Questions about the Trade Deficit.

I just had Michael Savage on...

I'd really like to like the guy... Well, the fact is that I do like him. He has a lot of the qualities I like in a person: he's friendly; he's crazy; he has a hard edge... He's tough. He's cool.

And he's smart... but he don't know nothin' about economics. George W. Bush knows a lot more. Keynes and Marx knew more economics than Savage. And I have zero respect for them: Marx for placing political prejudice above science and Keynes for placing personal gain above Truth - political, scientific or philosophical. "In the long run we are all dead" indeed. He died rich. Where'd he leave us? With Samuelson (who had to revise his estimates of Soviet productivity downward with every edition of his famous economics text) and Krugman, that's where!

But Savage... What's his excuse? He, and his beloved Pat Buchanen, keep espousing the economics of the Unions, who learned everything they know from Karl Marx. Who learned everything he knew from Ricardo and Smith, who, for some bizarre reason (Rothbard blames Calvinism) created the Labor Theory of Value (Smith, which led directly to Ricardo's Iron Law of Wages); a theory held by none of his predecessors that was blown out of the water by the Theory of Marginal Utility in the 1870s. The Physiocrats were closer to the truth (though they were also wrong).

But Smith, Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Marx and Keynes ALL understood economics better than modern unions, Pat Buchanen and Michael Savage.

The Trade Deficit means that we have money (somehow) that others value (somehow) and they have goods that we value. My question is: why do they value our money? And further: how do we make it valuable, and how do we keep from f***ing that up?

You can buy gold in 1/10 oz coins. If you're really worried about our money, you should buy some. I'll plug in some links when I have more time, but a Google search will tell you as much as I will. I'd recommend California Numismatics if you're really concerned.