Central Planners Freaking Out About Discussion Of Gold’s Role

Sound money issues make for good politics these days. The leading Republican candidates have all suggested reforms to our monetary system. The topic is popping up in debates as well as interviews. Predictably, Fed worshippers and proponents of central planning everywhere are snickering and trotting out the usual responses.

Michael Hiltzik, with the Los Angeles Times, recently published a column titled “The Worst Idea in the Presidential Debate: a Return to the Gold Standard.” He thinks “a return to the gold-standard would be so not right that it’s not even wrong.” It’s another way of saying the idea is so bad it defies analysis. Nevertheless, he tries anyway.

He’s terribly smug given his essential argument is for how great centrally planned monetary policy is. The collapse of the Soviet Union and other managed economies revealed the pitfalls of putting a handful of bureaucrats in charge of markets. But his point of view represents what most people are getting from the financial press, Wall Street, and Washington DC. Let’s have a look at Hiltzik’s main points, then take them apart.

The economic science is not settled

Mr. Hiltzik takes a page out of the playbook of climate activists. He wants people to believe that only wingnuts, Luddites, and Republican presidential candidates are still talking about gold. He cites a 2012 survey of economists supposedly “drawn from the entire spectrum of economic theory.” None thought a return to a gold standard was a good idea. Case closed.

One assumption is clearly wrong. The entire spectrum is not represented. None of today’s prominent Austrian school economists are included on the panel. You won’t find names like Mark Skousen, Hans-Herman Hoppe, Robert Murphy, or Joseph Salerno. But you will find Barry Eichengreen, who has criticized the Fed for not being interventionist enough, and Austan Goolsbee, who served as chief on Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors.