Ron Paul, career-long proponent of outmoded and discredited Austrian economic theory, went on Colbert last night to talk about how paper money sucks and he wants you you to be able to go into a store and buy a six-pack with some gold ingots. His proof? Paper money can rot and people have believed in the value of gold for centuries. So, gold is “better” because the collective hallucination around it is stronger. This wouldn’t be disturbing except for the fact that Ron Paul is the new Chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy. Yeeeeeks.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Gold Faithful – Ron Paul & David Leonhardt | ||||
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Gold Faithful – Ron Paul & David Leonhardt [ColbertNation]
RELATED: Ron Paul: Fed ‘monopoly’ could be broken if Americans use gold, silver as currency
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Ben, you have no idea who Ron Paul is besides the first line of Wikipedia do you? He’s a fervent supported of Wikileaks, the right of the people to have knowledge of their goverment, and has been against both wars and the Patriot act from the beginning. Yes he’s a hardcore libertarian, but his beliefs are consistent. He’s only of the only honest politicians with integrity left. I might not vote for the guy if he was on the ballot, but fucking respect him. He’s not a Fox News candidate. (They hate him over there)
He’s a hardcore libertarian which means he’s more enamored with his ideology than with reality. He might hit a few nice notes, but anyone who’s so excited with a philosophy and not a college freshman is going to be wrong about a lot of stuff too. That’s not the kind of person that should be running the country. Give me somebody who’s willing to look at the real world and make decisions based on what he or she sees rather than someone who looks at the world through ideologically tainted glasses and then tries to fit what they see into their preconceived notions about how the world should work.
your principles should shape reality, not the other way around. you start from a position of integrity, accountability, and responsibility and let the world adjust. to base ones principles on coping with the conditions that have been caused by the evils of your ancestors and contemporaries is to surrender to them. it’s a prison survivalist mentality to adopt the path of least resistance.
i believe it was Gandhi who said “Be the change you want to see in the world”.
gold is just as stupid but to smear ron paul is clearly showing your political inclinations. booo consumerist!
paper money is dumb but it doesn’t even cross many peoples’ hands like it used to; we’re all about plastic. money is the idea of standardizing the value of a good. so paper, plastic, or gold are just the same.
I happen to agree with Ben. Also I usually think people are exaggerating when they complain about political bias on this site. But the wording on this post is really over the top…
Fox News viewers also complain about exaggerations of political bias. As someone pretty much in the middle, I’d have to agree with both “exaggerations” (Fox = right and Consumerist = left). The sad thing is that Consumerist is supposed to be focused on a specific topic, that being consumer rights etc. but seems to draw in a lot of unrelated political content, and from what I’ve seen it is ALWAYS pro-left / anti-right / anti-libertarian.
Opposing receipt-checking is anti-libertarian?
And the contrast is that Fox News actually IS biased the vast majority of the time. Consumerist occasionally is (such as stories like this)
If this goes through, I can launch my new business venture – Gold4Gold.
Wasn’t the migration away from gold standard / gold backed money made so that governments (or in the case of the US the Federal Reserve – not part of the government) could print as much money and they needed to pursue their economic policies (right or wrong)?
Going back to a gold standard or actual gold itself would be extremely difficult and I would imaging enormously impractical.
That the Fed is not part of the Government is incorrect. It is a government created and run entity. employees and appointees are paid by the treasury. Gov board is nominated by pres and confirmed by senate.
Gold won’t mean much in the future if you don’t have water or food. Remember that Salt was once worth more than gold. Something is only worth as much as someone else is willing to pay for it. Diamonds, which at one point were extremely valuable (and illogically still are) are completely worthless when you consider that perfect stones can be created in labs…and diamonds used in manufacturing are worth more than some useless artifact on your finger.
Paul is an idiot or a fool if he actually believes that moving from one meaningless standard to another really will make any difference. At the rate we’re going, an ounce of beef or fish or honey might be more valuable in 50 years than some metal dug up from the earth.
To quote your former sister site, “You poked the Paultards”
I don’t know how legit this site is http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/gen99/gen99241.htm but gold sounds heavy. As obesity rises, would we as Americans even be able to carry around this currency?
I’m not excusing Bush and he certainly was no Ron Paul in terms of economic policy. Ron Paul and the Tea Party (yes, contrary to what MSNBC might say they existed before Obama became a national celebrity) were against the outrageous W spending.
In his 8 years in office, W increased the national debt by about $4.2 trillion. This includes the 2 years (2006-2008) when the Democrats had an iron grip on Congress.
Since W left office to now, the national debt has increased nearly another $4.1 trillion. That is in 2 years.
As a % of GDP, That goes from 70% (Bush) to 95% (Obama). Neither are good, but Obama certainly isn’t helping.
As for %, Reagan had it around 55%, and if you want to go back a little further, Roosevelt had it well over 100%.
