Patrick Barron on U.S. competitiveness and need to return to the gold standard

As long as America can print fiat money to pay for imports it will print fiat money.  But under the discipline of the gold standard, Americans will have to produce good quality products at world market prices in order to earn the foreign exchange (gold) needed to settle international trade.  It’s the only way. Erecting tariffs, as desired by President Trump, solves nothing and merely exacerbates the situation.  America must learn to compete in the world on equal terms; i.e., it cannot simply print fiat dollars.  It must produce goods that foreigners wish to buy at prices that foreigners are willing to pay.  Becoming an autarkic nation, a la North Korea, will condemn Americans to poverty.  America needs to become an honest, commercially oriented nation.  If not, the world will pass it by just as has happened to other great nations in the past. 

~ Patrick Barron, "David Hume’s Insight Explains America’s Economic Decline," Going Postal, April 16, 2025

Henry Hazlitt on how FDR suspended gold conversion for Americans in April 1933

The possibility of a discriminatory capital-gains tax on gold ‘profits,’ or even of outright confiscation, cannot be wholly dismissed.  We must remember that in 1933, when private citizens began to exercise their clear legal right to convert their Federal Reserve notes and gold certificates into gold, President Franklin D. Roosevelt suspended the conversion, ordered the citizens to exchange their gold for paper money, and made it illegal for private citizens to hold or own gold.  In other words, the government not only broke its solemn and explicit pledge to convert its notes into gold on demand, but treated the holder (and dupe) who had taken the pledge seriously as the real culprit.  And the Supreme Court later upheld the president’s act and the new law. 

~ Henry Hazlitt

1933 St. Gaudens $20, world's most valuable coin,
sold at auction for $18.9 million in 2021

Richard Nixon on closing the gold window

In recent weeks, the speculators have been waging an all-out war on the American dollar.  The strength of a nation's currency is based on the strength of that nation's economy, and the American economy is by far the strongest in the world...  Accordingly, I have directed [Treasury] Secretary Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets except in amounts and conditions determined to be in the interests of monetary stability and in the best interests of the United States...  Let me lay to rest the bugaboo of what is called "devaluation."  If you want to buy a foreign car or take a trip abroad, market conditions may cause your dollar to buy slightly less.  But, if you are among the overwhelming majority of Americans who buy American made products in America, your dollar will be worth just as much tomorrow as it is today.

~ President Richard Nixon, Bretton Woods speech, August 15, 1971

George Bernard Shaw on the gold standard

You have to choose (as a voter) between trusting the natural stability of gold and the honesty and intelligence of members of government. And with due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.

~ George Bernard Shaw, playwright and novelist, 1856-1950

Jim Grant on gold standard

If I am right about the dynamics of the Federal debt, not only is the mathematics for a gold standard compelling but so are the politics. In other words, and this should be no surprise to anyone, the transition to real money will continue until the fraud that is unbacked fiat is finally eliminated, with or without the Fed's support.

Jim Grant, Consuelo Mack Wealthtrack, April 14, 2011

Jim Grant on the transition of the US monetary system and the third Fed mandate

I think the difficulty with monetary policy is the nature of the policy itself. We have, over the years gradually, persistently elided [sp?] from a gold standard to a PhD standard. We have moved from central banking to a species of central planning. What our well-intended scholar, monetary policy mandarins are about is the manipulation of the economy, manipulation of interest rates and now, the manipulation of the stock market. You know, they had two mandates confirmed by Congress and they unilaterally have taken up a third, which is the levitation of stock prices.

~Jim Grant, author, Grant's Interest Rate Observer, CNBC's Kudlow Report, March 31, 2011

Alan Greenspan on the gold standard, savings and inflation

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation.

~ Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve Chairman (1987-2006), in 1966

Henry Hazlitt on the broken gold promise

We have forgotten that our currency unit, the dollar, was originally a pledge. It was a solemn pledge by the U.S. Government to pay its bearer on demand 1/20th of an ounce of gold. Our government disdainfully repudiated that pledge in 1933. It made another pledge to pay 1/35th of an ounce, not to our own people but to foreign central banks. That pledge was repudiated in 1971.

~ Henry Hazlitt

Joseph Schumpeter on the gold standard

An "automatic" gold currency is part and parcel of a laissez-faire and free-trade economy. It links every nation's money rates and price levels with the money-rates and price levels of all other nations that are "on gold." It is extremely sensitive to government expenditure and even to attitudes or policies that do not involve expenditure directly, for example, to foreign policy, to certain policies of taxation, and, in general, to precisely all those policies that violate the principles of [classical] liberalism. This is the reason why gold is so unpopular now [1950] and also why it was so popular in the bourgeois era. It imposes restrictions upon governments or bureaucracies that are much more powerful than is parliamentary criticism. It is both the badge and the guarantee of bourgeois freedom - of freedom not simply of the bourgeois interest, but of freedom in the bourgeois sense. From this standpoint a man may quite rationally fight for it, even if fully convinced of the validity of all that has ever been urged against it on economic grounds. From the standpoint of etatisme and planning, a man may not less rationally condemn it, even if fully convinced of the validity of all that has ever been urged for it on economic grounds.

Joseph Schumpeter, quoted in Richard H. Timberlake's article, "Federal Reserve Follies: What Really Started the Great Depression," 1954

Henry Hazlitt on paper money vs. a gold standard

When a country is not on a gold standard, when its citizens are not even permitted to own gold, when they are told that irredeemable paper money is just as good, when they are compelled to accept payment in such paper of debts or pensions that are owed to them, when what they have put aside, for retirement or old age, in savings banks or insurance policies, consists of this irredeemable paper money, then they are left without protection as the issue of this paper money is increased and the purchasing power of each unit falls; then they can be completely impoverished by the political decisions of the “monetary managers.”

~ Henry Hazlitt