Appeasing the goldbugs is just as stupid and just as harmful as trained doctors telling the anti-vaccination crowd that their position "might make sense".
The gold std is harmfully stupid. (see below)
Telling people that it is ok not to vaccinate kills children. (whooping cough deaths are rising)
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/ ... rime-time/
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Last week, the Republican Party officially endorsed a platform suggesting that the nation return to a gold standard. The statement on Page 4 does not mention gold specifically but rather talks about “a metallic basis for the U.S. currency.” The meaning is clear; no one is talking about basing the dollar on iron, copper or tin. The platform calls for a commission to study the idea.
Today’s Economist
Perspectives from expert contributors.
This approach is very similar to that in the 1980 Republican platform, which also endorsed a gold standard without mentioning gold. It talked about a “monetary standard” and breakage of the link between the dollar and “real commodities,” which led to “hyperinflationary forces.” Of course, gold is the commodity that dollars were linked to before 1971.
According to an article in the July 31, 1980, issue of The Washington Post, the drafters of the 1980 Republican platform inflation plank included Representative David Stockman of Michigan, the Republican strategist Jeffrey Bell and Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (and subsequently chairman of the Federal Reserve), who endorsed the gold standard in a 1966 article for the libertarian novelist Ayn Rand’s newsletter. The drafters were clearly contemplating a gold standard.
Today, the usual gold bugs – The Wall Street Journal opinion pages, Forbes magazine and conservative Web sites – are all very excited about the Republican endorsement of yellow metal in place of that paper junk we carry in our wallets. During the Republican primaries, both Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain endorsed a return to the gold standard.
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Even before that, however, the Reagan administration had signaled its negative position on any return to a gold standard in the Economic Report of the President, issued in February (starting on Page 69). The gist of its objection was that while a gold standard provided stable purchasing power over long periods of time, that was only because inflations were subsequently offset with debilitating deflations. As a consequence, there were greater economic instabilities, higher unemployment and longer recessions during the gold-standard era.
Economists today generally believe that the gold standard exacerbated the Great Depression. They note that those countries that went off it first in the 1930s were the first to recover. A survey of a panel of 41 prominent economists earlier this year by the University of Chicago business school found no support for a gold standard, including by those who had served in Republican administrations, including Edward P. Lazear of Stanford and Richard Schmalensee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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