The return to a gold monetary standard has been a long-term dream of the far-right and their corporate backers. It was one of the central aims of the 1933 coup attempt which was diaried here after a recent BBC documentary on the subject revealed Bush family involvement. It has since been supported by the John Birch society, the various far-right armed militia movements that became resurgent in the 1990's (thanks in part to virulent anti-Clinton, anti-government propaganda funded by wealthy right-wing dynasties, warning followers to prepare for catastrophic economic collapse), and Alan Greenspan (in a paper published by his friend Ayn Rand).
In recent years the most prominent voice for a gold standard has been the organized Libertarian movement and its main economic (and occasionally neo-confederate) think-tank, the Ludwig von Mises Institute founded by Lew Rockwell. Vocal gold standard activist and current Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul was formerly a faculty member. Another leading libertarian think-thank, the Cato Institute, funded by the Coors, Koch, and Scaife families, also supports returning to a gold standard. (See papers such as this one, supporting "the complete abolition of the government monopoly of issuing money".) Rupert Murdoch was formerly a Cato Institute board member.
The Ludwig von Mises after which the institute is named was for many years a leading economic consultant with the NAM, the lobbying group for military and oil companies most active in the 1940-60's, from which the John Birch Society emerged. Von Mises was not just in favor of a gold monetary standard but opposed monetary liquidity and the general availability of credit to the working classes. Alan Greenspan attended von Mises' lectures at NYU in the 1960's and the influence is obvious in reading Greenspan's essay on gold from Ayn Rand's The Objectivist, linked to above. Though von Mises rejected Keynesianism and was marginalized outside of right wing corporate and libertarian circles, the Dallas Federal Reserve published a paper on him, putting forth that he changed the course of history.
And now a quote from von Mises' Human Action, taken from the paper The Danger of the Debt Trap by Dr. Thorsten Polleit, Chief German Economist at Barclays Capital.
There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.
Multiple economics and other advisors from the Reagan and both Bush administrations, during which the nation dove head fist into an unprecedented orgy of debt and credit expansion, have joined either the von Mises or Cato Institute or other Libertarian related think-tanks. It is unbelievable to think that Alan Greenspan and others in positions of economic influence during the last three Republican administrations didn't fully understand the above quote.
So why did Greenspan support the Bush tax cuts and accelerated deficit spending? Why did he and other financial regulators support the offering and consumption of ARM and subprime mortgages that are only starting to push us over an economic brink with much further to fall? Why are we really in nearly $9 trillion dollars of national debt with no consumer savings?
Is it possible that students of Ludwig von Mises backed by a few very wealthy corporations and right-wing families, who would like to see a figure head Libertarian government stripped of all regulatory and tax powers with privately held stores of gold the only real currency, have engineered a freight train of credit expansion, for the explicit sake of inducing a "total catastrophe of the currency system involved"?