Salerno on the Gold Debate

“Even drug dealers have stopped accepting the dollar,” Joseph Salerno said during a speech entitled “The return to the gold standard” last night.

Salerno is a professor of Economics at the Lubin School of Business at Pace University and the editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. He presented the speech during an event sponsored by The College Libertarians in 262 Willard.

The point of Salerno’s speech was that since the U.S. gave up on the gold standard in 1933, inflation has caused the U.S. dollar to continually lose value.

“Inflation is a secret tax that affects people who don’t get new money right away,” Salerno said.

Salerno even blamed the length of recent wars on paper money.

“Paper money causes wars to be longer because people don’t have to pay higher taxes,” he said.

He called the gold standard “golden handcuffs” because governments can’t fabricate gold.

“Under the gold standard, prices tend to fall,” Salerno said.

Alex Weller, Penn State College Libertarians president, said the current economic system in the U.S. gives too much power to the government.

“It reduces freedom and liberty, and the goal of libertarians is to restore freedom and liberty,” he said.

Weller said the College Libertarians are in the process of forming a club called the Austrian Economics Society, which will focus on economic matters that are important to Libertarians, such as returning to the gold standard.

Nicole Ritschel (freshman-political science) is a member of College Libertarians and said she thought the speech was “amazing.”

“There’s so much trouble with the economy, and mainstream politicians don’t have solutions,” she said.

Salerno said returning to the gold standard would be difficult but not impossible.

“It’s like putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, but we can do it,” he said.