Gasoline is still quite cheap when priced in real money.

Back when I was in high school, gasoline in Northern California was 65 cents per gallon. I recall this because I used to work at a gas station after school and on weekends pumping gas, checking people's engine oil and doing light mechanic work around the garage. If you had dimes which were minted in 1978 (no silver content) and wanted to pay for gas using those dimes it would take 6.5 of them to buy one gallon of gas. 

Back then, silver was only $5.50 per troy oz so at the time there were still a good number of pre-1965 90% silver dimes floating around in the economy. If someone back then were to have melted down 90% silver dimes and sold the metal to pay for gas, it would have taken about 1.63 of those silver dimes to buy 1 gallon of gas. The calculation for this is simple:

·       90% silver dimes have 2.50 grams of total metal in them consisting of 2.25grams of pure silver mixed with .25 grams of copper.  For this calculation we’ll ignore the value of the copper as it was a small amount of metal and copper was really cheap back then.

·       1 Troy Oz = 31.1 grams.

·       31.1 / 2.25 grams per coin means you have to melt down about 13.82 dimes to recover 1 Troy Oz of pure silver.

·       $5.50 dollars per Troy Oz pure silver / 13.8 coins = $0.398.  In other words, each silver dime was actually worth around 40 cents in 1978 dollars. That means if you melted those dimes down and sold the metal it would take about 1.63 dimes to buy a gallon of gas.

Fast forward to today. Gas is around $3.75/gallon in Texas. It's substantially the same gas as we sold in California back in 1978. In other words, it has not gotten much better and so hedonics cannot explain the difference in price.  Everyone in the media is complaining about the price of gas and even asking politicians to "do something" about it.

However, if you were to pay for gas in silver (i.e. a monetary metal), gas is about the same price today as it was back in 1978!  How so???  Well, the spot price for silver today is $30.35/Troy Oz.  If you divide that by 13.8 silver dimes you get a metal value of $2.19 per dime (again, ignoring the copper value for simplicity).  Again, this is not the collectable value, just the value of the silver metal if you sold it to a metals recycler.  $3.75/2.19 = 1.71.  This means it takes about 1.71 silver dimes today to buy that same gallon of gas that cost 1.63 silver dimes back in 1978.  In fact, over the last several years the price of oil has actually been falling in terms of real money (gold):

So the next time you feel like complaining about the price of gas, please ignore the emotional argument which is replayed time and again by those who are economically ignorant.  Instead, carefully consider the fact which is that gas costs the same as it did 30+ years ago if you pay for it with real money instead of monopoly money that the government and its Federal Reserve have sneakily foisted off on us.  Coincidence??  I think not!  Careful thinking shows that there is nothing wrong with the price of gas! There is only something wrong with the value of the dollar. Asking politicians to "fix" this will only make it worse because they are the ones who messed it up in the first place!

What amazes me is that people seem to "get it" when I show them examples like this and so I then start telling them how they should save for retirement in metals, not paper (fake) money. Their eyes just gloss over. No amount of facts seem to be able to change their minds. They think money metals (gold and silver bullion coins) are "an investment" and a risky one at that!  I'm not talking about rare coins here (I think the rare coin market is a scam), I'm talking about coins minted very recently whose only value is the weight of the metal they contain (AKA "bullion coins"). No matter how badly most people are getting fleeced by the government con men in this deal, they still have blind faith that the scammers have the best interest of the people at heart. Math doesn't seem to matter to people and neither does logic or history. In fact, not only will they not save themselves from the corruption, they look at me as if I'm the crazy one for avoiding paper assets and owning physical metals for retirement...

The lemming style herding behavior is completely in charge. So, as Hans and Franz would say, hear me now and believe me later: at some point there will be a mass awakening of the people to this fiat currency and fractional reserve banking scam. At some point math and logic and history will again matter to people. When they finally wake up from their G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate style, fiat currency induced mental slumber they are going to realize just how badly they have been scammed and a significant percentage of them will become as Reavers. Or did you think that Joss Whedon didn't have a social message hidden inside of the plot of his famous Firefly series and movie?