"The Weimar Hyperinflation? Could it Happen Again?"

[galtgulch]

This is the big question which should be on your mind isn't it? Here is the link to an article by Ellen Brown which addresses this nightmarish issue:

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13673

May 24, 2009

The Weimar Hyperinflation? Could it Happen Again?

by Ellen Brown

Global Research, May 19, 2009

webofdebt.com

“It was horrible. Horrible! Like lightning it struck. No one was prepared. The shelves in the grocery stores were empty. You could buy nothing with your paper money.” – Harvard University law professor Friedrich Kessler on the Weimar Republic hyperinflation (1993 interview)

Some worried commentators are predicting a massive hyperinflation of the sort suffered by Weimar Germany in 1923, when a wheelbarrow full of paper money could barely buy a loaf of bread. An April 29 editorial in the San Francisco Examiner warned:

“With an unprecedented deficit that’s approaching $2 trillion, [the President’s 2010] budget proposal is a surefire prescription for hyperinflation. So every senator and representative who votes for this monster $3.6 trillion budget will be endorsing a spending spree that could very well turn America into the next Weimar Republic.”1

In an investment newsletter called Money Morning on April 9, Martin Hutchinson pointed to disturbing parallels between current government monetary policy and Weimar Germany’s, when 50% of government spending was being funded by seigniorage – merely printing money.2 However, there is something puzzling in his data. He indicates that the British government is already funding more of its budget by seigniorage than Weimar Germany did at the height of its massive hyperinflation; yet the pound is still holding its own, under circumstances said to have caused the complete destruction of the German mark. Something else must have been responsible for the mark’s collapse besides mere money-printing to meet the government’s budget, but what? And are we threatened by the same risk today? Let’s take a closer look at the data.

History Repeats Itself – or Does It?

In his well-researched article, Hutchinson notes that Weimar Germany had been suffering from inflation ever since World War I; but it was in the two year period between 1921 and 1923 that the true “Weimar hyperinflation” occurred. By the time it had ended in November 1923, the mark was worth only one-trillionth of what it had been worth back in 1914. Hutchinson goes on:

“The current policy mix reflects those of Germany during the period between 1919 and 1923. The Weimar government was unwilling to raise taxes to fund post-war reconstruction and war-reparations payments, and so it ran large budget deficits. It kept interest rates far below inflation, expanding money supply rapidly and raising 50% of government spending through seigniorage (printing money and living off the profits from issuing it). . . .

“The really chilling parallel is that the United States, Britain and Japan have now taken to funding their budget deficits through seigniorage. In the United States, the Fed is buying $300 billion worth of U.S. Treasury bonds (T-bonds) over a six-month period, a rate of $600 billion per annum, 15% of federal spending of $4 trillion. In Britain, the Bank of England (BOE) is buying 75 billion pounds of gilts [the British equivalent of U.S. Treasury bonds] over three months. That’s 300 billion pounds per annum, 65% of British government spending of 454 billion pounds. Thus, while the United States is approaching Weimar German policy (50% of spending) quite rapidly, Britain has already overtaken it!”

And that is where the data gets confusing. If Britain is already meeting a larger percentage of its budget deficit by seigniorage than Germany did at the height of its hyperinflation, why is the pound now worth about as much on foreign exchange markets as it was nine years ago, under circumstances said to have driven the mark to a trillionth of its former value in the same period, and most of this in only two years? Meanwhile, the U.S. dollar has actually gotten stronger relative to other currencies since the policy was begun last year of massive “quantitative easing” (today’s euphemism for seigniorage).3 Central banks rather than governments are now doing the printing, but the effect on the money supply should be the same as in the government money-printing schemes of old. The government debt bought by the central banks is never actually paid off but is just rolled over from year to year; and once the new money is in the money supply, it stays there, diluting the value of the currency. So why haven’t our currencies already collapsed to a trillionth of their former value, as happened in Weimar Germany? Indeed, if it were a simple question of supply and demand, a government would have to print a trillion times its earlier money supply to drop its currency by a factor of a trillion; and even the German government isn’t charged with having done that. Something else must have been going on in the Weimar Republic, but what?

Schacht Lets the Cat Out of the Bag

Light is thrown on this mystery by the later writings of Hjalmar Schacht, the currency commissioner for the Weimar Republic. The facts are explored at length in The Lost Science of Money by Stephen Zarlenga, who writes that in Schacht’s 1967 book The Magic of Money, he “let the cat out of the bag, writing in German, with some truly remarkable admissions that shatter the ‘accepted wisdom’ the financial community has promulgated on the German hyperinflation.” What actually drove the wartime inflation into hyperinflation, said Schacht, was speculation by foreign investors, who would bet on the mark’s decreasing value by selling it short.

