The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Traditional Historic American Values - Part 9: Perspective Also

4 November 2009

Volume 11, Issue 44

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Be strong, all you people of the land, declares the LORD. Work, for I am with you, declares the LORD of hosts, according to the covenant that I made with you when you came out of Egypt. My Spirit remains in your midst. Fear not. For thus says the LORD of hosts: Yet once more, in a little while I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land. And I will shake all nations, so that the treasures of all nations shall come in, and I will fill this house with glory, says the LORD of hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, declares the LORD of hosts. The latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former, says the LORD of hosts. And in this place I will give peace, declares the LORD of hosts.'" Haggai 2:4b-9 ESV

Yesterday was Election Day in the United States, the first (sort of) national election since the Obama happening last year. The results pretty much signify that the shaking continues and again verifies that this still is a moderately conservative nation. I doubt the vested pundits and the commentators will spin it that way, which means that the shaking will continue for the foreseeable future.

In the open historical conservative Congressional seat in upstate New York, the Democrat won, somewhat upsetting the New Era Conservative, nerdy, accountant type, endorsed by the small tent Republican aristocracy. If it were Texas you could prove the statement, “Don’t mess with Texas!” In the rest of the country a nap or maybe another cup of morning coffee, should be in order.

More significant however was the Republican victories in the governors races in Virginia and New Jersey. Neither victory bid well for the Obama Administration focus on remaking America in the image of the early twentieth century Soviet Union. ObamaCare and a Cap and Trade energy tax in the short-term future seem much more remote than they did a short day ago.

Of course no one knows for sure if that Bolshevik agenda is really the goal of President Obama, but that seems to be the present focus of Glenn Beck and his following. Perhaps a more moderate concept of redistribution of wealth would be a better pursuit to save the country from the greedy capitalists. However that also assumes that there is still some real wealth to redistribute to those who feel that they deserve it.

Off course the greedy capitalists think they deserve the wealth also and it will eventually trickle down to the have nots, just as in the continuing vision of the Reagan Revolution that shifted the role of small business from the innovators and job creators of society to a service sector of consultants and debt leveraged consumers.

Most of the wealth that now remains, really isn’t wealth at all, it is just a spin on “show me the money, and give me my money.” This is definitely a new, New Deal direction for the American Dream.

Probably the most significant item that happened yesterday was Warren Buffett’s purchase of the rest of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad for a $34 billion total investment. As news reports state, Buffett considers this the best bet in the country and it is hard to argue with his understanding. Furthermore it shows that the capitalistic vision of the precursor Great Northern’s founder Jim Hill is not dead.

For the last few decades, rails have been increasingly replaced by roads to haul America’s goods. That rail-based capitalism just can’t compete with the flexibility of free market trucks running on socialistically maintained highways, nor with airfreight, which travels to socialistically maintained airports. Just because a great big rolling railroad can transport goods for about one hundredth the cost of a truck per ton-mile really has made no difference in America’s debt driven consumerism. Of course we haul way too much stuff now for railroads to be but a minor player in the transportation mix, but what happens if the shaking drastically curtails the volumes of stuff to be transported.

While we are digressing, there was talk just on Monday about how the government may step in to save print journalism. Again for decades print journalism has survived by print advertising. Just as with the demise of railroads, cost effective inserts drove real journalism in local papers. Through these flyers you could find the latest bargains to fill your inflated house with stuff you really didn’t need and find people to help you manage that stuff that you would do yourself if you really had the time. With the current shaking, the stuff you buy has diminished, hence the sale flyers produce less revenue, and hence the whole paper journalism genre is an endangered species.

So now you find the stuff you need advertised on cable television. Advertising segments now run about three minutes plus some more time to promote other broadcasts. Rare is the program where you can get a break of twenty minutes without a potty or kitchen advertising break. Most of the time, especially toward the end of the program that non-ad segment is shortened to maybe five minutes.

Isn’t technology grand, with the advent of DVRs and TiVos, with the press of a button you can fast forward through all the ads to buy the stuff that pays for the programs you enjoy, and takes your mind off all the bad things happening in this increasingly shaking world. With fifty, or two hundred and fifty, or more channels just what is the future of free market entertainment either? Put another way, how can you create a demand for a fifty thousand dollar vehicle if people are unwilling to watch your slick egocentric advertisement.

What yesterday’s election is truly showing the politicians and should be showing the rest of us. is people are much more than consumption machines. What has been lost recently is just what are we? That is the big question not only in the United States but also around the world.

