[OT] why was private gold ownership made illegal in the US? (Re: "to outlaw general purpose computers")

[Harmon Seaver]

   Wasn't the dollar backed by silver for quite awhile? There were definitely
real silver dollars coined for quite awhile, and the dollar said something on it
about silver certificate. Likewise many smaller coins had a high silver content
-- this ended sometime during Vietnam, not sure the year. I've still got a bag
of silver coins laying around somewhere. 


On Tue, Jul 02, 2002 at 07:37:48PM -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
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> At 8:53 PM +0100 on 7/2/02, Adam Back wrote:
> 
> 
> > Just curious, but what was the rationale under which private
> > posession of gold was made illegal in the US?  It boggles the
> > mind...
> 
> Roosevelt wanted to make the dollar a fiat currency, IIRC. Before
> then, you could redeem dollars for gold, after then you could redeem
> dollars for, well, dollars.
> 
> This was slid sideways a bit after the war by the Bretton Woods
> agreement, which made various European currencies exchangeable into
> dollars at mostly fixed rates, and *foreigners* could exchange
> dollars into gold.
> 
> Which, once Europe was on its feet financially, and Johnson's
> democrats began inflating the dollar to pay for Vietnam and other fun
> things,  deGaulle's France (did I spell those both right, AAA? :-))
> happily started changing dollars into gold, FOB Paris, thank you very
> much.
> 
> At which point, Nixon floated the dollar, and, at the same time,
> allowed the private possession of gold in the US again. Then he did
> something really stupid and instituted price controls, but, he was
> always an Nerf-Conservative political opportunist anyway, or at least
> a Keynesian, which is the same thing, even Le Monde Diplomatique says
> so ;-)...
> 
> Fortunately, the rest of the innumeracy that was the New Deal has
> been going down the shitter since then. They finally got rid of the
> Glass-Stegal act a few years ago, for instance, the law that
> bifurcated investment banks and banks of deposit.
> 
> Cheers,
> RAH
> 
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> -- 
> -----------------
> R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
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> "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
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> experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com