Short selling is a technique used by investors to try to profit from an asset’s falling price. It involves borrowing the asset and selling it, with the understanding that the asset must later be bought back and returned to the original owner. The speculator is gambling that the price will have dropped in the meantime and he can pocket the difference. Short selling of the German mark was made possible because private banks made massive amounts of currency available for borrowing, marks that were created on demand and lent to investors, returning a profitable interest to the banks.

At first, the speculation was fed by the Reichsbank (the German central bank), which had recently been privatized. But when the Reichsbank could no longer keep up with the voracious demand for marks, other private banks were allowed to create them out of nothing and lend them at interest as well.4

A Story with an Ironic Twist

If Schacht is to be believed, not only did the government not cause the hyperinflation but it was the government that got the situation under control. The Reichsbank was put under strict regulation, and prompt corrective measures were taken to eliminate foreign speculation by eliminating easy access to loans of bank-created money.

More interesting is a little-known sequel to this tale. What allowed Germany to get back on its feet in the 1930s was the very thing today’s commentators are blaming for bringing it down in the 1920s – money issued by seigniorage by the government. Economist Henry C. K. Liu calls this form of financing “sovereign credit.” He writes of Germany’s remarkable transformation:

“The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, at a time when its economy was in total collapse, with ruinous war-reparation obligations and zero prospects for foreign investment or credit. Yet through an independent monetary policy of sovereign credit and a full-employment public-works program, the Third Reich was able to turn a bankrupt Germany, stripped of overseas colonies it could exploit, into the strongest economy in Europe within four years, even before armament spending began.”5

While Hitler clearly deserves the opprobrium heaped on him for his later atrocities, he was enormously popular with his own people, at least for a time. This was evidently because he rescued Germany from the throes of a worldwide depression – and he did it through a plan of public works paid for with currency generated by the government itself. Projects were first earmarked for funding, including flood control, repair of public buildings and private residences, and construction of new buildings, roads, bridges, canals, and port facilities. The projected cost of the various programs was fixed at one billion units of the national currency. One billion non-inflationary bills of exchange called Labor Treasury Certificates were then issued against this cost. Millions of people were put to work on these projects, and the workers were paid with the Treasury Certificates. The workers then spent the certificates on goods and services, creating more jobs for more people. These certificates were not actually debt-free but were issued as bonds, and the government paid interest on them to the bearers. But the certificates circulated as money and were renewable indefinitely, making them a de facto currency; and they avoided the need to borrow from international lenders or to pay off international debts.6 The Treasury Certificates did not trade on foreign currency markets, so they were beyond the reach of the currency speculators. They could not be sold short because there was no one to sell them to, so they retained their value.

Within two years, Germany’s unemployment problem had been solved and the country was back on its feet. It had a solid, stable currency, and no inflation, at a time when millions of people in the United States and other Western countries were still out of work and living on welfare. Germany even managed to restore foreign trade, although it was denied foreign credit and was faced with an economic boycott abroad. It did this by using a barter system: equipment and commodities were exchanged directly with other countries, circumventing the international banks. This system of direct exchange occurred without debt and without trade deficits. Although Germany’s economic experiment was short-lived, it left some lasting monuments to its success, including the famous Autobahn, the world’s first extensive superhighway.7

The Lessons of History: Not Always What They Seem

Germany’s scheme for escaping its crippling debt and reinvigorating a moribund economy was clever, but it was not actually original with the Germans. The notion that a government could fund itself by printing and delivering paper receipts for goods and services received was first devised by the American colonists. Benjamin Franklin credited the remarkable growth and abundance in the colonies, at a time when English workers were suffering the impoverished conditions of the Industrial Revolution, to the colonists’ unique system of government-issued money. In the nineteenth century, Senator Henry Clay called this the “American system,” distinguishing it from the “British system” of privately-issued paper banknotes. After the American Revolution, the American system was replaced in the U.S. with banker-created money; but government-issued money was revived during the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln funded his government with U.S. Notes or “Greenbacks” issued by the Treasury.

