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Jim's Quote of the Day:
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. - Alan
Greenspan, 1967
