Gold Standard

Because of the current economic and political climate, it is important to understand what we can do — and what we cannot hope to do in the short run.

So long as prices are flexible, any amount of money can "do the job.

David Frum is on the warpath.

Although Frum naturally doesn't say it explicitly, the only "cushion" that unbacked fiat money can provide is that it allows politicians to literally paper over crises, limping along from one to the next.

Mises said that such a monetary policy would ultimately end in the destruction of the exchange value of money.

So, in both cases of the "gold standard" and "free banking" we find that much of the case against the free-market policy is based on misrepresentations of the policies and semantic subversion.

Needless to say, during the course of this history, the federal government took more and more monetary powers so that, today, our monetary arrangements would be unrecognizable to any of the Founders. Our coins, in particular, are ugly little pieces of nothing and a constant reminder of our degradation.

The May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, the organ of establishment policy, published

From National Review Online’s David Frum:

Make the dollar as good as gold and you eliminate the inflation problem and the business cycles that go along with it.