Saturday 20 August 2011

Lessons from history: Nixon and gold



RT interviews Lew Rockwell on Nixon's fateful decision to break what was left of the Gold Standard, namely the Bretton Woods version, AKA the bastard son of the bastard son of the Gold Standard, and precipitating the world into the current paper money era.

Kudos to RT. You would never get such opinions and analysis on the standard corporate media.

6 comments:

James Higham said...

It's an issue which confuses me - I've read some people pretty well on our side of politics and they say no, others say yes.

Trooper Thompson said...

What is it that is confusing you, James? What are some saying yes and some saying no to? A return to the Gold Standard?

What is surely unarguable is that if governments and central banks control money and increase the supply, the value of any unit with decline, which is why the value of the pound and the dollar is a tiny fraction of what it was forty years ago.

The question is this: is a system based on central planning and government monopoly a recipe for success or not, or does history and theory teach us that such systems do not work anything like as efficiently that freedom?

Anonymous said...

The problems discussewd above are made worse by the fact that the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve are private companies over which the governments of the US and UK have no control and as such, do not have to respond to FOI requests, they do as they please.

Anonymous said...

Lew Rockwell always speaks common sense. His writings are a delight too.

The irony that the most reliable televised news source available to the UK is RT in Russia! Wasn't this the job of an impartial (coughs) BBC?

Trooper Thompson said...

Anon1,

the governments in the US and UK could take control, but they have neither the will nor the inclination. In the United States there is the hope that Ron Paul will finally slay the Fed dragon, and at least the subject is now openly discussed thanks to Dr Paul and others. It is also the case that the Fed hasn't been around longer than 1913 and there has been an historical battle against central banks, led by such great men as Jefferson and Jackson.

Over here, the central bank has been around much longer, and virtually no one outside the (puny)libertarian movement even questions it.

Trooper Thompson said...

Anon2,

re: RT and the great Lew Rockwell, agreed.

The BBC was the inspiration for Orwell's Ministry of Truth. Little has changed.