“Naught is possessed, neither gold, nor land nor love, nor life, nor peace, nor even sorrow nor death, nor yet salvation. Say of nothing: It is mine. Say only: It is with me.”
-D.H. Lawrence
In the beginning, God created gold. And the free markets for them.
The creation of all gold- that which has come to symbolize money- was forged by nature out of a violent cataclysm of a stellar- and singular- magnitude, that was much bigger than a Facebook IPO.
Even today, scientists still do not agree how gold was created.
They do know that it would have taken a force with both extreme temperature and extreme gravity in order to combine the basic hydrogen and helium atoms found in nature to create gold.
Some scientists theorize that a massive supernova- the explosion of a large star- would have been enough to create gold. Others say that the force and heat of a supernova would have been inadequate to create gold. Rather, they insist, it must have been the collision of two neutron stars that created gold. Only in such a collision, they theorize, would we have found adequate force and heat to bind together the unique seventy-nine atom arrangement that makes gold.
To put into perspective how much force is needed to accomplish the creation of gold under this theory, you could fit about one million earths into the mass the sun occupies. A neutron star has so much gravitational pull that it packs 1.5 to 2 times the mass of the sun in a ball the diameter of six to ten miles only.
Acting on gravity alone, an object falling from only 3 feet high on a neutron star- at 1.5 times our sun’s mass- would hit the surface traveling at a speed of 4.3 million miles per hour. Because of the intense concentration of mass, you’d weight 190 billion times what you do on earth on the surface of a neutron star.
Now imagine the energy in the form of heat and force released when two neutron stars, with their colossal compacted masses, collide in space while both are rotating at 60,000 times per minute. The result of the general holocaust created by the impact-death of these two objects would be to eject -in theory- dust particles of several of the heavier elements found on the Periodic Table of Elements.
Amongst these would be the designation Au- which is gold- with an atomic weight of 196.96655.
The gold deep within the earth then got there because dust particles, including Au, which make up the earth, compacted together through gravity to form our planet. The lighter material ended up on the outside of the crust and the heavier material, like gold dust, ended up deep below the crust.
Now this mother lode of gold, that we mine today, was deposited nearer the crust by super-heated liquid that melted the gold while it was buried deep within the earth. Heat then forced this liquid gold towards the top of the earth’s crust in veins of quartz near the surface through cracks and fissures.
And since before we could count, flakes of gold have eroded from mother lodes buried inside the earth, normally in small particles- with an odd nugget here and there- that has welded together. And because gold is heavier than other debris in a creek or river bed, it tends to settle together in ruts and holes just waiting for a poor man to come along so that the gold can make him rich.
It is here we likely find the first capitalists and the beginning of economics.
And it all had to happen this way; in theory at any rate.
For were it not for the destruction of those two- or more- neutron stars in reality, gold would not existed; gold would not have come to symbolize money; no wagons would have traveled along the South Fork of the Platte River turning south along the trail of the Plum Creek often under a banner that read “Pikes Peak or Bust;” no Forty-Niners would have staked out claims in Sutter’s Mill on the South Fork of the American River making the get-rich-quick scheme both the bane and the motive of the American psyche.
And the wonder of it all is that the Left will try to tell you that this all happened without a God, but then try to convince you that only a government program can create the miraculous.
When you live in the West, as I do, you come to have a different understanding of nature than that which was espoused by, say, Henry David Thoreau as he wintered at Walden Pond.
We Westerners think that nature is noble, too, like Thoreau, but we don’t romanticize it. When we see stones the size of large city buildings thrust vertically through the crust of the earth, we understand that the act that put them there was necessarily violent.
We understand that nature is savage, ungovernable and has no pity. Nature has the power of will without an individual conscience. We understand that conscience is God’s domain and man’s too, but not the domain of nature. Nature, like government, is not something we are vain enough to think we control or in which we live in harmony.
For us, it’s hard to accept an earth “in balance” when we walk on rock that once was so hot it was a liquid even while it smothered everything within 100 miles at the half the velocity of a pistol shot.
Yes, Westerners have a more pragmatic, realistic view of nature than this.
Only a fool, an alchemist or a government economist would think to control it.