Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Because money is imaginary, it can be exploited by people who understand how it operates. To prevent the connected, the privileged, and the unscrupulous from debasing the concept of money, conscientious people tried to institute stopping measures, of which the Gold Standard is the most famous. Theoretically, there can be an unlimited supply of money, as long as productivity exceeds consumption, but in practice, the creators of the imaginary money, governments, use it to reward insiders rather than to build an economy. In response, to limit the supply of money, it was tied to how much gold there was in the world. This was almost a random selection and it worked psychologically & practically for a while back-in-the-day, but make no mistake, there is no connection between real gold & imaginary money, and in fact, in an imaginary digital world, gold is no longer practical nor psychologically important, so any discussion of using it as a “standard” is Buggy-whip territory.

The Gold Standard was Stone Age economics, but a lot of quacks still talk about it as if it worked. There is an extended, last-ditch effort by monetarists to hang-on to such antiquated and misleading ideas because they provide cover for anti-taxers. Talk of the Gold Standard is a distraction offered to “cure” unbalanced federal budgets, but underneath, it's simply a smokescreen used by Politics-for-the-Wealthy. Low taxation is what causes unbalanced federal budgets, not spending. Spending is what creates robust economies, especially economies that everyone can participate in. High taxes are a luxury that people who have lots of imaginary money can afford.