There have been recently a series of articles that reinforce the US government’s bailout of financial institutions just a few months ago. The essence of those articles is that if we over regulate or don’t regulate these institutions, financial innovation, as we know it will cease, and with that failure the current world economic system will collapse. At first glance the first response is probably, so what, or bring it on. But with a little more reflection the understanding of what will replace the current, makes you see that there really is no human based enlightened worldview in waiting.

Al Gore and General Electric will give us the opportunity to create a green world, but that illusion is based upon the assumption that this economic model of growth can continue, and they just want to tweak the edges and make a ton of money in the process.

The Biblical reference from the Bible that begins this article is one of my favorite passages. Notice it focuses upon individual people and real wealth. That wealth can be divided into two ultimate sources or resources of wealth, one could be described as religion, the other material. Both of those however find their ultimate reality in God, not in the tangible reality of the ends. Hence in that light both could also be transcendent rather can just mundane.

We all consider true religion to be transcendent even if we don’t believe in either religion or transcendence. In that regard materialism considers transcendence and religion as false, a fiction of illusion. These are essentially primitive evolutionary concepts that exist in the minds of the less enlightened but still a reality that elitist enlightenment must deal with when confronting skeptics of global warming, publicly mandated healthcare, and the rest of the progressive agenda.

Gold and silver however are real, just not part of the current money genre of baseless money and fluent debt expansion. You can leverage precious metals, but there is a limit to that credulousness. But it is hard to dismiss gold and precious metals generally when today gold has reached a monetary high and may reach a value of $1100 per oz. before the end of today’s trading.

Precious metals are the means of securing wealth in turbulent times. These are turbulent times. If you happen to watch those more conservative cable channels, you continually have to leap through those advertisements offering to sell you gold. The really frightening thing about them is you have to hit the skip button at least a couple of times to get beyond the message. That means the gold sales companies are really spending a lot of money to sell you gold.

I founded a company in the 1980’s during the dotcom era that was to provide gold and precious metals mining and refining equipment to individuals and small commercial mining operations. I shut it down when I couldn’t raise funds beyond my own resources to get it beyond the research and development phase. That did not mean that I did not believe that the technology we had would not work, it was just that we could not raise the capital required to take it to the next level.

Less than a month ago I received a call from one of those contacts wondering if I could still do that same process on a deposit not too far from this present location. So I have reformed that company and begun again that development. As time and money permit we will again in the not too distant future be looking for investors in this wealth producing stability, as the world around continues to shake.

As the Bible passage says God claims the gold and silver for Himself. In that regard gold and silver are pretty much everywhere, however most of it is found in extractable concentrations in relatively small deposits that do not possess sufficient wealth for a typical modern mining company to achieve a return on investment. However for an individual or a small group of investors willing to work and an understanding that you are dealing with a transcendent commodity, you might achieve wealth beyond your fondest dreams, if you are willing to live by faith. After all a small deposit that had only 1000 ounces of gold (2.5 standard 400 oz/troy gold bars) would make you a millionaire.

Along that path back in the 80’s I sent a letter to ten popular Christian ministries that were continually asking for money on television. The concept was if you truly live by faith what better way to it was to ask God for gold to fund your programs. My ministry program consisted of the ministry providing the development funds to develop a property of their own choosing and they would receive ninety percent of the profit and my company would take the tithe or ten percent.

I think I got five responses, all five of them said that their bylaws prohibited them from receiving funds from any sources other than by essentially fleecing the sheep. The marketing director of one ministry however took the time to say that he believed that the Haggai concept was probably a better funding mechanism than what they were now doing (fleecing the sheep). Shortly thereafter scandal over took the ministry and it no longer exists, at least in the fashion that it once dominated evangelical Christian programming.

Shortly thereafter I broadened the 90-10 concept to include the wider world of investments. I found no investors with those who were looking to exploit their Mother Lode, nor even those with enough faith to support our environmentally sensitive air concentrators and related equipment. Trusting God for your reward is not something we humans find all that easy to do.

I am still here, and in the perspective of current times making it all work with twelve hundred dollar gold is going to be a whole lot easier and a whole lot more pertinent than in times when gold values were around three hundred dollars.

So think about the shaking going on in the world today and the path you want to take into the future. Save the actual occurrence of the evangelical Rapture, you can believe the hype of the moneymen and Wall Street, or you can believe the Bible. The real interesting concept in all of this is perhaps there are enough real money people who believe that the only way out of this mess is real money based upon a tangible asset based exchange rates of currencies. After all that is the true source of wealth that allowed for the development of human civilizations beyond tents and cave dwellers.