By Dr Jeffrey Lewis
A basic issue with silver investing for many people is that the actual metal is scarce, valuable and increasingly vulnerable to explicit and implicit confiscation.

Yet silver is not only an investment vehicle. It also acts as an alternative savings vehicle to saving wealth in fiat currencies.

Silver remains both literal and symbolic of the principles here. Furthermore, the physical possession of silver requires a different kind of investor strength and resolve, and it involves directly confronting market risk, storage risk and confiscation risk.

Silver investment
Investment suggests the anticipation of making a profit, and that certainly has been the recent trend for those lucky to be holding silver. Most market observers acknowledge that silver will eventually trade to its intrinsic value based on the bullish underlying fundamentals.

Appealing investment qualities of silver investing include its various industrial properties and its strategic important as a scarce and valuable commodity with inelastic demand.

Will it matter if the thousands of ounces of silver used in each Tomahawk missile cost multiples higher in U.S. Dollar terms when the government paying for these weapons has an essentially infinite ability to create the necessary number of monetary units used to buy those ounces?

This highlights the role of silver as a monetary asset or one more akin to an alternative savings vehicle.

The sanctity of savings
People are now living in an economically challenging time period where savings and capital are needed most, and yet the reward for or return on savings is at its lowest point in recent history.

Saving requires self-respect, sacrifice, strength and stamina.Savings — like capital formation —is precious to the wider economic community.

In a system where the promises to pay are generally adhered to, savings should be rewarded over time by an accumulation of capital. This process would grant the saver more options and freedom than they otherwise would have had.

Investment implies trading or taking risk in return for an anticipated profit, but savers are owners.

Silver is honest capital
Silver is a scarce natural resource with considerable intrinsic value. As such, silver is honest capital. Taking physical ownership of silver requires self-awareness and responsibility. It is not easy.

Above all, silver investing and ownership requires honest thinking about ourselves, our capabilities and our limitations.

The protection of honest capital thus requires clear and rational thought about the world, its dangers, its opportunities and the nature of risk.

Since savers provide the capital which makes that activity possible, they make the satisfaction of society’s desires possible.As capital grows cumulatively, today’s capital stock lays the foundations upon which tomorrow’s prosperity is built.

Furthermore, the decisions that people of today’s generation make with their capital and savings are what they will leave to tomorrow’s generation. It seems best to leave capital of true intrinsic value to your heirs, rather than paper promises.

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