I do not think they will confiscate gold again. Instead, I think, they will move to tax what is purchased, like Europe’s VAT. Same effect… if you have it, they get it.

Gold is fairly constant in value, not in price. Which means the dollar fluctuates, and more importantly inflates significantly over time. To a government that is going into massive debt, confiscating Gold is a way of doing damage control to allow them to keep spending, then they can use massive inflation to mitigate their debts.

On the current politic argument:

Bush was neither conservative nor anywhere near perfect. He, like many others before or after, used a crisis to gain incredibly scary amounts of power. The current president is using another crisis to gain scarier power. The power to suspend Habeas Corpus is bad (Bush), the theft of the right of self determination on a national scale is far worse (Obamacare).

On a historical scale, Bush made some bad decisions and was hated virulently, but in the end defended the nation effectively then turned into a raving liberal when the economy went tits-up.

On that same scale, Obama has been thus far extremely ineffective at doing anything but unprecedented power grabs and illegal takeovers of private industry. It will take a few years before his long term legacy is seen, but socialized medicine, a massive and ever-increasing debt and government takeover of private industry are his crowning achievements to date.

I, for one, welcome our new bureaucratic overlords.

Bush-Cheney never claimed they could make their own law and confiscate property from US citizens. Their executive power claims were largely centered around privacy of decision making process so that they could get a wide range of inputs.

Sigh….