07/31/13 – Arlo Pignotti – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Worden.
This is my show, The Scott Worden Show.
Streaming at scottworden.org and at noagendastream.com and a few other places too, Anomaly Radio, Liberty Movement Radio, and I don't know what else.
All right.
Later on, libertyexpressradio.com.
They'll be playing the replay for us here.
Next up is my friend Arlo Pignotti.
And I've known Arlo for, I don't know, man, ten years or something.
He's a libertarian activist here in Austin, Texas.
Welcome to the show, Arlo.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, you're welcome.
Very happy to have you here.
Fun anecdotal fact of a thing.
Your father is a regular guest on this show, although I admit it's been a little while.
But he's Dean Ahmad, the founder of the Minaret of Freedom.
He doesn't say all libertarians should be Muslims, but he says all Muslims should be libertarians.
And I think that's great.
He's a really great guy, and I've enjoyed talking with him over the years, so that's really cool.
Two good libertarians in one family.
How do you like that?
Yeah, that's great.
I've learned a lot from my dad.
He's really cool.
Minaret of Freedom, minaret.org, that's a great organization.
Very important to bring free market ideas to the Middle East.
And it has a dual mission, also teaching people in the U.S. more about Islamic culture and history.
That's important now.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
All right, so I'm going to cue up the spot.
I'm going to play the spot.
Here it is.
Hey y'all, Scott here.
Ever wanted to help support the show and own silver at the same time?
Well, a friend of mine, libertarian activist Arlo Pignatti, has invented the alternative currency with the most promise of them all.
QR silver commodity discs.
The first ever QR code one ounce silver pieces.
Just scan the back of one with your phone and get the instant spot price.
They're perfect for saving or spending at the market.
Anyone who donates $100 or more to the Scott Horton Show at ScottHorton.org/donate gets one.
That's ScottHorton.org/donate.
And if you'd like to learn and order more, send them a message at CommodityDiscs.com or check them out on Facebook at slash CommodityDiscs and thanks.
So, man, here's the thing.
I think that your idea of putting a QR code on the back of a one ounce silver coin is the solution to mankind's currency problem.
And I think mankind has a really big currency problem right now.
And I just, I can't imagine a better solution to the thing than what you came up with here.
This is so cool.
Well, see, it's something I've wanted to do for years and I just didn't have the technology really until now to make it practical.
Because, you know, the big problem with silver, everybody's thinking in dollars.
People aren't quite ready to denominate their menus and their hourly pay in ounces of silver.
We're thinking in dollars.
And, you know, as you know, when the government mints coins, they put one dollar on their one ounce silver rounds.
And, you know, no one wants to spend a solid ounce of silver for a dollar.
That's the consumer getting ripped off.
And then there's been all kinds of other alternative currencies tried where they put a nice round number on an ounce of silver that's rounded up from the intrinsic value.
And then that creates such a huge gap that you feel like you're ripping off the merchant.
So, for example, like, you know, right now there's currencies out there that you can buy a silver ounce of silver that's privately minted and they'll stamp $50 on it even though spot price is only $20 and it costs a few bucks to mint.
And it's just, it's not accurate.
And so you have the government having prices too low on their silver and then these other ideas for currency that's too high.
And I always thought, you know, man, if there's just a way we could have it, have a face value that magically changes as silver goes up and down.
And at first I had the idea of having, you know, what, we could have some kind of RFID chip in the silver and some digital readout that's right there on the silver.
And now, you know, there's the, I mean, yeah, I think RFID chips are cool, but there's too many libertarians that are freaked out by that.
So, but now we got the QR codes now.
Everyone has smartphones and anybody can download a QR code reader on their phone for free.
You just search QR app, you'll find tons of them.
And you just hold your phone over the silver piece and the spot price comes up and you can see exactly what it's worth.
Okay.
Now say, I don't know, if the wife all of a sudden had, I dream of genie powers and I could coerce her into just removing all government money from the face of the earth and we would all just have private competing currencies of one kind or the other.
