In a post-apocalyptic word, iodine will be a far more useful element.
Excuse me? The conservatives have been big fans of apocalyptic scenarios for ages.
And “decent conservative” like “compassionate conservatism” is an oxymoron.
Some right-wing people really believe the Obama administration will destroy the American economy and make the dollar valueless.
For that matter, about a fourth think that Obama may be the Antichrist.
Unfortunately I’m related to at least 6 of them. Plus their children.
Once you start talking about things in terms of direct utility, aren’t you talking about barter? Well, the boundary can be fuzzy.
For example, suppose I have a piece of land and can do enough gardening and hunting to feed myself directly. Very good, but to live a civilized life, I’ll need other things that I can’t provide for myself, lacking either the physical resources or the skills. Distillation is a time-honored way of converting agricultural produce into a more compact and durable form. If I can produce enough, I can likely obtain all kinds of things in exchange for bottles of liquor; the recipients can drink it, or use it as a solvent, or trade it themselves further down the road. If my neighbor builds a forge instead of a still, he can turn out a lot of knives and nails, and exchange them for useful things. Those are good durable goods; it might make sense for his trade partners to get a lot more nails than they actually need themselves, because maybe the next guy will need some, and have something good. And so on.
Depending on the density and distribution of settlement, and the availability of resources and skills in each area, at some point it becomes easier for everyone to use a few very compact, very durable media for most exchanges, rather than everyone trying to maintain not only a personal supply but a trading stock of all the things that someone who has something useful to us might want in return.
You see where this is going. It can be more practical to have a currency of some intrinsic value that doesn’t actually get used in practice very much. Would gold serve? It’s got a pretty good historical track record; there have been few civilized societies where one couldn’t trade gold for things of more immediate value.
I wouldn’t count on it retaining anything like its present value in relation to things of more immediate use, like liquor or nails or iodine or salt. In that sense, it’s a terrible “investment” for a post-catastrophic civilization. But the odds of any particular thing of value being obtainable in exchange for gold seem pretty good. If I had laid in my basic stores already and was looking for a repository for the rest of my fiat money before it blew away, I don’t think I’d want to fill the shelves with twenty thousand bottles of tincture of iodine.
Gold is indeed a good way to barter in an economic collapse. But by gold, I mean junk gold.
You’ve been told to stop using this term unless you’re posting in the Pit. This is your last reminder.
Stay on topic, please. This is about gold and the right wing, not an evaluation of conservatism.
Did it never occur to you to ask why this particular “good investment” would be so popular to a particular group? Hell, have you never read any of Susanann’s posts?
I don’t know. All I know is that gold would be useless if the government collapsed. The best things to have in the event of a real breakdown of society would be guns, ammo, alcohol, painkillers, antibiotics, and birth control.
Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.
Lol. Just watched that movie last week. One of the best.
There seems to be an industry of apocalyptic scare-mongering going on with all kinds of venders buying time on talk radio telling teabaggers they have to get ready for the imminent social collapse (which is inevitable, of course, now that the President is a you know what), by buying not only gold, but also crap like vegetable seeds and other apocalypse gear. It’s all a hustle. Teabaggers are easy marks. Remember when they all got stampeded into stockpiling ammo? Same thing.
In April, 1906, just after the San Francisco earthquake and fire, Amadeo Giannini rescued the gold stored in his Bank of Italy (now the Bank of America) by hiding it in his stepfather’s vegetable wagon. As a result, his bank was able to honor withdrawals right after the disaster. 
I used to know an ultra-right winger–Alfred Wayne Roy, my high-school government teacher at Redondo High in the 60s (died about 1990). He once told the class that he had scientific proof that blacks were inferior to whites! And he said he would go into the middle of Watts and say that! :eek:
I hope you encouraged him to do that.
Are you sure his name wasn’t Rex Kramer?
No, but that afternoon, when I got home from school, I told my Mom about it. She said, “Yeah! And then he’d run like hell!” 
I’m positive. Mr. Roy may have been a “Danger Seeker”; at least he was a verbal daredevil just to say that in class–although there were no black kids in the senior class that year at Redondo High.
I’ll give you 5 .45 bullets, 2 .223 and these three broken shotguns for a [del]burger[/del]Iguana-on-a-stick, medium fries and a large nuka cola.
If a one ounce coin that you can hold in your hand is worth $300, that’s pretty cool. When it’s worth $1700, that’s really cool. People buy baseball cards, fermented grape juice and wall hangings and call them investments. Part of gold’s appeal is its shininess: buyers pay for this mystique with correspondingly low risk-adjusted returns.
I dunno: what magnitude do they recommend? Think of gold as another form of currency; like foreign currencies, gold does not pay dividends or interest. If you think the dollar will collapse due to Obamarama, then you are logically saying that another currency will zoom upwards. So why don’t the wingers discuss Swiss Francs, Australian dollars or Brazilian reals? Mathematically, not all currencies can decline simultaneously. So clearly, there’s an underlying hyperemotionalism operating here.
For more info and some more serious justifications for precious metal investing, try this thread, thoughtfully resurrected today by Bricker: Is there a GQ response to the right wing marketing of gold? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board