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All these Junk Economists, like Paul Krugman, need to read this book. This “spend our way to prosperity” dogma has failed every time it has been tried. Latest example would be Japan in the 1990s.

Japan's Lost Decade: Origins, Consequences and Prospects for Recovery By Gary Saxonhouse and Robert Stern

“Inflation and credit expansion, the preferred methods of present day government openhandedness, do not add anything to the amount of resources available. They make some people more prosperous, but only to the extent that they make others poorer.” Ludwig von Mises,

“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.”

From the last two paragraphs of Gold and Economic Freedom by Alan Greenspan. 1966.

see: http://www.constitution.org/mon/greenspan_gold.htm