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Silver, Gold, and Middle-Class Families Having Fun?
What's the connection between silver, gold, and middle class families having the opportunity to pursue their dreams? (and having a little fun while they do it?) Plenty, it turns out.

What's the connection, you ask? And what does it have to do with Doo Wop Motels, you ask even more curiously? Well, everything.

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Historian, economist, and investment banker Lewis E. Lehrman (Harvard & Yale educated, a one-time New York gubernatorial candidate, and recipient of the National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2005) perhaps sums it up best in his various writings.

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If you don't care to read the full version, let us interpret it for you:

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There was a time when money had to be worked for and earned (or at least inherited from people who had previously worked for and earned it).

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Back in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s - hard-working entrepreneurs (often first or second generation immigrant families) worked hard, saved money, and invested in their own futures - including investments in the construction of independent, family-owned Doo Wop Motels built for other hard-working, newly mobile (in more ways than one) vacationers to stay in while visiting the southern tip of the Jersey Shore. The colorful, exuberant motels - with all their bright, kitschy colors and fanciful neon signs - were an expression of the exuberant entrepreneurial optimism of their owners (as well as good marketing tools to reach their would-be guests).

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Also back in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s - America was still on a version of the gold standard, which meant that the supply of money in circulation at any given time would always be limited, fixed to the price of a scarce naturally-occurring commodity that couldn't just be "printed" out of thin air, and instead could only be earned, saved, borrowed, lent, or otherwise exchanged on the basis of real value creation or transfer, and/or the prudent assessment of risk/reward in projecting future investment returns - of which a broad swath of society would normally share in the benefits of, including both capital (rising profits) and labor (rising wages).

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Starting in 1971, this system ended and the country would never quite be the same. Enter the era of fiat money. Money could now be printed out of thin air at will, backed only by the whims of politicians, with no restraints on supply. That meant an unrestricted ability for those with the right connections to borrow "freshly printed" (out of thin air) money (not really earned or worked for by anyone, ever) to begin driving up the prices (not based on any actual productive measure) of assets such as stocks and real estate (including Doo Wop Motels) to a point where their prices had absolutely nothing to do with their ability to generate any real economic activity, income, jobs, or other societal benefits. Prices just went "up" because, well, that's what they do. Printed money has to go somewhere, right? And most of it was no longer going to anyone who actually worked, produced, or operated anything for a living. Likewise, the construction of new Doo Wop Motels more or less ended after this period. Coincidence? We think not.

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"Most important, virtually all proponents of the gold standard (whether the proponents be the historicist classical or aspirational Austrian) wholeheartedly are committed to the prosperity of workers."

"Conservatives, a modern species of classical liberals, simply believe in a natural order. The data persuade us that the gold standard is the most viable path to the creation of a climate of equitable prosperity, most especially for the middle class.

Any Austrian economist can tutor us in the — decisive — utilitarian arguments why the gold standard makes labor (as well as capital) better off. But to put it simply, as President Kennedy so neatly phrased it, “a rising tide lifts all boats.’"

Ralph Benko

Fast forward to the early 2000s, and the ill-effects of the fiat system really began to accelerate as the era of "zero interest rates" began. The result? Two-thirds of the Doo Wop Motels in the Wildwoods were demolished to make way for speculative condos built & sold at inflated prices that, at the time, produced no income, produced no long-term jobs, and only created billions of dollars worth of bad debt that would end up in default by 2008 and have to be bailed out by hard-working taxpayers who never wanted any of it in the first place - they just wanted to stay at their favorite Doo Wop Motel - or maybe even buy & run their very own someday?! (after all, they worked hard for the opportunity, right?)

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"The prudent middle class on Main Street is dispossessed; the reckless on Wall Street, bailed out. Without incentives to increase true savings, new investment will continue to depend increasingly on bank debt, leverage and speculation."

Lewis E. Lehrman

Fast forward to today, and you can see the world that has emerged as a result of the system we've been living in for the better part of the past half-century (and particularly the past two decades), and how much it differs (not necessarily in terms of technological progress, which may be inevitable, but in terms of the culture & spirit accompanying the "progress") compared to the period that came before.

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It's true, change is inevitable. It's true, there's no point in desperately trying to hold on to the past (it was far from perfect anyway). But it's false that we have no control over the trajectory of our own future. It's false that we must let politicians and "central authorities" determine the very essence, culture, and spirit of world we live in, with no input from those actually doing the living (or the working).

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Recent technological developments such as Bitcoin (along with other cryptocurrencies and blockchain applications) are giving us new opportunities to imagine new and different ways of looking at our social, political, and monetary systems, the very definition of "value" (and how it relates to our "values"), and the kind of world we actually want ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren to live in. On our own terms, of course.

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The ability to imagine our own future is worth it's weight in silver and gold - or whatever currency comes to be backed by the values we believe in, and helps inspire the next wave of economic development that aligns with the spirit of Doo Wop.

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We get the future we deserve. And we all deserve a bright one. But we'll have to work hard for it.

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Related articles:

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For Struggling Middle Class Families, The Gold Standard Is No Fairy Tale
by Ralph Benko
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2013/09/30/for-struggling-middle-class-families-the-gold-standard-is-no-fairy-tale/

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How to Get to a True Gold Standard
by Lewis E. Lehrman
https://lewiselehrman.com/economics2.html