5In Gold We Trust
When the economy goes to pot, we the people place our faith in one indisputably sexy commodity. It’s the lone bright spot on Wall Street and a rallying cry for the riotous right. So as the Ron Pauls of the world dream of a return to the gold standard, GQ sent Wells Tower to the Klondike, where a new gold rush is on and rumors of a mother lode have everyone acting a little feverish.
Even so, you’d have a hard time packing a phone booth with econ Ph.D.’s who think the gold standard isn’t disastrous nonsense. The assortment of plagues a return to gold would inflict on our economy, experts say, is too vast to itemize here, so let’s do something simple. Let’s just imagine for a second where you’d be right now if the dollar were still yoked to gold. If you squint and are drunk, it looks pretty great.
Picture it: In the past decade, gold’s ascendancy would have jacked the dollar up 500 percent compared with, say, the euro. Boosh—slam dunk! Superpower! Face! Though wait, hold on: What if you’re a bright-eyed young entrepreneur who owns a factory that makes, say, bald-eagle flagpole toppers? Your competitor in China, who used to pay the stiffs in his beak-polishing department $6 a day, now gets them for $1 a day. His $60 bootleg of your Thrifty Patriot model now goes for ten bucks. Who wants to pay a 500 percent premium for your bona fide made-in-America eagle? Nobody. Everybody buys them from the Chinese guy. You lay off your employees and file bankruptcy. Your wife ditches you for a comparatively wealthy Zimbabwean roofer. You kill yourself. Everybody kills themselves. America ceases to push the envelope and run this planet.
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mytinylittlebubble reblogged this from essayist and added:
Yet again, in every economic crisis, the gold standard comes into mind
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