A true blue contrarian changes his opinion as soon as a majority of people adopt it. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
What if all the new consensus memes are as wrong as the ones they replaced?
I have the Contrarian Curse, and I have it bad. The Contrarian Curse is: as soon as the herd adopts your previously contrarian view, you start questioning the new consensus, just as you questioned the previous consensus.
Example #1: fiat currencies are doomed. After all, if creating “money” out of thin air solves all our problems, why not just let everyone print as much as they want at home? Oh, wait, only the super-wealthy and powerful get the newly created “money”? Oh, that makes it really sustainable, doesn’t it?
Now the hot meme is the US dollar is expiring and gold / commodity-backed currencies will replace it atop the heap. Many of us on the fringes have pondered alternatives to fiat currency, and so this becoming mainstream is a real sea change.
Which immediately arouses my contrarian curse. Ok, so exactly how does a gold/commodity-backed currency work? If gold or wheat declines (as measured in purchasing power to everything else), does the quantity of currency shrink to reflect this decline in value? Can the currency supply only expand if gold/commodities rise in relative value? Can the issuing central bank just keep emitting new currency without expanding the reserves of gold/commodities?
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 