Ah yes... (1) I always put my dinero in real estate not high end guns- as Mark Twain once said- "In the long run, real estate can be the best investment one can make, as God only made so much land and He always seems to be making more people"!!
(2)...at least the gruppen that banned EDM (like telling the Pontiff he can't celebrate Mass anymore in the Vatican) has the wisdom not to allow sales of Parkers via their forum- If you don't think the BATF Gestapo ain't patrolling the E-Net and the gun groups, guess again.
We agree (1) and disagree (2): First on real estate, my wherewithal is tied to the land (farmland) and I haven't owned stocks and/or bonds since 1995, so, to a point, we agree in the present tense.
But let's go back to the roaring 1970s, when the investors were chasing mucho dinero after farmland on the theory that they "weren't making it anymore." The price/earnings ratio of rents to asking/selling price skyrocketed (from a historic 20 to 25 times rents to 50 times rents). Investors were happy to buy a $3,000 acre renting for $100, with debt at 8% to 12% interest on the rationale that the $240 to $360 per acre interest was deductible at ordinary income tax rates, while they were going to flip the farm at a profit and pay only capital gains rates on the "profit." This is known in the trade as "the greater fool syndrome."
Truth be told, I did some of it (in moderation), and always found my "greater fool." Then I found my dreamboat in October 1980, stopped speculating in overpriced farmland, and sailed off into the sunset in spring 1981. Then the bubble burst, as all bubbles sooner or later do. I was lucky. And luckier yet when I returned from my 3-year sabbatical and found all that speculative $3,000 farmland in foreclosure and valued at $440 to $810, with rents of $70 to $80 per acre, and no one wanted it! (except me).
(1) Lesson to be learned is that when everyone is buying, maybe it's best to withdraw from the market. Could this be the case now with expensive double guns? It's hard to say, because they seem to keep going higher. Being smarter than the market is always retrospective. I think farmland in particular, and real estate in general, are overpriced. Investigation continues...
(2) As to whether a collectors group, like the PGCA or LCSCA, could or should allow the mention of guns looking for new owners, or persons looking for specific guns to express their first amendment rights on the group's BBS or Forum,:
I BELIEVE IT DEFEATS THE VERY PURPOSE FOR WHICH THE GROUPS EXIST, TO PROHIBIT MENTION OF GUNS FOR SALE OR GUNS WANTED ON TODAY'S BEST SOURCE OF CURRENT INFORMATION: THE INTERNET.
This issue goes back to the inception of parkergun.org when Ron Kirby and I burned up the phone lines several evenings a week, and what now is the BOD were, in reality, Ron's go-fer's, and had no legal control of the PGCA. Ron wanted to suck up to the dealers. Ron felt that if Parkers were bought and sold between collectors at "retail" rather than dealers buying collections at wholesale, breaking up the collection, and reselling one at a time at retail was going to hurt dealers.
But my understanding of the impetus for founding the PGCA (gleaned from many an evening in the founder's gun room, and with lunches with several of the founding directors back in the mid- to late 1990s) was to promote networking among collectors, not pimp for dealers. So when Ron called to sound me out about his plan to prohibit buy/sell communication on the new, almost on-line BBS, he claimed the specious concern about BATF monitoring the internet. I corrected him...but his real agenda was to protect dealers.
FACT: The Internet is no more subject to BATF monitoring or control than the newsletters mailed by the PGCA and LCSCA; both use a means of interstate communication. In other words, if the BATF were a legitimate concern, then the respective collectors associations should likewise prohibit buy/sell in their paper and ink publications. Prohibiting buy/sell on the PGCA site was simply Ron's ploy to favor dealers at its inception, which has since 2003, been perpetuated by the BOD of the reorganized PGCA, against good judgment.
I continue to be critical...and one cannot do anything but praise the current BOD under penalty of being excommunicated, so your reference to the Pope is well taken.
But the BATF and Buy/Sell prohibition aside, the rule is honored in its violation. A substantial percentage of the threads on parkergun.org are about guns for sale or thinly veiled offers to buy. This has to drive the webmaster nuts, and it impairs the vitality of the of the website and organization itself to have what is perceived as a silly rule with helter-skelter and often irrational enforcement.
While the first amendment only accrues to the one who controls the medium, be he an editor at a newspaper who slants coverage to tout BHO, or a webmaster who is chided by the BODs of a collectors group to squelch legitimate critique, the result is the same loss of credibility. Who would ever guess that a association dedicated to collecting anything, be it fine shotguns or barbie dolls, would prohibit communications directed to acquiring or dis-acquiring the very items that sparked interest formation of the group in the first place. EDM
