How will that be controled."

It will be controlled with guns, like ultimately everything substantial is controlled.

The difficulty of existing in this type of centrally managed economy is that it is not good enough for one to be a wise and responsible steward over their domain. They must GROW in the virtual world at a rate greater than or equal to the rate the maniacs insist upon. Staying even is a losing proposition.

I have talked with many in my family who continue to barrage each other with solutions to this mess based on appropriate outrage. I think it is important to remember there is no real value in money, or gold and silver either, unless you like jewelry or conductive materials. We must all stick to what is truly valuable in our lives and guard that by any means necessary.

To me that seems to be the biggest cause of inflation. We have more paper money than we have gold to back it.

I think there is another bubble building that is the rise of the price of gold. The more the FEDs print money the higher the price of gold. When the money fails the only good thing about owning gold is that it will become the money.

Another concept that concerns me is the moneyless system. I mean I go to work and my employer deposit my check directly into my bank. My creditors take the money directly out of my bank. I don't see any of the paper stuff for weeks. Pretty soon the FEDs won't need to print money. It will all be in a virtual world. How will that be controled.

What books should I read to understand U.S. economic history?

Aristotle

We might not be able to kill it, but we ought to make it truthful, transparent and accountable to the people, not the banks and the political class.

As stated above, we can either let businesses with unreasonable commitments fail and prices drop. Conversely, we can spend money until the value of that money is in line with the correct price. Basically, we reprice the entire economy to accommodate whatever we are being inflexible with.

Most people in this country have very little wealth, even before this crisis. This means that the majority of the voters don't really have much to lose by following that path--except for maybe that house that they'll be paying for in devalued dollars.

Some people value wealth above all things. Some people create a sanctity around the contract that ignores that they always are executed in a context. Those kinds of absolutes are just not going to work. An increasingly large number of voters don't *care* that your wealth will dwindle if they keep that house. They don't see any options in a maze of contracted options that collude to always put them on the hook for misfortune. It doesn't matter if its not *fair*. That complaint cuts both ways. It doesn't matter if its the lack of a welfare check, your debtors discharging what they owe in bankruptcy, or the decline of your 401(k)--life is not fair.

What's important, then, is getting people to agree on the values. What does a deterioration in wealth do to jobs? What does it do to our position in the world? What does that do to our consumer economy? Will we not be able to afford plasma TVs? Can we defend ourselves without the buying power to support expensive operations against people who would attack us?

Not one group has satisfactory answers to all of these questions. They generally rail on about their pet questions and pretend that the other ones don't matter. Well, in a democracy, they do matter--even the Plasma TVs. There's a complex interplay of quality of life, the utility of wealth, the limits of the exploitive power of contract law, the nature of the market, and a bunch of other things that guarantee that we won't agree on everything.

The problem is that we have to come together to agree on something. People need to start compromising or that's what's going to kill this country--the politics of the absolute.