Adrian Douglas
On September 15 former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan made a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. Some very interesting comments he made with respect to gold in response to a question were reported in an editorial in yesterday’s New York Sun, “Greenspan’s Warning on Gold”:
On this occasion Greenspan, who has been famous for gobbledygook that leaves the audience guessing what he meant, did not mince his words. He said, “Fiat money has no place to go but gold.”
Greenspan was a close friend of the writer Ayn Rand and he reportedly read drafts of her novel “Atlas Shrugged” before it was published and even had a letter published by The New York Times in November 1957 in response to the newspaper’s negative review of the book. In 1966 Greenspan wrote an essay published in Rand’s newsletter “The Objectivist” titled “Gold and Economic Freedom”:
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.
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