“If the Government can create money, why should not it create all that everybody wants? Why should anybody work for a living? … Why should we have any limit put to the volume of our currency?”
So asked an advocate of the gold standard in the publication “Cheap Money” back in 1892. Today, the evasion of that question is reaching its climax. We haven’t had a gold standard for a long time. It’s no longer seriously debated. It’s not even on the political radar screen. But the government’s solution to the current economic mess is to spend trillions and trillions of dollars on “public works” projects and bailing out bankrupt, formerly for-profit industries. In short: Nationalization of most of the economy with the aid of government printing presses. Already, the value of the dollar is falling and it’s predicted by most economists to continue doing so. And what happens if inflation arrives on a scale never before seen in our nation, not even in the 1970s?
It seems that the solution, from the perspective of those who advocate Big Government and Big Dollar, is obvious. Let’s pass a law requiring that economic prosperity be mandated. This way, we’ll never have to endure recessions or depressions again. All the government has to do is print enough money to make us all rich.
Why did nobody ever think of this before?