So yesterday I quoted some random Spearheader who described women (well, white women in particular) as “complete parasitical whores roaming the landscape spreading VD like Johnny Appleseed and fucking men over.”
One reader wondered if Mr. Appleseed really went about spreading VD. So I did a little research, and it turns out that it is exceedingly unlikely that Mr. Appleseed – who actually was a real person — spread anything other than the magic of apples. And his Swedenborgian beliefs.
Why? Because Mr. Appleseed – real name John Chapman – was what these days we might call a Man Going His Own Way. Seems he didn’t have much truck with the ladies, according to one contemporary account quoted in his Wikipedia entry:
On one occasion Miss PRICE’s mother asked Johnny if he would not be a happier man, if he were settled in a home of his own, and had a family to love him. He opened his eyes very wide–they were remarkably keen, penetrating grey eyes, almost black–and replied that all women were not what they professed to be; that some of them were deceivers; and a man might not marry the amiable woman that he thought he was getting, after all.
So what led poor Mr. Appleseed to these dire thoughts about women? Apparently the underage girl he hoped to some day get with was more into dudes who weren’t him:
Now we had always heard that Johnny had loved once upon a time, and that his lady love had proven false to him. Then he said one time he saw a poor, friendless little girl, who had no one to care for her, and sent her to school, and meant to bring her up to suit himself, and when she was old enough he intended to marry her. He clothed her and watched over her; but when she was fifteen years old, he called to see her once unexpectedly, and found her sitting beside a young man, with her hand in his, listening to his silly twaddle.
That ungrateful little strumpet!
I peeped over at Johnny while he was telling this, and, young as I was, I saw his eyes grow dark as violets, and the pupils enlarge, and his voice rise up in denunciation, while his nostrils dilated and his thin lips worked with emotion. How angry he grew! He thought the girl was basely ungrateful. After that time she was no protegé of his.
But Appleseed, despite giving up on women in the real world, held out hope for the afterlife – explaining to others that he expected to have two spirit wives all his own after he died. Which I guess is the 19th century equivalent of the MGTOWers today who fantasize about the sexy robot ladies who will eventually, it is hoped, make actual human females – with their troubling “thoughts” and “needs” and “desires” of their own – obsolete.
Mr. Appleseed’s quest to remain alone was probably also helped by the fact that – if the illustration I found on Wikipedia is any indication – he looked a bit like Dale Gribble from King of the Hill. Only much, much sloppier, with long hair. Oh, and instead of wearing a baseball cap, he wore “a tin utensil which answered both as a cap and a mush pot.”
So, yeah, a creepy weirdo who hates women — definitely an MGTOWer all the way.
Oh, except that he actually did something with his life — you know, helping spread apple trees to a big portion of the midwest — instead of spending all his time going on about how all women are whores.
We also have bears on our coins! 😀 Tho they’re called toonies instead of bearies.. which they should have been >:|
The Aussie $1 has kangaroos (suprise, surprise). We still haven’t decided whether to call it the “buckaroo” or the “brass razoo” 😉
Bank notes arose specifically because currency was scarce and without it, it was nigh impossible to run a functioning merchant economy. The South used bartering of titles (often of slaves) more often than the North and had less industry, which was part of the tension. By the time the Civil War hit, it had long been settled law that the person who endorsed a bank note to another was liable for the full value, despite the fact that banks often collapsed overnight. And people still used them, knowing this. That is because unless you have a widely available currency, you are left with cumbersome barter systems and anything other than a very, very simple economy can’t function on that at all.
and (I believe) some exotic scientific and industrial uses, but it is primarily a monetary metal.
The primary use of gold is decorative, followed by monetary use, then industrial – and it’s an essential component of almost all solid-state technology. cell phones, calculators, personal digital assistants, global positioning system units, and most TV’s… ETC! It all adds up, btw, to a lot of unrecycled “lost” gold when old electronics meet thieir maker. Then there’s medical/dental use.
I was reading the 1807 Sydney newspaper online. Looking at the classifieds, it seems a vew few people would take payment in dollars & dumps, others in English pennies, and the government paid in wheat, rum or land.
I vaguely remember being told that NSW colony was meant to be feudal (so not need money), and very little cash was sent out from England.
Does any of that make sense to those of you who understand currency and stuff?
