[habinero]

Sir, this is a Wendy's.

The gold standard is objectively terrible economic policy and "society was better when I was young" has been a meme for thousands of years.

It feels nice to attribute everything bad to this one weird trick, but it's fake.

[greenavocado]

19th-century factory towns sucked dick. Child labor, no safety nets, cholera outbreaks. Yeah, not exactly Disneyland. But that's not the argument. The gold standard didn't cause those horrors. Unchecked capitalism and shitty labor laws did. What gold did do was force a brutal honesty. You couldn't fake prosperity. If you wanted a war or a welfare program, you either taxed people directly or found the gold to pay for it. No printing press to hide the pain. Nixon's 1971 move didn't just detach the dollar from gold. It detached political accountability from fiscal reality. Every fucking crisis since '71 gets "solved" the same way: print, borrow, and kick the can. Gold didn't prevent recessions; it prevented this: a system where elites privatize gains but socialize losses. Your grandpa's $0.25/hour wage in 1950 bought 10 loaves of bread. Your $15/hour today buys 3 loaves. Your 401k inflates, your rent explodes, and Washington shrugs: "Inflation's transitory, bro!"

Gold "terrible"? Tell that to the single mom paying 40% of her paycheck to rent a BlackRock-owned apartment. Why's BlackRock her landlord? Because fiat made debt cheaper than dirt. They borrowed billions at 0% from the Fed, bought entire neighborhoods, and jacked rents. Under gold? Interest rates would've spiked, crushing their leveraged bets. But nah. We got "QE Infinity" instead. Today's policy is literally cronyism with extra steps: print to bail out banks which causes inflated assets which squeezes workers. Rinse. Repeat.