Friday, March 29, 2024

Donald Trump, the Gold Standard, Maynard Keynes, and Our Madmen in Authority

Donald Trump (photo credit: iprimages via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0)
Donald Trump (photo credit: iprimages via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0)

. . . June 5th, is the anniversary of the birth of John Maynard Keynes, once upon a time the great foe of the gold standard. [It] also, coincidentally, happens to be the anniversary of the date celebrated of FDR’s “taking America off the gold standard.”

These events are not mere historical curios. The current presidential campaign, and underlying political climate, shows we are finally, maybe definitively, emerging from the academic economists’ anathema on the gold standard. Considering how badly the economy is doing — and has been doing for 16 years — this is a very good thing.

Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, is on record as strongly appreciating the gold standard. His closest runner-up, Sen. Ted Cruz, campaigned on the gold standard. Something has changed. Maybe something big.

[…]

Will the gold standard come into play in the 2016 general election? It could.

Donald Trump clearly enjoys an intuitive appreciation of the gold standard. He has been misinformed as to whether we have enough gold to restore it.

We do. America, Germany and the IMF together have about as much gold reserves as the rest of the world combined. America has well more than that of Germany and the IMF combined.

Trump’s prospects for winning the presidency would benefit from elevating the gold standard as a campaign issue.  According to a 2011 Rasmussen poll 44% of the 1000 likely voters polled favored the gold standard. Only 28% opposed.

The gold standard unites the GOP. This is a stated Trump goal.  (Corey Lewandowski, call your office!) It enjoys strong support from mainstream Republicans, conservatives, and tea partiers.

Bonus: the gold standard splits the left. Rasmussen discovered that gold enjoyed outright majority support of African Americans and members of labor unions. The ethnic and labor left, unlike the nomenklatura left, favors gold. These are two major Democratic constituencies crucial to Trump’s electoral strategy.

[…]

Read the full article at Forbes.com.

Ralph Benko, internationally published weekly columnist, co-author of The 21st Century Gold Standard, lead co-editor of the Gerald Malsbary translation from Latin to English of Copernicus’s Essay on Money, is American Principles Project’s Senior Advisor, Economics.

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