Quote from jueco2005:
"... His knowledge of economics are awesome (Austrian Economics) but the only bad thing is his love for a gold base economy.
Just in case some don't understand "gold based economy"...
1. When America was on a "gold standard", it was inconvenient to deal directly with gold.. it was cumbersome, heavy, and not easy to sub-divide accurately. So, America printed paper money which was "convertible into gold on demand".
2. When American government got loose with their spending and deficits, prudent Dollar investors "converted" their paper notes into gold, thus depleting our gold reserves... and in so doing, held the US Government's "feet to the fire" when it came to spending.
3. Nixon put the kibosh on all of that... by removing the convertibility of paper money into gold. And hopefully you have been paying attention and know the rest.
However, there is no genuine NEED for a "gold standard" on fiat. There needs to be SOME standard to prevent abuse of the money by politicos... but it doesn't need to be gold.
We could have a "faith" based currency. That is, the US government could promise to (and actually adhere to) "increase the money supply by no more than ______% per year". The amount of money the economy NEEDS is proprotionate to the population. That is, if the population increases 2% per year, we NEED money supply to also increase 2% per year.
But Noooooo... being restricted to only increasing the money supply to keep pace with the population is not adequate "screwing with the money" for the politicos... and therein lies the basis of our problem.
IF the US Government were to HOLD to increasing the money supply by the approximate increase in the population.. and any bonds we floated were of course backed by the "full faith an credit of the US and its ability to tax the populace to honor debt commitments", we wouldn't need our money to be backed by any other than our "taxing authority"...
Unfortunately, history has proven we can't trust politicos with anything that important...
