Hugo Chavez is planning on moving $12 Billion worth of gold from England back to Venezuala according to an article in Reuters.com, (via Daringfireball). It is a good read, you should take a gander. Felix Salmon proposes that one method Chavez considers using to move the gold is crowdsourcing (read the article, it makes sense). My favourite part comes from the comments section:

“But here’s one last idea: why doesn’t Chávez crowdsource the problem?”
Sounds utterly insane to me: put gold in the hands of desperate who (a)might just leg it, (b)will set up a constant and dependable stream of vulnerable robbery targets and fraud opportunities.
It would give birth to a criminal society that would probably rival some drug cartels.

We are talking about Venezuala here. This is a country that has a #5 ranked murder rate1. Apparently Venezuala has a higher murder rate than the Democratic Republic of Congo2. I understand the commenter’s concern about creating a stream of vulnerable targets for robbery. I’m just not sure that Chavez would risk creating “a criminal society” by following this line of thinking. Of course, I am equating the murder rate with the criminal tendencies of an entire nation. Perhaps that isn’t a fair metric to use.

The Pentagon has been working for nearly a decade on an audacious plan to strike anywhere on the planet in less than an hour. Thursday could prove to be the do-or-die moment for that plan.1

Seems like a duplication of effort to me. The United States already has a weapon capable of knocking the world back to the stone age in less than an hour – its financial services industry.

One European Union study this year found that 17 per cent of Britain’s youth are classified as “NEETs” – for Not in Employment, Education or Training, in other words high-school dropouts with no prospects of employment – the fourth-highest percentage in the European Union. There are 600,000 people under 25 in Britain who have never had a day of work.1

Imagine a game show where 600,000 young adults are stranded on an island on which all resources and power are tightly controlled by a jealous few. What outcome would you predict? (I’m pretty sure my 21 month old child could figure this one out…)

“Every gun that is made,” Eisenhower told his listeners, “every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Any nation that pours its treasure into the purchase of armaments is spending more than mere money. “It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

— from The Tyranny of Defense Inc., The Atlantic Online. retrieved 2011-01-04.

I don’t know enough about his presidency to comment on all aspects of his government or his person, but he seems to have been able to see the future he was about to help create. I wonder if he ever envisioned a fighter jet costing $130 million?

Here is the audio of the full speech (from Archive.org)

Text of the full speech is available from the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission