Managing Editor’s Note: Today we hand the reins to Rogue Economics expert Chris Weber.
Chris is possibly the most successful investor you’ve never heard of. He started investing in 1971. By the time he was 18, he was independently wealthy.
He has authored and co-authored eight books on investing and economics, including the best-selling Getting Rich Outside the Dollar.
Today, Chris writes The Weber Report. He’s been extra bullish on silver lately. And in the latest edition, he shared a unique reason to own the metal.
We found Chris’s insights so fascinating, we had to share them with you…
Everyone knows how the naval battle of Salamis (480 B.C.) ended once and for all the attempt of Persia to conquer Greece.
The Greeks were outnumbered and up against the wall that day. But they had a true “savior general”: Themistocles.
The tactics he used assured a victory so large that the Persians ran back to Asia as quickly as possible. But a few years before that, to make it all possible, a huge vein of silver had been found outside of Athens, in Laurion.
Some people advocated for dividing it up equally amongst the people, but doing so would only have amounted to ten days’ average salary per person.
Far better, said Themistocles, use the silver to build a navy to protect us in the event of another Persian invasion.
Remember that in 490 B.C., the Persians were stopped at Marathon, 26 miles from Athens. The smartest Greeks knew that they’d return, but in much larger numbers.
By the time they did, the silver had bought a navy large enough to completely defeat the Persians.
As Victor Davis Hanson writes in his book, The Savior Generals:
One need not be a cultural chauvinist to appreciate that Persian culture had very different ideas about personal freedom, democracy, the rights of the individual, and rationalism.
Quite simply without the savior general Themistocles, the world as we know it today might have been a very different place indeed.
Substitute “Iranian” for Persian, its modern-day name, and you realize that things haven’t changed much in that part of the world.
But without the navy, there would have been no victory at Salamis. And without the silver spent to create that navy out of nothing (not a popular idea at the time, to put it mildly), there would have been no navy, no Salamis, no free Greece.
Persia would have snuffed out the ideas we get from the Greeks… What we know as Western civilization may have never happened… And the culture of today’s Iran may well be ruling us still.
It is not so far-fetched an idea, believe me. Salamis made Athens free and gave the idea of freedom a place to be born.
So when you buy silver, don’t just think of it as a bargain investment. Think of it as perhaps the ideal asset of liberty.
Yes, gold is more valuable. But when it was most needed, it was silver that came to the rescue of our way of life.
Regards,
Chris Weber
Editor, The Weber Report