[e-gold-list] Re: clear thinking

[unlinQ Marketing]

On 5/1/07, The Phoenix Dollar <info at phoenixdollar.net> wrote:
> Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek argued in his 1976 monograph, The Denationalization of Money, that private firms should be allowed to compete with government money and that the competition would provide a more stable and sound currency. With globalization, technological change, and firms like PayPal and E-gold we may eventually get there. In the meantime, as the Fed changes personalities, it is important to keep in mind that our modern monetary system, based entirely on expectations, has existed for only a brief time and its stability should be monitored cautiously. ~ Benjamin Powell

Discounting the differences between the self-regulating classical gold
standard that prevailed before World War I and the government-managed
gold-exchange standard that replaced it, many writers have erroneously
blamed "the gold standard" for the inability of Federal Reserve Board
policymakers to implement countercyclical policies in 1929–33 and thus
to prevent the Great Depression. Worse, they failed to identify the
true culprit in the monetary system of that era—the fallacious real
bills doctrine, which guided Fed policy.
~ Richard H. Timberlake, Gold Standards and the Real Bills Doctrine in
U.S. Monetary Policy,
http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_11_03_01_timberlake.pdf

> GATA has never maintained that gold and silver are or should be the only forms of money, only that they are honest money and thus may be preferable to other forms of money. Fearing honest money so much, the government only brings suspicion on its own money and on itself. ~ GATA

An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue
which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense-perhaps
more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of
laissez-faire -- that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that
the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each
implies and requires the other.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect
savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of
value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding
illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for
example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any
other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for
goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and
government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods.
The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no
way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against
gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of
wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as
a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no
difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold
standard.
~ Alan Greenspan, Gold and Economic Freedom

-- 
unlinQ
Financial Services Marketing Group



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