Voip,
I can’t spoonfeed you on six thousand years of history of money in a blogspace devoted after all, to an different topics. Believe me, there is the relevant scholarly material in economics, praxeology, history, anthropology, law and legal philosophy, sociology, and three dozen or so other disciplines,
You would think that anyone with an IQ above his shoe size would be concerned about the integrity of what remains of the world’s reserve currency- with the European Community falling into the crapper by the day, with the US government on the hook for far more than the entire GDP (ALL the goods and services produced in the country in a calender year), with the US Dollar having lost 97% of its purchasing power since 1913 relative to gold, and yet you still think that paper fiat money is the way to go???
Go fly a kite!
Mises.org is a useful and interesting source for the citations you say that you are interested in. Look under “gold”, ‘history of money’, ‘origins of money’, ‘international trade’, and perhaps you will also be interested in the relevant writings of e.g. William Graham Sumner, Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Amasa Walker, Murray Rothbard, Benjamin Anderson, Jean-Baptiste Say, and William Smart, for starters…
Enjoy! If you are still capable of reading.
Go look up David Graeber if you want to know something about the origins of money. Hint: it’s not barter or gold. It’s temple accounting/gift economies/social obligation.
Graeber’s work on money origins IS fabulous, I also recommend the work of Niall Ferguson. Also, as a sort of mutualist/sort of austrian, there ARE very good things to be said for the vast archives of mises.org, which as a history deposit of austrian scholarship, not all of which is goldbug, is without match. Though it is much more about austrian theories than a truly scholarly history of money, for the most part.
(also beware the randroids)
Magpie – I am now gonna definitely look into more about NSW colonization and money. 🙂
Meller: How is money whose value is based off the gold standard NOT fiat money?
Forget the value of gold. Gold has use value, that’s fine. I think its actual value is a lot more socially constructed than nature-based than you do, but that’s beside the point.
The issue here is the value of MONEY. If the government says “this piece of paper is worth X amount of gold that the US government will pay the bearer”, that’s still fiat value. Your only guarantee that you’ll ever see that money is that you have the government’s word that they’ll pay you. Tomorrow they might as well tell you ‘fuck off’ or decide that piece of paper is worth twice as much gold as before.
So the value of a Gold-based dollar still is only based on *market confidence*. The currency markets would value the dollar only based on their confidence the state would honor its value and not work actively to debase the currency. At that point I don’t see why you need to waste your time with the intermediary (gold). In both cases the value of the currency is still only based on the market, and not on some intrinsic value of the money, unless you’re actually calling for a return to precious metal-based coinage only (and the end of paper or electronic money) so that at any time you decide the money is worthless you can just smelt it and get the gold?
DKM
I wasn’t asking for History 101, I was asking for a single citation (if possible, from a website that isn’t written in Comic-Sans). You are making a claim based on historical precedent, but what I am seeing here is an atemporal just-so story. To what event are you referring when you say
I assume it’s from the US, because of “State statutes,” but apart from that I’ve got no clue. It can’t be present-day history because our paper money is not failing. Can you narrow it down to a century?
Maybe a garbled version of darksidecat’s post?
zhinxy
Not his WW1 book though; that’s messed up.
Not his WW1 book though; that’s messed up.
Oh, yikes, that’s right, or so I’ve heard! Only recommending the money history stuff, which is the only stuff of his i’ve read!
“…paper money is not failing…”
The US dollar (reserve currency for the entire world since 1946, and altogether detached from gold since 1971, has lost 97% or so of its original value ($20.57 per troy oz. of gold0 since 1913–the founding of the “Federal Reserve”, set up specifically to “stabilize the value of the dollar”–America’s Money Machine–Elgin Grosclose; The Case Against the Fed–Murray Rothbard; The Creature from Jeckyll island–G.Edward Griffin.
If losing c.97% of its original purchasing power in less than a century is “not failing”, what is??
Global runaway inflation of the Weimar model, when the US dollar and the currencies it backs, all becomes worthless simultaneously?
NO THANK YOU!!
Regarding “randroids”; Ayn Rand, in the pertinent chapters of Atlas Shrugged, explained the utility and value of the Gold standard, and the corruption of paper money in clear and excellent prose, with more clarity than most of us “goldbugs”have ever done.
Her noisy and sometimes misinformed pronouncements on other issues–where she never claimed expertise anyway-notwithstanding! Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction, but as an introduction to one’s understanding the value of gold, and the primary importance of freedom to trade and exchange, along with how such a system rewards the best within us is a magnificent tour de force which has never been equalled, and probably won’t be in our lifetimes!
