Shun Gold

[From Ran Prieur]

I got a bunch of comments on yesterday's post. X says, and I agree, that resourcefulness is more important than preserving stuff. And Y says, and I agree, that "investment" is just a fancy word for gambling, and "the only legitimate way to make money is to do something useful."

A couple readers pointed out that I didn't mention gold. That was not an oversight. I think buying gold is one of the worst things you can do. Unlike food or tools or skills, gold has no use value, except a few industrial applications. And most important, gold is zero-sum. Food is often shared, tools can be shared without losing their value, and skills actually grow with sharing. Even some metals, like iron and copper, can be shared by building stuff out of them to be used in common. But gold cannot be shared, and in practice it's not even given away without expecting something in return. Basically, gold is a pure embodiment of human selfishness. That is its use.

Now, you could say the same thing about cash and stocks and bonds. But the difference is, all of those things are less stable than gold -- in an economic collapse, they lose their value. This seems to make them less useful than gold, but really it makes them less evil. If we're all living on bank accounts, and the banks fail, then we're all in the same boat. But suppose the banks fail and some people have gold. Will they use it for the common good? It's impossible -- gold doesn't work that way. They will use their gold to set themselves up as the new elites -- or they will be murdered by people who have the weapons and the ruthlessness to set themselves up as the new elites.

Imagine you have a store of gold coins, and you try to use one to buy a really good shovel. The shovel seller will be thinking some combination of these things: "Gold! Gold! I'm rich!" "Hey, if you have one gold coin, I bet you have a bunch more, and my brothers and I can follow you home and kill you and steal them." "I can dig holes with my shovel, but what can I use a gold coin for?" "If I accept this coin, how will I be able to spend it without the next person thinking the same things? But if I don't spend it, you know I have it, and who else knows?" This is the kind of thinking that gold carries with it.