Will Greenspan suddely rediscover that gold is money and money is gold? And fiat money is, well, not even paper today, for electronic money does not even have the value of a sheet of paper. Will he resume writing along the lines of his essay, Gold and Economic Freedom, in which he ends two paragraphs that say why fiat money is the enemy of liberty:
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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.
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from:
Gold and Economic Freedom
by Alan Greenspan
www.usagold.com/gildedopinion/greenspan.html
That’s funny. I’m glad I never took the time to write down my thoughts about raising kids before I had children. I’d hate to have to square those with my kids!
Wow, that last paragraph really hits the nail on the head!
If our economy were still dependent on a fixed amount of gold holdings, wouldn’t we be a zero-sum economy with little room for growth? Wouldn’t bank loans and mortgages be VERY hard to get since there’d be so little money available in the first place?
Bump. And the shell game continues.
As the housing market collapses and people fault on their loans, someone will be collecting up the pieces to sell again...
And how soon will they re-discover that money (in the form of gold) is another word for labor already performed? Well, I think we are making some headway folks. At least the word 'gold' is now back in their vocabulary.
And maybe some day they will re-disvoer and admit that it wasn't the gold that was confiscated. It was the theft of the people's labor. Gold is the measure of that stored up wealth.
But that must never be mentioned, for as long as it was only an impersonal commodidity like gold that was taken, people don't get too stirred up with those kind of losses. They can be replaced. On the other hand, labor already performed is a measure of how much freedom you have, and how much sweat you used to purchase it. That is a personal substance that cannot be replaced, for it was yours and yours alone. It has your DNA stamped on it. It was your passport to freedom and allowed you to structure your life in your own peculiar way.
The point is that we've allowed tyrants to structure our lives all these years . . . and continue to do so as long as we allow them to steal our labors and make it impossible to store up wealth.