Fellow Libertarians, why do Democrats and Liberals Hate the Gold Standard?

[Free Bird]

We had one for YEARS. Why is it suddenly this great Satan, when it seems to make more sense than a Fed that prints money from nothing?

[Sumner 1868]

The gold standard is widely associated with Gilded Age corporate exploitation.

[bedstuy]

It makes sense to you because you're completely ignorant.

A gold standard would be completely counter-productive, probably impossible to implement and it has no advantages.  The question should be, how could anyone be so insane to propose such an idea?

[Associate Justice PiT]

     The major criticism that I have seen against the gold standard is that returning to one now would cause a massive economic contraction.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

We never were on the gold standard in the way that libertarians tend to think of it.  We always had banks of one sort or another putting out their own currency and inflating the money supply without much control.  The only good thing about the gold standard is that at least it isn't bimetallism.

[Free Bird]

It makes sense to you because you're completely ignorant.

A gold standard would be completely counter-productive, probably impossible to implement and it has no advantages.  The question should be, how could anyone be so insane to propose such an idea?

HOW would it be bad specifically is the question

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

It makes sense to you because you're completely ignorant.

A gold standard would be completely counter-productive, probably impossible to implement and it has no advantages.  The question should be, how could anyone be so insane to propose such an idea?

HOW would it be bad specifically is the question

It would be absolutely disastrous. Monetary policy is the greatest tool we have to fight downturns and you are virtually eliminating it. Inflation and deflation were actually more extreme under it in the short-term and there was limited ability to predict the next period's inflation. Complete lack of stability which the creation of the Federal Reserve helped fix for the most part. Also, depending on your definition, pegs are almost always disastrous.
I've posted extensively on this before. Was decent in its time period but the system has evolved into something much much much better.
This only creates problems and doesn't solve any.

[Indy Texas]

We had one for YEARS. Why is it suddenly this great Satan, when it seems to make more sense than a Fed that prints money from nothing?

We also had bank panics and nasty deflationary recessions.

Oh, I forgot, the early United States was a perfect paradise and nothing bad ever happened prior to the 1930s. We must never deviate from what our demi-god Founding Fathers would have wanted (even as we make generous assumptions about what they would have wanted in an era they never could have conceived of).

[King]

HOW would it be bad specifically is the question

It would cause another massive global recession and bankrupt all the major financial institutions again and eliminate our ability to bail any of them out and deflate every owner's land value and make credit cards worthless and make online commerce impossible and cause a panic on our debts and our federal government would collapse and the state governments would have to start issuing currency and there would be disputes over the value of their state banks as U.S. gold reserves are not distributed equally and states would probably declare a civil war on each other as, say, Tennessee claims Kentucky is storing gold stolen from their mines and millions of people would die in the battles and an entire generation of Americans would be born illiterate and stupid from the breakdown in education and infrastructure and a new era of feudalism would dawn.

Other than that, nothing really bad would happen.

[bedstuy]

It makes sense to you because you're completely ignorant.

A gold standard would be completely counter-productive, probably impossible to implement and it has no advantages.  The question should be, how could anyone be so insane to propose such an idea?

HOW would it be bad specifically is the question

It would lead to our entire economy was basically dictated by gold mining and our country was focused on maintaining a fixed exchange rate of dollars to gold, instead of things like unemployment, economic growth, price stability.  

Current system:
*Low unemployment
*Stable price levels
*Ability to withstand and respond to recessions
*Monetary policy made by independent experts appointed by government.
*Federal Reserve makes a profit for the taxpayers
*Banking works in the 21st century
*Inflation over the long term

Gold standard:
*Much higher unemployment permanently
*Wild price fluctuations including deflationary spirals that could wreck the economy
*Recessions would lead to depressions with 25% unemployment and failure of commercial banking
*Monetary policy made by the mining of gold in Russia and South Africa
*Federal Reserve costs the taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars
*Long-term price stability

[Ban my account ffs!]

Fiat currency is a great idea if you don't have a parasitic succubus collecting the interest of our fruits. (This precludes government by, of, and for the people who collect money into a pot and expend it on common interests)

[AggregateDemand]

We had one for YEARS. Why is it suddenly this great Satan, when it seems to make more sense than a Fed that prints money from nothing?

Why would a "libertarian" chain himself to a specie-based currency? Furthermore, QE and money printing are not similar. Ask the Weimar Republic.

[Ebsy]

We had one for YEARS. Why is it suddenly this great Satan, when it seems to make more sense than a Fed that prints money from nothing?

Why would a "libertarian" chain himself to a specie-based currency? Furthermore, QE and money printing are not similar. Ask the Weimar Republic.

