But Which Gold Standard?
"It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments. Ideologically it belongs in the same class with political constitutions and bills of rights."
"No State shall...make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts..."
"A government-guaranteed gold standard is a rotten idea. It is just a little better than a fiat-money standard. But advocates of 'the gold standard' almost always mean 'a government-guaranteed gold standard'. Therein lies the problem. Governments lie. They cheat. They steal..."A government-guaranteed gold standard is a fool's gold standard...There are two kinds of gold standards: government-guaranteed and privately administered. The first is a counterfeit of the second. The politicians set up the rubes to be skinned."The private gold standard places the monetary authority in the hands of the citizen. He claps golden handcuffs upon his government. He guards the Treasury."
"When the public had access to gold coins prior to 1914, individuals controlled banking policy. They also controlled government fiscal policy. They could take their coins out of commercial banks if they did not approve of government policy. This is why national governments annul or restrict gold-coin redeemability whenever a major war breaks out. They do not want to face the citizens' veto."With the repudiation of any gold-coin standard since 1914, citizens no longer understand the case for a gold-coin currency. They do not understand that widespread gold ownership was the number one restraining factor on the expansion of state power in the economy. The uncoordinated individual decisions of millions of people could overturn any government policy that required central bank inflation to fund it. The politicians resented this. So did the central bankers."They refused to return to the prewar gold-coin standard in 1918. Politicians and bankers did not want to transfer this power back to the masses. Once the central banks in every nation stole the gold from commercial banks, who had stolen the gold coins of the depositors by breaking the contracts of full gold-coin redemption on demand, the political elite never again let the masses have their coins."