Nixon closing the gold window may have sealed the death of the republic. From David Stockman at David Stockman’s Contra Corner via lewrockwell.com:
It is perhaps fitting that on the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s dirty deed in August 1971, the US Senate saw fit to pass a budget resolution that will add $3.5 trillion of additional girth to the nation’s already bloated and unaffordable Welfare State. As Forbes properly noted,
The Senate on Wednesday set the stage for the biggest expansion of the federal social safety net since the advent of modern-day food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s, approving a blueprint for a massive $3.5 trillion budget bill aimed at “restoring the middle class” through a slew of government initiatives – including universal preschool, tuition-free community college and a new federal health program – while combating climate change and hiking taxes for the ultra-wealthy.
We make the connection between the Senate’s latest welfare bonanza and Tricky Dick’s severing of the dollar’s link to gold because on that fundamental matter, Alan Greenspan was actually correct. We are speaking, of course, of the Greenspan of 1966 before he fell off the wagon in pursuit of government power, position, praise and pelf.
In his seminal but now forgotten speech called “Gold and Economic Freedom”, the proto-Maestro observed,
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……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.
