The investment game, Inflation and the cost of goods.

[Slamz]

Well it's all a house of cards isn't it? A grain of wheat only has intrinsic value if you can mill it and bake it into bread. Gold isn't worth shit unless you can smelt it and stick it on your tooth. So Maull's relativism (I'm giving him credit for purposes of this argument) still rings true.

Relativism yes but my point with intrinsic value is that if nobody will buy your stock, it's literally worth nothing. If nobody will buy your farm land, you can still live on it and grow wheat and if nobody will buy your wheat, you can still eat it. Those things, at least, have some built-in value in that you can use them in your life.

Gold is more arguable but gold is like a stock with a long history of being valued by people. It doesn't seem to take a very high level of civilization before gold starts to become valuable again.

Come to think of it, the human preoccupation with gold and jewels is kind of strange. We're like giant magpies.


I guess we're really talking about investment for the purpose of making money versus investment for the purpose of having wealth without regard for the state of the economy.

Land is wealth. Food is wealth, albeit you probably wouldn't collect it. Gold, I would say, is wealth, at least as long as our magpie tendencies hold up.

Stock is money. Savings accounts are money. It's not wealth until you turn it into something that will maintain its value outside of the economy.