The Lonely Goatherd Blog And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats - Matthew 25:32
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November 08, 2007
David Frum vs Ron Paul and the gold standard David Frum has a posting over at National Review about Ron Paul in which he offers a detailed basic answer to Ron Paul's signature issue, advocacy of the gold standard. Mr Frum offers a pretty compelling sounding argument about why the gold standard was not a good thing, and why it would be absolutely out of the question today. I don't claim great expertise in monetary policy or history to say much for sure, but Frum's explanation seemed pretty reasonable.
On thing though where I do have an obvious answer to his outlook. "What the gold standard really is, fundamentally, is a rule that the nation's monetary stock should be determined, not by central bankers, but by miners. Why that should be regarded as an improvement by anyone, I cannot understand."
Answer: The reason one might prefer miners to central bankers as determiners of the money supply is because miners cannot artificially inflate the supply of gold. They might find a little more here and there, but no amount of gold they find today is going to substantially change the overall supply of all the gold accumulated ever. Whereas, a central bank or government with fiat money is constantly tempted with mischief. You see some country with 5000% annual hyperinflation, you know it didn't come from being on the gold standard.
There might be other reasons why a gold standard doesn't or wouldn't work so well today, but the elimination of political mischief with the money supply would certainly have to be considered at least one good argument on the other side.
