Re: The Economy Of Plenty

Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@pigdog.org)
Mon, 15 Sep 1997 14:09:40 -0700

Bren Allsop writes:
> Before we had the "Fed" controlling things and things were based
> on "hard" money or Gold there were periods of wild inflation when
> there was plenty of God and periods of wild deflation when Gold
> became scarce. Such wild fluctuations often totally devastated
> the economy and was very unfair to some and gave way to much to
> others arbitrarily based on the Gold supply.

I don't think there's been any period of inflation in the
United States as bad as the 1970s since the Civil War. The Fed
was in full control of the money supply during the 1970s. And
I don't think that any economic fluctuation in United States
history was quite as bad as the Great Depression, which also
happened on the Fed's watch.

The old gold economy produced nothing to match these disasters.

(The Civil War inflation was a result of outright
counterfeiting by both governments, like the old Continentals
of the Continental Congress or the worthless paper money
printed by the Weimar republic... nothing to do with the gold
economy there.)

--
Eric Watt Forste ++ arkuat@pobox.com ++ expectation foils perception -pcd