also add:
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Very true indeed. The Gold Standard is a classic example of a solution in search of a problem, and of confusing the map with the territory. And crypto is basically little more than a Ponzi scheme, and an energy-guzzling one too.
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