[I'mWaitingForTheMan]

(04-17-2012 10:37 PM)durangotang Wrote:  

(04-17-2012 09:02 PM)All or Nothing Wrote:  

(04-17-2012 08:05 PM)durangotang Wrote:  

We should not have an income tax, no. We should abolish the Federal Reserve system.

Some rules and regulations are good, though generally less is better.

As for public education, there should be no federal funds, nor federal control of content, and if you wish to send your children to a private school you should receive compensation commensurate. I am in favor of locally controlled eduction, preferably private education.

How are government services going to be paid for without income taxes?

Without a central bank, how are we going to maintain a single monetary system? Quick fact, before a centralized bank there were 100's of types of currencies in the U.S.

Is the school system going to be paid for through the state?

What government services do we need? Roads, schools, a legal system, and jails... these are almost all funded outside the income tax and represent 5-10% of total taxation. Welfare, warfare, and endless wasteful spending would need to be cut.

Without a central bank we could use gold as a monetary system. There would be far more stability, far less deficit spending, and far less inflation (which is a silent tax on the poorest).

States and local municipalities could determine the best way to fund education for themselves and hopefully we would return to having the highest standard of education in the world, as we did before the federal Department of Education was established.

The world did use the gold system predominantly up until the 20th century and a return to the gold standard was even tested out by several countries. It doesn't work in an expanding global economy. It got abandoned for a reason. It easily allows for the supply of money to dry up, and if the economy is expanding it chokes off the expansion of currency that is necessary to sustain economic growth. Gold is also a commodity just like anything else and one with a more inflexible supply than others.
Regardless of how bad the recent financial crisis was, the world economy was still growing as a whole. What do you think would have happened if the majority of countries by GDP in the world were on a gold standard during this recent economic crisis? Deflation would have happened, and economic growth would have crashed alongside an ever increasing global population. Goods would have been produced, and the inelastic supply of money on a gold standard would not have increased the supply of money to account for the greater population and greater outflow of goods and services. Prices drop and before you know it when you used to get $20 for selling something at your store (for instance) your getting $8. When this happens across the board everybody stops producing new things, and the economy goes into the toilet.

[kosko]

Gold Standard is not realistic. Gold is the most manipulated asset on earth. You need money that is tied to something real but something that is still has some sense of expandability.

But money is not the issue. Money can be static as it needs to present things that are real and real things are finite. The issue with 2008 was the contraction of credit. If you have a stable near static money supply then you encourage capital to grow and not credit. Evrey finance crisis has been caused by banks limiting access to credit or capital. Its a matter of control. If governments are able to freely expand money at no interest to its self then it has the ability to fund the necessary projects its needs to with a disincentive to abuse the system as it would dilute their ability to expand and thus power. This was common before the current private central bank fractional reserve model became the global norm.