-- Posted 9 June, 2010 | | Discuss This Article - Comments:

Most people have never heard of “the invisible hand” of the market, which is the surprising result of everyone working to get money with which to satisfy their own selfish interests, and it ends up benefiting everybody, a result that is so glorious that it seems that things are being guided by some “invisible hand.”

On the other hand, most people have heard the conundrum, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” (Answer: a kind of “whoosh”), and they have heard the oxymoron “Hi. We’re from the government and we’re here to help you.”

Against those timeless phenomena, we have James A. Dorn of the Cato Institute writing about the “grabbing hand,” which is entirely familiar if you have kids who are always whining that they are always hungry because you spend all your income on gold, silver and oil in your fearful, panicky response to the Federal Reserve creating So Freaking Much Money (SFMM) and the Obama administration deficit-spending So Freaking Much Money (SFMM).

So you already know about how these ungrateful kids get “grabby” around the dinner table, and fight over any scraps that fall from your lips as you eat to complete satiety in order to keep your strength up.

Just as you would expect, then, Mr. Dorn says, “As the state’s ‘grabbing hand’ interferes with economic freedom, the ‘invisible hand’ of the market will suffer.”

And for perhaps a good example of the “invisible hand,” Bill Bonner here at The Daily Reckoning notes that the Chinese premier Xiaoping is alleged to have said, “To get rich is glorious,” which could be the ultimate in selfishness, and thousands and millions and billions of Chinese people working to do that exact thing has resulted in the fact that “They got richer, faster than any people ever had. The economy is now 10 times larger than it was then; it grew 300% just in the last 10 years,” and, “Incomes rose every year!”

I am sitting here, stunned that a third of the world’s population has an economy that is tripling in ten years! Ten years!

As a result, “There are now more millionaires in China than in France. Three times as many as in Britain. And more people are becoming millionaires there than anywhere else on earth.”

And what does any of this have to do with anything useful to a greedy, grubby little weasel of a guy like me, who just wants to make a lot of money in a short period of time without working? I’m glad you asked!

In a word, silver. Silver is already so laughably under-priced, due to the slimy manipulations and illegal price-suppression short-selling scams and schemes exposed by GATA, Ted Butler and others, that it comes at the Perfect Storm moment that a third of the world’s population is going to need more and more silver to supply all those electronic and electrical goods they are going to demand, and all the other industrial and health applications that consume silver, only to discover that there isn’t any! Hahaha! Surprise!

The industrialization of Europe and the United States into mature, developed nations consumed all the silver that there was above ground, including the 9 billion ounces gradually dis-hoarded from strategic stockpiles since the ’60s, which makes you say to yourself, “Wow! That’s a lot of silver!”

Keep that fact in mind when you remember that a Chinese population, as big as Europe and the United States put together, is going to want just as much silver, to have just as much stuff that requires silver, but there isn’t any silver!

Without going into unnecessary details, that is just one reason why, among dozens of other reasons why, I am happily accumulating silver like a man possessed, driven by the certain knowledge of a Can’t Miss Thing (CMT), which is the best kind of thing! Whee!