Maggie's drawers and how I got there

Funny how you can be looking for one bit of information and land up in a completely different place as in "how did I get here?".  I remember way back in the dark ages when I was a kid them selling war stamps. The idea being that kids could contribute to paying off the war debt from the prior decade by buying stamps for an album that could be traded for a war bond. The over all idea of both stamps and bonds never really caught on because during the war prices were fixed. People didn't have much savings and weren't about to tie it up for 5 years. 

Checking out rationing and shortages in this rat's maze of web surfing lead to how various states of recessions came about all stemming from oil shortages and major changes in our monetary policies. There was the "Nixon Shock" of the early 70s. How had I missed that bit of info having lived through it? And then there was the oil embargo that caused everybody to drop their speed limits from 75 or 80 down to 65 or 70 even though the requirement was 55. But it was Nixon's dropping of the gold standard that created a goodly chunk of the mess we face today. Prior to that all currencies could be tied to the price of an ounce of gold (side note why is ounce abbreviated oz. there's no z in ounce). What lead to this point in the maze of info gathering? It was a meeting in New Hampshire by the high mucky mucks of finance called the Bretton Woods Accord which established rules for commercial and financial relations among the world's major industrial powers. It also brought about the IMF which was supposed to bridge imbalances of payments. For anyone old enough may recall Nixon's attempt to put the brakes on inflation by instituting price and wage freezes which didn't work after he dumped the gold standard there was also Germany requiring a wheel barrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread prior to WWII. So now any attempts at stabilizing a world economy were now dashed since any government could now print as much money as it saw fit. (Careful what you wish for boys.)

From a layman's perspective we are now at a point where the world's economic situation is such that nobody really has the economic strength to bail out anybody else in this game of Monopoly. And again I wonder how I landed here. Oh yes, this post was supposed to be about the NRA and how they've missed their mark with their insistence of arming the entire populace. That in army parlance is known as "Maggies Drawers".