Alan Greenspan and the Gold Standard

Speaking of weird monetary economics. Maybe everyone knows this, but a commenter on the last post led me to some details about Alan Greenspan's past that I did not know about.

First, Greenspan puts Paul Ryan to shame in the Ayn Rand department. Greenspan was not just a casual reader of Rand, but was in her inner circle while she was writing Atlas Shrugged. Greenspan was, or is, a committed Objectivist and wrote an essay, "Gold and Economic Freedom," for Rand's book Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal. That essay is described in the link as being influenced by the ideas of Murray Rothbard, whose ideas also have a bearing on what Ron Paul thinks. Like Rothbard, Greenspan thinks that backing bank deposits with gold is a good idea, but he doesn't go so far as to recommend a 100% gold-reserve requirement. Somehow the reserve requirement is supposed to limit inefficient credit creation. Like Rothbard, Greenspan is confused as to why unfettered markets should work so well everywhere except in the banking system. He also thinks that the "golden" age of monetary arrangements existed prior to the existence of the Federal Reserve System. Most monetary historians think of the National Banking era (1863-1913) as a period when the financial system of the United States was fatally flawed, as it produced repeated banking panics. Not Greenspan apparently.

Here's an excerpt from "Gold and Economic Freedom":

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.

You could put those two paragraphs in Ron Paul's "End the Fed," and no one would notice. The use of "insidious" is interesting. That's the same word that Paul Ryan used to describe QE3.

The amazing part of this story is that Greenspan served as Chair of the Fed for a long time, and didn't seem to screw up (though some people lay some of the blame for the financial crisis at his doorstep, I'm inclined not to). If I had read "Gold and Economic Freedom" before his appointment I would have been in a panic. Maybe this means we could appoint Ron Paul to replace Bernanke, and everything would be fine. No, never mind.

For your entertainment, here's a 2007 interview with Greenspan on the gold standard. Apparently his views have not changed much.