THE SOUTH'S GONNA DO IT AGAIN, I.E. LOSE.

This week's Texas gold buggery story is amazing all by itself:

On Friday, Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation that will create a state-run gold depository in the Lone Star State – one that will attempt to rival those operated by the U.S. government inside Fort Knox and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s vault in lower Manhattan. “The Texas Bullion Depository,” Abbott said in a statement, “will become the first state-level facility of its kind in the nation, increasing the security and stability of our gold reserves and keeping taxpayer funds from leaving Texas to pay for fees to store gold in facilities outside our state.” Soon, Abbott’s office said, the state “will repatriate $1 billion of gold bullion from the Federal Reserve in New York to Texas.” In other words, when it comes preparing for the currency collapse and financial armeggedon, Abbott's office really seems to think Texas is a whole 'nother country.

Brian Murphy's entire story is worth reading. Adding some savor for me: I've been reading E. Merton Coulter's "History of the Confederate States of America," published in 1950 as part of LSU's History of the South series. (Coulter was a white supremacist, but his research is sound.) I've just come through the part about the CSA's Treasury woes. Along with the understandable problems with sustaining a new economy in wartime, the Confederate Congress was apparently scared to raise taxes, and the response when they did try to raise them shows why: citizens availed every subterfuge to avoid paying, and the Confederacy, per Coulter, "raised throughout its existence about one percent of its income in taxes." The last Confederate Treasury Secretary, George Trenholm, "wondered throughout the period of his secretaryship why the people could never see and think of the Confederacy as part of themselves -- not something far away -- and why they as one great family did not come to the rescue," Coulter adds. States' rights is a hell of a drug. This new drive to lay up gold strikes me as a potent mix of that, Texas' secessionism revival and the government's pandering to same, and the influence of Goldline and related scams.

But at least the Rebels didn't have the dubious benefit of modern financial instruments. Murphy interviews Texas House member Giovanni S. Capriglione, the genius behind the gold-gathering, who says the state is defraying the cost of transporting and storing the bullion by having it handled by -- you guessed it! -- the private sector:

Moreover, by privatizing the depository’s operations, Capriglione said he was able to begin recruiting “stakeholders” who “are interested in being a part of the system we’re creating.” Rather than build a Fort Knox-type facility in Texas, Capriglione said “there are commercial vaults not being used or not at full capacity, and I’ve heard from groups willing to start their own depository and IT security companies with underground storage facilities for data centers who can make space available” for gold and other precious metals. 

Most importantly, Capriglione found that by offering gold brokers and dealers the chance to become “depository agents” who can accept deposits on the state’s behalf or set up accounts with their own precious metal holdings that can then be sold off and subdivided to would-be depositors, he found a broad network of supporters for the state depository...

By Charles Keating, that's good! If the Rest of America doesn't descend into Armageddon, expect some hilarious hearings when those bars go missing.