Selling the apocalypse

Dire warnings and prognostications are the currency of politics and have been since long before those prophets told us what God was going to do if we didn't start or stop doing something the prophet didn't like. The willing gullibility of  some of in believing it without question is astonishing. Prophets sell obedience. Politicians sell all kinds of things, most of them will cost you.

Much of it speaks of ignorance, of course.  Highly informed people may be more rigorous in asking questions and of course being highly informed, can pick up on the glaring contradictions in what we hear from propagandists, politicians and liars, if I may be allowed some redundancy here.  How many can listen to Chris Christie ranting about how weak the economy is under "Obama's weak, indecisive leadership" without noticing that all evidence contradicts it?  Quite a number, it seems, but for prophecy and politics (I know, I'm being redundant again) evidence is self created and seeing a weak economy, high unemployment, low job growth and increasing deficit spending are necessary to support the bogus premise:  Obama is a weak ( although tyrannical) president. We do what's necessary to keep the faith.

I got an e-mail this morning, masquerading as "a developing story" by The Crux.com wherein Dr. Ron Paul reveals #1 Step to Prepare for America’s Next Big Crisis.  There's an image of a badly corroded pre-2008 penny and it's titled:

The new 2015 U.S. Penny – The warning signs are obvious if you know where to look.

The weakness of the dollar, we're told, makes the penny worth less than the cost of minting it, which suggests that seeing the record strength of the dollar, someone is lying here.

Could it be Stansberry Research, who publishes this advertisement posing as an objective blog?  It seems they're advising you to dump everything and buy gold  "with no risk"  just as the gold brokers were telling us right before it collapsed.

They quote Ron Paul extensively as predicting a great and imminent financial crisis, but I don't recall that at any time during the Obama administration there was a lack of  massive and apocalyptic predictions which of course have not only failed to materialize, but things have developed in quite the opposite way.  That "irresponsible" stimulus has made a large profit for the government, unemployment is at 5.3% and deficit spending has steadily declined while revenues have risen.  There has been no "double dip" recession as predicted daily - but you know that or you would have stopped reading this already. 

I find it odd, which is my way of saying that I don't find it odd that during the Bush years, we weren't prophesying disaster and were actively libelling anyone who advised caution.  I find it necessary to ask just when Paul made these predictions and whether the picture of the Bush era penny indicates that this is recycled hokum. Had he warned us in 2006 or 2007, he would have been right, but now?

Or I could just be like the tea soaked victims of such advertising, sell my entire holdings and give the cash to Stansberry to "invest" for me.