Down With the Gold Bugs!

As an investor, I am a negative indicator. I have sometimes thought that I could make a good living by approaching CEOs of publicly traded companies and threatening to buy their stock. Every once in a while, though, I get lucky. I bought gold a year or two ago, which turned out to be a good move. Gold has performed remarkably well over the last decade, as this chart shows. Click to enlarge:
goldchart92.png
But not everyone is happy about the rising price of gold. Incredibly, Democrats on the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection will hold a hearing next week on the proposed regulation of the gold industry. Actually, it appears that they intend to investigate conservative media, on which gold is a prominent advertiser. Future Of Capitalism has the story:

Just as the government is trying to prevent people from investing in anything other than T-Bills by raising taxes on taxable interest and dividends to confiscatory levels, it’s also trying to prevent you from parking your wealth in assets, like gold, that compete with the paper dollars issued by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. A press release from Rep. Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York, not yet (as of this instant) posted on Mr. Weiner’s Web site, announces that a September 23 hearing of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection (a subcommittee of Rep. Henry Waxman’s Commerce Committee) will focus on “legislation that would regulate gold-selling companies, an industry who’s [sic] relentless advertising is now staple of cable television.”
From the press release: “Under Rep. Weiner’s bill, companies like Goldline would be required to disclose the reasonable resale value of items being sold.” That’s great. Are Mr. Weiner and Chairman Bernanke also going to agree to print on every dollar the reasonable expectation that its value will be eroded by inflation? …
Mr. Weiner’s regulatory push seems as much aimed at conservative journalists as at the gold-dealers. The press release says, “Goldline employs several conservative pundits to act as shills for its’ [sic] precious metal business, including Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, Laura Ingraham, and Fred Thompson. By drumming up public fears during financially uncertain times, conservative pundits are able to drive a false narrative. Glenn Beck for example has dedicated entire segments of his program to explaining why the U.S. money supply is destined for hyperinflation with Barack Obama as president.”
Imagine the uproar if a Republican-majority Congress started investigating and having a regulatory crackdown on big advertisers in liberal outlets such as the New York Times. The First Amendment freedom-of-the-press crowd would be marching in the streets.
The whole situation is amazing. If Mr. Weiner really wants to calm fears about hyperinflation, the last way to do it is to have a government hearing cracking down on the people warning of it.

Glenn Reynolds adds:

The New York Times still has big advertisers?

Heh. This kind of episode shows how brain-dead the Democratic establishment in Washington, D.C. is. There is a world-wide market in gold and other precious metals. If Democratic Congressmen seriously think they can prevent Americans from participating in that market, they are even more clueless than they thought.

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