I don’t know what I would do if I had the misfortune of being American (well, technically I am 1/4 American, but we’ll consider that too small a proportion to be significant) and having to vote in an election. My favorite democratic candidate was Kucinich. But I am a member of the Green Party of Canada, so that’s probably not surprising.

If anyone is interested in blindly finding out which candidate actually matches their viewpoints on the issues, there are several quizzes on the internet. Here’s one:

http://www.dehp.net/candidate/

I. I said Volcker lead the fight to abandon the gold standard. That doesn’t mean he intended record inflation, but it does imply he wasn’t wise enough or historically literate enough to anticipate the consequences.

“Coinage is imprinted gold or silver, by which the prices of things bought and sold are reckoned….It is therefore a measure of values. A measure, however, must always preserve a fixed and constant standard. Otherwise, public order is necessarily disturbed, with buyers and sellers being cheated in many ways, just as if the yard, bushel, or pound did not maintain an invariable magnitude.”
– Nicholas Copernicus, “Treatise on Debasement”, 1517

II. The idea that the Federal Reserve would self conciously choose high interest rates in order to curb unemployment is positively ridiculous. They would choose exactly the opposite policy, if they were going to intervene at all.

In any case, in August 1971, when Nixon (pressured by Volcker et al) abandoned the gold standard, unemployment was 6.1 percent. When Volcker became chairman of the Federal Reserve in August 1979, unemployment was 6.0 percent.

He pulled the brakes on the money supply, and pulled them hard. Did this reduce unemployment? Hardly – three years later unemployment was 10.1 percent. It was five more years before unemployment was back to 1979 levels.

It did stop the record 1970s inflation – an inflation we never would have had if we stayed on the gold standard in the first place. If the first rule of reserve banking is first do no harm, Volcker and the rest of the 1970s era monetary establishment were singular quacks.

Volcker’s brave non-political actions in 1980 gave us Ronald Reagan. Greenspan’s craven political actions led to two terms of George W. Who can be more proud?

By the way, in #73 I am not making the mistake of equating volatility with long term trends. I didn’t equate anything. The juxtaposition was intended to point out that you don’t have any idea what electricity prices will be in 2050. You probably wouldn’t have predicted 10 years ago that the price of oil, then also at a historical low, would be trading nine times higher either.

Please explain, however, what you were talking about with putting lead directly into the water. I wasn’t quite following the argument by that point.

Canada would come to resemble the state of Maine – with one important difference: Montreal would look like Las Vegas. And the United States would take on many characteristics of the province of New Brunswick.

E.B. White wrote a short story many years ago called “The Supremacy of Uruguay.” It contains many things that might happen should Canadians rule the world.

Didn’t I hear that in Sunday School at some point?