The dramatic difference in the results of Germany’s two money-printing experiments was a direct result of the uses to which the money was put. Price inflation results when “demand” (money) increases more than “supply” (goods and services), driving prices up; and in the experiment of the 1930s, new money was created for the purpose of funding productivity, so supply and demand increased together and prices remained stable. Hitler said, “For every mark issued, we required the equivalent of a mark’s worth of work done, or goods produced.” In the hyperinflationary disaster of 1923, on the other hand, money was printed merely to pay off speculators, causing demand to shoot up while supply remained fixed. The result was not just inflation but hyperinflation, since the speculation went wild, triggering rampant tulip-bubble-style mania and panic.

This was also true in Zimbabwe, a dramatic contemporary example of runaway inflation. The crisis dated back to 2001, when Zimbabwe defaulted on its loans and the IMF refused to make the usual accommodations, including refinancing and loan forgiveness. Apparently, the IMF’s intention was to punish the country for political policies of which it disapproved, including land reform measures that involved reclaiming the lands of wealthy landowners. Zimbabwe’s credit was ruined and it could not get loans elsewhere, so the government resorted to issuing its own national currency and using the money to buy U.S. dollars on the foreign-exchange market. These dollars were then used to pay the IMF and regain the country’s credit rating.8 According to a statement by the Zimbabwe central bank, the hyperinflation was caused by speculators who manipulated the foreign-exchange market, charging exorbitant rates for U.S. dollars, causing a drastic devaluation of the Zimbabwe currency.

The government’s real mistake, however, may have been in playing the IMF’s game at all. Rather than using its national currency to buy foreign fiat money to pay foreign lenders, it could have followed the lead of Abraham Lincoln and the American colonists and issued its own currency to pay for the production of goods and services for its own people. Inflation would then have been avoided, because supply would have kept up with demand; and the currency would have served the local economy rather than being siphoned off by speculators.

The Real Weimar Threat and How It Can Be Avoided

Is the United States, then, out of the hyperinflationary woods with its “quantitative easing” scheme? Maybe, maybe not. To the extent that the newly-created money will be used for real economic development and growth, funding by seigniorage is not likely to inflate prices, because supply and demand will rise together. Using quantitative easing to fund infrastructure and other productive projects, as in President Obama’s stimulus package, could invigorate the economy as promised, producing the sort of abundance reported by Benjamin Franklin in America’s flourishing early years.

There is, however, something else going on today that is disturbingly similar to what triggered the 1923 hyperinflation. As in Weimar Germany, money creation in the U.S. is now being undertaken by a privately-owned central bank, the Federal Reserve; and it is largely being done to settle speculative bets on the books of private banks, without producing anything of value to the economy. As gold investor James Sinclair warned nearly two years ago:

“[T]he real problem is a trembling $20 trillion mountain of over the counter credit and default derivatives. Think deeply about the Weimar Republic case study because every day it looks more and more like a repeat in cause and effect . . . .”9

The $12.9 billion in bailout funds funneled through AIG to pay Goldman Sachs for its highly speculative credit default swaps is just one egregious example.10 To the extent that the money generated by “quantitative easing” is being sucked into the black hole of paying off these speculative derivative bets, we could indeed be on the Weimar road and there is real cause for alarm. We have been led to believe that we must prop up a zombie Wall Street banking behemoth because without it we would have no credit system, but that is not true. There is another viable alternative, and it may prove to be our only viable alternative. We can beat Wall Street at its own game, by forming publicly-owned banks that issue the full faith and credit of the United States not for private speculative profit but as a public service, for the benefit of the United States and its people.11

Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.” She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her earlier books focused on the pharmaceutical cartel that gets its power from “the money trust.” Her eleven books include Forbidden Medicine, Nature’s Pharmacy (co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker), and The Key to Ultimate Health (co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen). Her websites are www.webofdebt.com and www.ellenbrown.com.

Notes

1. “Examiner Editorial: Get Ready for Obama’s Coming Hyperinflation,” San Francisco Examiner, April 29, 2009.

2. Martin Hutchinson, “Is It 1932 – or 1923?”, Money Morning (April 9, 2009).

3. See Monthly Average Graphs, x-rate.com.

4. Stephen Zarlenga, The Lost Science of Money (Valatie, New York: American Monetary Institute, 2002), pages 590-600; S. Zarlenga, “Germany’s 1923 Hyperinflation: A ‘Private’ Affair,” Barnes Review (July-August 1999).

