what's Holla Forums's opinion on the gold standard?
From being here a year I've only seen people denounce it and laugh at ancaps for proposing it. All I know about it from a Communist point of view is that Marx said it'll stop being the world standard.
Here is what >>>/liberty/70478 had to say about it
It's completely irrelevant and even if mighty Odin snapped his fingers and returned the world to it the economy as we know it would completely implode
Melt it into door knobs.
No I meant what if we return to the gold standard. Why isn't (or is) it a good idea? The fellas at /liberty/ had pretty decent arguments.
In other words, would you prefer fiat money or gold standard until the revolution and why? If it's either to haste the collapse, why is the other then practically preferable for the system?
gold is less volatile then then fucking loans or cryptocurrency or anything else,
it already won long ago
You can't print your way out of a recession with the gold standard. Praise Keynes.
wouldn't it balance by itself? Yes, I was reading the lolberg literature
No
Melt it into dildos. Dildos actually have value.
It’s probably better for workers than fiat money but the capitalists have found that the printing press is a way to alleviate the stress of an economic crisis. If we had been on the gold standard in 2008 the crisis would have been apocalyptic and worse than the 30s but by the same token the real earnings of workers ever since the fall of the gold system has declined dramatically.
If you look at workers pay in terms of their gold-value, workers then probably made the equivalent of $35-50 an hour but commodities were more expensive at the time due to higher labor inputs so this doesn’t really show up in a typical inflation calculator which will tell you the minimum wage in 1968 is worth 11 an hour. Capitalism still makes commodities worth less in gold-terms but this is concealed by constant monetary devaluation.
But, would the capitalists really pay that much money today? I kinda doubt it, one of the beauties of Keynesianism is you don’t have to do the old-school much hated wage-cuts —the devaluation of the dollar does it for you. Hell, if your not getting a 3% pay raise every year then your taking a pay cut because the average annual rate of inflation is at least that high and governments have good reasons to doctor inflation data anyway (aka large masses of pensioners)
You can’t print your way out of recession at all. Read Sam Williams.
Or Marx, your pick.
If only the Capitalist Class had gold, then all the economic problems would really be solved. I trust this scenario wouldn't end up fucking up, this sounds like a very believable idea.
friend, the financial crisis of 2008 was handled literally like puting a couple of bandaids on a person with a exposed fracture.
Eventually shit will leak again like it always does.
Fam, I’m just saying for arguments sake. It’s true some of the underlying dynamics like debt bubbles and so on that will make the next crisis worse. But right now there is something of a capitalist boom going on as shitty as it maybe in comparison to booms of even the past few decades (such as in parts of the 80s and 90s) but the new crisis will be a result of both problems unsolved by the fast crisis and the typical Marxist 7-10 year crisis cycle in action.
user is saying even this wouldn't have really been possible under the gold standard. It would have been worse and harder to resolve.
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
The thing about the gold standard is that it's more or less just as meaningless as fiat. The difference is that it's out of control of individuals and institutions, and due to the heterogeneous distribution of gold on Earth produces a bunch of "silly" effects on distribution of useful material. Obviously, in general we support the abolition of production for exchange, but as long as that's out of the question, fiat v gold v crypto isn't really a question we care much about. One could say fiat would be the progressive option because it's giving Man control over the system that controls him rather than putting that control in the hands of natural chance a few billion years ago or a social construct, but then one has to consider that the "Man" in control of fiat is not humankind or the collective but members of the bourgeois. In the end, the question is one not to dwell too much on; the best option for socialists is to decide the one that would best benefit their personal material conditions and advocate for it when socialism isn't a feasible victor in the current discussion, but abolition of production for exchange in general.
I'm keeping eye on you, OP
It would make it a lot easier to understand capitalism if we went back to commodity money.
It is a meme. Read Marx and you will understand why in capitalism money works without needing anything to back it.
The only reason gold has value is because we give it value, same as any other currency. It's not some magic rock.
the value of gold is almost entirely from fetishization
yea you can
what do you mean?
dangerous and down right stupid
To some degree you can but you need a fake gold standard like Breton Woods and it might increase pressure to devalue currency.
Breton Woods was more of a dollar standard than a gold standard.
If I was still in an arguing mood I'd dwell on that a bit more because Ancaps seem to love using that as a motte and bailey. First gold is defended using statistics from the postwar economic boom, then advocate a completely different form of actual gold standard. (Where for example every country would hold convertible gold reserves, rather than "Your pound is convertible to the dollar which is convertible to gold.")