Gold and Economic Freedom

"An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense - perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire - that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.

In order to understand the source of their antagonism, it is necessary first to understand the specific role of gold in a free society.

Money is the common denominator of all economic transactions. It is that commodity which serves as a medium of exchange, is universally acceptable to all participants in an exchange economy as payment for their goods or services, and can, therefore, be used as a standard of market value and as a store of value, i.e., as a means of saving......

.....In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

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 [written in 1966] Ironic considering Alan Greenspan has created more phony "money" from thin air then all central bankers and fed governors in the history or our republic put together.

Forming the iron ingot into the shape of a bull created value above and beyond the value of the iron. It would be worth some measure of gold today (much as in the case of the bull sculpture on wall Street (which is actually probably bronze)) as well, unlike 2-1/2 or 3 little slips of paper with a couple of extra zeros printed on them equaling the value of an ounce of gold. Actually that was a few years ago. Today it would take about 4-1/4 of these slips of paper to purchase the same amount of gold, or European goods, not to mention Australian, New Zealand or even Canadian goods, of just a few years ago. Look at the M3 chart. Iron takes energy and labor to sever. They don't even have to print the phony money any more, they can do it through the convenience of electronic entries.

Christopher Mayer, writing for the Ludwig von Mises Institute, stated it well: "Faith that paper money itself was of any lasting value would have struck our forebears as patently absurd."

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, 'Account overdrawn.'" - Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged

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