5. Henry C. K. Liu, “Nazism and the German Economic Miracle,” Asia Times (May 24, 2005).

6. S. Zarlenga, op. cit.

7. Matt Koehl, “The Good Society?”, Rense (January 13, 2005).

8. “Bags of Bricks: Zimbabweans Get New Money – for What It’s Worth,” The Economist (August 24, 2006); Thomas Homes, “IMF Contributes to Zimbabwe’s Hyperinflation,” www.newzimbabwe.com (March 5, 2006).

9. Jim Sinclair, “Fed Actions a Bandaid on a Gaping Economic Wound,” reprinted in Go for Gold, September 18, 2007.

10. Eliot Spitzer, “The Real AIG Scandal, Continued! The Transfer of $12.9 Billion from AIG to Goldman Looks Fishier and Fishier,” Slate (March 22, 2009).

11. See Ellen Brown, “Cash Starved States Need to Play the Banking Game,” webofdebt.com/articles (March 2, 2009).

TO ORDER ELLEN BROWN'S BOOK

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© Copyright Ellen Brown, webofdebt.com, 2009

www.campaignforliberty.com 25May 2AM 154,232

"Have you heard of the Campaign For Liberty?" That is how I open the subject usually with someone with whom I have just done some business transaction or even a complete stranger whom I happen to meet and after pleasantries are exchanged with eye contact. Especially if they say, "What's new?"

I go on to tell them about it. What seems to most impress is when I tell them it started with Ron Paul support groups on 40 campuses and now there are over 125 campuses involved! I think that shows that it is not going to go away but will be sustained and ongoing as it continues to spread and grow on campuses across the country.

I mention that there were just 6000 members when I joined last summer and that now there are over 154,000 and that that number keeps going up each day.

I mention our goal is to enlighten everyone about how the marketplace operates when the government doesn't intervene and that we intend to run for every office in both major parties until we take our country back!

I tell them we read Atlas Shrugged and books by Ludwig von Mises and invite them to join with us and to let others know. www.campaignforliberty dot com

gulch

Edited May 25, 2009 by galtgulch

[Alfonso Jones]

gulch -

Thanks for posting this one.

I give you enough negative feedback that I should not neglect to give you positive feedback when appropriate.

Thanks for this one.

Bill P

[tjohnson]

A good example of why currency speculators should be regulated maybe even eliminated?? Does currency speculation have any use in an economy or is it just a way for people to leech off others?

[syrakusos]

This is the big question which should be on your mind isn't it? Here is the link to an article by Ellen Brown which ...

1. It was not "Hitler" is was HJALMAR SCHACHT himself, who was also the finance minister for the Nazis. In John Toland's biography of Hitler, Schacht wrings his hands in despair and then quits as national-socilist plans undermine and then destroy his attempts to bring Germany to prosperity.

2. For anyone who believes that there exists an included middle between A and non-A, Warren Buffet says that he loves people who short Berkshire Hathaway because all they are doing is agreeing to buy it in the future. They put a floor under the price.

2.a. Short sellers are often cleared out of a market when the price rises. Short selling is no more magical than going long. Is the price of gold held "artificially high" by long positiions?

3. For anyone who believes that there exists an included middle between A and non-A, you "speculate" every time you go window shopping or call around for price or read advertising ahead of a purchase. "Speculators" (so-called) are just ordinary people made into scapegoats by anti-capitalists.

4. The Weimar Republic was held responsible for the entirety of the civilian losses in World War I. England and the USA just took their gold, so of course, their currency collapsed. Austria, on the other hand, having Austrian economists to suggest solutions, borrowed gold, against which they issued their own currency.

(Note the Sickle and Sledgehammer. Hedging their bets, no doubt...)

Both Austria and Germany suffered from currency crises. In both, locales and other issued "Notgeld" (need-money; emergency money). Also, people spent silver coins that had been hoarded. We know that from the large percentage of "commemorative" coins that exist in lightly circulated grade, Extremely Fine.

5. The Weimar Republic had no assets. Just to ante up, the USA government in Washington DC has tracts of land ("national parks") larger than European nations.

6. The spike in the stock of money in 2009 represents only a 40% increase.

7. Why have the gold markets not responded? (See the GATA website to find out about the games being played by the central banks.)

8. Ultimately, as Objectivists, we watch these events play out according to known laws of economics.

9. Hitler's national-socialists did nothing for Germany, except to destroy it. Their attempt at autarky led directly to what Herrmann Goering so insightfully called a "Plunder Economy" (Pluenderekonomie, direct cognate). That anyone could suggest otherwise is as ugly as the leftists who gloss over Che Guevara and Mao Zedong.

