OT: "It'll be a 'Rainbow Nation' - an example to the world!"

European capitalism was such a successful economic philosophy that they only had to steal half of Africa's gold to do it! Hard to argue with success like that. Maybe I'll go rob Fort Knox and then people will tell me what a successful businessman I am.

Good luck with that. It's been long-rumored there's nothing left in it. Elon Musk wanted to go in there with a live TV feed with some independent experts to do a full assay and inventory, but guess what? Permission refused. What do they have to hide if all the gold's still there?

Gold isn't wealth. It's like paper money, just an agreed way to avoid barter. Its intrinsic value is small.

If we mined asteriods for gigatons of gold or platinum or diamonds, their value would crater.

The european economy grew because of local productivity. The "stolen" catalysts were sugar and coffee and chocolate.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

There are plenty of things that could benefit from being made of gold if only it had been less expensive. It's such a waste to just hoard the stuff.

Jeroen Belleman

Au contraire, mon ami. Gold is *nothing* like paper money. Paper money can be printed to any level you like, which is inflationary. You can't do that with gold. It's a finite resource. You can't print more of it. And you say its intrinsic value is small, but is $3,800 an ounce (as it currently is roughly) "small" to you? You must be *very* rich if it is!

Agreed. But how likely is that in the foreseeable future?

The *real* capital of Europe was brains. Ideas. People with vision. They are innumerable. If you dig into it, you find again and again that the greatest thinkers and doers in the world came from primarily two countries: Germany and England. For some reason the Lefties hate that uncomfortable little fact. But that's another story.

The point is that it would be worth far less if it was just another industrial metal.

Not much. But diamonds are fairly easy to make now.

I agree. The "means of production" is ideas. Which Marxists destroy when they try to seize it.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

It isn't any kind of "fact". India produced much of the mathematics and linguistics that Arab and - later - European thinkers built on.

What Cursitor Doom is presenting is the European choice of the people to be credited with the innovations the Europeans found valuable.

The American academic habit of only reading academic papers published in English in American journals gives them a similar sense of intellectual superiority.

It's intellectual laziness, and both the left and right go in for it. Cursitor Doom adds a generous dollop of complacent ignorance.

The Marxists in China are churning out about 80% of the solar cells produced. That's pretty creative destruction. They are doing pretty well in wind turbines and electric cars too.

Authoritarians - like Donald Trump - aren't good for industrial production, but the Chinese seem to be somewhat less authoritarian than regular Marxists.

Mikhail Bakunin did object to Karl Marx's political ideas - which were authoritatian - on the basis that socialism needed more flexible politics. The Chinese do seem to have got some way towards proving Bakunin right. Whether they can continue to be creative is an open question - with Donald Trump busily wrecking American creativity it's clear that it is easy to wreck.

Mostly cultivated in remote colonies by slaves imported from even further away.

"Local productivity" was by no means the whole story.

A lot of the local economy was devoted to building ship, guns and cannons to defend existing colonies and acquire new ones.

Kinda stating the obvious there, John! Its value comes in large part from its scarcity, same as just about every other in-demand commodity.

Marxism always devolves to The Party getting rich at the expense of the workers.

Creative? The russians and the chinese mostly steal our ideas. And usually mess them up.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Gold is special. Lots of scarce things are worth maybe 1% as much.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Karl Marx did make the mistake of insisting on the leading role of the party, which does put in a heavy bias towards authoritarian behavior.

Chinese Marxism does seem to have backed off from that to some extent. It may evolve into something closer to European style socialism, but this isn't looking all that likely at the moment.

Europeans tend say the same thing about America. When I got into the electronics business, integrated circuits were all American, but that didn't last.

The Russians didn't steal the T-34 tank from the west, except in the sense that it used the Christie suspension, and they certainly didn't mess that up.

There's a lot of sharing of technical innovations, and everybody has their own ideas about how they should be used.

It has been popular as a medium of exchange for a very long time. Once you've built up a customer base of rich lunatics, their enthusiasm is all you need to make it special. Donald Trump and the MAGA movement is a more recent example. Of course Trump isn't remotely incorruptible.