The price of gold has had a solid triple since about 2001, when an ounce would set you back a mere $300 or so. (Remember that? Oh, the good old days!) For the past year or so, however, gold has been stuck, trading in the $900-980 range. It goes up a bit, down a bit.

At this level, gold isn’t overly dramatic. We haven’t seen any really big moves one way or the other. The big moves will happen, eventually, I believe. We just have to be patient.

Why do I believe that gold will soar? Well, we’re still in the early chapters of the overall “gold story.” The plot is still forming, although I believe that all of the main characters are on stage.

We have excessive U.S. government spending. It’s out of control, to all intents and purposes. We have the deepening federal deficit, and associated exploding national debt. We have significant monetary players overseas, like Japan and China and Middle Eastern nations, holding trillions of dollars worth of U.S. bonds and other paper — and getting nervous about it. We have a hollowed-out North American economy that’s turned into what historian Charles Maier calls an “empire of consumption.”

Then we also have the utter incompetence and hubris of upper-level U.S. politicians and policymakers. They’re collectively so out of touch that they don’t even know that they’re out of touch. We have the parallel incompetence of the Big Media, with their overall “infotainment” approach to presenting vital news to the American people.

Where’s the tragic theme? There’s this sense of denial that anything really bad can possibly happen. It’s the monetary equivalent of a Dec. 6 or Sept. 10 kind of thinking. It’s a failure of imagination at the highest levels.

And whatever does happen, there’s this attitude that the U.S. can add complexity to the system and “spend its way” out of anything. Big government? Sure, and let’s make it bigger. (Hey, let’s have the government take over health care while we’re at it.) Stimulus? Go for it. Bail out Wall Street? Of course — aren’t they too big to fail? Cap and trade, and thus cripple the U.S. energy economy? Yep, we’ll just “conserve” more energy and build lots of windmills. Right?

It’s just spend, spend, spend, spend, spend. Or control, control, control, control, control. And bureaucratize, bureaucratize, bureaucratize, bureaucratize, bureaucratize. Modern governance is all about spending money we don’t have on complexity that we, as a society, cannot afford in any sense of the word. And few of the power brokers at the top seem to think that there’s anything wrong with it. They’ll just pass another law, spend some more money.

The tragic part of this drama is that the high and mighty are setting themselves — and the U.S. economy — up for a terrible fall. Sooner or later, with all the spending and new bureaucracy, we’re going to have an implosion and see a collapse in the level of complexity. Those green “notes” that the Federal Reserve prints — with the nice pictures of dead presidents on them — will not be worth nearly what most people believe.

Neither you nor I can do anything to prevent it. (OK, write to your congressman, for all the good it’ll do. Or go to a town hall meeting, for all the good it’ll do.)

The answer, of course, is to protect yourself and your family, and save what you can. When the mighty tumble, be sure not to be standing there in the crash zone.

Source: My Favorite “Mistake”