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For just one example of how this presentation is misleading, gold has never really been selected by free markets as a currency. "Never"? Quite the oppos
by temphn 14y ago
For just one example of how this presentation is
misleading, gold has never really been selected by free
markets as a currency.
"Never"? Quite the opposite. Gold was seized by Roosevelt with Executive Order 6102 to prevent people from using gold as a currency. Nixon pulled the dollar off the gold standard in 1971 as the US Treasury didn't have enough gold to finance the war in Vietnam, and he feared a run on the banks. On both those occasions, people wanted to get into gold, but the government prevented them from doing so. And today physical gold has been bought by millions of people as a hedge against the world financial crisis.
On these occasions and more people would use gold as a currency if they weren't prevented by law (= men with guns) from doing so; this is the opposite of the claim that "gold has never really been selected by free markets".
imperial governments with big war machines minted gold
and silver coins, paid soldiers and military contractors
with them, and then required the coins back from the
general population in payment of taxes. This fostered
markets to service the war machine.
Speaking of counterfactual claims, the war machine is actually powered by printing money. The reason Nixon got the US off the gold standard was to print money to finance the Vietnam War. Every major war in the US (Civil War, WW1, WW2) has involved increases in US debt, inflation, and printing of money to facilitate the massive/rapid seizures of wealth that governments use to fight and win wars.
- betterunix 14y ago"Gold was seized by Roosevelt with Executive Order 6102 to prevent people from using gold as a currency" That is not accurate. People were hoarding gold at the time, which was harming the economy. Gold currency was taken out of circulation by the government and replaced by a currency less prone to hoarding. Hoarding stopped because people were given money that was not worth hoarding -- which is a good thing for the economy. "today physical gold has been bought by millions of people as a hedge against the world financial crisis" Which is not a currency, any more than a building, a field, or a gun is currency. "On these occasions and more people would use gold as a currency if they weren't prevented by law" Nobody in this century is prevented from using gold as a currency, just like nobody is prevented from using Bitcoin as a currency. The only difference is that gold is not legal tender. People tend to gravitate towards legal tender as a currency, probably because people live in a society governed by laws and need to legally repay their debts (taxes and others).