I hear your concerns on confiscation etc. Believe I share those as well. However, I think this is issue is blown out of proportion. After some research I think my understanding is no one actually went Nazi style into homes taking away gold in the 30's. Yes they said it was illegal to own and was threat of huge fine and imprisenment. But there was no one standing guard in banks looking what people took out of safe boxes. It was more of a patriotic thing to do.
That is true - actual convictions and forced confiscations so rare as to be non-existent. It really was unnecessary, and I see even the rationale behind that on the part of government, the first being a well-founded fear that a well-placed SCOTUS ruling that could overturn Roosevelt's Executive Order. Those who voluntarily turned in their gold could not be considered "injured" parties, and would thus not have any standing in court. Secondly, once the ownership of gold was declared illegal, the net effect on the remaining gold was upward pressure on its value, given that all the other gold that was effectively and permanently removed from circulation. The only way you could trade in gold (aside from black market bartering or getting the gold into a foreign country) was to turn it in and accept fiat notes.
In other words, they didn't have to confiscate your gold. Declaring it illegal had all the effect of physical confiscation, as simply making it illegal prevented it from publicly circulating. This stalemate meant that the value of your gold really was confiscated, rendered useless to you even if you retained possession.
I think silver is a good investment as well. Just trying to understand better to get my weightings down. But I don't think threat of confiscation of gold over silver is a great one. If silver ever did become reletivley more valuable as people expect then why would the govt not just confiscate that? The idea that they would blindley focused on gold and nothing else doesn't make sense to me. Especially if there is is this ever growing industrial usage. actually u cold make the case they would have more reason to confiscate silver because it has more industrial uses and without it the country could not run.
That could happen (and does) with any commodity, of course, but it wouldn't be on the basis of silver's use as an international currency backing. Silver as an international currency is way too volatile.
Governments are NOT looking at silver OR gold as "investments". That's fiat-centric market speak, where value and price are conflated and confused, as we mentally confuse a "gain" in the price of gold as an "increase in its value", when gold was the constant, making the currency the variable.
Governments will all be forced into gold backing their currencies for the same reasons rational people want the same thing: for gold's reliable constancy as a STORE OF VALUE, and its ability to provide a check on value based on its natural scarcity. Governments absolutely need this as a check on the value of other governments, including determining the rate of free-fall of their currencies under their respective fiat Ponzi schemes.
Gold is far more valuable to governments in this regard given the fact that the supply really is stable. Most of the gold mined is still above ground. Silver would not be a reliable indicator at all, given its many uses, including its rate of destructive consumption, making it more like an exotic investment based on its continually increasing rate of scarcity -
especially in the more developed countries.
Trying to make silver an official currency would also place governments in the position of having to artificially curtail its consumptive uses "for the public good" (which, as you stated correctly, could happen anyway).
The reason gold was confiscated in the 30s is because we were on the gold standard and we need to inflate the fx to get out of the recession. we are no longer on the gold standard.
I think it's important to remember that the currency was inflated through fractional reserve lending, with multiple artificial claims to the same physical gold, long before it was confiscated, and even while we were on a gold standard. The Great Depression only happened as a result of a massive contraction of all the paper derivatives that had already inflated the currency, and should never have been circulated in the first place. In other words, the Fed put the entire banking system of the country on cold turkey withdrawals. Had those multiple contradictory claims not existed from that inflation (i.e., no fractional reserve banking tolerated), such a massive artificial contraction of the so-called "money supply" could not have taken place to begin with.
So "the need to inflate the currency to get out of the depression" was only saying that without adding more of the heroin that should never have been injected into the economy to begin with, the patient would die. And it's true. But an acknowledgment of the nature of the addiction, with a plan for getting off that addiction, was never part of anybody's plan - which turned Keynes' "temporary and selective methadone solution" into rationale for a
"more is always better" full-scale heroin trafficking operation.