10. When President Roosevelt closed the banks on March 5, 1933, the people still had assets and liabilities, jobs and work to be done. So they created their own community currencies. (See here about Depression Scrip.) It wasn't gold, but it worked well enough -- as did Notgeld -- for the time needed.

[galtgulch]

gulch -

Thanks for posting this one.

I give you enough negative feedback that I should not neglect to give you positive feedback when appropriate.

Thanks for this one.

Bill P

Bill P,

I am glad you appreciate this one, but still she says "maybe, maybe not" so hyperinflation remains a possibility which is frightening. Even if you stock up on food to last the duration, as if that period of time is calculable, in the meantime whatever money you have in money market funds or bank deposits would become worthless. In other words the middle class could be or would be wiped out. The schmucks who believe in Keynes got us into this mess and are not likely to do the right thing to get us out of it either, even with an adult in the room in the form of Paul Volker.

I just hope I can get gas for the commute to and from work and that my wife can hold off the roving gangs with her trusty weapons of individual destruction until I get home each night.

What did you find useful in the article by Brown who incidentally looks just like Christine Smith the LP wannabe presidential runner up?

www.campaignforliberty.com 25 May 2PM 154,297, 8PM 154,337; 26 MAY 5AM 154,382

gulch

Edited May 26, 2009 by galtgulch

[Brant Gaede]

A good example of why currency speculators should be regulated maybe even eliminated?? Does currency speculation have any use in an economy or is it just a way for people to leech off others?

The currency markets are so gigantic speculators have little effect on them unless they read the tea leaves right and are George Soros'-sized.

Regulate or eliminate? That's part and parcel of regulating and eliminating capitalism. What benefit do you see in injecting force into the Forex markets?

How will McDonalds bring its profits home from Europe? Pay shareholders dividends in Euros? What could they do with them? Go on a shopping trip to Paris? How could dollar holders know the value of their dollars relative to the Canadian or Australian dollar? The Euro? They'd have to flee the dollar to hard assets to a greater extent than they are now.

How will foreign trade be conducted? Eliminating currency exchange is inherently protectionist which is what is with the Chinese currency and economy right now. They take in dollars we spend there for what they produce but nobody here takes yuan for what we produce. The dollars in China are converted to yuan and go to the government which buys our Treasury bonds so we can recirculate the same dollars back to China to buy more stuff. We have debt and they have dollars and our bonds. We are both between a rock and a hard place. They can't sell many of those bonds to get dollars back without driving down the price of the bonds corrupting the value of their remaining bond holdings. For the dollars they do have they are rushing into industrial commodities if not gold itself. We have to keep selling bonds to finance our government's idiocies. The dollars aren't out there to buy enough of our T-Bills. Our T-Bills are our maxed out credit but we want to keep spending.

The party's over. It will take 20 years to fix this mess and by then the baby boomers will be deep into impoverished retirement wishing they had had a lot of kids to support them in their old age.

--Brant

not a baby boomer and not wishing I had had a lot of kids, yet

Edited May 26, 2009 by Brant Gaede

[Christopher]

Never trust an author who claims "public works" saved the state. How does a command economy figure out what 1 deutschmark of work is?

[tjohnson]

Regulate or eliminate? That's part and parcel of regulating and eliminating capitalism.

I don't know why you are so against some regulation. Is there any objective reason why the relationship between the USD and the CAD should move 25 points in 4-5 months (just throwing out numbers)? These violent movements in the valuation of things make running a business very difficult. You say currency speculation isn't driving this then what does? The price of oil is another thing that jumps around like crazy, again making it difficult for long term planning and development of alternative fuels. When I see the word 'capitalism' I read 'pursuit of individual wealth' and we will never eliminate that but when a small minority of people control the majority of the wealth we will never have a stable economy and we will be plagued by periodic breakdowns (like right now).

[Christopher]

I don't think it's divisions in control of the wealth that is important per se, it's how the wealth was created and is currently used. If we take the extremely rich, then the stereotypical producers (hey, we're on an Objectivist website) like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates earned their wealth by making my life better. Doesn't matter that they own a gazillion times more wealth than I own.

