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"we" came off of the gold standard because Nixon was having trouble paying for the Vietnam war. Printing money doesn't create wealth, it redistributes it to the

• mc32 7y ago
  Whatever the case, it’s bit of odd bedfellows when extreme conservatives and some people on the left see the bi-metallic standard as something to go back to. What’s the case for it?
  • logicchains 7y ago
    It takes power away from the government. Printing money is a wealth transfer from currency holders to the printer (hence why counterfeiting is illegal), and the government has unlimited ability to do this, which in the case of a bad government can result in hyperinflation and mass impoverishment, like happened recently in Zimbabwe and Venezuela. It's harder for the government to do this with gold.
• qubex 7y ago
  No, the Gold Standard effectively died when convertibility of paper currency into gold was suspended, starting with the Gold Reserve Act of 30 January 1934 and subsequently elsewhere. The post-WWII Bretton Woods regimen of “gold standard without domestic convertibility” definitely falls short of meeting the gold standard for gold standards: absent any audit of extant gold reserves, the price of gold (dictated by a purely hypothetical estimation of availability) served as a fixed exchange-rate (and thus implicitly fixed relative real rate of risk-free interest) and not as a true gold standard. To say that Nixon dictated the end of the Gold Standard is as myopic as to suggest that the surgeon who removes the organs from a brain-dead patient is guilty of murder.