Gumby wrote:
It makes no difference. Jefferson's work was discarded, like litter on a highway, the moment the Macro flaws became relevant. The "safety" of gold ended up being nothing more than an illusion, except for a few gold coins that people were able to hold on to.
History shows us that EVERY gold-backed currency already failed. Over. History. Done. It was nice while it lasted.
That's utter and complete Keynesian falderal.
And the reason why Keynesians like it:
John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1920 wrote:
By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
ibid wrote:
There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose.
V.I. Lenin wrote:
The way to crush the bourgeois is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.
Ludwig von Mises, 1952 wrote:
The eminence of the gold standard consists in the fact that it makes the determination of the monetary unit's purchasing power independent of the measures of governments. It wrests from the hands of the "economic tsars" their most redoubtable instrument. It makes it impossible for them to inflate. This is why the gold standard is furiously attacked by all those who expect that they will be benefited by bounties from the seemingly inexhaustible government purse.
Gold puts the brakes on gov't. Sure, they'll eventually escape that if the people let them, but in the interim it's better than nothing. And paper is nothing.
Alexander Hamilton wrote:
The emitting of paper money is wisely prohibited to the State Governments, and the spirit of the prohibition ought not to be disregarded by the United States' Government.
Thomas Jefferson, to Josephus B. Stuart, 1817 wrote:
That paper money has some advantages is admitted. But that its abuses also are inevitable and, by breaking up the measure of value, makes a lottery of all private property, cannot be denied.
Malcolm Forbes wrote:
Why then, is gold the unmentionable, four letter word of economics? The Answer is threefold: A misunderstanding of the role of money; a misreading of history, and finally, a visceral revulsion to the notion that a metal can do a better job of guiding monetary policy than a gaggle of finance ministers, central bankers, and well degreed economists.
Pres Charles de Gaulle wrote:
There can be no other criterion, no other standard, than gold -- gold that never changes, that can be shaped into ingots, bars, coins...that has no nationality and that is eternally and universally accepted as the ultimate fiduciary value par excellence.
Alan Greenspan, Gold and Economic Freedom, 1966 wrote:
In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation... This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.
Alan Greenspan, 1999 wrote:
Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world. ... Fiat money, in extremis, is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted.
Alan Greenspan, 2007 wrote:
There are numbers of us, myself included, who strongly believe that we did very well in the 1870 to 1914 period with an international gold standard.
Tim Harford, NPR Planet Money, 20 May 2011 wrote:
Bubbles should be defined in terms of fundamental values... it's just not clear what the fundamental value of gold is. It's worth something because people have always thought it's worth something. And that's really weird, because what it tells you is gold is in a 4,000-year-old bubble.
Joseph Schumpeter, 1883-1950 wrote:
[The gold standard] is extremely sensitive to government expenditure and even to attitudes or policies that do not involve expenditures directly, for example, to foreign policy, to certain policies of taxation, and, in general to precisely all those policies that violate the principles of economic liberalism. This is the reason why gold is so unpopular now and also why it was so popular in the bourgeois era. It imposes restrictions upon governments or bureaucracies that are much more powerful than is parliamentary criticism. It is both the badge and the guarantee of bourgeois freedom -- of freedom not simply of the bourgeois /interest/, but of freedom in the bourgeois sense.
Wall Street Journal editorial, pg14, 7 Jun 1965 wrote:
The purchasing power of that famous paper currency [dollar] has itself been steadily eroded by the selfsame Government in its pursuit of inflationary policies for more than 30 years. Given that bias, it is not surprising that our money is being more and more COMPLETELY DIVORCED FROM BOTH GOLD AND SILVER. The trend should give rise to something besides nostalgia. The wholesale expunging of silver stands as one more symbol of the Federal progression towards fiat money, no matter how many silver linings the Government professes to see.
Daniel Webster wrote:
Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money.
ibid wrote:
We have suffered more from this cause [paper money] than from every other cause or calamity. It has killed more men, pervaded and corrupted the choicest interests of our country more, and done more injustice than even the arms and artifices of our enemy.
Walter E Spahr, NYU economist, The People's Pottage, 1953 wrote:
So long as a government has the power over a people that is provided by an irredeemable currency, all efforts to stop a government disposed to lead a people into socialism tend to be, and probably will be futile.
ibid wrote:
The evidence seems overwhelming that a defender of irredeemable currency is, wittingly or unwittingly, an advocate of socialism or of government dictatorship.
Kenneth Parsons, aka Johnny silver Bear, 2004 wrote:
During the first half of the 20th century, each of four world leaders did the exact same thing within ninety days of their ascension to power. Each made it illegal for the citizens of their respective countries to own gold. Those leaders were: Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Ezra Taft Benson; former Secretary of Agriculture; The Proper Role of Government; 1968 wrote:
I believe in honest money, the gold and silver coinage of the Constitution, and a circulating medium convertible into such money without loss. I regard it as flagrant violation of the explicit provisions of the Constitution for the Federal Government to make it a criminal offense to use gold or silver coin as legal tender or to use irredeemable paper money.
George Bernard Shaw, avowed socialist wrote:
You have to choose between trusting the natural stability of gold and the honesty and intelligence of members of the government. With due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.
Gold and silver are quite likely the worst currencies possible, except for all the others already tried.
So I'm going to believe these fine folks and similar learned opinions based on thousands of years of history instead of Keynes' disciples over the past 80 years or any Gumby distortion of it. Thanks anyway, but I have to take a break from this insanity. I'm out.
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