re: #534 gnargtharst

We free market wackos were told a couple of decades ago that lowering tariffs and other international trade barriers was a pipe dream and was never going to happen, ever.

Any claim that the future of idea X [free banking, gold standard, lowered trade barriers, separation of church and state, etc.] is predetermined, is preposterous.

The gold standard was abandonded after a long evolution of changing ideas in politics and economics (not good changes, imho). But the ideas that flourished prior, were *also* a product of a long era of revolutionary political thought. Cultures change; change is brought about by the thinkers who integrate and communicate new ideas (not by those who deny that such can happen).

The gold standard (and free banking), is certainly possible. More so, when it becomes more commonly known that even unilateral moves towards such policies most benefit those who adopt them (which is very similar in principle to unilateral adopters of reduced trade barriers).

[Link: www.capmag.com…]

The gold standard, like genesis literalist creationism, a sun-circled flat earth, the four elements, the four humours, phlogiston, the ether, the doctrine of signatures, and spontaneous generation, is a discrdited concept with a past, but no future.

Marching bravely backwards is simply reactionary conceptual luddism.