Money

The House passed two bills attempting to rehabilitate the housing and mortgage market this week. There doesn't seem to be any shortage of criticism and blame for the bad decisions, and rightly so. Lenders and banks do share much of the blame for the overheated market. Lending standards were relaxed, or even abandoned altogether, creating an exaggerated pool of homebuyers that led to ballooning home prices that many, especially real estate investors, expected to continue forever. Now that the bubble has burst, the losses are staggering.

Did you hear about the dyslexic insomniac agnostic, who lay awake all night wondering if there was a DOG? Seriously, let us get a sense of reality back into what we talk about. Why do we regard a dollar as something of value? Why let central banks, who officially hold that their paper notes are legal tender, work to devalue the thing that will be our true money? Why do we continue acquiescing in government, let alone actually consenting to it?

We are Taxbucks. We say "we" because you never find one of us alone. Taxbucks always run in packs, usually in millions, often in billions, and ever more frequently in trillions. Many of us started life in a form known as "Money." Humans like to keep us tucked away somewhere until they want to swap us for something else. This swapping is called buying and selling. It's a trade that humans do voluntarily. If there's no swindling or other trickery going on, both sides are happy because both sides get what they want.

“First, Congress banned the use of credit cards ‘and other payment forms’ to settle Internet wagers. Now the San Francisco Chronicle wants to impose a similar ban on the use of credit cards to make purchases from online pharmacies. … Credit cards and other payment systems, once seen as a potential route to financial flexibility, have become tools of political control. There are alternative means of payment, but these have proven vulnerable to government pressure.