Comment by Dylan16807
2 months ago
Semi coherent. The greed and corruption is a real theme but would still be 100% possible while on the gold standard.
2 months ago
Semi coherent. The greed and corruption is a real theme but would still be 100% possible while on the gold standard.
They'd have to physically steal gold from people, and people would notice that. Or they could mine more gold, but that's hard. Or they could publicly and officially change the exchange rate (of dollars to gold), and people would notice that politicians make it go down, the same way that people notice when politicians make taxes go up (they notice way more than when prices other than taxes go up).
With the current system, they (the central bank) can just increase some people's numbers in some spreadsheets, and the effects are extremely indirect. Nominally this is in exchange for assets of equal value so the situation returns the normal after some time, but that hasn't been happening - the amount of money created this way has not been decreasing at any meaningful rate.
Considering the amount of panics and depressions and general economic insanity that happened on the gold standard in the 1800, none of this is true.
Just selling bonds would have raised more than enough money to give out corruptly.
And corporate bailouts are downright cheap compared to the federal budget.
And it would be impossible to bail out those bonds when they defaulted, nor to reuse the bonds to back money.
5 replies →
You're goddamn right corruption existed under gold. Nobody's claiming it was some purity paradise. But here's the difference: gold didn't enable systemic looting on a planetary scale. Gold didn't prevent sin. it prevented the industrialization of sin. The robber barons were sharks in a pond. Today's fiat-enabled oligarchs are gods reshaping reality. When you can print the fucking rules, accountability evaporates. That's why Nixon's 1971 decision wasn't just policy. It was an engraved invitation for the largest wealth transfer in human history.
Greed and corruption absolutely festered under the gold standard. Boss Tweed embezzled a fortune from New York City coffers, Vanderbilt strong-armed railroads, and Rockefeller crushed competitors with predatory pricing. But here's the huge distinction: gold acted like a leash on a rabid dog. It didn't kill the beast, but it kept it from devouring the whole goddamn village. When robber barons got too greedy in the 1800s, their schemes imploded under gold's brutal discipline. Jay Cooke's bank collapsed in 1873? No Fed stepped in with trillions in printed cash to resurrect his corpse. Markets purged the rot, losers ate shit, and the system reset in years. Not decades of zombie corporations propped up by cheap debt. Corruption back then was like a bar fight: bloody, ugly, but contained. Tweed stole existing gold coins. He couldn't order the Treasury to mint him a fresh fortune overnight.
Vanderbilt couldn't borrow billions at 0% interest from a central bank to buy every competitor; he had to convince investors with real profits, not financialized vapor. Fast-forward to today: fiat didn't invent greed. It weaponized it. LBJ funded Vietnam and the Great Society without raising taxes because the printer go brrr. BlackRock gobbles neighborhoods with Fed-subsidized debt while renters bleed. Tyson jacks food prices 20%, blames "inflation," and pockets record profits because fiat decouples prices from real value. Banks peddle toxic mortgages knowing the Fed will bail them out. Politicians pass $6T "stimulus" bills while your paycheck buys less bread than a 1950s factory worker's. That's the cancer Nixon unleashed in '71. Not corruption itself, but its metastasis into a globalized, systemic looting operation where elites privatize gains, socialize losses, and inflation becomes a tax on the powerless. Gold didn't stop crooks. It stopped crooks from becoming untouchable gods. The 1800s proved humans will always be greedy. Fiat just gave them the universe's credit card and told your grandkids to foot the bill.
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