Just a trillion marks for your thoughts.

[136or142]

We had one for YEARS. Why is it suddenly this great Satan, when it seems to make more sense than a Fed that prints money from nothing?

We also had bank panics and nasty deflationary recessions.

Oh, I forgot, the early United States was a perfect paradise and nothing bad ever happened prior to the 1930s. We must never deviate from what our demi-god Founding Fathers would have wanted (even as we make generous assumptions about what they would have wanted in an era they never could have conceived of).

1.The Current Federal Reserve was reinstated in 1913.
2.The Gold Standard was not fully eliminated until President Nixon did away with it, although I gather President Franklin Roosevelt altered it significantly.

U.S gold standard history is not something I've researched closely.

Most importantly:
3.This excellent website shows the wild swings in inflation that occurred frequently under the gold standard in the 1800s: http://www.measuringworth.com/

I highly recommend that anybody interested in macroeconomics bookmark that site and refer to it regularly.

For instance:
Inflation rate
1800   2.10
1801   1.31
1802   -15.73
1803   5.49
1804   4.38
1805   -0.70
1806   4.23
1807   -5.41
1808   8.66
1809   -2.05
1810   0.00

While some may question how accurate the statistics on that website are prior to modern econometric methods, they are likely the best information available and probably aren't that far off.

With that caveat in mind, that site shows that Real GDP growth per capita is superior by nearly 0.5% (I believe it's 0.46%) from the years 1913 to the present than it was during the years in the 1800s up to 1913 when there was no central bank (I forget which years those are, I knew it at the time I checked it out.)

[Simfan34]

Well, I suppose on the face of it, "a piece of paper whose value is derived from our gold reserves" is more intuitive than "a piece of paper that we all agree is worth some amount of money but has no intrinsic value". I could see the logic of a $10 bill making sense as it is worth $10 in gold and the illogic of an $10 bill being worth that because we say it is.

It's not particularly relevant nor does it actually mean the gold standard is reasonable, but I can see why it would make sense to people.

[Oakvale]

That's the conventional answer, sure, but it's really just pushing the most challenging question back a step from "Why does this piece of paper have value?" to "Why does this piece of shiny metal have value?"

This is usually the point at which goldbugs start talking about how gold doesn't rust or something.

[Simfan34]

That's the conventional answer, sure, but it's really just pushing the most challenging question back a step from "Why does this piece of paper have value?" to "Why does this piece of shiny metal have value?"

This is usually the point at which goldbugs start talking about how gold doesn't rust or something.

They wouldn't be wrong. I assume gold's value derives from its chemical properties and rareness- all the similar elements (silver, platinum, etc) are similarly high valued. Of course this doesn't mean we should have our economy dependent on the supply of it, but I don't think its hard to see why it is valued.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Rather than what's so bad about it, what's so good about it should be the question. The only answer I'm seeing here is a childlike understanding economics and that it "doesn't involve money out of nothing", but how has that done so badly? And no, that wasn't the cause of any recent recessions.

Usually the argument I hear is some type of anti-Federal Reserve paranoia.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I assume gold's value derives from its chemical properties and rareness- all the similar elements (silver, platinum, etc) are similarly high valued.

Interesting factoid.  There are 19th century counterfeits of gold coins made from gold plated platinum (or gold coins hollowed out and filled with platinum) because platinum is similar in density to gold, but at the time was cheaper.  Of course that factoid as well as the glut of silver than vastly devalued it relative to gold are classical examples of the perils of bimetallism.  Yet the problem is in the bi- not the metal.  Anytime you try to fix the value of dissimilar items, be they two types of metal, or a type of metal and pieces of paper, problems result.

[Gustaf]

Real stability>nominal stability

[Antonio the Sixth]

Because it's the economic equivalent of tying yourself up.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

One of the worst mistakes ever made by a Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK was Winston Churchill's absolutely disasterous return to the Gold Standard which led to absolute devestation among British industry. The misery of the next handful of years largely killed off any remaining affinity with the standard across the ideological spectrum (aside from a few cranks).

[SWE]

I like how this thread is basically asking "People who agree with me, Why do some people disagree with me?"

[Ban my account ffs!]

The Libertarians want a gold standard in the shape of a bull market that they can worship.  Such was the religion of the Hebrews when Moses came down from Mt. Sinai.

[ag]

Because it's easier to spend money under a gold standard. Liberals needed to spend money they did not have in order to fund their expansions of government. Liberals also prefer keynesianism. Liberals are closet corporatists and they aint even know it

Mind translating this into coherent English?