George Gilder, whose new book publishes today, is one of the original pillars of Supply Side economics. As stated by Discovery Institute, which he co-founded, “Mr. Gilder pioneered the formulation of supply-side economics when he served as Chairman of the Lehrman Institute’s Economic Roundtable, as Program Director for the Manhattan Institute….”
Lately we have been engulfed by headlines reporting financial turmoil on every continent, in almost every nation, large and small. The commissars of central planning who so marred the history of the 20th century have been replaced by central banks in the 21st. In Cyprus, the new leadership now dares to confiscate citizens’ wealth with a one-time tax of up to 60 percent on bank deposits above 100,000 euros. Self-interested prime ministers blame continental monetary policies for instigating the currency wars that they themselves surreptitiously carry on.
The True Gold Standard (Second Edition)
Monetary Pre-Commitment
Imagine if central bankers were actually held responsible for their monetary goals – much as corporate CEOs are in effect held responsible for meeting their quarterly targets. We might have a lot of unemployed central bankers. “In recent years, more and more Americans have adopted a new strategy in the quest to rid themselves of bad habits: an approach called pre-commitment. The idea is simple: you set a specific goal (lose twenty pounds in six months, say), and then commit to paying a penalty if you fail,” wrote James Surowiecki in The New Yorker. He noted that there are now “pre-commitment Web sites, like stickK.com...that will track your progress or lack of it, and take your credit-card info to insure that you suffer if you fail.” Surowiecki cited the government equivalent of pre-commitment. “Congress may not have signed up with StickK.com, but it, too, has tried to use pre-commitment to curb its bad habits. A big part of the dreaded ‘fiscal cliff’ that we keep reading about is the direct result of Congress’s attempt to force itself to change its ways.” Imagine if the next nominee for chairman of the Federal Reserve were asked to assign a penalty to himself for not making bank goals. Of course, we know that central bankers don’t penalize themselves, they penalize the public and future generations who will have to pay for their irrational exuberance. Some states have policies that legislators don’t get paid if they haven’t passed a budget. But there is no penalty for Congress to watch the country be projected off the fiscal cliff. After all, their elections come first and voters may forget when the time comes for their reelection. We need a monetary standard that doesn’t forget. The gold standard is in effect a pre-commitment to monetary discipline. That’s a goal worthy of the Yale professors and MBA student who created stickK.com. As New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg wrote in The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, “During turmoil, organizational habits become malleable enough to both assign responsibility and create a more equitable balance of power. Crises are so valuable, in fact that sometimes it’s worth stirring up a sense of looming catastrophe rather than letting it die down.” We have a crisis, folks.     
Constitution.org provides an extensive and thoughtful Memorandum of Law by Larry Becraft, Esq., of Huntsville, Alabama, on Article I, Section 10, clause 1 of the US Constitution.
Sir William Blackstone courtesy of Wikipedia
One of many interesting matters the Memorandum treats is Blackstone's Commentaries, a book that was a fixture in the...
The value of the yuan has been slowly rising. The value of the Japanese yen has been sharply falling. Abenomics is attempting to reflate the Japanese economic – slowly, slowly. “Japan is back!” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe tells the Japanese.
Coming back isn’t easy. The Financial Times’ Jonathan Soble has noted...
via Google Translate: Milton Friedman was one of the most outstanding economists of the 20th Century. He came from...
Only a world currency will work. That is why having national currencies convertible to gold—an international money—has worked in...
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Kathleen M. Packard, Publisher The Gold Standard Now
Board of Advisors: Senior Advisors Sean Fieler, James Grant, Senior European Advisor Advisors In Memoriam
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