Can the government just confiscate your investments in gold?

To be sure, this sort of question seems to be the fodder of the paranoid, conspiracy believers, and the doom and gloom panderers.

Then again, even paranoid people have enemies.

Investors in the United States are, in fact, rightly concerned that nobody’s life, limb, or investments are safe when Congress is in session and the president has control over the issuing of regulations and declaring Executive Orders.

The saying “good as gold” described the U.S. dollar up until 1933. Then Franklin D. Roosevelt became president and within one day set the United States down the road to a deeper depression.

An Executive Order was based rather dubiously on the Banking Relief and Trading With The Enemy Act of 1917.

What can one say? FDR’s policies were not only a failure but resulted in prolonging the depression right through the end of World War II. Nothing like a million soldiers coming home, getting married, having kids, and buying “stuff” (as George Carlin would say) that put private industry back to creating productivity with a booming economy.

Some 41 years later, President Gerald Ford on December 31, 1974 recognized that the “emergency” of the depression was over and the supposedly temporary Executive Order of 1933 was ended.

Americans were again legally entitled to buy gold.

Thank goodness for President Ford.

Do investors have a legitimate concern that confiscation of gold can happen again?

The next minute is always unknown until it has passed. But it certainly is reasonable to consider that if it happened once, then it can happen again.

Government action once taken is pretty good proof that government can take the same – or worse — action in the future.

Right now it seems to me that the president is on some an agenda that most people have not yet come to understand or accept. Whatever Saul Alinsky had in mind, the president seems to be doing it now.

This is an administration that condemns the water-boarding of enemy combatants, but has no trouble with the president keeping a hit list of who he wants summarily killed at his personal command.

Congress is effectively impotent and irrelevant. Nothing new about that.

And up to now the Supreme Court, ever since Wickard v. Filburn, thinks that limitations on government are somehow unconstitutional.

Decades of government mismanagement is causing a deterioration of the economy to the point that, in real terms, the United States is bankrupt. The current administration isn't the cause, but is responsible for exponentially accelerating the march to the economic abyss.

Personal liberties are becoming a luxury which government would tax if it could. Everything you do, everywhere you go, and everybody you have any connection with is under the scrutiny of the government. All, of course, for your protection from terrorists, drug kings, white slavers, and arms dealers.

These have been the true growth industries, along with working for the government, of the past 40 years. All that government surveillance does is tighten the noose of income tax that straggles you and the private economy.

If the Senate has its way with pending legislation, all the Treasury has to do is “certify” that you owe $50,000 in taxes and your passport can be taken away. With that you can’t leave the country, or if you do, then you can’t come back.

If you try and leave and become a citizen of another country, then you have to pay to the Treasury, right now, essentially the taxes you would have paid in the future. Otherwise you can’t leave the country.

This is the environment in which gold investors must operate.

Will the government again find a national “emergency” and confiscate your gold?

All I can say to you is that history seems to have a way of repeating itself.