The following quote comes from Murray Rothbard's 'Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar', the final words of this short work. I bring it to your attention, dear readers, as it has a wide application, encouraging us to stick to our principles, and keep up the fight.
There is no gainsaying the fact that this suggested program will strike most people as impossibly “radical” and “unrealistic”; any suggestion for changing the status quo, no matter how slight, can always be considered by someone as too radical, so that the only thoroughgoing escape from the charge of impracticality is never to advocate any change whatever in existing conditions. But to take this approach is to abandon human reason, and to drift in animal- or plant-like manner with the tide of events.
As Professor Philbrook pointed out in a brilliant article some years ago, we must frame our policy convictions on what we believe the best course to be and then try to convince others of this goal, and not include within our policy conclusions estimates of what other people may find acceptable. For someone must propagate the truth in society, as opposed to what is politically expedient. If scholars and intellectuals fail to do so if they fail to expound their convictions of what they believe the correct course to be, they are abandoning truth, and therefore abandoning their very raison d’être, All hope of social progress would then be gone, for no new ideas would ever be advanced nor effort expended to convince others of their validity.
3 comments:
where and how did you amass this wealth of knowledge on the who's and what's about politics, Trooper?
A gem of a quote, Trooper.
One thing that worries me about the world adopting the gold standard is that the majority of the gold is probably held by the very banksters which fried the world's economy.
If they own most of the gold, they still have us by the short and curlies.
I am also reminded of what transpired in the US - Roosevelt confiscated the public's gold.
Apart from that, I'm all for an asset-backed currency, which prevents unscrupulous governments from 'printing' money.
Alison, you're too kind. I hesitate to answer. The more I learn, the more I realise the little I know!
Fausty, I have pondered this very issue, but I don't think it would be unsurmountable. Good old Ron Paul is plugging away trying to get an audit of the gold in Fort Knox. It would be interesting to know how much, if any, is still there, likewise in the BoE, after Gordon Brown's terrible decision (I believe he was only following orders from above - EU or Bilderberg not sure which!).
Don't forget silver. In a free market, gold and silver will both operate as money, and silver is much less controlled, due to its relative abundance.
In any case, I think where there's a will, there's a way, and the point Rothbard makes is that we need to keep fighting for what we believe, as this moves the argument in the right direction. For a great many years, there has not been a will amongst the mainstream economists and politicians, but we live in interesting times. The Age of the dollar as world reserve may well be coming to an end, and not every country may wish to go along with a new Bretton Woods. Who can say what will happen?
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