The Same Only Different

The paper mill is still there on Main Street, right in the middle of Cheboygan. Parts of the building are over a century old, and it has had several owner over the years. The current owner is a guy who used to be my boss when I worked there. We used to call him "The Weasel". It was said that he could fall into a vat of shit and come out smelling like a rose and, last I heard, he hadn't changed much. He bought the place after it had been idle for three years. He had some partners at first, but somewhere along the line, he became the sole owner. He's had labor trouble, legal trouble, and financial trouble, but he managed to weasel out of it all. I don't think they make diapers there, just generic grade tissue products.

The U.S. had inflation before they went off the gold standard, and before they went on it as well. If historical inflation numbers don't always add up it's because they keep changing the way they calculate it. People think of inflation as rising prices, but that is the effect of inflation, not the cause of it. The cause of inflation is when the government increases the supply of money in circulation.  It doesn't matter if it's coins, paper money, or money on paper. When the amount of money and/or credit increases, it devalues the money already in circulation, which means it takes more money to buy the same stuff. They were already doing this before they went off the gold standard, but the price of gold was fixed, so it gave some stability, or at least the illusion of stability, to the U.S. dollar compared to the currency of other countries. I seem to remember reading on Wiki that the reason they went off the gold standard was that there was so much money in circulation that they couldn't guarantee the price of gold anymore. I'm not sure what that means exactly, but something else on Wiki made more sense to me, that there is no longer enough gold in the world to support all the global economic activity going on. In other words, gold has become too valuable to use as money, or something like that.

Uncle Ken's proposal to use pictures of corn as money is not all that far fetched. Real corn is certainly valuable, but it's not as easy to carry around as pictures of corn on paper. The paper corn could represent real corn that was stored someplace, just like paper money used to represent gold that was stored someplace. I don't believe there is enough paper corn in existence to serve the purpose right now, but I'm sure somebody could be found to produce more of it. It would have to be somebody who has a lot of experience working with the medium. Now where could such a person be found?

Rich people buy lots of artsy-crafty stuff in Northern Michigan, it's a significant part of what we call the "tourist trade". The only full sized totem poles I have seen are in Indian River, on display in two public places. They are not for sale, but I believe the artist is still living in the area and could be commissioned to make more of them.

I looked up Old Dog's "terra preta", which is Portuguese for "black dirt". I found it interesting, but then I am an earthy kind of guy. The only problem I can see with mass producing the stuff is that burning all that wood to make charcoal would put even more carbon into the air. Maybe they could use coal instead, just grind it up and mix it with compost. No burning required.