Australia: Car Seizure Law Used to Take Bike From Little Girl

kkt, If you wanted your car, or gold, back, that was what you now had to pay. If you were happy with FDR & Friends having it, I guess not. People had chosen to keep their savings in gold not because they liked the shine of it, but because of its value in exchange. So those $35,000 in gold were claims on $35,000 of whatever goods and services it could be exchanged into. After confiscation, you had claims on $20,000 worth, while FDR & Friends had claims on the remaining $15,000. Perhaps not the exact distribution you had envisioned when deciding whether to put that extra dollar aside for your retirement, rather than blowing it on Jazz Age vices and Gatsbyesque grandeur, but hey! And those previous claims were not limited to claims on "consumer goods", whatever arbitrary scheme the confiscators might have used to classify some goods as such to the exclusion of others, but were claims on the economy as a whole. And while I have no doubt allowing deeply indebted bankers to grab a share of 40% of everyone else's savings, felt infinitely more manageable to those bankers themselves, as well as to those whose political campaigns they were bankrolling; I somehow doubt those that had eschewed speculation, and were now robbed of the opportunity to parlay their superior investment acumen into expanding their share of the total banking and asset markets, felt quite the same way. But then again, why should someone be allowed such an opportunity, merely on account of being enterprising and competent, when there were oh so many incompetents around to choose from; many of whom, on the back of massive debt, had managed to inject themselves so deeply into our benevolent politicians' social and economic spheres? Also, while I'm sure being able to confiscate at will ensured FDR's supply of gold was no longer in danger, I doubt the remaining citizens of the nation felt their supply was all that secure any more. I know I wouldn't. And how does confiscating the savings of those who saved, in order to help pay down the debt of those who speculated with borrowed money and lost, hurt speculators? The same way taxing children not yet born, to bail out speculators at Goldman Sachs does? As for "hoarders", they're more commonly referred to as savers. And since investment comes from savings, and economic growth comes from investment, hurting savers doesn't exactly strike me as the cleverest move out there, at least if ones goal is economic growth and not wealth transfers, favoritism and ideological masturbation. And the rest of the population? Well, what they got was 10 years of depression. Followed by five years of war. Followed again by decades of nonsensical mumbo jumbo about how things would have been "even worse" had people not bowed down, bent over and let themselves and their belongings be violated, all in the name of economic quackery incessantly spewed by an ever growing parasitic caste of leeches acting as little more than boat anchors around the ankles of productive humanity. Not exactly my idea of the right move, but perhaps I'm just a little eccentric.