[justshutupandtakeit]

No country has been on the gold standard for long. When they are recession is the inevitable result since there is insufficient metal supplies to provide for a currency which can expand with productivity and population growth.

Gold supplies shrink when in use as currency by about 2% per year just from wearing away. So old gold coins cannot be counted on to weigh what they are supposed to weigh.

Love of gold is just a supersition. It is not a viable currency as any real study of monetary history will show. No reputable thinker in this field wants to return to that mechanism.

If you prefer crackpots and know-nothings then nothing will help your understanding.

Socialism has nothing to do with the form of the money supply unless you change the definitions of words to fit your argument.

[AdamSelene235]

Socialism has nothing to do with the form of the money supply unless you change the definitions of words to fit your argument.

But the opposition to the gold standard in any form -- from a growing number of welfare-state advocates -- was prompted by a much subtler insight: the realization that the gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state). Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale.

Alan Greenspan (another "crackpot and know-nothing" according to Justshutupandtakeit)