Source: LewRockwell.com
It’s one of the greatest ironies of history that gold detractors refer to the metal as the barbarous relic, when in fact the abandonment of gold has put civilization as we know it at risk of extinction.
The gold coin standard that had served Western economies so brilliantly throughout most of the 19th century hit a brick wall in 1914 and was never able to recover, so the story goes. Europe turned from prosperity to destruction, or more precisely, to the prosperity of a few and destruction of others, as the Great War got underway. The gold coin standard had to be ditched for such a prodigious undertaking.
If gold was money, and wars cost money, how was this even possible?
First, people had been in the habit of using money substitutes instead of money itself – paper bank notes instead of the gold coins for which they could be redeemed on demand. People found it more convenient to carry paper around in their pockets than gold coins. Over time the paper itself came to be regarded as money, with the gold it represented a clunky inconvenience from the old days….