"I've listened to enough of your crap ! You're a ******* git !" – And then he began firing. - Michael Lewis' account of Irishman Gary Keogh throwing rotten eggs at the chairman of Allied Irish Bank, in his Vanity Fair article "When Irish Eyes Are Crying".

"We have so much unemployment, it is so undercounted. The free market economists report that there is probably 22% of unemployment. They [the Fed] pumped in US$4 trillion, they should have added a lot of jobs, but how much did it cost us, and that of course is the price inflation that will come. We are moving into another 30 year period where we are going to see a reversal of interest rates, and we are going to see a crashing of the bonds like we saw 30 years ago and it's going to last a long, long time. The Fed deserves the blame for the inflation, and for the unemployment." - US Congressman Ron Paul.

Mention "Holland" to people and you conjure up a variety of associations. Some think of a longstanding and spicy relationship of trading and military sparring with Britain that was formally salved with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Some think of an impressively cultured and polyglot race. Some of us think of about two full school terms devoted to the Dutch Revolt that never actually featured in our History A-Level Exam, so thanks for that, Oxford and Cambridge Board. Now we can add another facet to this colourful and otherwise learned country: the quasi-fascistic bullying of an innocent pension fund.

Website Zero Hedge reports that De Nederlandsche Bank went to court and forced the glassworkers' pension fund to sell most of its holdings in gold. The court sided with the central bank and ruled that the glassworkers' pension fund, with a 13% allocation to bullion, was investing in a way "inconsistent with the interests of the participants". Dutch pension funds are apparently, on average, invested in commodities to the order of 2.7%. Whether gold should even be viewed as a commodity is open to question. We would, of course, argue: No, it's natural money, and always has been. But at a time when central banks globally are busily depreciating their currencies (translation: stealing from their own citizens), what is extraordinary about the ruling is De Nederlandsche Bank's belief that the price of gold fluctuates too much for it to be classified as an investment. If the price of gold fluctuates, what about the value of paper currency ?

Not only developing nations but western governments have form when it comes to stealing from their own citizens. Putting to one side recent raids on pension funds (the UK, France, Ireland) the most notorious and pertinent comparison with the current Dutch ruling was the US' Executive Order 6102 of 5th April 1933, under which President Franklin Roosevelt forbade the hoarding of gold coin, bullion and certificates by American citizens.

We checked with an informed source [hat-tip and thanks, Eric] and the Dutch story and ruling appear to be correct (if not necessarily moral or legitimate in a broader sense). The ruling hinges on whether gold is money or currency (which the pension fund argued), or merely a commodity. But the upshot is that the fund is now forced to sell the majority of its (highly profitable) holding in bullion and replace it with government bonds, which one might fairly call instruments of confiscation in themselves.

Man has used a variety of things as money during our relatively brief economic history – including cattle, shells, nails, tobacco, cotton, copper, silver and gold. Invariably, precious metals have been selected over the alternatives on account of their scarcity, durability, divisibility and beauty. The most important point, though, is that they were never forced on us. Through a gradual process of free choice, precious metals won against all other media of exchange in a free market. Man grew to using precious metals as money out of what J