12/19/05 Quotes, News and Views

All That Glitters...
...Ran across a couple of fascinating quotes today regarding gold - fascinating because of who made the quotes.

"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves." .
"This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard. "
.
...The above quotes are from Alan Greenspan, believe it or not, in his 1967 essay Gold and Economic Freedom, as reprinted in the book Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal, by Ayn Rand in 1967. Mr. Greenspan was a disciple of Ms. Rand.
...What is even more remarkable, given his standing as Fed chairman, is this: Supposedly Ron Paul, the Congressman from Texas has an original copy of Mr. Greenspan's essay and asked the Chairman to sign it in 2002. He asked the Chairman if he still agreed with what he had written or whether he had changed his mind. Mr. Greenspan replied that he wouldn't change a single word of it. I consider that amazing, given Mr. Greenspan's position and our government's fiat money system and deficit spending.
.
...More rumblings on the gold front from someone who thinks that Russia's central bank is preparing to buy a lot more gold.
.