On the flip side, if there are those that use their wealth to manipulate the money system/market so-as to minimize their later investment costs at my expense, then sure, high wealth can be a dangerous weapon. But hey, democracy can also be a dangerous weapon in the hands of the uneducated. Just because the unthinkers are a majority and becoming more so doesn't mean that the size of their voter population compared to the educated population is bad. It just means that there should be limits on how elected officials canoperate so that majority-selected candidates don't issue laws that help themselves at my expense. (but then they are, aren't they?(

[Selene]

"...running a business very difficult. ..." << one of the most difficult tasks in the world - try it some time.

[tjohnson]

I don't think it's divisions in control of the wealth that is important per se, it's how the wealth was created and is currently used. If we take the extremely rich, then the stereotypical producers (hey, we're on an Objectivist website) like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates earned their wealth by making my life better. Doesn't matter that they own a gazillion times more wealth than I own.

On the flip side, if there are those that use their wealth to manipulate the money system/market so-as to minimize their later investment costs at my expense, then sure, high wealth can be a dangerous weapon. But hey, democracy can also be a dangerous weapon in the hands of the uneducated. Just because the unthinkers are a majority and becoming more so doesn't mean that the size of their voter population compared to the educated population is bad. It just means that there should be limits on how elected officials canoperate so that majority-selected candidates don't issue laws that help themselves at my expense. (but then they are, aren't they?(

LOL, you think Bill Gates has made your life better??!! Sorry, that is another topic but I spend many days cursing the day he was born. Also, democracy sounds like a great idea but it is not an effective way to run a country - even if it was applied properly, which it isn't.

[Brant Gaede]

Regulate or eliminate? That's part and parcel of regulating and eliminating capitalism.

I don't know why you are so against some regulation. Is there any objective reason why the relationship between the USD and the CAD should move 25 points in 4-5 months (just throwing out numbers)? These violent movements in the valuation of things make running a business very difficult. You say currency speculation isn't driving this then what does? The price of oil is another thing that jumps around like crazy, again making it difficult for long term planning and development of alternative fuels. When I see the word 'capitalism' I read 'pursuit of individual wealth' and we will never eliminate that but when a small minority of people control the majority of the wealth we will never have a stable economy and we will be plagued by periodic breakdowns (like right now).

There has to be some regulation because of the existence of central banking. I'm against the existence of central banking which is socialism controlling the money supply. It's the existence of central banking world-wide that we are in this awful mess which is getting worse.

I should have been clearer about speculation. If a company like Microsoft wants to hedge its dollar exposure it might speculate on the euro, the speculation being that the euro would go up aginst the dollar, at least stay the same or only decline a little. The idea would not be to make money, but to protect money hence what we can call a "speculative hedge." With such a hedge in place the CFO, CEO and the shareholders can sleep easier. This is not the same as turning euros into dollars to bring them home to the US. It is risk management. Yes, these fluctuations in value can make business difficult. If each country had currency backed by gold these fluctuations would not be happening. As for the small number of people controlling the majority of (whose?) wealth, the Democrats in Congress agree with you and have decided to take that chore upon themselves.

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

LOL, you think Bill Gates has made your life better??!! Sorry, that is another topic but I spend many days cursing the day he was born. Also, democracy sounds like a great idea but it is not an effective way to run a country - even if it was applied properly, which it isn't.

Why don't you get an Apple? Don't let Bill victimize you.

--Brant

[tjohnson]

Why don't you get an Apple? Don't let Bill victimize you.

--Brant

Oh I use linux on my workstation but I keep a pc with Windoze on it because I need to support the other employees in the company who use it.

[Brant Gaede]

Why don't you get an Apple? Don't let Bill victimize you.

--Brant

Oh I use linux on my workstation but I keep a pc with Windoze on it because I need to support the other employees in the company who use it.

How selfish of them that they don't support you instead!

--Brant

[Christopher]

LOL, you think Bill Gates has made your life better??!! Sorry, that is another topic but I spend many days cursing the day he was born. Also, democracy sounds like a great idea but it is not an effective way to run a country - even if it was applied properly, which it isn't.

I do have Internet Explorer and Media Player built into my Windows. I'm also quite satisfied with Word and Excel. Sure, there might be a few bugs, but overall the experience is quite nice and I don't have to worry about getting all the necessary programs from 5 or 6 different vendors. Apple does the same - it packages all the hardware and OS together though, so it's one step beyond MS in terms of packaging products.

Anyway,.. why is it again that OL topics morph so frequently? :angel:

[Selene]

Too many ganja smokers - past present and future???

Boy that punctuation change makes a big difference. lol

Edited May 26, 2009 by Selene