You think it'd be problematic using silver coins?
Would that QR code spot price, you know, as revealed on such a continual basis like that actually lead to instability?
When, like say, if it was olden days and we don't know about the changes in the fluctuation of the market value of a piece of silver, you know, we only learn every once in a while or whatever.
It seems like it would be more stable that way.
But if there's a big, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but you know what I mean, right?
Well, yeah, I mean, a lot of people question, you know, well, how can we have commodity currencies when the price is changing every day?
But prices of everything changes every day, including the value of the dollar itself.
The American dollar is fluctuating all the time.
We just don't, you know, we don't care.
We don't know it.
I mean, I really don't see how a commodity is any different from the dollar.
If anything, it has more long-term stability because, you know, it's going to be minus the inflation.
That we have, I mean, when you look at what the U.S. dollar was worth 100 years ago, and now it's been inflated to weigh 99% of its value.
And so, I mean, I consider silver more stable than the dollar when you look at it long term.
And it can be inflationary, right?
If they find a giant new comm stock load somewhere or something like that, that can make a real difference.
But at least you got to put some work into getting that silver out of the ground.
Well, that's right.
I mean, yeah, in a way, everything inflates and deflates according to its supply and demand.
But nothing could be more arbitrary than the U.S. dollar when they just decide to print trillions, which they've done.
And those trillions of dollars are just sitting in bank accounts right now.
They haven't been flooded into the market yet.
Because, you know, many of the trillions of dollars have been printed over the past few years.
They're just not circulating yet, and that's why we haven't seen massive inflation.
But I am worried that we could see that.
And even if we don't, just the little bit of inflation that we already have, I think, is already incentive enough to use alternative currencies.
Well, you know, think about, too, Higgs and Rothbard both on the 1920s.
And I'm not trying to put words in Higgs' mouth about our current situation or whatever.
But I think they both agree that during the 1920s, there was not a lot of on-the-shelf price inflation.
But what was happening was, as prices would have been falling much more rapidly because of the almost unimaginable increases in productivity and technology during the time.
And plus coming down from the post-World War I crash.
And so what was going on was the prices, you didn't see a lot of high price inflation on the shelf.
But you saw what seemed like stability where prices should have been falling.
So it still was a massive dislocation, even before the real bubble creating inflation in 1927 that led to the crash of 29 and the beginning of the Depression.
But, you know, things were already, you know, way skewed.
And I tend to think that that's what's going on right now, is they created so many gigantic, you know, bazillion dollar black holes of bad bets during the Bush years.
That as all that stuff is still liquidating and all those prices are still falling and all those bad debts are still being canceled, they're still inflating more and more and more.
And so even if it's not a massive boom before a bust, it's still a big dislocation from any kind of free market price level.
Which means there's corrections coming all the way around one way or the other.
I'm not saying I understand it as well as any of these geniuses, but you know what I mean.
It could be a big deal.
That's a really great point that, yeah, with technology just moving ahead and increasing and everything becoming more efficient and effective in business, prices should be falling.
So when people say, oh, inflation, it's only 3%.
Well, you know, that 3% per year is reported by the government and they're only, you know, kind of cherry picking a few things to put the dollar up against to make it look lower than it is.
But, you know, prices should actually be falling.
A lot of people mistakenly think, oh, yeah, stuff gets more expensive over time.
Like, well, that doesn't make any sense at all.
I mean, just think about it, you know, think about in whatever work you do or, you know, anyone who's, you know, we see how new software and apps and faster computers and, you know, just vehicles becoming more fuel efficient.
And just, you know, everything should be coming down in price because it just takes less effort, uses less energy.
Well, here's the other thing, too.
And maybe this doesn't count.
If you're a conservative militarist or you're a liberal socialist type, then you don't have the same objection that us libertarians have.
But I want the national government's budget to be zero.
