Doug Henwood wrote: > Interesting. It seems like it's a short step from conspiracism to > goldbuggery.
I like that last word. > Ever read about the 19th century? There were lots of violent booms > followed by busts. The busts were often horrendous. The U.S. spent > about half of the last three decades of the 19th century in recession > or depression. Central banks are supposed to mitigate that sort of > thing, and they've mostly done a decent job of it. In the U.S., the > Fed was in part an appropriation of the populist proposal for an > elastic currency system. Gold is horrendously austere - part of the > apparatus of conservatism, as Keynes put it. Hayek understood that, > and [Ron] Paul does too. It seems pretty strange that some PEN-Lers don't. on top of that, the gold standard implied deflation, which steadily increased the debt load of farmers. Nowadays, debt problems are more general, so that increasing real debts and thus debt-deflation are more likely. Also, allegiance to the gold standard is one reason why the Fed encouraged the US economic collapse of the early 1930s, complete with a large debt deflation (cf. Irving Fisher). -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
