You invoked Ron Paul, who is against fractional reserve banking. So while I agree with what you said in the first half of your post (about a fractionalized gold standard), the “irony” you cited about Ron Paul’s position just isn’t there because the system you described is not what he proposes.
As for the second part of your email, I really, really dislike it when people accuse me of being dishonest. Because I’m not dishonest. So it is offensive to me when people assume dishonesty rather than a simple miscommunication.
I believe that a gold standard would be better than the current system, but I could say that about any number of monetary arrangements. That is more than anything else a function of the current system being dysfunctional and horrific and incredibly regressive. That’s hardly an “endorsement,” as I think that practically any system would be better than the current rip-off-the-poor-developing-nations and enrich-the-speculators based system. And while I do think many people overstate the flaws in a gold standard, especially in comparison to the current system, I have never, ever “endorsed” it as the ideal system.
The fact is I’m pretty confident we could come up with a system better than a gold standard. Runaway expansionist monetarism, as you aptly put it, is very harmful and imho we haven’t even come close to seeing the depths of the harm it will eventually cause. But there are a lot of different systems that could prevent runaway expansionist monetarism, the gold standard being just one and probably not the best one. But I don’t give a lot of thought to the alternate monetary systems, gold standard included, because that’s in the realm of navel gazing about policy that will never happen (not before the current system completely breaks down anyway), and I don’t typically spend much time on such thoughts.
In fact, unless I’m asked about it, I usually avoid conversations about the gold standard because I really haven’t spent a huge amount of time thinking about the topic, because I don’t want to give the impression of endorsing a gold standard as the ideal system, and because it’s not really a topic I am interested in spending a lot of time debating.
In the case of this thread, I wasn’t asked, but your statement as I understood it (remember here that since you invoked Ron Paul, I incorrectly assumed you were talking about the non-fractionalized pure gold standard that he endorses) seemed off-base enough that I felt compelled to correct it. Clearly that was a giant mistake on my part.
Next time there is a disagreement, please, ask me about it before accusing me of being a liar.
