… and even that may be a bit generous. A possibly slightly more cynical take might have it that the boosters of tethering the economy to gold have a degree of intent toward maintaining and ever increasing - and hence entrenching the relative balance of power as it exists now and in the past for perpetuity.
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if memory serves, europe was embroiled in war after war, bankrupting itself over gold throughout much of it’s history. england probably would have collapsed if it weren’t for a young queer mathematician named isaac newton who basically invented coinage, allowing the realm to fractionally relate currency to gold.
now maybe england should have collapsed, but stable(ish) coinage put it on a pretty good run as an empire if that’s how you judge a country
venezuela’s worst problem, frankly is us. our economic embargo would have devastated any county regardless of currency. money’s no good regardless of value if it can’t buy you anything.
which is exactly why people there are mining bitcoin. or hell, virtual gold from runescape. anything to obtain a currency other people in the world are allowed to legally accept. real gold wouldn’t work because no one can trade it with them.*
( * the real moral of the story is never find oil, or have territory needed to access oil, or the world will f you up. )
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Aw. That’s disappointing, though not very surprising when I think about it.
Apropos, I quite like the designs for the (non-existent) Amero, the hypothetical currency for the (non-existent) North American Union:
Source: Coin Designs by Daniel Carr. UNA Amero Pattern Coins.
While the US embargo certainly doesn’t help, Venezuela’s worst problem is definitely their government and its economically illiterate and self-destructive policies. Chavez could get away with it because of the high oil prices, but Maduro lacks that (and anything approaching competence or charisma).
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Go to a good, artisan bakery and get a decent size loaf of sourdough and it’ll easily cost you £4, in any city in the UK. Asda (oof) is not somewhere you can use as a point of reference to a history that involved making things by hand, and needing to turn a profit on all goods (no basics loss-leading strategies like the supermarkets pull). It would be like comparing the cost of a tailored shirt in 1909 to one you buy from Primark. We’ve lost touch with the actual cost of goods.
I’m not a proponent of the gold standard but the comparison is far from fair.
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They may not have eaten Asda wholemeal in the Middle Ages (for example), but they didn’t eat modern artisanal sourdough, either. Depending on time, place and class, bread could be made with wheat, rye, oats, rice, lentils, peas, chestnuts or acorns; there was also a good chance it would be adulterated with dirt, chalk, sawdust, or clay (or worse).
I don’t think any comparisons that purport to show the constant value of gold (or any other commodity) are likely to be anything other than misleading. There are simply too many factors in play.
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Wasn’t Rand’s point as far as a gold standard goes, she understood that, come the apocalypse, the economic illliterates manly men who think of gold as having intrinsic value would be the ones swapping it for guns to kill the people with food?
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They wouldn’t have gone to an artisanal bakery, no, these bakery’s exist now because of the race to the bottom when it comes to produce. What we buy today in an artisinal bakery is what any common man or woman was buying in the street in the middle ages, whatever grain it was made of. And they paid more then they we do today - basic goods cost more.
I agree with your broader point, my point was simply that in this case it is actually a fairly good comparison, your rebuttal was comparing chalk and cheese.
Again, as I’ve pointed out above wrt suits and bread: you cannot make a meaningful comparison across centuries and cultures. The economic meaning of Asda white loaf is not the same as a bowl of barley porridge in mesopotamia, though it’s closer than a craft bakery is. Fudging it to suit your agenda is just that.
The context in which goods are made changes. A suit of clothes in the middle ages is closer to a car in some ways than it is to a suit now.
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There’s a hipster butchers up the road from me where you can spend the thick end of four quid for a loaf, but it is very nice bread. And the sausages are sublime, but I digress, and am in accordance with your take on goldbuggery.
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Not a good chance. A slight chance and only in times of deprivation. And even then, if caught, the baker could look forward to severe punishment.
That is…very much not true. What Newton did was oversee recoinage, standardise exchange values with foreign currencies and prosecute counterfeiters and clippers. The concept of coinage and the theoretical principles behind it had been known and talked about for literal millennia by that point.
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I think this nails the problem with this sort of comparison on the head. People see these artisanal businesses servicing the more affluent end of the middle classes and think they’re somehow representative of the same sectors in earlier times, whereas in reality ye olde butcheres’ clientele would buy a disproportionate amount of tripe and the government had to pass a law to stop the bakers from padding bread out with building waste.
Also, I find the idea of a butcher’s that sells bread inexplicably disturbing.
ETA:
Would you say it was … special?
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They sell veg too, just to add to your discomfort 
And the offcuts they make the sausages from would be the top flight stuff in a supermarket.
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There is no reason you should know it. Anthem is not officially a sequel to Atlas Shrugged. It’s just a fun anti-fan theory that makes a lot of sense for people who doesn’t like Rand. Just like this comic:
https://www.angryflower.com/348.html
There are unfortunately some people outside USA who like Rand. The leader of the Swedish party “centerpartiet”, Annie Lööf, once described Atlas Shrugged as the best book she had read.
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Why would anyone trade guns for gold?
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Because it has intrinsic value, duh
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Dear evilkobot,
In case you were not being facetious; the value of gold depends only on the greater fool that you unload your gold on. In dystopia there will be those that keep their guns, rob gold, and then hunt for the greater fool. I would hold onto my gun, if I had one.
Sincerely,
DTK
I think that tells us a lot about the end point for ayn-caps though. We still don’t have machines that are both intelligent and docile enough, and probably never will, so what we will end up with is slavery.
It’s that or Skynet, and I can’t work out which would be worse.
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The world may f*k you up, but unless you already have a stable, reasonably non-corrupt government your leaders are even more likely to do it. In a country with lots of oil, gold, diamonds etc the leaders don’t really need the people, except a few to run the mines. They can loot all the wealth they want from that. Without resources like that, the only income is from taxes, and then you need a productive population with enough wealth to tax.
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