I heard something interesting recently.

Everybody following the silver stacking community knows there are huge shortages and resulting huge premiums on American silver eagles, the most popular 1oz stacking coin in America. It is also known that the US Mint has been causing the shortages by not producing enough coins, and this has been attributed mostly to covid lockdowns, but apparently the whole thing was misunderstood, in light of what I’ve heard: that the US Mint actually can’t source “blanks” (essentially “empty” coins of correct dimensions and purity produced by a third party, which are then bought and finished in the sovereign mint) because of a law that forces them to source the material at spot price, and the spot price is artificially kept so low using various paper trickery, that nobody actually wants to sell them silver at that price. Since absolutely everything is sold at a “premium” over spot, including 1000oz industrial bars, “spot” price is actually the price of absolutely nothing at the moment.

This made me think about such laws, combined with fake “official” prices that don’t reflect market realities, and what happens when physical realities assert themselves, and I remembered shortages in Yugoslavia. It’s not that the shortages were necessarily caused by lack of goods; they were caused by the state attempt to keep the prices low, and basically at those prices the manufacturers had no incentive to produce and sell, because they would do so at a loss. Failure to allow prices to surge upwards in an inflationary environment causes shortages. The more the state tries to intervene, the worse it gets. That’s what happened in the occupied Germany after WW2; the Americans implemented a tight price control which caused shortages. The only way someone actually fixed the problem was when they removed all price restrictions (the wording of the American-written law prohibited changing the restrictions, but didn’t say anything about removing them altogether), allowing the prices to go wherever the market dictated, which almost immediately created supply and normalised the market. One would expect that the Americans, with all their talk about free market economy and all, knew better than to impose price restrictions, but apparently not. However, the correlation between governments trying to control prices in an inflationary environment, thus trying to hide inflation, and trying to implement misguided social policy by trying to keep food and energy prices low after they successfully destroyed the purchasing power of the currency by money printing, is historically well established. In such a country you can always see official, “legitimate” stores with empty shelves and low prices, and “black market” where you can buy anything, but at the actual market prices, and for “real money”.

Another thing crossed my mind recently, when I had to pay cash for hotel because due to all sorts of Easter holidays I could not transfer money between accounts, and I almost ended up sleeping in the car because the entire booking process was done digitally on the Internet, and I got a confirmation of the reservation and all, but the trick is, it all existed only between computers, and no human ever saw any of it because they were all on holiday, and so nobody was there in the hotel reception and nobody knew we were coming. We did manage to contact someone through a phone number handwritten on a piece of paper at the reception door, but it was a close call indeed. The point I’m trying to make is that I joked with the receptionist that people are wrong when they think that the computers will kill us by making Terminator-like extermination robots; no, they will kill us by digital money simply not working, after all the physical cash is withdrawn from circulation as “primitive” and “obsolete”. Also, the Croatian tax service introduced something called “fiscalisation”, meaning that every retail transaction has to be registered online with the tax service in order for the seller not to be liable for a tax evasion fine. Imagine how well that would work if the Internet went out. Also, imagine if they replaced conventional money with something that relies on the transaction being registered on the blockchain. Basically, the Internet goes down and everybody is suddenly reduced to bartering things for food, because we all got suckered by our God damn thieving governments, and I mean ALL governments everywhere. They are all thieves and bastards. They initially sold us the fashion of using paper notes instead of gold and silver coins, because it’s more modern, more practical and elegant. Peasants use coins, gentlemen use banknotes, so we all used banknotes, but don’t you worry, banknotes are as good as gold. Ooops, convertibility of banknotes to gold was “suspended indefinitely”, but don’t you worry, it’s just to prevent “gold hoarding”, it’s still good money. Ooops, no it’s not, it keeps devaluating. Also only criminals and terrorists use cash, and all sorts of diseases spread through cash so don’t use cash, use credit cards and digital payment, it’s as good as cash but oops, the governments can now trace every transaction, and not only that, they can “sanction” you if they don’t like your political attitudes, and “freeze” your digital assets and make your cards stop working if you’re not obedient to the current democratorship. But don’t you worry, when they completely remove cash, because terrorists and drug dealers, and because little babies will cry if they don’t remove it, and they can control everybody’s money from a central point, everything is going to be great, because only the crazy conspiracy theorists don’t trust the government, right? We need to prevent financing terrorism and “money laundering”, right? Actually, when truckers protesting against vaccination mandates are “terrorists”, and avoiding insanely excessive taxation introduced because the governments have to somehow pay for all the spying, restrictions and oppression is “money laundering”, I reserve my God-given right to be a terrorist and to launder my money as much as I feel like, thank you very much for your concern and please accept my dick up your arse if you don’t like it.