_Rasor Rasus_, the Scraper Scraped

Dear Dr. Bones,

Religionism always excepted,

there is no more fertile breeding-swamp for clowns and charlatans than economics:

True but irrelevant Obama will still be wiped out if he expects us to swallow gas prices 3-5 times what they were in the early 2000s. The [C]onstitution gives the [C]ongress the power “To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures”. Oil isn’t expensive, the dollar is cheap. Congress has the power to change that, they should use it. Right now neither Romney nor Obama are close to the solution, but Romney is closer. If prices are the problem, it’s unlikely that Romney will stumble into the right solution on his own, but at least a few of his advisers are familiar with the context and the Republican Congress could be much better than the Democrats who are hopeless on the issue. seascraper @ Sun 18 Mar 10:22 PM

"and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures" Say, I know – let’s redefine a quart as a gallon. Buck-a-gallon gas – problem solved! david @ Sun 18 Mar 10:26 PM

Like a couple of other honourable an’ neogallant reactionaries who occasionally drop by the Great Blue Hill, Freelord Seascraper makes it difficult to work out exactly what bushes he is shootin’ from behind. Instead of crystal-clear factional soundbarks like "¡Drill, baby, drill!" his freelordship quoted the Fedguv Constitution, which made it possible to suppose, in good faith, that his freelordship supposes (IGF) that Mr. Madison and the Gang of Eighty-Seven supposed (IGF) that the Wicked State can just "make up" the value of its money pretty much the same way Shakespeare made up _Hamlet_. That, of course, is what very properly got spoofed as makin’ a quart be a gallon by callin’ it one.

Snooping around

(( The WhightGuard Officers Mess ))

I discovered the following bit of seascraperiana that casts some light. His freelordship quotes from that grave an’ learnèd journal, The Sun of Gotham City:

[T]he [P]resident is "pushing back against election-year attacks from Republicans" who say his energy policies "are to blame for high gas prices that are eroding his popularity with voters." The problem with all this is that it’s not the energy policies that are driving up gasoline prices. It’s the MONETARY policies, and if the Republicans can’t manage to get that point into focus, it’s hard to see how they can put the rest of the MONETARY debate to their advantage

(( _Italics_ mark the freelordly emphasis; UPPER CASE, my own. ))

Now, ’tis news to Paddy McTammany that there exists any "monetary debate." Foxcuckooland, to be sure, is a foreign country an’ kiddiecons debate things differently there. On the other hand, I do waste quite a lot of time slumming out there, and have yet to run into this alleged controversy. The Sunsters, however, do seem to be cranks vendin’ a panacæa, even if they cannot find anybody grown-up to argue about phlogiston an’ ‘specie’ with:

We’ve been making this point for months now. The fact is that priced in specie — gold or silver — the value of gasoline has been plunging. We made this point in April last year, after Mr. Obama used his weekly radio address to declare that to rectify rising gasoline prices there was, as he put it, “no silver bullet.” Our point was that a gallon of gasoline was selling at the time for fewer grains of silver than it was selling for when Mr. Obama (or, for that matter, Mr. Bush) had acceded to the presidency. Gasoline at the pump was selling for a sixth of an ounce of silver when Mr. Obama was sworn in. Today, the value of the same gallon of gasoline has fallen to less than a 10th of an ounce of silver. Measured in gold, the value of gasoline has also been plunging. In other words, it’s not the gasoline that’s been going up. It’s the dollar that’s been going down. Americans, however, don’t hold their money in gold or silver. They generally hold their money in accounts denominated in dollars, and the dollar has been getting weaker....

With that background filled in, one can see that Freelord Seascraper is only another ‘goldbug’, which, however, would not be easy to guess from the brief communication with which we were honoured. The first time I read it, I was wondering what sort of Chicago-Viennasausage monetary fandango Congress or the Federal Reserve was expected to dance, but there was no need to speculate, for of course they certainly could make nothing but precious metals legal tender for the payment of debts. If they all go around the bend together in a handbasket, that is. It would be dotty, but it be constitutional.

It seems safe to agree that W. M. Romney is ‘unlikely’ to "stumble into" *that* "right solution," [*] one not only accounted more or less insane in TopPercenter economic circles, always "severely conservative," but also not held by enough wingnutettes an’ wingnuts of lesser stature to be worth the pander.

Happy days.

___
[*] I detect, perhaps mistakenly, a certain lack of respect on the part of his freelordship for the Governor’s bigmanagerial skills, as imparted to His Excellency by the H*rv*rd Victory School,

(The former Allston (Mass.) Academy of Chirurgy and Barber Science)

an’ certified with an M.B.A ’75, an’ then honed by years of remorseless baincappin’.

In fact, I could have written that depreciatory ‘stumble’ myself, though with a very different idea than his freelordship’s of what ‘Mittens’ on the unimpeded gallop would look like.