Gold as Wages

The image is from Cocharelli's Treatise of Vices. It depicts a late fourteenth-century counting house. I found it on a brilliant blog called Idle Speculations that I discovered tonight.



Here's an interesting one. The American Federal Government is doggedly pursuing a Nevada entrepreneur, Robert Kahre, for tax evasion. Through the Inland Revenue Service, it has been doing so for most of the past decade. Kahre's alleged crime? To designate his employees as independent contractors and to pay them in gold and silver coin at the face value of the coins, which are legal tender, rather than at the market value. The taxman is not happy.

As a consequence of the bank bail-out and the massive expansion of funny-money spending of late, the United States faces either ten years of ten percent inflation, or massive inflationary bubbles, to halve debt and to return the value of currency to its proper level. It can only hope to experience this process if its present decline is arrested, and it will be dizzying. In addition, more and more states are technically or feasibly bankrupt, and anti-federal, anti-bank, and anti-dollar moves will grow in the United States.

So I can't help joining many blogosphere sites--some endearingly batty, some half-serious--as they watch what is going on with Kahre, and at whether the government gets its way. If it fails, ordinary businessmen may well reintroduce a mixture of barter and the gold standard by the back door; it would be the first time in nearly a century when government monetary control would be blindsided in a major economy.

I shall clear my throat and ask my employers to pay only in gold, priced at the convenience of the legislature of the State. Why, simply nothing else will do, should it become the latest thing. I shall accept no less.

After all, a Goldfinger tribute act such as my body will no doubt become in a decade's time needs the appropriate trimmings....