Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >I disagree,,,, there is time, but not in terms of years or making a 
> decision - decision making time tends to need to be made within a few short 
> weeks/months once the top is in.

For someone who proposes to strategically increase their discretionary wealth 
over time by means of trading gold this might be germane.  But this gold 
discussion came from the proposition that if someone were not homesteading 
right 
now and they decided at some point in the future that it was the "right time" 
to begin homesteading, having some gold coins to jingle about would be as 
good, 
if not better, preparation than getting oneself on some land, any land, and 
begin laying in the necessities and improving the soil.

It doesn't matter why such a prospective homesteader would be looking toward 
homesteading.  It might be for a new economic base in their affairs or it 
might be under the notion of living an undocumented existence below the radar 
of 
the authorities.  But let's suppose the "time" has come and we're ready to 
head 
to the homestead.  If "wealth" has been stored as grain, beans, canned goods, 
tools, stoves, and improvement in the soil, it doesn't matter when that 
"time" comes, you are ready.  

But suppose the strategy is to put your money in gold with the plan that when 
the "time" comes, you cash in the gold and buy all the above things (with the 
exception of soil fertility which you can't buy).  The "time" under some 
models being viewed under the umbrella difinition of homesteading is when the 
authorities or creditors bid fair to come knocking.  So one goes jingling out 
the 
back door with their pocket full of gold coins.   But suppose this is a low 
point in the price of gold?  Suppose, as is rapidly becoming the case, the 
authorities tightly monitor the buying and selling of gold?

Leslie, the sorts of things you talk about in trading of gold, that is 
prediciting a bubble or significant rise, buying before the rise, and selling 
at 
some advantage at an elevated price ... is a paradigm based on reality and 
happens all the time, has happened all the time through monetary history.

But the ficticious notion of salting away some gold coins and in an emergency 
(general or personal) going to some remote landholder and slapping down some 
coins for land, or going to the farm supply or stock yards and slapping down 
a 
coin or two for what you need is a pure fabrication with no examples of it 
ever having happened.

I might add that the paradigm of acquiring and occupying land before an 
emergency (general or personal), stocking it with foodstuffs, fuel, and 
tools, 
slowly building the soil fertility and one's own skills and strenght ... is 
also a 
tried and true formula that has been done for ages and continues to be done 
even as we speak.

As for the place of gold in the homestead plan, trading gold is one way of 
making money.  But so is driving a taxi, raising cows, or doing woodwork.  
Gold 
trading has no real advantages over any of those latter methods and has its 
own risks and drawbacks.  Apart from that the notion of stuffing value into 
some 
gold coins, in effect stuffing a homestead into some coins, so one can slink 
off somewhere and cash out the homestead in a pinch is, to put it bluntly, an 
idiotic proposal.


James