Tag: suppression

Censorship vs. Suppression

Guest Post by Eric Peters

Libertarians – me included – have wrestled long and hard with this one: Is it censorship when private entities do it?

No – not in a legal sense. Because these private entities do not have the power to forbid publication, per se.

But they do have the power to suppress (and even to punish) publication when the entities at issue effectively control the means of publication – and so it amounts to the same thing as censorship.

It may even be worse, since one can always get around government censorship (see, for example, the underground Samizdat press in Tsarist Russia or, later, the anti-communist press in East Germany and Poland).

But how does one “get around” private control of the all-encompassing Internet and related “social media platforms”?

Continue reading “Censorship vs. Suppression”

CORRELATION, CAUSATION, OR COINCIDENCE?

With some volatility, the price of gold had tracked the national debt and the debt ceiling  from 2000 through 2012. It doesn’t take a goldbug to figure out that if you increase your debt from $5.7 trillion to $16.7 trillion over 12 years by printing paper fiat dollars, those dollars will become worth less in relation to a scarce commodity that has functioned as money for over 2,000 years. The price increase of gold is simply a matter of supply and demand versus the USD.

But something unusual has happened in 2013. The national debt has continued to soar. Just because the government stopped counting on May 21 doesn’t mean it hasn’t continued to go up by $2.5 billion per day. Your government says the national debt stands at $16.747 trillion today, which is $48 billion higher than the official debt limit. In reality, the national debt has reached $17 trillion. By the time Obama leaves office it will be $20 trillion.

Despite the rhetoric in Washington DC, no one will be cutting anything. Obamacare will cost far more than any CBO projections. The economy is in recession, so tax receipts will be far lower than projections. We will surely fight another war or two between now and 2016.

So was the 12 year increase in gold prices that tracked our increase in debt just a coincidence? Does the 2013 disconnect prove that gold prices have no correlation to debt and dollar debasement? Or has there been a concerted effort by the Federal Reserve, the government and the Wall Street banks to suppress the price of gold artificially through the paper gold markets and use of derivatives? Do they know that the price of gold reveals their debasement scheme?

If you believe that artificial suppression will fail and that gold truly is correlated to the amount of debt being accumulated by your political leaders and money printing (QEternity) being done by Ben and his boys, then you will conclude that gold would be fairly valued at  $1,800 per ounce today. It will be fairly valued at $2,200 per ounce by the end of Obama’s term.

Do you believe Bernanke and Wall Street will win this battle? Or do you believe the market will ultimately prevail?