Gold, money, and the integrity of private property is one of the areas where Rand is at her best. If you haven’t read Atlas Shrugged, read it, and more importantly, if you HAVE read it, read it again!
Enjoy!!
@Voip: is DKM referring to the Great Depression (just before WWII) perhaps? That’s…that’s all I can think of. :p
(Oh no, it looks like DKM is about to embarrass us all! DKM, know your limits! Don’t talk about gold — talk about how soft and fluffy kittens are! ^^)
Federal paper money was not widely used until the Civil War (there was a printing during the Revolution, which did not work out well, largely because there was little confidence in the Revolution’s success in many quarters). There was federal currency in coinage, but it was very scarce. Which meant that businesses were left with almost no access to currency. Into this gap stepped banks, often liscensed under state statute (there was a federal bank which issued federal bonds, but it was not largely involved in this business), which printed “bank notes” which were a form of promisory note, really, in practice. Bank notes were used widely, especially in the Northern US, because official currency was so scarce that it was impractical in day to day business. Now, as anyone with a passing knowledge of US history will tell you, the North industrialized at a much, much faster rate than the South, while the South remained largely an agrarian slave economy, the North was full of mills and railroads and such (by the Civil War, that is, but the Mill Acts, for example, were common in the early 1800s and states were exercising eminent domain on the behalf of railroads in the north by the 1820s and 30s). US Courts actually altered British common law in regards to bank notes and promisory notes in order to enhance the security of bank notes, making those who endorsed them liable to the endorsee even if a bank collapsed.Technically, banks were absolutely operating on a gold standard, or, that is, operating on a currency standard where the state currency used a gold standard, they were just largely unregulated. The way a bank note works is that the bank issues a person a note on credit (in the renaisance, it was often used for cross national bank branch transactions). The note represents a promise of a certain amount of currency, issued on the credit of the endorser. Think of it sort of like a check issued by a bank (a check is actually a good example of a similar system). So there was a paper currency system, just one with no real state backing, but rather a strange bastardized promisory note rule system in which sometimes, certain notes would almost randomly become unwanted (it was even more random because some stayed good based on the endorsers credit). t was a horrible mess and there was quite a bit of desperate legal scrambling needed to keep the system going. But there is absolutely no reason to conflate a state backed currency with this system, in fact, this was a system that arose by its very nature in a system with a functional state legal system but with very scarce state backed currency. There are massive, massive legal and social problems caused by overscarcity of official currency.
tl;dr, Meller knows as little about bank notes as he does about everything else.
“…DKM, know your limits! Don’t talk about gold–talk about how soft and fluffy kittens are!”
Now you know, dear reader, why I hate feminists! DKM.
DKM, what use do you think shiny yellow metal will be in the End Times That Are A’Comin?
If you’re going to stockpile, how about gasoline? Ammunition? Medication? Seeds and gardening tools? Dried and canned foods? Even stockpiling steel makes more sense than gold in the event of a world currency collapse.
I suppose your life savings in steel would be a hell of a thing to fit under the mattress, though.
darksidecat–the word you are looking for in State chartered “banks” is “FRAUD”!
The banknotes were receipts NOT of the banks’ gold holdings, but those of the bank’s depositors and/or creditors. It was never the banks–or its owners–to lend out in the first place.
When this is done to any other category of merchants, serious felony-grade laws normally come into play against the miscreants! Fraud (falsely claiming ‘ownership” of another’s property), embezzlement (using money or property for yourself without the knowledge or consent of its owner) and counterfeiting (issuing a claim on property–“banknotes”–that has no claim at all)!
I am not a prosecuting attorney by profession, so I have probably left out quite a few additional charges above.
To put it bluntly–if I walked into a goldsmith’s shop, bought ten oz of gold from him, and paid for it with say–500 ‘darksidecats’, assuring the seller of the gold that YOU would cover my debt–taken without your knowledge or consent–and then lent out the gold for a year at say 5% /yr. simple interest, and at the end of the year, you, the swindled goldsmith, and the police came for me, would I be allowed to excuse such felonious misbehavior by claiming that I was assuring proper liquidity in the money and credit supply (sound familiar)?
I THINK NOT!!
Why have banks been exempt, not from “regulation”–they have had regulations, even in the XIX century, coming out of the gazoo, but from these fundamental laws prohibiting fraud, embezzlement, and counterfeiting?
That is the fundamental evil of paper money, whether it has governmental or central bank blessing, or not.