Yes, Reagan had it at around 55% . . . INCREASING IT increasing from the previous 32%
Yes, Roosevelt had it around 95% . . . LOWERING IT from the previous 117%
Two questions: Why do you think you will successfully mislead anyone when the data is freely available? And, why do you feel it is appropriate to mislead people about the fiscal practices of US Presidents?
Sorry this was supposed to be in response to another post.
Yes Reagan increased it, eveyrone knows that, so what?
Also to my knowledge, Roosevelt started with about 50% and ended at nearly 120%. When did he decrease it?
My original point though, was that while other presidents have had increases in deficit spending, the current rate since the 2006 Congress / 2008 Presidential elections is by far the highest since WW2, in the middle of the biggest and most expensive war of all time (and Obama’s spending rate is very closely approaching that). People complain about W’s deficit spending but Obama has done more damage in 2 years than Bush did in 8.
“outmoded and discredited Austrian economic theory”
How so? He was exactly right about the debt bomb and the housing bubble.
The Keynesians are proving to be clowns and idiots and generally wrong on everything.
The neoclassical economists are the ones calling not enforcing fraud “free trade”.
Or should I see the consumerist article hawking Laetrile describing the “outmoted and discredited chemotherapy”. That is the problem – it describes money and credit and the problem. You love debt and inflation.
I love Ron Paul, but taking Gold as currency at retailers? That’s a bit far from anything plausible we could ever expect to happen. C’mon Ron, keep the common sense attitude going but the crazy ideas on monetary policy in check.
If you pay attention to what Paul has been saying other places the whole point of having a gold currency standard is not to even replace the dollar. But to have a competing currency and remove the federal reserve monopoly on the purchasing power of citizens.
Also regarding the talk about inflation that NYTimes guy was just dumb. The whole reason Paul advocates for the currency changes is because of those bubbles he brought up. And the NYTimes guy clearly had no viable response. His only answer was don’t worry about inflation because look at how bad our economy is due to the inflationary bubbles that fiat currency and poor monetary policy caused. What a ludicrous response!
Ben, please leave the politics to the Huffington Post and Drudge Report.
Uh, where is Austrian economic theory discredited? And how is printing paper better than gold? For what ever the reason, gold has been desired by people. Economist say that money has a few functions:
- Store of value – if you print more, it’s worth less
- Medium of exchange – if it’s worth less, people will stop wanting to use it.
- Standard of deferred payment – if people stop using it, you can’t pay debts with it.
Gold has none of these problems since it’s rare and can’t be created out of nothing. That’s why a gold-standard makes sense.
I don’t know him but I’m gonna say Ben Popkem is a registered democrat? Congratulations on using an “unbiased” website to push a liberal agenda. “This wouldn’t be disturbing…” What a load of crap. Maybe I shouldn’t post this since my account will be suspended for calling out an editor on his political bias.
One final though since many of us gave Ben a bruising today. We like the site, we like most of the articles but maybe less political commentary and bias.
Maybe a little relevant consumer humor too – this would have been a winner and more relevant
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-january-3-2011/san-francisco-s-happy-meal-ban
Libertarians have no friends: liberals call you an idiot, Democrats think you’re insane, Repubilcans consider you a threat, and conservatives compare you to perverts.
Personally, I like their whole “burn it to the ground” attitude in regards to the government.
Dammit, Milton Friedman. Why can’t you still be alive, so you can explain to people exactly how this currency thing works. I’ve never read more simple, to the point, and rational points than those you made in your 1973 Playboy interview.
Well, we can see where your viewpoint lies now can’t we Ben. Nice of you to arbitrarily announce to the world that an economic method is dead. What qualifies you to do such a thing exactly?
Disappointing Ben.
Ron Paul’s solution may not be perfect, but at least he is drawing attention to the issue of the doubling of the monetary base, ‘sound money’, and how to reduce further inflation; not to mention pulling back the curtains of secrecy from the privately owned (not federal government) Federal Reserve Bank.
Wow. Your commentary is quite possibly the most mind-bogglingly ignorant thing I’ve ever read on Consumerist, Ben.
I’ve always been a little shaky on the ill-informed opinion on this site, but this just takes the cake. You can say whatever you’d like in the privacy of your offices about the irrelevance of a single user calling it quits on Consumerist, but wearing ignorant and insulting prejudices on your sleeve like this will do nothing to bring in new readers and only serve to drive people like myself away. I wish you good day, and hope that you open your mind a little bit and listen to the economic opinions of people who have been studying the field longer than you’ve been alive.
What’s incorrect about anything said here?
Paper money can be devalued in an instant. All you have to do is print more. By golly, that’s what the government is doing!
This is a really bad idea because there isn’t enough gold.
$259,200,000,000 of gold is how much gold the US currently has
$977,984,000,000 is how much gold all of the governments of the world collectively have.
The US would have to go on a massive buying and development spree to back the economy with gold. It just wouldn’t work anymore.