And I certainly don't want them to be able to play this ridiculous bookkeeping trick where they can just print a bond and then print some money and buy it from themselves in order to introduce new currency into circulation and get away with paying for tyranny and oppression that they otherwise could not afford by taxing us without getting a revolt out of it.
So that's a really great reason for me to oppose any kind of government currency at all, because if they have it, they manipulate it and they use it against the rest of us in horrible ways.
And so it seems like a great way to starve them out of their power would be, well, kind of this large scale agorism, right?
Just ignore the bastards and just use every kind of alternative currency you can and every kind of under the table transaction you can and get all your furniture at a garage sale.
Sorry, I'm going off on a tangent, but you know what I'm saying, though, right?
Well, yeah, that brings up the other good point is that inflation, inflation through printing money is a hidden tax.
It's a tax that most people don't think about.
So while we're debating raising taxes or lowering taxes, I mean, what's the point when the government can just print money out of thin air and it makes everybody's savings worth less, everybody's income worth less?
Because, you know, I think most people don't keep it in mind that they need to be asking for demanding raises in proportion to their inflation.
I mean, they're just kind of getting robbed of that.
And certainly it's really unfair to people who save money.
And so it's a tax.
And the only way to afford it is to raise dollars.
Real wages haven't gone up in 35 years either, you know?
Real wages never.
It's always, you know what, I'll never forget Alan Greenspan saying, yeah, and this is what they all say, but this is just a particular anecdote.
Yeah, you know, if there's any more upward prices, upward pressure on wages, that could cause inflation.
And I'm going, oh, man, he's picking on the hourly wage earner at the lowest end of the paycheck scale and blaming them for finally being the last ones in the entire chain to get the slightest 25 cent an hour cost of living increase for being the cause of the inflation in the first place.
And nobody's ever burnt that guy's house down or nothing.
Can you imagine that?
It's amazing to me what these people get away with.
His wife is in charge of telling us what's true every day on TV.
Yeah, this isn't just a libertarian thing.
This is something everybody should be able to get behind.
I mean, it's pretty maddening when you understand it.
Sure as hell is.
All right.
So let's talk about this awesome idea that we had for, I guess it must have been your great idea for a fundraiser thing for the show.
This show, the Scott Horton show.
Anybody donates a hundred bucks or more, they get a commodity disc.
We didn't even tell them your website or anything.
It's commodity discs dot com.
And it's also Facebook.com/commodity discs.
That's how you can learn all about it.
That's how you can communicate with Arlo all about it and order your own, et cetera, et cetera.
And how much do you charge for them?
Well, what it is, is it spot price plus four dollars.
And so the way we come up with that pricing is very transparent.
I mean, what it is, is just we want the intrinsic value of the spot price plus what it costs to manufacture it and insure it and ship it out to get it in the marketplace and to cover the, we're trying to cover the dyes that were used to create the first thousand.
And so four dollars should cover it.
So spot price right now is $19.50.
So they're $23.50.
But, of course, donating your show right now is really the only way for someone to get just one because I'm selling these in quantities.
So it's a ten ounce minimum right now for orders.
And so, yeah, silver goes up or down.
When you scan it, it'll show you the spot price.
And underneath that says suggested or manufacturer's suggested trade value spot plus four.
Right.
And now there's just been a pretty good correction in the silver market, right?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it's spiked there.
And that's the only time I'm worried about buying silver is if it goes up too sharply.
And so, you know, silver goes up, goes down, but in the long run it is always going up more than it goes down.
I mean, all you have to do is just look at the last few hundred years, but particularly the last hundred years since the creation of the Federal Reserve relative to the dollar.
But so you're not trying to say, hey, everybody, buy in at the top of the bubble here or anything like that.
There's just been a correction.
If there's a good time to buy, it's right now anyway.
That's right.
Yeah, we're definitely.
It sure looks like a dip to me.
I can't imagine silver staying below 20 for long.
You know, we had it past 30 for a while.
And when I first started using silver and gold as money, you know, and this was, you know, I was trying out Liberty Dollar.
I was trying offering people bullion, people who I do business with.
