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> The Gilded Age, which had quite high levels of inequality, occurred when the gold standard was active

I've got some news for you about modern levels of inequality.

The separation of wealth during the Gilded age was caused by the same thing it is caused by today: rapid industrialization. This rapid industrialization began when the US was off the gold standard during the civil war. The 1920's gilded age was fueled by fiat money, the greenback.

The great depression was triggered in part by imbalanced gold flows when we returned to gold back currencies.

https://explaininghistory.org/2025/06/12/golden-fetters-the-...

We are essentially replaying the greenback inflation of the 1860's and have been doing it since 1971.

The Great Depression was caused by France panic hoarding gold https://www.nber.org/papers/w16350

Semi-ironically France was the reason the US fell off the dollar standard after it panic hoarded gold AGAIN when the French government made one last, massive purchase of gold from the US using US dollars, paying $35/oz. A French warship arrived in New York in early August 1971 to load the gold and bring it back to France.

Reckless spending post WW2 was the main reason the US shot itself in the foot and got into this position where they couldn't reasonably pay most clients back and France saw this developing.

All in all France managed to deal massive blows to the US economy covertly TWICE within the same century.

https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...

Eh, aren't most of those points non-sequiturs?

> The Gilded Age, which had quite high levels of inequality, occurred when the gold standard was active:

And the Gilded Age [1] ended long before the gold standard. Which makes sense since the Gilded Age is a political issue not a monetary one; how will the productivity from railroads be redistributed?

> It should also be noted that the gold standard did not bring any kind of price stability:

A comparison of 35 years against 4?

That's like bragging about how smart private credit is by showing the low volatility in it's price over the past year.

The large concern from gold bugs is that by printing money we just make the next crash even larger. But of course we just print more in the next crash so it doesn't happen. Take a look at the fed balance sheet [2]; under Kaynsian ideology you were supposed to sell that off during the boom years so you can take on debt during the busts but politicians are not disciplined enough to do that so the Gold Standard would've never let them.

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IMO, the real argument against the Gold Standard is that the US left it is because we spent more money than we made to finance the Vietnam War. If we returned to it, then we'd just leave it again when it became inconvenient. It's not the Gold Standard that needs fixing in the country.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era

[2]: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...

By the same standard shouldn’t he also get credit for those 20 years of prosperity?

Really?

I don't think anyone really holds him responsible for the dotnet crash of 2000 as that was a market issue and irrational exuberance issue and not a monetary one.

And 2008 was similar. The Fed doesn't control or have any responsibility for lower lender standards or ARM mortgages.

Congress was responsible for the GSE's that bought any mortgages and wrote insurance on those mortgages, so you can't blame the FED for that.

Wallstreet are their regulators were responsible for the securitization of mortgages that went bad in 2008, not the FED.

At worst you can say they had the wrong monetary policy but that's an opinion and not something that can be said as a fact.

Can you flesh out how you feel Greenspan is responsible for 2008?

It was generally 20 years of growth and the 2008 banking crisis actually happened after he left.

> Prices should get cheaper.

Does that include the price of labour? Are you okay with your salary going down? Because the historical record shows that's what happens during deflationary periods: producers of good/services see the price that they can sell things for goes down, and so they insist on their suppliers and inputs—including labour input—reduce their prices as well.

> Imagine a world in which prices regularly go down

That world results in a lot of people individually deciding "why buy now, when I can buy for less later" and sitting on their money.

That in aggregate makes the economy much worse.

You're up against human nature here. Money may be an arbitrary numerical denomination of value, but people's behavior around it and how that affects the economy at large need to be accounted for. Having prices slowly creep upwards over time (low inflation) tends to result in more, better things sooner.

Tech product price dynamics benefit from a bunch of things that food doesn’t: they’re optional purchases, they’re early stage developments which have more low hanging fruit, and purchase price can be subsidized with later plays (subscriptions, data sales, network effects, freemium to enterprise pipeline).

Also - I think if you look at the data you’ll find periods off the gold standard where food prices grew more slowly than inflation and even wages, ie food becomes cheaper. 80s and 90s for example.

> We get better at growing food every year, why shouldn't food get cheaper?

It has gotten cheaper, as a percentage of people's income and spending.

I suggest a bread standard. It's more useful than gold, and it worked in Brazil.

If prices get cheaper all the time, there would be no way for anyone to ever borrow money. Tech products like phones used to get cheaper because 1) they start out at a wild markup; 2) they have intense competition by rivals to build the latest and greatest; 3) the ability to make things faster/smaller continued to increase. Those factors are non-existent for most industries, and they are reducing in effect for tech products over time.

>"We get better at growing food every year, why shouldn't food get cheaper? Imagine a world in which prices regularly go down."

Because a lot of people earn their living by producing or selling food. Your other necessities don't become more affordable just because food prices go down, but if that's your livelihood it becomes at risk. Food was incredibly cheap during the great depression. There's an amazing quote from the PBS documentary series on it; "A sack of flour cost a nickel, but where were you gonna get a nickel?". Steady, controlled inflation via fiat is the only way to keep a capitalistic economy functioning, because you can't micromanage or control the price of everything, and people need money to live. The real issue is stagnation of wage growth while assets explode. It's the transfer of real wealth from earners to owners that has put us in the current position, not absolute prices.

> - stopping fraud / - addressing wasteful and ineffective programs

Good to know that this will be an evergreen argument despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that taking place in the last two years with nothing to show for itself other than hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Also please add as an option: raise taxes on the wealthy individuals and corporations back.

https://inequality.org/article/11-charts-tax-wealthy-corpora...

This is really ambiguous:

"- stopping fraud"

And can mean many things. On the right, it often means Somali daycares, on the left it means the underfunding of the IRS so that it doesn't do audits of rich people.

I find this to be mostly a distraction:

"- figuring out how the net worth of people in Congress increases from hundreds of thousands of dollars to 10s or 100s of millions of dollars"

We should ban stock trading by members of the government, the Ro Khanna bill, but while it can be a source of corruption, it isn't a major source of inequality in the US.

This is unclear, can you be more specific as it has different answers based on one's partisan leanings:

"- addressing wasteful and ineffective programs"

I think a lot of the distortion of US policy towards the rich is a result of Citizens United and similar unrestrained lobbying funds.

This ball is already in motion IMO. Inflation numbers aren’t even believable and It’s already not fun.

From what I observe from fraud and corruption witch-hunts, they are nothing more than that. The real fraud is that government that is supposed to serve the people who elected it serves everyone else first.

There is nothing left (edit: discretionary) to cut, and there is no material fraud. Taxes must go up. Only the top 40% of Americans have any income or wealth to tax (bottom 60% of Americans have no federal tax liability). Or, as you mention, we monetize the debt, print dollars, and burn up the currency value.

https://usafacts.org/government-spending/

https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-debt-does-the-us-have/...

Tying it to our goodwill, military might, and diplomacy seems like it might be a bad long term plan.

Nixon was running out of money fast- the cold war was expensive.

What regulations did he as federal reserve chair rollback and which of them caused the 2008 crash?

> but not enough to completely collapse the world economy and return to the feudalism they wanted.

Don’t worry, wealthy drug addict pedophiles in Silicon Valley are carrying that torch now.