The World's Most Destructive Currency Terrorist The Fallout of Alan Greenspan's Toxic Legacy

By Greg McCoach
Friday, October 8th, 2010

In 1966, Alan Greenspan wrote his famous "Gold and Economic Freedom" essay.

Originally appearing in The Objectivist, an editorial perspective explicitly based on Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, Greenspan's brilliant exposition urged citizens to keep their politicians accountable through a gold standard.

Greenspan's "Gold and Economic Freedom" opens:

An almost hysterical antagonism towards the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense — perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire — that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.

Beautiful words.

Greenspan continues in his essay advocating gold as a critical element of any monetary organization. He concludes:

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. (more)