Redpill me on the gold standard

Redpill me on the gold standard

If America gets back on the gold standard, wages will rise again.

-t. man

Nixon took us off the gold standard, leading to the collapse of Bretton Woods and the rise of Neoliberalism.

Fiat currency is the only way for capitalists to play employees zero exchange value

How do you mean?

Commodity fetishism at its purest.

Almost as if Neoliberalism is the natural outcome of Keynesian policy in practice. Weird.

interesting argument

Introducing fiat currency is an easy way for a government already in debt up to its eyeballs to say "everything is ok. If our money means nothing, then our debt means nothing." It stole anything resembling stability from currency and replaced it with an easy way for banks with empty vaults to give loans it shouldnt give out so that greedy bankers and their petticoat stooges can make ait pretty penny.

Also

Pic related

I've got a secret for you, fam.

Money has always meant nothing

Pssssst… the gold standard is a fiat currency, too. Any currency is fiat currency because exchange value is entirely subjective, regardless of whether or not there's a commodity behind it.

The privatization of social services and the gold standard have nothing to do with each other.

This. I think it's hilarious to see all the retards who think that hoarding gold is going to save them in a time of economic ruin. What's to say that anyone will want to trade in gold? Nothing.

Then I guess that means that porkies use their fat stacks of nothing to pay pinkertons to keep the worker down, and politicians spends small fortunes of nothing to get and keep positions of power to guarantee that ever growing rivers of nothing keeps getting deposited into their off-shore bank accounts

say what you will about libertarians, at least we dont hold onto a whole college courses worth of doublethink just to keep our narrative afloat.

Gold has socially necessary labor embodied in it, giving it exchange value

what about the canned food and wooden shack standard
where value is ultimately backed by real material interests

All I know is Ron Paul won't shut the fuck up about it even today

Retrograde vulgar marxists with their simplistic economics seem to like the gold standard.

Canned food, yes. Because it's consumable and it expires, which eliminates hoarding and essentially ties exchange value almost 1:1 to use value.

But no use value to the vast majority of people.

It wasn't a real gold standard, more a USD standard randomly pegged to gold. Also gold standards are stupid. (But currency pegging and balanced trade are great.)


Eh, the Triffin Dilemma always made that inevitable. There was no way a US president would ever choose international obligations over domestic living standards.


Nope. Most economists at the time were using a bastardised synthesis of Keynes and Neoclassical economics (a different bastardisation to the present synthesis, this one still containing a trace of Keynes.) and if Keynes plans for an international clearing union and accounting unit (instead of the USD) had been adopted then the Triffin Dilemma would never have arisen and the system wouldn't have collapsed.

The largest and most glaring problem in returning to the gold standard is that there is simply not enough gold in the world to cover the quantity of currency presently in existence. To put it another way, even if the US were somehow able to purchase the world's entire gold stocks (in itself an impossible proposition) there would still be nowhere near enough gold to cover the total value of dollars in existence. It is estimated that the total amount of gold that has been mined in the world is equal to about 142,000 metric tons. Assuming a price of $50,000 per kilogram (corresponding to around $1550 per troy ounce), that equals about $7.1 trillion: not enough to cover all circulating money and deposits in the United States, let alone the entire world. A return to the gold standard would require a massive devaluation of the US dollar, precisely the scenario that many gold bugs feel that the gold standard would prevent.

Furthermore, this calculation only applies to the US. If all the world's other countries were simultaneously trying to do the same thing then this problem would be exacerbated. In addition, if the US were to follow the policy of buying the world's gold as outlined above then a large number of the actual dollars would have ended up overseas and the US would have the metal. Presumably, the US would then have to create more dollars for internal use, which would hardly be a counter-inflationary policy.

In addition, gold has gained several industrial uses in the last century, particularly the tech industry and some medical uses, as well as traditional uses in jewelry. The ensuing hyper-deflation of a return to the gold standard would devastate the jewelry industry (no one but the filthy rich is going to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a 14k gold wedding band, never mind 24k) and the tech industry as the extensive use of gold interconnects in chip packaging would send component prices through the roof.

t. copypasta