Glad to have cleared that up. (I hope!)
Holly P–I suppose that ALL of the things that you mention would be important, except that the importance of gold–like all money, sweetums–is what it can be exchanged for, and how long it will keep its value! Somehow, gold (or even silver) has shown itself to be more useful as an item of barter and exchange than steel, using both these criteria..
Next case!
DKM, I was referencing an awesome video, but as always:
the point
your head.
>>If losing c.97% of its original purchasing power in less than a century is “not failing”, what is??
I don’t see how that’s failing. Maintaining the purchase power of a dollar is not some sort of absolute good. In fact, inflation, when it is not hyperinflation, has a beneficial side-effect: it stimulates spending. If a dollar tomorrow is worth less than a dollar now, it gives incentives to spend it ASAP, which means more consumption, which is good for the economy. Contrast to the effect of deflation, for instance (if my dollar is worth more tomorrow, the rational thing to do is to keep it and not spend it).
Since money is a medium of *exchange* and its entire purpose is to facilitate the transfer of goods from producers to consumers (not something that ought to be collected and accumulated for its own purpose), a mild level of inflation is in fact probably a good thing.
except that the importance of gold–like all money, sweetums–is what it can be exchanged for, and how long it will keep its value!
That’s what fiat currency is good for. But if there’s no faith in the currency, then gold–which is pretty and has some uses in dentistry and electronics, but is massively overvalued for those modest uses–can also going to lose people’s faith.
Since gold is only useful to jewelers and dentists, there’s no particular reason we should use it as a medium of exchange instead of, I don’t know, some specially printed pieces of paper. It’s just something we’ve arbitrarily agreed is valuable. That arbitrary agreement can change.
Gold’s value is purely symbolic, just like banknotes are. (Unlike banknotes, gold is produced and consumed willy-nilly all the time.) If you want something with “real,” non-symbolic value, buy things you can eat or things that make things you can eat.
” If you haven’t read Atlas Shrugged, read it, and more importantly, if you HAVE read it, read it again! ”
I’m going to let everyone else handle the gold issue and just laugh at the idea of anyone enjoying reading Atlas Shrugged. An excellent writer Rand was not.
Do you think we should tell DKM that Atlas Shrugged was written by an evil womyn?
Gold has a history of over six thousand years, in cultures at all levels of technical and economic development, all races and religions, countless languages and forms of political and legal organization! Gold was MONEY–a store of value, a medium of exchange, and a vehicle of saving!–that has outdone everything else in the world for the length of time characteristic of human civilization! It has done this despite endless attacks upon it by the powers that be, whether it be emperors clipping coins, goldsmiths and magistrates (the ancestors, I suppose, of our banking houses) adulterating the value of coins and tokens, Gold, as MONEY, has survived the endless attempts to seize its weallth by counterfeiting in the manner described above (see my reference to darksidecat’s post November 7, 2011 @2:10pm) from eighth century China (Where paper currency was first issued) to todays New World Order where there on ongoing attempts to create a global paper “money” but these attempts are being undercut by paper money’s inherent instability and unworthyness as money (cf. the troubles with the “Euro” now very much in the headlines”!
Gold is above all of that, is resistant to it when tried literally EVERYWHERE, on a time scale correlating with that of human civilization itself. Nothing of that timelessness is ‘purely symbolic”, nothing of that timelessness is–or can be–dependent on something as flawed as human banks or governments to preserve its value, it is, if anything, the governments and banks who are purely symbolic, as gold (and to a lesser extent, silver) wil continue to function as MONEY–a store of value, a vehicle for saving, and a primary medium of exchange–long after the powerful of the Earth today have been relegated to obscure footnotes in books discussing the folly and evil of mankind in an all-too-primitive age, and long after misuse of paper (to say nothing of electronic debits and credits) as money is recognised as the primitive superstition that it is, along with flat Earth, Ptolemaic astronomy, and Pharmacotoxic (“Western”) medicine!
Scarcity, permanance, and fungibility are the three values–NOT shared by paper–which make gold useful as money. Paper only acquires use as money after the frauds (banks and governments) pass legal tender laws and exemptions for themselves for laws prohibiting fraud, embezzlement, and counterfeiting, that are enforced against everyone else!
DKM’s endorsement of Atlas Shrugged is sort of bizarre, isn’t it? I mean, when I think of a quiet, submissive woman whose greatest joy lies in rubbing her husband’s feet while complimenting his intellect, I do not think Ayn Rand.