And it's surprising how many people are happy to accept gold and silver once they get the idea that, oh, yeah, you can just start using this as money.
But I've been doing this for 10 years, and QR-coded commodity disks are brand new.
These just had my first thousand minted just a few days ago.
And this makes it more convenient and easier than ever.
But even before that, I was using silver and gold as money.
And silver was worth about maybe $6 per ounce when I started doing this, and gold was just around $400.
And so now silver is almost at $20, and gold is about $1,250 right now.
And it's really cool.
I love it.
It's fun doing this.
I bought a car at R&D Motors here in Austin.
I paid one ounce in gold per month until it was paid off.
There's people who accept gold, too, and that is on the – it's my plan to make a gold commodity disk as well.
Hell, I'd love to make a platinum and copper for smaller transactions, and I want to make certificates that have QR codes on them.
And there are private companies that can create a silver certificate or a gold certificate that is more difficult to counterfeit than a Federal Reserve note.
So we can have a paper form of this currency and, of course, eventually a digital version.
And that's been done before.
Even Liberty Dollar, they had certificates and a digital version of their currency as well.
But they got in some trouble because their currency was similar enough to legal tender that they were shut down by the government.
And my currency, it's just a piece of silver with this funky-looking QR code on it.
I really would find it hard – I just don't see how it's possible for anyone to claim that, oh, people will think this is a quarter.
They'll think it's legal tender.
No way.
It doesn't even have a value written on it.
You have to know enough about it to know that you scan it with your phone and right there in addition to the spot price is a disclaimer saying this isn't supposed to be legal tender.
This is an alternative to legal tender.
It's a private barter's currency, free market currency.
Yeah, it's the best idea for one that I've seen, and I just love – and I think it's going to catch on too.
Maybe I'm not the best at making these kind of bets.
I don't know.
What do I know?
But it seems like it's the perfect mix of the high tech with the QR code and at the same time this precious metal people have been trading with for 6,000 years and always will as long as the government doesn't explode us all with hydrogen bombs.
The best thing we can do now is just spread the idea, let people know it's out there, and we'll see if they want it.
And, yeah, anyone who is used to doing business with someone else – like I personally, I love to always carry around one or two of them and show them off to the people I do business with and just ask them if they would like to officially accept payment in silver.
Then we'll put them on a special directory so people know that they can spend their silver with them.
So it's kind of a traffic builder for them.
It's a networking tool as well.
Right.
All right, good deal.
Well, listen, so the website is commoditydiscs.com, and then the networking side of it, check them out at facebook.com/commoditydiscs.
And, again, anybody who donates $100 or more at scotthorton.org/donate, scotthorton.org/donate, you get yourself a commodity disc, a one-ounce silver piece with a QR code on the back, which I think is the future of money in the world.
Thank you very much, Arlo.
I sure appreciate it, dude.
All right.
Thanks again, Scott.
Talk to you soon.
All right, everybody, that is Arlo J. Pignotti, and you can find him on Facebook.
He's in my top friends list, it says here.
And you can find him at facebook.com/commoditydiscs and commoditydiscs.com.
And, again, he's got a minimum order and that kind of thing.
But if you want one, just to check it out first, well, you'll have to donate $100 to The Scott Horton Show.
Wouldn't that be nice?
Then you would have a piece of silver, and I can keep doing The Scott Horton Show, and it'll be great for everyone.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
Ever wanted to help support the show and own silver at the same time?
Well, a friend of mine, libertarian activist Arlo Pignotti, has invented the alternative currency with the most promise of them all, QR silver commodity discs.
The first ever QR code one-ounce silver pieces.
Just scan the back of one with your phone and get the instant spot price.
They're perfect for saving or spending at the market.
Anyone who donates $100 or more to The Scott Horton Show at scotthorton.org/donate gets one.
That's scotthorton.org/donate.
And if you'd like to learn and order more, send them a message at commoditydiscs.com or check them out on Facebook at slash commoditydiscs.
And thanks.
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